[-empyre-] Critical Dromology - and terror, capital

[Christina McPhee]

hi Navjotika and Jordan and everybody,

You've brought up this weird mention of the diagram in Deleuze.   
There's a thread here.  Beyond the diagram moves this terrain of  
erotic assemblage Jordan is beginning to note- but first i want to say  
something about the psychological force of the apparition or sudden  
appearance  the diagram in relation to assembling visual data of  
disaster sites. Hassan's beautiful work is also in the mix moving  
beyond a frozen gaze, resistant. Navjotika's suggestion that the  
'diagram' is some part of resistance makes me wonder.

During the making of La Conchita mon amour I encountered an intense  
experience of the Deleuzian diagram.  As I was compositing in video  
and photomontage. I noticed how shooting and remixing into the digital  
causes the facts of place to disappear. Visual ambiguities to which  
the human eye assigns a meaning, reduce to cliche.  Disaster becomes  
another kind of pornography: look at it, shoot it, tart it up in  
Photoshop, distribute the images electronically.  This very banality  
of the software ensures its overriding[writing].  It's too predictable.

If you explode the layers upon layers of documentary image a strange  
things starts to happen. The strange  phenomenon of the birth of a  
structural visual zone, an anomaly, happens.  Thinking of 'diagram' as  
Deleuze may have meant the term with regard to the paintings of  
Francis Bacon, in "The Logic of Sensation."  You start with all  
potentiality; from zero,  you begin to scratch , line, tear, slash and  
frm this something happens that refuses to be set aside or to go away.  
This Deleuze calls the diagram.  He writes of how it emerges as soon  
as Bacon marks, materializes,  image fragments.  Left to its devices  
the diagram will be the monster in the garden-- messing up the perfect  
grid of the canvas- or the html.   It confronts. It refuses to be  
tamed. No tidy grids.  You feel shocked by something forcing you to  
attention. You are implicated.

Disaster images become pornography almost default.  Until you start to  
manipulate them.  The diagram turns on, turns on you. The feeling of  
being implicated in the disaster and sequelae appears with the  
emergence of the diagram.  Something else happens that is not  
predictable. The strange thing is that the diagram rears its strange  
head in a field it's not supposed to be in, the rationalized regime of  
surveillance aka graphical user interface.   The diagram emerges as an  
affront to the image. It refuses to be pictorial, stay inside its neat  
little boxes of photos, or any lineup of suspicious activities or  
territories. It refuses me.  It stares you down.

Navjotika writes

>  years are missing from dates provided on photos, photo grids of  
> similar locales and meals are created that blur information about  
> specific locales and times, and so forth. Is this assumption of  
> "guerrilla tactics," or the enactment of an artistic insurgency that  
> may be deemed what Deleuze called “diagrammatic,” the only viable  
> means of resistance in “societies of control”?


Is the diagram enough? Resistance? The diagram hypnotizes as surely  
you as it does the FBI.  I find this apparition of the diagram to be  
like a Medusa head.   In an awareness that is already assuming  
(consuming) everything as an apparition or phantom effect; the  
pictorial sensational catastrophe is overridden, overwritten by  
something else, or something less. The diagram is kind of like staring  
down a death angel.  So then how to move beyond the diagram?

(further comps:  Naked Lunch  (Burroughs: Elahi) , or L'Ange au Secret  
(Cixhous:Crandall)

Or :  http://www.christinamcphee.net/tesserae/works/american_iraqi_flag.html 
    lines up video clips from a memorial protest installation  
(landscape)  of civilian Iraqi deaths.   Is it a resistance?   It was  
cathartic to make, I can say that.


-cm




http://christinamcphee.net




On Nov 18, 2008, at 8:06 AM, KUMAR, NAVJOTIKA X wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I am reminded by Gabriela's observations about his writing on  
> various governments' use of surveillance technologies to wage war on  
> their own civilian populations of Hasan Elahi's project "Tracking  
> Transience." Elahi, then a professor and conceptual artist at  
> Rutgers, and now at San Jose State, was detained upon his return to  
> the US in 2002 shortly after 9/11 at the Detroit Airport by the FBI  
> and extensively interrogated based on the suspicion that he was a  
> terrorist. After numerous subsequent interrogations and 9  
> polygraphs, as well as the knowledge that he was being constantly  
> watched, he started carrying a GPS device that enabled anyone,  
> anywhere, to track his location and activities online at all times.  
> He also began posting numerous digital photos of these locations and  
> activities, including the toilets he used at different places, the  
> different meals he ate, the airports he passed through etc. This  
> ongoing project of interrupting governmental surveillance by self- 
> surveillance, or of enacting a mock complicity that overloads the  
> system with excess information/ transparency, is ongoing at www.trackingtransience.net 
>  and receives many hits (including, it seems by the FBI and even the  
> executive office at the White House). His exhibition "Tracking  
> Transience: The Orwell Project" of course reveals that Elahi's  
> manner of presenting all this information is ultimately designed to  
> subvert his stated objective of collaborating with the government/ 
> FBI as usually years are missing from dates provided on photos,  
> photo grids of similar locales and meals are created that blur  
> information about specific locales and times, and so forth. Is this  
> assumption of "guerrilla tactics," or the enactment of an artistic  
> insurgency that may be deemed what Deleuze called “diagrammatic,”  
> the only viable means of resistance in “societies of control”?
> And how does the assumption of these tactics intersect with students  
> putting all their information online as noted below? While they do  
> seem unafraid of surveillance, or of sharing private information,  
> does the storing and availability or archiving of this information  
> online represent a potential threat in the future given that  
> employers and others can potentially access their photos and  
> information later on, etc?
>
> Navjotika Kumar
> Kent State
>

Christina McPhee
http://christinamcphee.net

skype: naxsmash
facebook: Christina McPhee

contact:  c/o info at silverman-gallery.com

http://silverman-gallery.com, San Francisco