The theme of water might be approached from a textural and layered point of entry. By that we might want to think of the interlacing or separation of different circuits of infrastructure (fresh water and sewage systems) but also different layers in the water itself, like different bios-layers intermingling but also separating. This could concern questions of scale (molecular to organism or infrastructure) but also might go back to the issue of the screen (sieve) in the passage on the Event of Deleuze’s Leibniz and the Baroque. Textures emerge as the interstice, or diagram, pertaining to a more enveloping and transductive procedure open for new relays – for instance the relaying between a physical or biological process of complexity and its potential of instigating a conceptual or artistic resonance. Finally, texturing and layering might enable interesting techniques for experiments with video and projection, as some mentioned they wanted to work with.
The themes we touched upon in relation to the urban fabric should carry our thoughts when turning toward water. Water as crucial force in the making of an urban fabric might enable us to further undo a substantialist or social constructivist view on the urban fabric which we started to critically address in our discussions and meetings. The material procedures working with and not against water (in terms of flooding) is an interesting point of generating alternative geographies of the urban fabric. Also, different materials behave differently under different “watery” circumstances, like frozen rocks or electricity lines breaking, rusting, stretching, becoming supple or solid.
"I wonder how the different flow speeds intersect in the canal system..."
"Medieval canals intersect with those that look like highways. How does the flow transition between these different infrastructural levels of the canal system?"
One important technique carrying us through the series of workshops and events are the movement profiles. We initiated a process of tracing, interlacing and relaying movements between different geographies, materialities, and realms of thought. It might be interesting to continue movement profiles, now attuned to water. This feeds into the question of a trans-local urban fabric resonating through our specific live-worlds or milieus and their shared ground.
We have to get back to the movement of the imagination that makes the deserted island a model, a prototype of the collective soul. First, it is true that from the deserted island it is not creation but re-creation, not the beginning but a re-beginning that takes place. The deserted island is the origin, but a second origin. From it everything begins anew. The island is the necessary minimum for this re-beginning, the material that survives the first origin, the radiating seed or egg that must be sufficient to re-produce everything. Clearly, this presupposes that the formation of the world happens in two stages, in two periods of time, birth and re-birth, and that the second is just as necessary and essential as the first, and thus the first is necessarily compromised, born for renewal and already renounced in a catastrophe. It is not that there is a second birth because there has been a catastrophe, but the reverse, there is a catastrophe after the origin because there must be, from the beginning, a second birth. Within ourselves we can locate the source of such a theme: it is not the production of life that we look for when we judge it to be life, but its reproduction.
Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands
"Water could become a semiotic instrument for writing or annunciation (understood as a molecular component of language). How can pulling similarities between language, water and sense, for example, actually help compose different semiotic assemblages?"
Movement Profile: simple proposition to make a movement profile of whatever is relevant in your movement ecology, the format is open. The movement profile is a good way to avoid representation logics of identification among people who are new to each other.
