Cursory Touches: Algorithmic Mediation as Tangential Conjuring

Kurzfassung/Abstract

The tangent — as line, as surface, as volume — is only actualized through
encounter. This touching relation is always flee(t)ing, it is one of brief
attention, an encounter en passant: the slight touching of shoulders on a
crowded street, the longing brush of a hand along a dusty shelf, the
skimming over of theories in an academic paper. A digressive departure? Or
is it a distracted avoidance? Despite this “mere touching,” imprints,
however slight, are left behind; traces are drawn, flows are redirected,
desires remachined. The point of contact becomes a point of impact, a
singular event wherein differential forces intersect in ways that we can’t
see coming, only leaving. Such events carry no specific outcomes or
utility, but they can nevertheless make their mark. The tangential
relation, as cursory and punctual as it might be, is not indifferent, but
emerges in difference. It is an encounter en passant that refuses to merely
pass by.

Taking off from this tangential thinking, this collaborative
performance-lecture experiments with passing relations as they might
emerge, in unforeseen and non-linear ways, through aesthetic practices
(where aesthetics refers to sensorial conditioning and perceptual
distributions, aesthetics as aisthesis). In this particular occurrence, the
invocation of tarot reading as an algorithmic medium turned occulted
composition device will be combined with philosophical riffing and sonic
computational techniques (such as live coding) in order to experiment with
how seemingly codified and codifiable moments of interaction emerge not as
causally-entangled relation but instead as “dark precursors” (Deleuze,
1994). Here, we understand the tangential relation as just one form of
“aberrant nuptial” (Deleuze, 1994), as just one instance of the subtractive
encounters that are enabled between the momentary touching of systems
characterized by fundamental difference. It is through this touch that we
hope to invoke, or better, conjure, unthought modes of collectivity where
the “collective” refers to a sense of anorganic and inhuman multiplicity
that deploys itself beyond individual entanglements toward “the side of
preverbal intensities, indicating a logic of affects rather than a logic of
delimited sets” (Guattari, 1995, p. 9). Through this performance-lecture we
want to consider, in witchy ways, how the tangential meeting of
“heterogeneous systems of couplings and resonance” (Assis & Giudici, 2017,
p. 9) might impact our own thinking, as artists, teachers and researchers
of sociology and pedagogy, in yet unthought ways.