All posts tagged with 'felix guattari'
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Vanessa Meyer is a graduate of the Communications undergraduate program at Concordia University and is currently completing her final year in The New School Media Studies Masters program. Her work is fundamentally interdisciplinary in that she makes a conscious effort to bridge the field of critical media studies with other domains, such as philosophy, political science, cultural theory, sociology, and art criticism. Along with this academic project, Vanessa maintains the importance of integrating a strong practical element into her work. She is currently working on experimental ways of conceiving of and producing documentary.
A ‘Politics’ of Mapping, Or How to Produce a Whatever Documentary
What are the emerging politics of our new media environment? Is “politics” even the appropriate term to be using? It is not the goal of this paper to offer any simple solutions to these questions, or really any “solutions” at all, instead the present paper develops a (creative) way of understanding the developing political atmosphere from the perspective of an ever changing and fluid media landscape. Through an interdisciplinary approach it will follow in the footsteps of the thinkers that it draws on, such as Jodi Dean, Giorgio Agamben, Thacker and Galloway, Paolo Virno, Geert Lovink, and Deleuze and Guattari. By outlining the movement from the centralized televisual media landscape to the distributed network of the web this paper will combine Deleuzian theories of rhizomes and “mapping” with ideas for “new documentary” in order to create a creative and experimental way of working with both theory and practice- and subsequently gain a fuller insight into our developing “politics.”
Arthur Bravo grew up all over the Northeast and spent several years living throughout California where he earned a BA in Art. He is currently a second-year Master’s student in Anthropology at The New School for Social Research. His developing interests lie in exploring the middle-class experience in the contemporary United States and its projection to the rest of the world, with specific attention to childhood, contemporary art, imagination, creativity, and aesthetic taste. Apart from his official academic activities, Arthur is a member and participant of ‘Music in Space’, an art collaborative under the experimental, unaccredited, volunteer-only, and primarily student-run ‘school’ called The Bruce High Quality Foundation University. Eventually, Arthur hopes to reconcile his dual interests and activities as artist and anthropologist at some point in the foreseeable future.
How Contemporary Takes on Art, Theory and Life Converge in Robert Altman’s ‘The Company’
Declaring that ‘thought lags behind nature’, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari introduce the concept of the ‘rhizome’ in an attempt to overcome the limitations of structure and linearity by embracing multiplicity and cyclicality. Rhizomes, they argue, let us imagine our world as countless flows of perpetual change and motion with no beginning and no end – and no central essence – for they are composed of, defined by, or exist because of the connections they embody or represent.
One artist whose works have exhibited such dynamism in imagining, interpreting and representing our world since the 1970s is American filmmaker Robert Altman. Through the use of ensemble casts, improvisation during filming, overlapping dialogue, and the use of multiple roaming cameras, Altman has presented audiences with singular pictures of American life in the latter half of the 20th century.
My intention is twofold: to make a reading of Altman’s film ‘The Company’ utilizing Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘rhizome’ theory, and consequently to consider the implications of such a reading, that is, to contemplate art, theory, and life in the contemporary era.