Models as rhythmic investigations: The itinerancy of intention through intercession, interruption and interception.

Abstract

The piece is a contribution to an anthology developed by Geir Harald Samuelsen as part of the PKU project Matter, Gesture and Soul (DIKU) in the wake of a seminar, in a series hosted by the project: Tracing Rhythm. It developed in several stages with exchanges with him for about a year.

The topic and method of the piece is the same: itinerancy. It ties up with model-thinking by reference to Julia Robinson’s reworking of the kind of thinking-in-performance that she discusses in relation to George Brecht (John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, David Tudor and Jackson Pollock etc.).

The work is discussed and referenced in the text. The definition of the model as /non-repetitive seriality/ challenges the reader to conceive—based on analyses of concrete art works—what series are, in such terms (echoing Deleuze’s discussion of series in the Logic of sense from 1969).

The question raise in the piece is apparently simple: what becomes of iteration as a groundwork for developing model-thinking, when it happens under the conditions of a walkabout. The piece was completed at Tyin in the spirit of Tim Ingold’s mountaineering hikes, but also from the topics raised.

Mountaineering is a practice shared by the author and Geir Harald Samuelsen. And the method of seeking an experimental consistency between the thinking and the method of the essay—its thoughts and extensions—is explored on the backdrop of Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari.

The piece establishes a groundwork for a cartographic research design, that have followed in the wake of these tasks and occasions, worked out in encounter with Samuelsen. It features a theoretical horizon for the development of logbooks as reflective formats in art education at KHiO.

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Preface by Geir Harald Samuelsen:

“Rhythm is everywhere. It is breath and heartbeat; it is the sound of a drum and the repetitive flint carved lines in stone done by a prehistoric human being in Fontainebleau. It is the flickering screen and a million digital processes too small to see. It is engraved in the depth of our minds and bodies. It is how we remember. It is in how we walk, how we talk, how we write, and we act together. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, rhythm (Greek rhythmos, derived from rhein, “to flow”) is an ordered alternation of contrasting elements, and according to Roland Barthes, both painting and writing started with the same ges- ture, one which was neither figurative nor semantic, but simply rhythmic. In this publication, exhibition, and seminar (6th of December, 2022 at KMD, Bergen) the contributors have all approached rhythm through contemporary artistic, academic, and archaeological imagination, starting with some engraved and painted lines drawn by our stone age ancestors in France and South Africa. The initiative for this publication originates from the international artistic research project Matter, Gesture and Soul, based at The Art Academy – Department of Contemporary Art, Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, at the University of Bergen.”

The volume also includes documentation from a photogravure project by the author. The series is considered as part of the investigation: a lineup (Aufstellung) rather than an exhibit.