Strange Assemblage

This paper contends that the power of Deleuze & Guattari’s (1988) notion of assemblage as theorised in 1000 Plateaus can be normalised and reductive with reference to its application to any social-cultural context where an open system of dynamic and fluid elements are located. Rather than determining the assemblage in this way, this paper argues for an alternative conception of ‘strange assemblage’ that must be deliberately and consciously created through rigorous and focused intellectual, creative and philosophical work around what makes assemblages singular. The paper will proceed with examples of ‘strange assemblage’ taken from a film by Peter Greenaway (A Zed and 2 Noughts); the film ‘Performance’; educational research with Sudanese families in Australia; the book, Bomb Culture by Jeff Nuttall (1970); and the band Hawkwind. Fittingly, these elements are themselves chosen to demonstrate the concept of ‘strange assemblage’, and how it can be presented. How exactly the elements of a ‘strange assemblage’ come together and work in the world is unknown until they are specifically elaborated and created ‘in the moment’. Such spontaneous methodology reminds us of the 1960s ‘Happenings’, the Situationist International and Dada/Surrealism. The difference that will be opened up by this paper is that all elements of this ‘strange assemblage’ cohere in terms of a rendering of ‘the unacceptable.'

The Material-Discursive Border & Territorial-Apparatuses (The Eile Project)

Through our trans-disciplinary practice, a place, of their own , and one specific project based at the UK border with the Irish Republic, we discover, occupy and create (alternate) 'field conditions' of various kinds. Our ongoing art and spatial research in The Eile Project draws together different bodies of knowledge, experience and practice; from art, architecture, urbanism, philosophy, and science, to create new imaginaries and cartographies of the border. This is a particularly apposite time for such an endeavour - as the UK's protracted and contentious manoeuvres to leave the EU create renewed tensions and uncertainties at the Irish Border, and borders and their most brutal and basic spatial manifestation of the wall are increasingly being built around the world, physically and in the collective imagination. We firstly establish the borderlands through a particular reading as material-discursive, to pay attention to its construction through spatial, material and embodied processes, as well as through the concrete work of various discourses. We then explore aspects of our spatial art practice as territorial-apparatuses. We will illustrate how this opens up important complex questions about disciplines, knowledge, ethics, aesthetics, territoriality and the potential of the confluence of art and spatial practice

Living absence:the strange geographies of missing people

In this paper ‘missing people’ gain an unstable presence through their (restaged) testimonies recounting individual occupations of material urban public space during the lived practice of absence. We explore ‘missing experience’ with reference to homeless geographies, and as constituted by paradoxical spatialities in which people are both absent and present. We seek to understand such urban geographies of absence through diverse voices of missing people, who discuss their embodiment of unusual rhythmic occupations of the city. We conclude by considering how a new politics of missing people might take account of such voices in ways to think further about rights-to-be-absent in the city

Cinematic and aesthetic cartographies of subjective mutation

This article exmaines the use of cinema as a mapping of subjective mutation in the work of Deleuze, Gauttari and Berardi. Drawing on Deleuze's distinciton between the reduction of the art-work to the symptom and the idea of art as symptomatology, the article focuses on Berardi's use of cinematic examples, posing the quesiton in each case of to what extent they function as symptomatologies or mere symptoms of cultural and subjective mutations in examples ranging from Bergman's Persona to Van Sant's Elephant to finish on speculations about Fincher's The Social Network as a cirtical engagement with subjective mutation in the 21st Century

Ancient Cartographies as a Basis for Geolocation Models in Public Space: The Case of Giambattista Nolli and its Heritage Application

In 1748, the architect and surveyor Giambattista Nolli mapped an abstract reality of the city of Rome. As a challenge to the inherited projections, it represented the city mixing streets, halls, corridors, churches, baths and markets as part of a unique public space network. A new way to design public space and rethink the whole urban system was opened by the possibility of containing in these representations a single layer with all kinds of public space (including the interior of public buildings). Despite this, Nolli's plan remained as a useless instrument since the hegemony of automobile mobility appeared as a pre-eminent system. This research tries to understand how the application of the ancient cartographies' methodology can improve the pedestrian mobility of historic cities by means of enhancing the graphic value of the system of Giambattista Nolli. Nowadays, free public space is represented as empty and built ones, as solid. This proposal would revert this reified conception of the city, understanding this baroque representation as an instrument of identification and assessment of the transitional heritage. The clues unveiled by Nolli seem to be able to integrate the plans of public buildings within the urban tissue, which would result in a step towards the full integration of cartography and mobility. The success of the comprehensive tools offered by large servers such as Alphabet inc. (Google) or Bing Maps confirm the suitability of the combination of new technologies and Big Data with urban planning, reaching the synchronisation of Smart Cities. Nowadays, open public space can be 'walked in' from any electronic device, consequently, the application of the "Nolli methodology" would implement the model of urban geolocation with the assimilation of inner public spaces. In the creation of a great global map of the public space, a chimaera could be intuited. This would be discussed within a tangible reality: every open public space is already housed in the Big Data and it is accessible through geolocation tools. The inclusion of the of the public buildings' interiors would contribute to develop a greater permeability between city and citizens. Furthermore, this representation would optimize pedestrian travel times and would be able to expand the geolocation system network as a documentary repository

From the cartographic gaze to contestatory cartographies

Rene Descartes declared in the 16th Century that the world was now dominated by the visual, a notion that would be seen as defining the Enlightenment (Descartes, cited in Potts, 2015). As the increased dominance of seeing and the desire to visualise the world cohered with the production of increasingly accurate tools of measurement and the advent of the printing press, cartography emerged as a discipline, often used as tool of oppression and dominance. Cartographic visualizations, afforded the creator, and user, a Gods eye view of the world. Following others (See Casas-Cortés et. al., 2013; Koch, 1998), this chapter refers to this way of seeing the world from above as the Cartographic Gaze. First, the chapter briefly examines the historical emergence of the Cartographic Gaze before turning to a discussion about how the proliferation of geographic imaging technologies and digital tools simultaneously further embedded this gaze into mapping practice, while also diffusing such practices of mapping to broader populations. Discussing the rise of participatory mapping and counter mapping under the rubric of contestatory cartographies, the chapter presents some of the challenges that face those attempting to create alternative maps of their worlds, and the ways in which they become entrapped by the pervasiveness of the Cartographic Gaze. We use the term participatory mapping to refer to methodologies for map-making based around the participation of those who the map will represent. And we employ the term counter mapping to reference those mapping practices that explicitly seek to expose and challenge power relations. In specific, we look at how the colonizing origins of the Cartographic Gaze limit what it is possible to do with these alternative mapping practices

Encoding Spatial Experience in Garhwali Popular Music Cassettes

Connections between particular sounds and geographically conceived places/spaces seems to be a recurrent part of many repertoires in different parts of the Himalaya. A number of examples exist in which ritual repertoires are linked to pilgrimage pathways, to specific spiritual sites or to an ordering of space in relation to geomorphic realities. In the North Indian region of Garhwal, these connections are most directly made within wedding processions in which particular repertoire items are mapped against particular landscapes and pathways. In other repertoire items, specific motivic devices are used in more subtle ways to enhance the spatial experience of performers and listeners. In popular music idioms, connections between sounds and geomorphically imagined spaces are achieved in ways that borrow from traditional repertoire but also expand the symbolic use of sound through studio enhancement. In conjunction with more obvious regional identifiers such as language, rituals, deities and costumes, sounds help construct a shared regional identity amongst listeners that is associated with the physical reality of mountains. This paper examines a selection of popular music songs from Garhwali cassettes from the 1980s, 90s and early 2000s and notes a number of consistent uses of particular sounds that prompt a spatial experience associated with a mountainous landscape

Where in the World Are the Lesbians?

In 2001 I became, as far as I can tell, the first person hired at a Catholic university specifically because of my work in LGBTQ studies. I am blessed, as it were, with a departmental colleague who publishes widely in postcolonial queer studies, a colleague in another department who teaches queer U.S. history every two years, and many supportive friends on the faculty. Still, I am the most public face of LGBTQ studies on campus, and if a new queer studies course is added to the curriculum, I am likely to be the one who develops it. Over the years I have come to realize that my role is not unusual, Catholic university or not. I was in a similar position at a large state university for seven years and have several friends and acquaintances across the country at a variety of institutions in similar spots. Most of us are not lucky enough to work among even a small clustering of others teaching in our field, even if we do have colleagues who assign queer theory in their courses or publish on queer topics. Of necessity this makes us chameleons, generalists. As an interdisciplinary scholar with an interdisciplinary doctorate, I feel suited to the role

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment edited by Louise Westling

Randy Lee Cutler reviews The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment, edited by Louise Westlin