Towards a Practice of Affect
Jondi Keane's installation Perception Lookout: The east and west of self-organisation, shown at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, during October-November 2002, was a subtle and thought-provoking environment which induced a multi-dimensional visual field. Ordinary and ordinal visual signifiers (tools, lines, diagrams, planes and shapes) were arranged intensively into a diagram of cues - continually referencing direction and depth, orientation and circulation, position and movement. The work was a life-size map--but not, as one might first think, a cognitive map for the mind, but rather, after experience and reflection, a perceptual field for the body.
In Brian Massumi's recently published book Parables for the Virtual, he grapples with what has become the overwhelmingly central motif in cultural theory (and contemporary art practice), namely the body. Massumi is determined to explore the body in the many complex dimensions of the physical as having a force in its own right, without recourse to essentialisms and biologism (though at times he leans quite close to these positions). He borrows from scientific research and theory in order to steer away from a purely phenomenological and philosophical understanding. Massumi is fascinated with the physiology of perception, believing we need a deeper and more sophisticated understanding of how we see, move and feel in order to better understand why we are shaping and being shaped by the media, architectural, and technological environments of contemporary society. Jondi Keane's Perception Lookout echoed this same fascination and motivated similar lines of questioning through the experimental logic of its visual field. In this article I will explore Massumi's thinking as it relates to Keane's work.
There seems to be a growing feeling within media, literary, and art theory... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline