Text by Nikita Safonov for
https://masterkey.garden project at
"I don't know whether the Earth is spinning or not..." digital exhibition, VII Moscow International Biennale for Young Art
This analysis forces one to consider situations... where there is a net flux of lines of force… 1
One opens multiple by decomposing a locked system—not an empty sign, but the key-figure of swinging movement tracing the autonomous sign-complex composed from materially, semiotically, and conceptually reiterated elementary images: motifs (of affective tonality) and characters (of rhythmic anarchitecture). Any particular encounter with a key-figure not only refers to an atomic fact (state of affairs) or sublime experience, but produces knots in the net. Elements of such a structure cannot escape contingent folding of motifs and characters. The Topologist "would call it a handle" for multiple connections, whereas the Physicist "more vividly terms it a wormhole."
2Never grasped, captured, possessed, but abstracted and sensed through variations and distortions: how can a fire act as a navigation point for striating affective motifs (melodic scapes) and counterpoints (rhythmic events)? Filtering sequences of concrete becomings: returned by a racket in the form of foamiran, representing itself as a bonfire, strawberry-formed or revealing itself as a worker to be collaborated with. Objects are ready to be processed as a full set deployed in a textual, physical, or digital setting. They appear to be constituents of captured motifs (propositions)—not things but reading-mades: formed imprints of affective tonality, signals and performative signs from psychophysical realities. Reading-mades construct not narratives but channels of passions (forces) with refrains and accidental connections (bursts). Propositions are not yet facts; they mark or striate absolute smooth space—non-signifying reality of affective anarchitecture—by deploying passion-nets with knots identifying and contracting desire-webs.
Such a swinging movement tests the opposition between desire and passion. The former, being a way in which "the self projects itself into, and remakes, the world," is "autonomous, absolute, and universalizing," the latter, being "heteronomous, gratuitous, singular," embodies aesthetic feeling, which is a way in which "the world projects itself into, and remakes, the self.
3 This opposition sets up the dialectics of difference between passion-net of reading-mades (objects as particulars or propositions) and desire-web of refrains (basic signs as characters), reevaluating levels of access
4 to the affective anarchitecture.
1 Charles Misner and John Wheeler, Annals of Physics, Volume 2, Issue 6 (December 1957).
2 Ibid.
3 Steven Shaviro, Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).
4 As noted by Justin Hoover.