Choral Writing

Breaking in virgin territory, as any post-Derridean would:

"Chora receives everything or gives place to everything, but Plato insists that in fact it has to be a virgin place, and that it has to be totally foreign, totally exterior to anything that it receives. Since it is absolutely blank, everything that is printed on it is automatically effaced. It remains foreign to the imprint it receives; so in a sense, it does not receive anything—it does not receive what it receives nor does it give what it gives. Everything inscribed in it erases itself immediately, while remaining in it. It is thus an impossible surface—it is not even a surface, because it has no depth."

And yet chora makes itself available as a space for discovery, an in-between space of becoming that enables the artist-medium to tap into their creative potential while methodically acting out their inner choreography as if in perpetual postproduction.

The networked aspects of contemporary choral writing are filmic in nature and are being transmitted body-image to body-image. These mobile body-images circulate in an intersubjective space of co-poiesis so that we (the mobile images) can remix (with/in) each other:

'I' meets a 'non-I,' 'I' meets another 'non-I.' This 'non-I' meets another 'I.' Each encounter creates its own psychic resonance field, and each resonance field is with and in other fields of resonance. Thus, each matrixial cluster is a web of meeting of one with-in the other, where each one -- and each other -- belongs to several such clusters. The matrixial web is thus the body-psyche-time-space of the intimate even though it is a web of several, and it is from the onset transgressive. Transgressive and intimate -- even when the encounter is between, with, and in two subjects, the encounter is not symbiotic. Transgressive and intimate -- even if the encounter is between three subjects, inside this sphere triangulation is not Oedipalizing. Com-passionate matrixial empathy is not oedipalizing, yet difference is being swerved there already.

Swerving through time and space, the artist-medium navigates chora perversely:

Chora, then, is the space in which place is made possible, the chasm for the passage of spectacles Forms into a spatialized reality, a dimensionless tunnel opening itself to spatialization, obliterating itself to make others possible and actual.

Actual entities ("the possible impossible") are then rendered into the ongoing remix as source material to be "taken" and postproduced into an aesthetic reconfiguration that feeds into the artist-medium's ongoing sense of satisfaction for having achieved what Whitehead calls Higher Phases of Experience.

Concrescent prehensions, rising to the occasion:

Actual entities can best be understood as "drops of experience" in space-time. They are both the subject that grasps other experiences and the new reality constituted by those experiences. Whitehead introduces the term "prehension" to illustrate this dual idea. The word "prehension" is related to the more traditional word "apprehension." Both are from the Latin "to take." But whereas the latter implies a subject taking hold of an object, Whitehead's term attempts to transcend this subject-object distinction. It implies a subject taking account of an object in a way that makes the latter a constitutive element of the subject as subject. It is a way of suggesting a real relatedness of subject to object, not just a relation of reason. To illustrate, consider the relation of parent to child. The child owes its existence and genetic inheritance to the parent; the parent does not owe its existence or genetic inheritance to the child. Hence, the child is related to the parent in a real or constitutive way, which is not the case considered the other way around.

Whitehead uses the term "concrescence" to define the process of prehending. "This concrescence is thus nothing else than the 'real internal constitution' of the actual occasion in question." (PR, 244) To continue the example, the process by which a unique person emerges from its inheritances and experiences is its concrescence.

For the artist-medium, creating a body of work (concrescent reality) that at once "emerges from its inheritances and experiences" while simultaneously navigating the matrixial in-between space of chora where it "has to be totally foreign, totally exterior to anything that it receives," the greatest challenge of all is maintaining its transgressive movement.

One approach is to invent persona via the postproduction of presence in trance narrative space.

Case in point: Immobilité, opening as a solo exhibition at the Chelsea Art Museum in April.

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Metadata: chora, foreign film, body, language, creativity, art, co-poiesis