Deleuze * Derrida

For the 2017 Deleuze and Artistic Research conference I instantiated a machinic-writing-event, which addressed the somewhat tensile relationship between Deleuzean and Derridean philosophy. A related paper - delivered at the one of the conference panels - explored this territory in a broadly traditional academic fashion, whilst also providing the raw data which could be utilised by a pair of computer controlled writing machines machines (x-y pen-plotters interfaced with Processing and Arduino). The machines mined the multiple drafts of the paper, exploring the material, performative and durational aspects of its composition – foregrounding, and in some sense reactivating, the vectors of its textual becoming.

Prior to the conference, the draft materials for the paper were archived daily, providing an archive that would ultimately serve as a data source. Through a process of writing and over-writing, the writing machines explored the chronological development of a series of textual passages - revealing the emergence and development of ideas, as well as deletions, redactions and changes of mind. Contact microphones were attached to the plotting mechanism, providing a percussive accompaniment to the development of each machinic palimpsest.

The plotters were ‘tuned’ respectively to Derridean or a Deleuzean lexicons, and this served to influence the mining of the text. Ultimately, the work instantiated a zone of indeterminacy – celebrating the sonic, textual and ideational couplings which emerged from material collision of texts.