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I Feel Like an Abstract Line
Mirror-touch synaesthetes are capable of extraordinary embodied and empathic responses to other people and also to non-human and non-living things. This talk argues that non-synaesthetes can also cultivate this kind of embodied empathy. My case study will be the "abstract line," in Deleuze and Guattari's term: a line that describes no figure but exhibits its own feeling qualities. Drawing on perceptual theories from the nineteenth century to the present, I suggest that feeling like an abstract line allows us to feel what we have in common with nonorganic life. Examples will be drawn from Islamic art, abstract painting, animation, and analog video synthesis. Feeling like an abstract line helps us arm ourselves against commercial applications that try to instrumentalize human acts of perception and empathy.
Laura U. Marks is a scholar, theorist, and programmer of independent and experimental media arts. Her most recent books are Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image (MIT Press, 2015) and Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art ( MIT, 2010). She has curated programs of experimental media for festivals and art spaces worldwide. Marks teaches in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada.
Photo of tiels at Sheikh Lutfollah Mosque, Isfahan by Natalie Sorensen
Contact:
Jarrett Duncan | jarrett.duncan@uleth.ca