It is well known that despite his close engagement with cinema, Gilles Deleuze was less concerned with animated film, being somewhat dismissive of its capabilities. In recent years, however, a number of attempts have been made-most notably by William Schaffer, Thomas Lamarre, and Dan Torre to construct Deleuzian positions in animation theory. This paper outlines some of these approaches, whilst engaging critically with Torre's writings. In particular, it foregrounds Torre's neglect of the post-structural, political dimension of Deleuzian thought, through an examination of the concepts of faciality, the close up, and relation as they occur in Deleuzian and Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy. This is in part facilitated through a comparison of Stuart Blackton's Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906)a work directly addressed by Torre, and Emile Cohl's Fantasmagorie (1908)a work which he largely passes by. It is claimed here, that despite a number of apparent similarities, the animations of Cohl and Blackton express a radically divergent series of ontological commitments. Cohl offers the audience an experience of chaotic, mutable, relational complexity that revels in its incoherence, whilst Blackton presents a series of more straightforward set pieces, dwelling for the most part upon object-centric representational form. The tension between representation and becoming that occurs between these works is employed to facilitate a critical engagement with Torre's process-cognitivism. It is suggested that Torre's work, though exceptional in its pedagogic value, is likewise expressive of this tension, and that in its effort firstly to combine a series of process philosophical and cognitivist ideas, and secondly to unpack the radical ideas of Deleuze through the more conservative philosophy of Nicholas Rescher, it runs the risk of falling back into a quasi-Kantian philosophy of generality and representation.
Following Massimo Banzi's comment that the Arduino development board might be seen as a means of 'scratching your own itch', this paper explores the concept of affect in relation to physical computing, and investigates the ways in which cybernetic and networked objects could be said to enact a series of process-philosophical and object-oriented tensions. In so doing it addresses the cultural saturation of Arduino and its employment in an array of institutional, artistic and activist contexts, and brings this to bear on the conflict between the process philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and the more directly object-oriented perspectives of Graham Harman, Ian Bogost and Bruno Latour. Framing the enquiry around the at once ethico-aesthetic and speculative realist questions of what it is to 'scratch' and what it is to 'itch', the paper examines micro-and macro-political agency in the context of physical computing-contrasting process philosophy's pronounced notion of affective, connective, creative differentiation with the black-boxed, withdrawn objects of object-oriented philosophy, and its quasi-causal mode of aesthetic interaction.
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