GEOMETRIC PERMUTATION

The primordial division of consciousness that establishes the minimal difference in which the surface of the subject can emerge from the void is a gesture of thought, rationality, logic and reason: a gesture of Virtuality. It is only within the framework of such Virtual cognitive forces that the BwO is able to form the subject in what Deleuze and Guattari describe as “that glacial reality where the alluvions, sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that

compose an organism – and also a signification and a subject - occur” (2004b, 176). Beneath this shifting cartography that enables a territory of the subject to form and develop is the perpetual decision of consciousness to think itself. An artist who critically confronts this

notion is Pascal Dombis, whose “regime of post-virtual images” (Buci-Glucksmann 2012) aim towards a perpetual reconstruction of the relation between the subject and technology through a radicalisation of the processes of reason that define the Virtual structures of reality.

If Deleuze “gives philosophical expression to a world of fractal and Reimanian [sic]⁶

geometries, quantum and chaotic physics, and a logic of pure relations and paradoxes” (Smith 2009, 41), then Dombis gives artistic expression to the same world, embedding within

technology the processes of human thought that have given rise to such irrational lenses on reality through hyper-rational extrapolation. Dombis states that his aim is to:

convey a vision of the world in terms of itinaries [sic] and displacement, offering another kind of mapping in which networks get into the picture…to confront the human viewer with their own primitive irrationality through my artworks, artworks that result from an abuse of technological processes. (Dombis 2004)

This agenda is precisely a confrontation with the parallax of subjectivity and a disruption of the Virtuality of consciousness, through which we might achieve a critical contact with the Real of our technological age. Though the computer, as an embodiment of machinic processes of rational logic, appears as the mediating tool for his work, it is the “principles of self-reproduction, proliferation and excess” (Debailleux 2008b) upon which his artistic process rests in the exploitation of and challenge to the viewer. The stream of practice in works such as Rizong (1998-1999), Antisana (2000-2008), Hyper-Structures (2002-2004) and Spin (2006-2012) spans over a decade of such exploitation of simple functions taken beyond their visual limit into the realm of excess and disfunction. Across prints, video and site-specific

installations, the use of simple artistic gestures – lines – reveals in these works a creative

6 An elliptic, non-euclidean geometry in which metric properties change through space and parallel lines do not exist (see Riemann 1873), creating a mathematical basis for the curvature of space-time in relativity.

Fig.14 Spin (2009) © Pascal Dombis

Computer generated images from excessive algorithmic iteration.

statement that is “not interested in their discrete particularities or aesthetic qualities, but in their excessive accumulation as well as in the various mental scapes conjured up” (Amine 2011). This exposes the role of the algorithms used for such work as a desiring-machine that only works artistically through its disruption and disfunction, as we have seen in the self-positing nature of Virtual consciousness in creating the cognitive landscape of the surface of the subject, but also creates a new mode of mapping the relation of thought to technology.

There is here a cartography not only of a subject between landscapes but of subjective landscapes that are themselves constantly shifting. Dombis creates such a mapping in his excessive use of abstract lines, circles and spirals as both objects and forces.

By placing the line as a gesture of the Real – excessive in its use but lacking in cognitive signification – these geometric works construct themselves iteratively as the perpetual self-positing of the subject. The partial objects, as a dark energy of the visual field, are drawn into the assemblage of the work through this excess, as they “always proliferate by tens of thousands like an immense digital tapestry, the epidermis of the world” (Buci-Glucksmann 2012). Here Dombis is negotiating what is labelled here as the relation between emergent Virtual and presupposed Real, for the individual line exists only on the surface once posited by the functioning algorithm of the work, while the entire assemblage forms an artistic BwO, a

“surface like an immense real-imaginary continental map” (Ibid.). This is the quasi-causal relation between the Real and the Virtual: the former appears as the cognitive ‘material’ from which the latter is formed; the latter instigates the separation of the former as ‘object’ out of the unknowable flux of the void. In Dombis’ geometric abstractions Frank Popper identifies a

“new conceptual space that emerged through self-programmed iterative hyperstructures. We are here already at the heart of the virtual sphere” (Popper 2007). Dombis labels these

emergent structures “Irrational Environments” (2004), expressions of “supra-rational excess”⁷ (Nechvatal 2005) in the inherently excessive functioning of Virtual consciousness, manifested as art through “complexity, perpetuation, enrichment and chaos…a relentless machine-logic bent on achieving a contemporary techno-hyperirrationality” (Popper 2007). What Dombis is aiming to expose is the inherently irrational nature of rational thought, pushing consciousness and symbolic structures to their extreme to reveal what we label here as the Real in the Virtual, the necessarily inaccessible objectification of a thought, which Deleuze aligns with expression and sense as the fourth and most problematic element of a propositional logic (2004b, 22). Even the imagery engages with this emergent structure surrounding the notion of the unrepresentable, for example in Antisana II (2000/2008) which “opens out like a

7 Suprarational: “transcending the rational : not to be comprehended by reason alone” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary 2014).

false fractal butterfly, a meshing together of lines and spirals, in which a million curves engender a being as airy as it is baroque” (Buci-Glucksmann 2009). It is the self-similarity between the void of the Real and the true void of subjectivity that enables a glimpse of the inaccessible space formed at the core of consciousness, mirrored in the self-similarity of the Virtual as an infinitely scalable pure function that creates the surface of the subject. This excessive reiteration of function develops “the fractal loop’s potentialities” as the “infinite combinations of geometric structures” (Popper 2007) forming the abstraction of the BwO that we call subject. Dombis explicitly confronts the stakes of the Virtual formation of

consciousness through the constant processes of emergence that form in his relation to creation, function and consciousness. His ‘Irrational Environments’ reveal the necessary void within thought as the irrational genesis of rationality, always threatening to re-enter

consciousness as madness and the excessive Real: the cause of Virtuality’s desire for

perpetuation and permutation, lost amidst the processes of thought and re-inserted through the “new regime of virtual and post-virtual flux-images” (Buci-Glucksmann 2012) that form his geometric, abstract and algorithmic practices.

Fig.15 Antisana II (2000) © Pascal Dombis