Forming

The aim of art for Deleuze and Guattari is to render perceptible forces that lie beyond perception and to capture, in what is given, the forces that are not given. They task artists with producing compounds of sensation, heterogeneous assemblages of affects and intensities, extracted from forces lying at the limits of sensibility. This chapter explores the forming of these assemblages through processes of capture orientated around practices employing sculptural methodologies. Although Deleuze and Guattari have little to say about sculpture in general or specific works, they refer to the sensations of stone and metal as vibrating according to the order of strong and weak rhythms. Drawing on the writing of Gilbert Simondon these rhythms are discussed as dynamic modulations that emphasise temporal appearance. And examined in relation to Jack Burnham’s use of systems thinking identified in the artworks, by artists such as Hans Haacke and Public Share, that register complex flows of matter-energy exchanges.