Cage's (1952) Untitled Event inspired an academic-performance-event, which we performed for the Society for the Study of Affect Conference's "evocative pit” in Lancaster, PA. In this space, Eakle's painting, inspired by late Cézanne paintings and water lily ponds, my Baroque music fragments connected with New Music experimentation, and Crump’s theatrical elements drawn from Artaud’s aleatory techniques, form what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) called transverse lines (p. 11) between diverse artistic practices. Herein, the three of us were not individual presenters but components of a larger collective multiplicity that encompassed music, painting, and theater performances.

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My performance quoted the sonic experimentations documented in the previous movements, creating new sounds through an Akai MPK mini keyboard assemblage. This electronic territory is connected with my ongoing research into Ning Yu's performances of Aaron Einbond's (2020) Cosmologies and other New Music compositions. The sonic landscape was further enriched by fragments of Baroque music, creating what Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) call "transverse lines" (p. 11) between duration and contemporary musical expressions. 

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Eakle's painting components conceived with encounters in nature created visual territories that intersected with the sonic and theatrical elements and with the light and color trickling through the windows at the conference. His work with color—cadmium red, orange, yellow, cobalt blue, violet, ultramarine, alizarin, and titanium white—produced what Deleuze (1981/2003) calls "coloristic sensation" (p. 112), creating affects that flowed between elements of the performance.

 

Crump's theatrical elements are drawn from his work on becoming-theater. His position on the poet's ladder—a direct reference to M.C. Richards' sketch of Cage's Theatre Piece No. 1—created vertical territories within the performance space. The incorporation of Artaud's aleatory techniques and amputated Shakespearean elements produced what Deleuze and Guattari (1975/1986) describe as "minor literature" (p. 16) within the context of academic performance.

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The following excerpt from our presentation, is a plateau of intensity where academic and performative forces intersect and transform each other. Through this assemblage, research becoming-minor, escaping the striated spaces of traditional methodology to create new possibilities for knowledge-production.

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"Opening Script of a Plan to Produce a Logic of Sensation

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We are a current, in a current. Our current work, together. We dive into our conference’s methodological stream to show the construction of an assemblage that will eventually land in an “evocative pit,” a black hole of sorts, later this afternoon. Its main constituents are comprised of overlapping territories of New Music, New Painting, and New Theatre presently cramped into academic space. As with this kind of stuff, our assemblage is comprised of a plan inspired by many related and connected parts.

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…Springing from Cage and David Tudor is a first durational segment about New Music, which is orchestrated and performed by Xiaoyue Zhang. Throbbing in the background of our entire assemblage is a base soundtrack that she created with cuts from her ongoing academic project involving multimedia performances by Ning Yu of Aaron Einbond’s (2020) Cosmologies, among other New Music compositions, as well as a dash of Baroque. Connecting to this work, Xiaoyue performs a composition of her own New Music using an Akai MPK mini keyboard. Alongside this music will be other visible and hidden instruments playing.

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A second segment is about painting and sensations, which is orchestrated and performed by me pertaining to an in-process oil painting made especially for, and during, the conference. It works out of the abstract expression of Black Mountain painters such as Franz Kline, the DeKoonings, the MC Richards diagram, and is inspired by my summer encounters with Cezanne’s Garden at Les Lauves at the Phillips Collection, an ocean of water lilies and wind creating waves in low marshes of the National Aquatic Gardens, Tokyo’s Ueno Park and other multisensory encounters in Japan, Western North Carolina near Black Mountain, and Lake James. The painting starts with an armature of vertical and horizontal, points closest to viewers, and yet-to-come points beyond the horizon. Within the armature, color bits created by blendings of cadmium red, orange, and yellow, cobalt blue and violet, ultramarine, alizarin, titanium white propelled by linseed oil and Japan dryer are introduced to produce sensations.

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Performing a third, theatre segment is Evan Crump that springs from and out of Deleuze and Guattrai’s becomings and Antonin Artaud’s (1958) aleatory work. Part of those elements are amputated from Shakespeare, others are composed by Evan, and contain becoming-animal sounds that drift from his position on a poet’s ladder that mirrors elements from M.C. Richards’ sketch of Cage’s Theatre Piece No 1. Additionally, following Cage’s (1952) Zen Buddhist recitations at the Untitled Event, we draw from a portion of a paper pertaining to Mystics of Tibetan Buddhism, national art museum shows, and Jack Kerouac. At the center of the performance is our audience, submerged with us in an affective refrain hinged on control and chance in what Artaud might call “a constant bath of light, color, images, movements, and noises” (p. 125) between sensations and, physical bodies, human and otherwise."