Diagrammatic Praxis

Diagrammatic Praxis was a post-doctoral research process drawing upon applied concepts of the diagram previously explored in my dissertation, ‘The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram.’ As a researcher in the Art, Research, Theory and Innovation (ARTI) lectoraat of the Amsterdam School for the Arts, the primary focus was on image/text relationality as a vehicle for investigating applied theoretical practice in artistic processes. I worked with Foucault’s concept of the diagram, rejuvenated by Deleuze as abstract machine and Massumi’s concept of the biogram. Thinking the diagram entails negotiating several registers of relations between forces immanent to a field of experience. A diagrammatic practice emphasizes movement with and through the dynamic intensities of an inter-disciplinary field, instantiating the commingled performativity of theory and artmaking through fielding. It experientially engages energetic transductions between unformed matter and unformalised function, between the discursive and the non-discursive, the visible and articulable, content and expression, chaos and order, catastrophe and rhythm. The research aims to contribute to emerging discourse on artistic research as experimental methods of reading and writing are interwoven with artmaking processes. Additionally, the current wave of discourse on vibrant materiality, object ontologies and thing theory resonate with collaborative, diagrammatic methods. Diagrammatic praxis is situated within interdisciplinary investigations of the collaborative dynamics of mattering. How, as Bruno Latour has pointed out, matters of fact emanate as matters of concern. How objects, things, performers and publics might generate the felt concerns of the event. This proposition of gathering, through an intricate mesh of mattering inclusive of things at all scales of experience, from quarks to cosmos, from facts to fictions excites what matters as the experience of the relational dynamics of the event and its emerging concerns. The material presented in JAR is a compilation of a fraction of the image and text elements from a three-year process, shaped as a graphic essay. Works include graphic translations, works on paper and published texts created from an integral diagrammatic method.