return to Appendix IV, Return to 'Work'

'Intensity'

QUOTE from
Stuart (2004b) Compositional Techniques for Live Dance in 'Moving' Digital Scenography presence, sensation and the time-image. This paper was presented as part of an MA in Collaborative Arts at University College Chichester, UK on 12th May 2004.

Using Deleuzian logic (2003) sensation can be related to presence. Deleuze suggests that presence of a person or thing can act directly on our nervous system (ibid. p51) and become, within the aesthetics of art, a form of 'hysterical' force, that is, an intensity of life portrayed and projected by the artwork. Further he suggests that

Force is closely related to sensation for sensation to exist, a force must be exerted on a body, on a point of the wave. But if force is the condition of sensation, it is nonetheless not the force that is sensed, since the sensation "gives" something completely different from the forces that condition it. (ibid. p56)

Thus presence can be seen as a force, which art might capture and use to promote a form of sensation through a viewer's body.
· Deleuze sees art as rendering visible not just presence but also other invisible forces, such as gravity, pressure, inertia, weight, attraction and time (ibid. p63). He suggests that
In art, and in painting as in music, it is not a matter of reproducing or inventing forms, but of capturing forces. (ibid. p56)

return to Appendix IV, Return to 'Work'