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ACTUAL VIRTUAL - #06
ISSN 1752-5624

A/V is happy to offer our readers and viewers the first issue of the editorial panel’s selections from ‘The Deleuzian Event’ conference at MMU. I want to flag up that our selection here does not imply a ranking order but is based on two factors that enabled us to get this issue out to you in good time: the earliest editorial feedback we received (which happens to foreground film) and papers in the most advanced technical state of readiness for our final edits.

Dr. Felicity Colman who teaches Cinema at the University of Melbourne, brings us To make war:  Deleuze’s metaphysical principles of the cinematographic event. In the cinema’s artistic and commercial forms of expression, we see the actualization of unnatural formations and connections, false borders and changes of the coordinates of the geographical and historical milieux. War is qualified on a daily basis as different types of events reconfigure its infinitives; to engage munitions, to destroy, to maim, to rape, to kill. In this examination of the nomos of being, produced in conjunctions of the war event on screen, an arbitration of consciousness occurs.

Frida Beckman of the English Department, Uppsala University, presents Double Exposure: Rethinking the Event in the David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Duplication and the movement between bodies in the play between virtual and actual open up an immanent movement beyond narrative logic and subjectivity. Via Lynch, Deleuze offers the possibility of rethinking the event in the heart of Hollywood.

My own Cinematic Narcosis: The Event of Multiplicity in Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome considers cinema as drug to induce magickal intoxication. I focus on a climactic hallucination near the end, when overloaded superimpositions tax cognitive grasp and descriptive language. This very quality of multiplicity is deliberately used by Anger to engineer psychic receptivity as event.

David Deamer is film co-ordinator/editor with AV. ‘Watch out! Recollection’: the ‘spectre of impossibility’ in Kaneto Shindô’s /Children of the Atom Bomb’ explores flashbacks in Deleuze’s theory and Shindô’s film. For Shindô the flashback can be radicalised to produce images that cannot be reconciled to the on-screen body. It is not just Shindô’s characters that recollect the a-bomb in order to act, but also the spectator who encounters it as an event. Deamer explores Shindô’s strategy through the conceptual figurations of ‘forking paths’ and ‘sheets of the past’.

This issue’s artist input is from Artist/Researcher Dr Gary Anderson whose work focuses on tactics of politicising a video practice. The Special Relationship was made in response to the recent high profile visit of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Liverpool. It grew out of a frustration with conventional public protesting and takes the form of a ‘family’ protest as a Home Movie. His introduction considers how the event of dissemination is a site, in potentia, of the productive, affirmative connection between thinking in radical immanence through an arts practice and acting in the interests of social and ecological justice.

The first of our three keynote papers is by Ian Buchanan, Professor of Critical and Cultural Theory at the University of Cardiff. Practical Deleuzism works via the case–study of Google’s internet search engine to ask ‘Is there a practical form of Deleuzism? Is it possible to use Deleuze’s work to think about and critique ethical, moral and political judgements?’ Buchanan suggests that not only is such a critique possible it is also consistent with what Deleuze defines as the event of thought.

Anna Powell
Website Director .