Me and my iPad

“Bodies assemble and disassemble as they are machined through desire” (Clark 2012:210).

Desire is expressed by Clark (2012:202) in an affirmative way as the “magnetic attraction between bodies”. My iPad is a vital part/extension of me. When I use the potentials and engage with the affordances of the tablet (especially in terms of drawing) then the creative ‘artwork’ appears to open up my thinking through theory and practice. This communication seems to generate flows of intensity and affective entanglements.

I recognize the formation of an assemblage in/between myself and the tablet, towards a plane of consistency (Deleuze & Guattari 1987). This creative encounter enables me to be sensitive to the forces and flows through their mutual intelligibility (Barad 2007). The concept of a Body without Organs (BwO) is helpful in terms of the distribution of intensities, through the taking away of obstructions (Deleuze & Guattari 2987). It indicates an ideal limit that is unreachable. Yet the potential multiplicities and ambiguities provide a positive flow beyond blockage points and nodes of disruption.

There are two phases in the construction of a BwO, named by Clark (2012) as experimentation and becoming (Deleuze & Guattari 1987). The former explains the process of “finding pieces with which to connect and experiment” (2012:203). My drawings are spontaneous and free. I do not plan them or predict what they will look like. They are generated as I think through/with the materiality of the tablet, any time, any place. There appears to be a dual flow of affect through the fabrication of imagining images.

In the latter phase, my becoming, the process facilitates my action “to make something circulate on it or pass across it” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987:152). Through the relationship of my iPad and me, there is an energy that opens up the in-between space (Clark 2012). This experience becomes a movement that is a force in my becoming.which is open to new possibilities.

The image above (drawn on my iPad using the Brushes App) attempts to illustrate the disarticulation apparently happening in the generated assemblage. The unanticipated flows of intensities prevail as I explore art and images through visual text. There appears to be “freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO” … with a  “connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987:161). This production of a minoritarian assemblage resembling my becoming-researcher, becoming-art-creator, becoming-iPad contrasts with the established majoritarian assemblages that foreground binaries such as self/other and researcher/data (Clark 2012). As the process moves forward, I look forward to gaining a deeper understanding of these elements.

Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of

matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Clark, V. 2012. Art practice as possible worlds. International Journal of Child, Youth and Family Studies (2012) 2 & 3: 198–213.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari. F. 1987. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia.

Trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.