Memories of a Flat Multiplicity

Beau Anthony Deurwaarder

Abstract:

If multiplicities are defined by and transformed by the borderline that determines in each instance their number of dimensions, we can conceive of the possibility of laying them out on a plane, the borderlines succeeding one another, forming a broken line… Can a given multiplicity flatten and conserve all its dimensions in this way, like a pressed flower that remains just as alive dry? [A Thousand Plateaus, 277]

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s longest treatise, A Thousand Plateaus, is renowned for its philosophical diversity, intricacy and difficulty. It is an investigation of the mechanics of multiplicity: a call for abstraction by way of experimentation, a guidebook to the political infrastructure of the new. Over the last year so I have been working on a series of pieces, each entitled Flat Multiplicities, which condense and deliver A Thousand Plateaus into exactly one thousand sentences, across a variety of dates and mediums. Situated somewhere between a seminar and an artist talk, Memories of a Flat Multiplicity is a long prose piece prepared for the La Trobe Philosophy Seminar Series, written from the ashes of my recent solo exhibition of work.  

Bio:

Beau Anthony Deurwaarder is a young artist who misses being a student at La Trobe University. Flat Multiplicities was first delivered in a seminar setting to a collective in Perth called Non-Knowledge in November last year. It was then presented at the Canberra Museum and Art Gallery for the You Are Here festival in March, as a kind of weird art experiment, and again recently as a collated exhibition of work at Balkon Art Incubator in Melbourne. Beau will rework Flat Multiplicities one final time in July for the 7th International Deleuze Studies Camp and Conference in Istanbul, Turkey.