Re: desiring machines

> ways to put them together to produce desirable effects : for example, collect
> the bark of various trees and feel their qualities and imagine what you could
> put together with them by actively experimenting with it :: this is how the
> human race formed itself, this is how it formed its assemblages of huts-
> villages-bows&arrows-gathering baskets, etc. Please underline the fact that
> none of these things had ever existed before. The invention of a bark skirt is
> an INCREDIBLE invention, the highest tech imaginable, because there was
> NOTHING comparable! People experimented with the sensorimotor possibilities of
> the objects and living things in their environment, and came up with creative
> syntheses. We have become so reified we forget the possibilities of this. We
> think that everything that can be invented has been invented. Deleuze and
> Guattari suggest that we can return to this pre-form-ational inventive
> creativity of our ancestors. This has implications for ecological
> consciousness. When you go on a hike, collect some cast-offs of the bodies you
> experience : sandstone bodies, tree bodies, bush bodies, etc., and continue to
> experience, experience, experience them without preforming an idea of what
> they can do. As you begin to gestalt this, connect your collection together to
> see what effects it produces. What can be done with this? Then begin to invent
> something without knowing what you are inventing, guided by the sheer pleasure
> of the inventing process itself and the interesting intensities or flows of
> sensation it is producing. This is the desiring process. This is "desiring
> machines".

this curiously reminds me of a woman i was seeing once (quite a brilliant
artiste and very wonderfully bizarre) who, living in her low-ceilinged
attic apartment (which was much fun to hang out in, being as it had many
unusually-angled walls which met in odd ways) had decided to take the
branches of the tree in her backyard (which her housemates had cut many
branches off of to make space for a picnic table) and hung them from the
ceilng, leaned them against the walls, created mobiles with them...she
created this incredible arboreal consciousness-space. i remember being
completely amazed and awed the first time shc brought me up there. she was
definitely a shaman, without any directedness or 'aim'.....quite a woman.
unfortunately, she tried to play me against her ex-boyfriend/lover, and
that didn't work because we both figured out what she was doing and became
good friends in spite of her....haha.