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Fractal Philosophy (And the Small Matter of Learning How to Listen): Attunement as the Task of Art

Fractal Philosophy’s first iteration was in 2008 when delivered as a live philosophy installation at the Serpentine Gallery, 2008, touring also in Europe, including Cologne, Berlin, Skopje, and published as “Conversion on the Road to Damascus: Minority Report on Art,” Gest: Laboratory of Synthesis (2010). It was substantially rewritten for an advanced scholars think-tank event (Pacific Center for Technology and Culture in Victoria, Canada, 2009) and disseminated via major art/philosophy websites. Subsequently peer-reviewed/published as Fractal Philosophy and the Small Matter of Learning how to Listen,” in Deleuze and Contemporary art (2010) and in c-Theory, it became a landmark study for the concept of immanence, developing a qualitatively new, epistemological shift in the making, thinking, and interpreting of contemporary art, concentrating on the links to meta-mathematics (in this instance, around the fractal and Mandelbrot’s algorithm z z+C). Professor Golding’s contribution was to assess and develop the argument as to why modernist and postmodernist analytics, from Hegel to Deleuze, and including Heidegger, cannot fully address the task that Deleuze himself set: the importance of attunement as a fundamental task for art. Golding’s piece is unique in that it threads together a series of philosophic arguments that simultaneously bring into the picture the importance of ‘fractal’ and ‘algorithm’ for a non-representational / acoustic platform for epistemology and aesthetics. The work shows (1) how and why dialectical logic still remains a significant epistemological framework for contemporary art and culture; (2) how and why Deleuze sought to overthrow that particular framework (of dialectics/arboreal ‘rooted’ logics); (3) why this move was crucial, but ultimately did not work; and (4) how a move away from dialectical logic it might be still achieved should one move toward certain aspects of contemporary physics, especially involving ‘multiversal’ logics and a turn toward non-representative ‘acoustic’ philosophy. It has been widely cited.