NETWORKS AND FLOWS

Artificial materials, multitudes and multiplicities, site of an ephemeral time, the world is a web. We now inhabit a world of networks, where everything is sold and circulates in a generalised telepresence. It is a world both immediate and mediated, like an immense tentacular squid, for unlike the culture of objects, with its stability and its anthropogenic points of reference, the culture of flux delocalises us and hides us. An enormous rhizome has gradually replaced the genealogical tree of our roots. Now the rhizome, that of Deleuze and Guattari in Mille Plateaux, is a plane and a horizontal "plateau", which proceeds through progressive enlargement, in an endless future. Like a map with endless entrances, it demonstrates the true wisdom of rhizomatic plants: when you cut them they grow back, but without putting down roots. Networks are like complex, multiple rhizomes, subjected to all the viruses. Rhizome processes which I travel round and get lost in, characterised by a short memory which permits things to be forgotten.

Proliferating, diversifying, reducing, connecting, getting information, becoming erotic: the world of networks resembles that of Borgès with its endless Babelism. But it also has its models of complexity, its creations of forms and its frontier experimentation between science and art. Made of folds, flows and turbulence, forms are set in the passage of time, where they trace all kinds of inflections.

Copyright 2000 Christine Buci-Glucksmann