2021
31/10/2012-21 plays with different cartographies and drifts upon folded planes within land, mind and language. The piece evolved as I struggled to put into words how epistēmē and tekhnē knotted together within my practice. I was anxious. I needed to present some-thing to a group of contemporaries. The shipping forecast was on in the background. It was late as I started to pull strands together.
Surrounded by water, we live within a sensual body without organs, according to Deleuze and Guattari (2013) [1]. An uncontrollable force of rhythms—a power beyond human control. The coast, specifically a stretch of beach in Norfolk, is a space I found myself re-turning to taste, touch and smell the different rhythms of the sea.
The act of re-turning, for an artist, means that process is always in motion. This is the praxis of my thesis. The force of material is held within this method of repeating and is a constant thread within my cyclic production; an endless looping of materials, the re-turning to making, writing, thinking and becoming.
A process, an entity, of research and the re-searching in the form of labour. The physical act of writing ebbs and flows in re-writing the sentence as it forms. The process continues in my mind as my fingers rest on the surface of the computer keyboard. And then, sporadically, one digit touches a key. In sequence, one after another, a word forms. Each letter invisibly moves from the mind through the body, onto and into the machine before it appears in another form. From my mind, the intangible form is visualised on the screen. The rhythm is staccato. It is constantly interrupted. A fractured process of weaving threads and following traces within and through my mind. One reference moves on to another, as the voices, videos and images of 31/10/2012-21 flow as many meld into one.
Theoretical material, memories and perhaps fantasies are held as thoughts, intangible data yet to be visualised. Each thought is a process of labour. The movement of this commodity within, between and through the writer is an intra-action of machine, mind and being. A process that materialises through an intangible algorithm. The data added to an algorithm creates a unique form. This form is seemingly worthless within a capitalist world until a monetary value can be pinned to it. (This process is possibly a non-fungible token.)
Like the process of writing, when you return to the process of making with physical material, your return means reshaping, reforming, and rethinking many threads. During revDuringmaterial, the maker engages in , the labour and forms the thing through and by the material in all of its guises. According to Marx, the material is labour. Therefore the act of grappling with the material is the process of production. The process is labour, and the forming of a commodity is production. As labour elements unify, thought and are entangled with the process. They influence each other, often combine, yet can and are sometimes separate entities.
For the artist maker, the entanglement does not stop. There is another component within this space of pure immanence—the act of production and labour—the hands intra-act with the material. The material touches the nerve ending at the tip of the fingers. Digits become the tools, and as they move the material, the substance of the material forms the structure. Here historical materialism, the act of labour is the material, as the substance, material drives the process of thought, being and doing.
The Hegelian idealist may consider that human consciousness creates reality, while Marx draws to the physical act of labour. The maker embraces the nonconscious and acknowledges the physical act of labour, while knowing there is something more within this knot of art practice.

[1] Deleuze, G., Guattari, F. and Massumi, B. (2013). A thousand plateaus. London: Bloomsbury, p.183.