. . . all emotional encounters inevitably transform us. All relationships are transformations that leave both me and world changed by one another, encounters in which one penetrates the other and leaves it altogether different than it was before. Everything changes when we engage with it in emotional contact. No encounter leaves us the same. We cannot be neutral. We are always already swept up. What we see or hear changes our perception—and our new way of engaging with things causes a change in the way we make contact with the world. We are never the same from one second to the next. We are constantly becoming—and the place in which we live changes along with us.

Andreas Weber, Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology, trans. Rory Bradley

Paul Haviland :: Florence Peterson assise, de profil, 1909-1910. Autochrome. Musée d'Orsay

In the desert. Land of Geronimo. 1945.

Ulisse Aldrovandi - Specimens of Nature, Watercolour, Biblioteca, University of Bologna, Bologna

Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences. (Roy Ascott’s phrase.) That solves a lot of problems: we don’t have to argue whether photographs are art, or whether performances are art, or whether Carl Andre’s bricks or Andrew Serranos’s piss or Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’ are art, because we say, ‘Art is something that happens, a process, not a quality, and all sorts of things can make it happen.’ … [W]hat makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you — so the value of the work lies in the degree to which it can help you have the kind of experience that you call art.

— Brian Eno

Lucio Fontana (Italian, 1899-1968), Concetto spaziale, attesa, 1968. Waterpaint on canvas, 100 x 81 cm.

To fall in love is to individualize someone by the signs he bears or emits. It is to become sensitive to these signs, to undergo an apprenticeship to them (thus the slow individualization of Albertine in the group of young girls). It may be that friendship is nourished on observation and conversation, but love is born from and nourished on silent interpretation. The beloved appears as a sign, a ‘soul’; the beloved expresses a possible world unknown to us, implying, enveloping, imprisoning a world that must be deciphered, that is, interpreted. What is involved, here, is a plurality of worlds; the pluralism of love does not concern only the multiplicity of loved beings, but the multiplicity of souls or worlds in each of them. To love is to try to explicate, to develop these unknown worlds that remain enveloped within the beloved.

Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs