1837: Of Refrain

Summary

Definitions

Questions

Overall, we may say that music is plugged into a machinic phylum infinitely more powerful than that of painting: a line of selective pressure. . . . Painters, at least as commonly portrayed, may be much more political, and less controlled from without and within. (348)

In the Mount Dennis mobile kitchen project, who are the painters, and who are the musicians? How can we encourage painters to become musicians, and musicians to become painters? Or is this a false duality: are musicians always painters, and vice-versa?

The refrain also has a catalytic function: not only to increase the speed of the exchanges and reactions in that which surrounds it, but also to assure indirect interactions between elements devoid of so-called natural affinity, and thereby to form organized masses. (348)

If we consider our mobile kitchen as a refrain, as a territorializing assemblage (the seed of order in chaos, organizing a limited space around an uncertain and fragile centre, open to the future and the cosmos), how does our it instrumentally organize heterogeneous masses? How do we ensure that this organization remains rhizomatic?

Your synthesis of disparate elements will be all the stronger if you proceed with a sober gesture, an act of consistency, capture or extraction that works in a material that is not meager but prodigiously simplified, creatively limited, selected. (344)

What strategies (material choice, procedural, conceptual, division of labour, or otherwise) can we employ to prodigiously simplify, creatively limit, and select our final design direction?