the dark precursor
paulo de assis, paolo giudici

Thunderbolts explode between different intensities, but they are preceded by an invisible, imperceptible dark precursor, which determines their path in advance but in reverse, as in negative relief. Likewise, every system contains its dark precursor which ensures the communication of peripheral series. (Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition)
Gilles Deleuze’s intriguing concept of the dark precursor refers to intensive processes of energetic flows passing between fields of different potentials. Fleetingly used in Difference and Repetition, it remained underexplored in Deleuze’s subsequent work. This collection of essays departs from that concept, focusing on artistic research, and offering a wide-ranging panorama on the intersection between music, art, philosophy, and scholarship.
The forty-eight chapters in this publication provide a kaleidoscopic view of different fields of knowledge and artistic practices, exposing for the first time the diversity and richness of a world situated between artistic research and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Within different understandings of artistic research, the authors— composers, architects, performers, philosophers, sculptors, film-makers, painters, writers, and activists—map practices and invent concepts, contributing to a creative expansion of horizons, materials, and methodologies.
The two volumes of this book are arranged in five sections: Sound contains papers by composers, performers, and musicologists exposing or reflecting upon creative and performative practices. Writing maps diverse approaches to writing and to post-dramatic staging of texts. Image collects presentations on visual arts, including cinema, painting, sculpture, and comics. Space presents papers on architecture and urbanism, whereas Politics includes chapters on emerging modes of subjectivity, the politics of art, the relation between art and society, and the possible role of artistic research.
This is an outstanding collection of essays, whose authors find ingenious ways of relating the thought of Deleuze to various disciplines and engaging Deleuzian concepts with current research in their respective fields. (Ronald Bogue, University of Georgia, US)
Paulo de Assis is an artist-researcher active as a pianist, musicologist, and composer with wider interests in philosophy and psychoanalysis. He is the Principal Investigator of the EU project Experimentation versus Interpretation: Exploring New Paths in Music Performance in the 21st Century (musicexperiment21.eu), and a Research Fellow at the Orpheus Institute, Ghent.
Paolo Giudici is an artist-researcher living and working in Padua and an Associate Researcher at the Orpheus Institute, Ghent.