The class is primarily a coming together of the MFA students to discuss a series of articles. I try to find some thread that might be possible to discuss across the disciplines, notions such as "performativity" or questions about aesthetic experience have been previous topics which we used as a focus. These readings are not all about "composition" this is just one way, which we can find a common thread of discussion. We may often let go of this thread.

Why did I choose such a topic? Primarily because it seems to me, from my perspective in the visual arts anyway, that discussions of traditional notions of composition have been critiqued and abandoned (we will make more historical sense of this in class discussion) but yet, we go on making work. The artwork we make necessarily involves choices: it involves shaping sounds, movement, light, etc. in time and space. Even if our methods are chance procedures; conceptual; appropriation; sampling; made by artificial intelligence, etc, it seems to me we can still profitably discuss them as composition. This is an intuition....lets see what happens.

Jaques Attali

Noise the Political Economy of Music

143

147

Composition does not prohibit communication. It changes the rules. It makes it a collective creation, rather than an exchange of coded messages. To express oneself is to create a code, or to plug into a code in the process of being elaborated by the other.
Composition–a labor on sounds, without a grammar, without a directing thought, a pretext for festival, in search of thoughts–is no longer a central network, an unavoidable monologue, becoming instead a real potential for relationship. It gives voice to the fact that rhythms and sounds are the supreme mode of relation between bodies once the screens of the symbolic, usage and exchange are shattered. In composition, therefore, music emerges as a relation to the body as transcendence.

Deleuze and Guattari

Percept, Affect and Concept

from What is Philosophy

191, 192

Gertrude Stein

"Composition as Explanation"

It is understood by this time that everything is the same except composition and time, composition and the time of the composition and the time in the composition.
Everything is the same except composition and as the composition is different and always going to be different everything is not the same. Everything is not the same as the time when of the composition and the time in the composition is different. The composition is different, that is certain.
The composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living. It is that that makes living a thing they are doing. Nothing else is different, of that almost any one can be certain. The time when and the time of and the time in that composition is the natural phenomena of that composition of that perhaps every one can be certain.

Sarat Maharaj

"Xeno-Epistemics: Makeshift kit for sounding visual art as knowledge production and the retinal regimes"

78, 80

Documenta XI catalogue

(Duchamp's) nominalism test the idea that we should approach creativity with such a clean slate that each time a "work" is made it should be as if for the very fist time. It throws up its own definition each time in the process of its creation—rules and principles through which to make sense of it.
This unscriptedness is at odds with knowledge systems that define themselves according to rigorous disciplinary boundaries, methods, procedures. For a radical nominalism, the sky's the limit—anything can become the receptor-conductor of art practice...
...How Deleuze turns the 3D concept system inside out is riddled with aconceptual forays. By recasting the philosopher's job, he makes it more akin to the artist-creator's tinkering–less like the academic functionary at the concept-machine. Through imagining and rigging out concepts for a particular situation, knowledge production becomes active, more daring and keen to plunge into things. It is able to wire into transformative interaction, to get into shaping matters, into conductivity with experience—escaping the prison of textual-discursive reflection. His model is the art studio-the unscriptedness of visual arts, how it cobbles together unlikely materials "to see if it works." The gear he has in mind is assemblagist, "a directionless creeper"—a "non-conceptual conceptual" mode, even "vagabond, non-discursive."