Hauntings – A nodalist study

Since Deleuze and Guattari first described the concept of the rhizome as a model of cultural transmission in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), a new way of processing information in the Arts and Social Sciences has emerged – ‘Nodalism’. Philip Gochenour has convincingly argued that units of culture can now be thought of as ‘nodes’ existing in a nonhierarchical, web-like network. Information transfer between nodes in the network is horizontal, omni-directional and not necessarily teleological, a way of viewing the world which has been paralleled and actualized in the last twenty years by the emergence, growth and ubiquity of the internet and the World Wide Web.

The author – a developing audiovisual artist – here offers four videomusic pieces and one virtual sound-synthesis tool. At first glance, the pieces may appear to have little in common. However, the commentary will attempt to show that they are subtly linked together, immersed in a cocoon of rhizomatic, pluralistic, thread-like connections.

The strongest ‘thread’ holding them together appears to be the trope of being ‘haunted’ in some way – either by influence, genre, or overarching concept. However, this thesis will attempt to show how a detailed consideration of each piece results in a highly complex final picture in which the pieces can be thought of as individual cultural nodes suspended in a dense rhizomatic mass of lateral cultural threads. For the sake of completion, however, the project has received the name Hauntings in reference to one of the strongest shared tropes running throughout all five works.