n-1

A black field carrying horizontal bands of fine vertical white strokes, densest at the centre — *n-1*, laserjet print, 150 × 220 cm. Courtesy of the artist

Year: 2014
Medium: Laserjet print
Dimensions: 150 × 220 cm

In the work n-1 the eye penetrates via repetition (to say whom or what would again establish subject/object relationship and instantiate the other, so by omitting an object the verb "penetrate" turns into a property of the eye, something what eye always does, even behind the lid or in particular when removed from the body), in its abudancy almost pornographic, and this repetition turns the work into a machine. It is not a simple machine, but something Deleuze and Guatarri call "desiring machine", where a vision machine is plugged into an image machine, turning straight lines of occidental labyrinth into detours and shortcuts, swallowing Ariadne's thread together with Minotaur. No more centre and no more periphery. All that is left is a vibration, produced by the machine, present neither in the image nor in the eye but reverberating in a meaning-inducing machine, the brain.

A close detail of the print in which the vertical bands resolve into repeated eyes and lips — Detail — the bands resolve into eyes and lips. Courtesy of the artist

The journey of "n-1" started with the image of two bodies. Those bodies refused to leave the common grounds of the representation, oversubscribed to the existing connotations. From there on n-1 took a detour and started tracing the whole chapter of Thousand Plateaus - *Year Zero: Faciality* and by doing so turned the body into a face and the face into a landscape. The face Deleuze and Guatarri describe there is not "a volume-cavity system" but "a surface-holes, holey surface, system", a map with white walls and black holes, creating a landscape that Occident can read and trace. "n-1" forms this landscape through the gaps between the recurring eyes (and the lips) that produce difference, or to be more precise *differance*: "With its a, differance more properly refers to what in classical language would be called the origin or production of differences and the differences between differences, the play [jeu] of differences." Through the gaps, the image constitutes itself, whose vibrancy and liveliness defeat the stillness of representation, allowing the untamed and the strange to emerge.

A black field carrying horizontal bands of fine vertical white strokes — The panels. Courtesy of the artist

The print seen flat against a grey ground, its bands of strokes filling the sheet — Installation view, Central Saint Martins, London. Photo: Hana Vojáčková