The viral symphOny 4th movement has been web published here:
http://www.heyokamagazine.com/HEYOKA.13.VIRAL.4.htm
viral symphOny 4th movement is the first ten minutes of the viral symphOny orchestrated for strings, percussion, didgeridoo, piano, and violin by Kevin Harkins and then blended with the first ten minutes of the electronic viral symphOny.
Joseph Nechvatal : original concept viral structures Mathew Underwood : nano, micro, meso and macro structures Andrew Deutsch meso and macro structures Stephane Sikora : C++ programming Kevin Harkins / Progressive IMG inc : orchestration
viral symphOny was produced at The Institute for Electronic Arts Steven Mygind Pedersen : IEA project technician
(c) Joseph Nechvatal 2008
First two movements here: www.ubu.com/sound/nechvatal.html
A Virological Analysis of Sound and Dance (part 1)
Rhythmic Parasites: A Virological Analysis of Sound and Dance
by
Stamatia Portanova, East London University.
Introduction
This paper sets out a conceptual analysis of rhythm as a force of disruption and of re-organisation. By disentangling rhythm from human corporeality, habits and purposes (rhythm as a prerogative of human movement), we will propose its re-qualification as an attribute of matter itself: rhythm as a galvanising current flowing in and between all human, animal and technological, animate and inanimate, organic and inorganic bodies, simultaneously dissolving their solid organisations and re-modelling their fluid exchanges. Being supported by an ontological dichotomy, most philosophical or musicological theories have perpetuated the difference between rhythm as a mechanical and broken repetition of units subject to physical laws (as in Plato's essentialist theory of rhythm), and rhythm as an organic, uncontrolled and continuously flowing expression of the natural world (coinciding with phenomenological notions such as Henri Bergson's 'duration'). [1]In order to escape this philosophical impasse, the aim of this paper is to unravel the relation between the cuts and flows, the breaks and continuities, the intensive and extensive moments which constitute the ontological and physical status of rhythm.
In the specific case of sound and dance, the rhythm of a dancing body (as a bio-physical, but also cultural and social entity) results from an immanent virtual state of dis-solution (the body as a fluid multiplicity of uncontrollable, infinitesimal particles intensively stimulated and excited) and a simultaneous solid state of re-shaping and re-structuring (the body as a solid whole extensively drawing space with its own steps). Working as a virus, rhythm disrupts linear bodily movements and clear perceptions, re-organising them after its own order. This paper will analyse rhythmic infection and its cohesive/dissolving effects in three directions. The first one is bio-physical: focusing on the biological, anatomical and perceptual dimensions of sound perception and movement, we will describe the spread of rhythm across the cellular population of a body, as a catalyst of biological and anatomical processes of disruption and reorganisation. The second is cultural: mapping the insertion of this bio-physical body/organisation into particular social and geographical contexts, we will consider rhythmic diffusion across spatial confines in and between human bodies and collective groups, as a catalyst for the weaving of autonomous rituals, contacts and relations. The third is technical: after a temporal leap (from old rituals to contemporary dance events), we will investigate contemporary rhythmic engineering through various digital machines directly plugging in the molecular composition of a dancing body, trying to understand how the new digital manipulation and diffusion of rhythm becomes a locus for the capitalist, biological and social control of bodily movements, but also for unpredictable self-organised events at both bio-physical and cultural levels.
Rhythmic trans-coding
The Platonic theorisation of rhythm as a repetition of elementary units (steps or beats) provided the philosophical basis for all future definitions of rhythm as a meter of mechanical measurement, comparison and judgement, and as an instrument of behavioural codification allowing the prediction, control and regulation of bodily movement.
Distinguishing the disciplinary nature of all metric practices aiming at the control and regimentation of movement from the undisciplined character of rhythm, Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari write:
It is well known that rhythm is not meter or cadence, even irregular meter or cadence: there is nothing less rhythmic than a military march. ' Meter, whether regular or not, assumes a coded form whose unit of measure may vary, but in a noncommunicating milieu, whereas rhythm is the Unequal or the Incommensurable that is always undergoing transcoding. Meter is dogmatic, but rhythm is critical; it ties together critical moments or ties itself up in passing from one milieu to another. It does not operate in a homogeneous space-time, but by heterogeneous blocks. It changes direction. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1992: 313)
Echoing Deleuze and Guattari's conceptualisation of this rhythmic 'trans-coding' force, we can start to delineate our definition of sound and dance rhythm as the spread of a physical and cultural virus carried by sound molecules across and between different bodies and groups, and whose propagation is also able to undermine the linearity of all economic, cultural and political meters. For this purpose, it is of crucial importance to highlight the ambivalent nature of the rhythmic virus, and to grasp its double role as an agent of homogenisation and of 'heterogenisation'. By identifying the relation between meter and rhythm as an immanent one, we can start to grasp the inextricable link between two different but simultaneous processes of rhythmic dissolution and metric re-organisation. These coexistent processes characterise the capitalist commercialisation and control of sound through the diffusion, modulation and codification of rhythm, and through its transformation into music, but are also at the basis of an autonomous net of rhythmic self-organisations and of sound/dance events.
In Deleuze and Guattari's words, the periodic repetition of a unit realises a behavioural code, a metric reiteration which allows the disciplining of the body and its movements through identification, synchronisation and communication mechanisms. In other words, the homogeneous and specular reproduction of constant units or copies (as in the genetic, cultural or information codes) acts as an instrument for the bio-physical identification of a human body, for its regular functioning in a social environment and for its efficient control of cybernetic systems. Metric reiteration is the accurate clock which enables a body to recognise its organic and human identity (the biological code as based on genetic and cellular reproduction), to perform its ordered movements and interactions (the social code as based on rigid behavioural structures) and to adapt technology to its own aims (the digital code as based on clear information exchange). In this sense, meter would correspond to what Deleuze defines as 'generality', i.e. a set of immutable laws regulating the identity and resemblance of subjects and their equivalence to designated terms, while also allowing for political and economic control. (Deleuze, 2001) Isolating rhythm and limiting it to the field of human movement (intended as a linear sequence of positions and steps), Western science and philosophy have theorised a categorical difference between disciplined and undisciplined motion, reducing rhythm to a sort of motor regulator.
After the modern recuperation of Presocratic and atomistic ideas (such as Lucretius's 'clinamen'), rhythm becomes an imperceptible, quantic coagulation or dispersion of matter behind perceivable steps and beats. Rather than to equality and equivalence, the development of rhythm is more related to singularity and uniqueness, disruption and trans-coding. 'Effective but lacking content, the [rhythmic] 'transmission' is not a [linear, interceptable] communication. It is a 'transduction': a self-propagating movement seeding serial self-organizations, ''. (Massumi, 2002: xxx) Linking together heterogeneous blocks (of molecules, human populations, information units), the transmission of rhythm opens every bio-physical, social or technical organisation to identity contaminations, synchronicity disruptions and communication disturbances. In this sense, we can define the disturbing spread of rhythm as a viral propagation infecting all biological, social or cybernetic bodies, engendering different material organisations where each body does not form a new world closed in on itself but, on the contrary, is constituted by coexistences and interactions of different kinds. (De Landa, 2001)
The first of these rhythmic organisations is bio-physical, coinciding with the constitution of the dancing body as a living, moving and perceiving organism. Considering rhythm as an attribute characterising the molecular, micro-physical dynamics of matter and its energetic vibrations (i.e. rhythm as a continuous qualitative emergence spreading from material, chemical reactions), the whole of matter loses its static appearance and becomes an ensemble of dancing molecules. This dancing matter becomes organised into inorganic or organic, moving and perceiving bodies through particular hierarchical and functional dispositions of elements. Sequences of molecules and cells, neuro/chemical paths and a multiplicity of particles/signals, organs, tissues and apparatuses align themselves in a particular order, building up the biological con-formation of an organism and its formal, anatomical structure, at the same time transforming it into a host of parasiting processes. The evolution of the human species happens then through a particular systematisation of organs and through particular morphological (arms, legs, head), postural (standing position) and kinetic features, gestures and movements, together with the development of a particular sensori-motor system and a perceptual/behavioural coordination.
At the same time, myriad molecular movements and relations perform their own schizo/rhythmic development, provoking a sort of micro-kin-aesthetics of imperceptible alterations and deviations. The spread of intensive qualities from the movement of these particles is immanent to the harmonic and functional equilibrium of the whole organism. In other words, while the 'organic organisation' of a body is based on the formation, specialisation and communication of all its parts, at a microscopic level this organisation is continuously de-coded and dis-articulated. Acting as a sort of physiological viral development, the molecular propagation of energy (sound, light) across a living/moving body can be seen as following the same rhythmic patterns as those of an epidemic diffusion. This rhythmic vector of energetic spreading cuts across the very organisation of the body: the transversal weaving of intensive amplifications along the linear sensori-motor circuit decentralises and trans-forms the integrated image and coordinated actions of the body. In the muscular/skeletal apparatus, the spread of rhythm happens as a viral energetic diffusion through the nerves, in a sort of neural micro-dynamics fractally composing movement and dance as a series of involuntary jerks, variable speed relations and gravitational lines of flight. In the dancing body, the energetic dance of electromagnetic and acoustic matter produces a series of molecular alterations and generates multiple local realisations, dispersion and excesses.
After this transformation and passage of rhythm from sound and light waves to bodily movements, we can see how the performance of movement becomes culturally organised among different social groups. In its social dimension, dance is usually identified with the movement of a collective body according to a common rhythm, as the act of keeping time together for a prolonged period, "so as to establish a regular beat". [2] In evolutionary terms, this activity is associated with the enhancement of group homogenisation and with the dissipation of friction through imitation and synchronisation. In this sense, dance becomes a kinetic, cultural and social organisation aiming at the material preservation and cultural integrity of a collective body. Uniform kinetic habits and corporeal regulations, geographic confines and ethnic, sexual or class discriminations constitute the rigid grid which entraps and moulds the free circulation of rhythm inside and between social groups. At the same time, the kine-topology of rhythm reveals how solid and stable social structures are eroded by uncontrollable subterranean movements coinciding with a micro (or local) level of aggregation of crazy particles/people gathering or moving around particular speed attractors and drawing a schizo/rhythmic map across cities, states and continents. Rhythm's micro-physical turbulences determine a series of intensive alterations in the social field, gathering or scattering masses of people in crowds and tribes that move beyond the impermeable segmentations imposed by cultural and socio-kinetic discipline. Disturbing the social equilibrium of all identified groups, rhythm acts as a virus whose propagation is often historically and socially linked to epidemic diffusions along episodes of 'populational' contacts. As a viral spreading or transversal weaving of sounds and dances across cultural codes, rhythm galvanises the social organisation of life, while decentralising and de-forming every rigid cultural morphology or behavioural regularity through the molecular movements of a collective body in continuous passage and change. On this social layer, technological apparatuses emerge (from acoustic drums to digital sampling and mixing machines), provoking acoustic or electro-acoustic amplifications and turbulences that infect the bodily sensorium and corrode the borders of regimented social relationality, while freely travelling across time and space.
Beyond every metaphorical or analogical association, the definition of rhythm as a virus infecting all physical and cultural organisations beyond temporal and spatial confines is founded on the identification of a common viral behaviour: on one hand, viruses carried by pathogenic agents, breaking the linear genetic sequence and purity of biological communication; on the other hand, sound fostering promiscuous contacts between molecules, or between different populations and cultures, through the explosion of dance as an intensive alteration and metamorphosis of the physical and social body. Symbiosis constitutes the process common to these viral dynamics. In her Serial Endosymbiosis Theory (or SET), molecular biologist Lynn Margulis illustrates how heterogeneous contacts and assemblages of molecules and compounds, cells, bodies and species proliferate through a promiscuity which is at the very basis of life:
The Darwinian logic of evolution, is substituted with a rhizomatic recombination of information expanding through viral hijacking of codes between singular machines of reproduction: a microbe and an insect, a bud and a flower, a toxin and a human. (Parisi, 2004: 16).
All 'symbiotic' relations between beings of different scales, species and worlds, and all webs of transversal relations continuing across linear transmission processes are carried by a viral and rhythmic spread of vibrations 'inside and between' heterogeneous populations. At its molecular level, sound represents an example of symbiotic contact. Travelling across bodies, seas and historical eras, screens and sensorial surfaces, flows of sound particles are carried by rhythm as an energetic wave. Entering the body-organisation as a viral energetic flow, sonic rhythm opens it to multiple side communications between different particles. Generating symbiotic contacts and contagions between bodies (such as the impact of sound vibrations on the molecular constitution of a human body), rhythm becomes a viral catalyst of bodily movement and transformation. In this sense, it is crucial to note how, in order to realise and reproduce their mechanical energy, the replicating mechanisms of sonic vibrations utilise a series of host media: from air molecules to neural cells, the infection of sonic rhythm provokes dance as its main pathology and cure. The social spread of sound and dance in periods of epidemic diffusion makes the viral character of rhythm even more evident. From this point of view, the biological, anthropological and cybernetic dimensions of rhythm can be integrated with a study of acoustic and epidemic phenomena, allowing for a fractal understanding of sound and dance in terms of molecular packs, viral spreads and pathological behaviours.
Bio-physical rhythm: Neural infections of sound and the symptomatology of dance
The discovery of the DNA code, for example, is focusing on how you can create different species of beings by starting from the very smallest particles and their components,' Karlheinz Stockhausen has said. 'That is why we are all part of the spirit of the atomic age. In music, we do exactly the same. (Eshun, 1993:02[013])
In his multidimensional and interdisciplinary analysis of electronic dance music, Kodwo Eshun describes the sound studio as a lab, a research centre for the breaking down of the beat as the infinitesimal sound molecule (Eshun, http://www.ccru.net/swarm3/3_abducted.htm).In the lab, the Breakbeat is isolated and replicated, becoming the DNA of rhythmic science and the matter of multiple sonic and cultural mixtures. Through the digital sampler, a sequence of sounds can be played for an infinite number of times, cut into small bits and re-ordered, accelerated or slowed down. The separation of singular elements and fragments forming the fabric of acoustic material is realised as a 'granulation' of sound.
When translated into sonic terms, meter becomes a 'standard unit ' that divides ' music; the ' rhythm ' counted evenly and stressed on every main beat.' (Davis, http://www.technosis.com/cyberconf.html) On the other hand, in the linear flowing of a 'pulsed' sequence, the viral behaviour of rhythm appears as a molecular web of relations between uniform metric lines, or as a swelling wave connecting different critical moments of qualitative acoustic change. As a rhythmic example, we can see (or hear) how the meter-grid of either classical music beats or electronic sound BPMs (beats per minute) is dis-organised by velocity or frequency shifts emerging as critical moments in-between the pulses and weaving their own organisation. At the same time, 'permanent conversations or cross-patterns [emerge] between each [line], a dialogue which is also a complex dimension of difference introduced between elements that are themselves often quite repetitive and simple.' (Davis, http://www.technosis.com/cyberconf.html) In this sense, the rhythm of a sound track is tied together as a continuous, intensive swelling or criss-crossing going on under the linear development of meter.
The viral diffusion of rhythm as an intensive, energetic sound wave across the body provokes a circulation of electrical signals via the nerves. This neural diffusion of energy/electricity is the source of a displaced and decentred movement, a multiplicity of 'local motions' and uncontrollable nervous jerks in the rhythmically contaminated body system. Every quantifiable, measurable and organisable succession of steps is fractally composed and de-composed by multiple micro-electroshocks leading the body across various critical points (such as sudden speed shifts or centrifugal and centripetal transitions).
The first thing to do is to acknowledge that rhythm isn't really about notes or beats, it's about intensities, it's about crossing a series of thresholds across your body. ' When you hear a beat, a beat lands on your joints, it seizes a muscle, it gives you a tension, and suddenly you find your leg lifting despite your head. Sound moves faster than your head, sound moves faster than your body. What sound is doing is triggering impulses across your muscles. (Eshun, http://www.ccru.net/swarm3/3_abducted.htm)
According to Brian Massumi, movement is a continuous, qualitative change of the body, a passage across various intensive thresholds. A trajectory of successive displacements can only appear retrospectively, when movement stops and the occupied positions emerge, in a sort of progressive freeze-frame attempting to discipline and control the body between beginnings and endpoints but failing to bring to light its real changes. Steps and gestures, poses and positions can only be plotted by subtracting movement. Movement itself lies in the intervals, when the body in motion does not coincide with itself but is in transition, never in any point and always in passage. This transition is not decomposable into constituent parts: in Massumi's words, it is a dynamic unity which dissolves the stasis/motion binarism into a continuous emergence of different speeds. (Massumi, 2002: 8) Conceiving a body in terms of its rhythmic, intensive passages allows us to go beyond its lived, accomplished experiences (which are related, rather, to a phenomenology of movement), and to reach the very conditions of those experiences, the continuous qualitative metamorphoses which, once realised in space as positions and steps, represent the controllable and controlled actions of a bodily identity. Borrowing Deleuze's words, we can say that a body's rhythm or duration is realised in the process of its dissolving, showing how this body differs not only from other things, but first and foremost from itself.
Rather than metricising a reiteration of steps, rhythm delineates the elusive character of the body, its molecular self-differentiation, its continuous dis- and re-appearing after all perceptual and spatial changes. At this level, human perception, sensori-motor coordination and cognition are indistinguishable from trance and hallucination. The penetration and invasion of sonic timbres, pitches, textures and speeds strikes and affects the kinesic equilibrium of the dancing body, while the listener/dancer is in passage between different dimensions, trying 'to explore a complex space of beats [and] to follow any of a number of fluid, warping, and shifting lines of flight.' [3] The hindrance of rhythm puts gestures in a continuous variation, transforming dance from the observable and controllable movement of a single body/particle, to the unpredictable and imperceptible metamorphosis of the body as a population of particles. Rather than offering the body a regular hold to be followed with an ordered sequence of movements and steps, rhythm leads the body to total dis-orientation. It con-fuses its perceptual and motor capacities, breaking the coordination of its steps and opening its movements to unpredictable and involuntary realisations. Escaping the logic of mastery and organisation, the body gets entangled and crippled, interposing itself into the series of its continuous metamorphoses, forming and de-forming itself along a line of continuous variation. [4] Through rhythm, dance dissolves the system of power and dominance which organises it as an expression and communication of physical potency and as a tool for social control.
This physical and anatomical level is then organised as a system of codified gestures and steps forming the traditional behavioural patterns of particular ethnic groups. At this level, the coherent physical organisation of the dancing body becomes the instrument for a linear, ordered sequence of gestural memes. As cultural units of information, memes are cognitive and behavioural patterns copied and replicated from one individual's memory to another. Habits and traditions (such as the steps of a dance) become independent creatures in symbiotic relationship with human cultures, replicating themselves by using human hosts and influencing their behaviour. According to the memetic model, social and cultural evolution work along the same principles of biological evolution. The system of linear memetic and cognitive communication between generations of the same group via a mechanism of vertical transmission (limiting for example the steps of a dance to a specific ethnic tradition) is nevertheless disrupted by a horizontal spread of qualitative traits (such as rhythm) between different individuals or populations. Ancient worldwide navigation and contemporary information vectors like radio or the Internet spread these cultural/rhythmic viruses all around the globe, making them increasingly invasive and able to influence a people's 'meme pool'. As highlighted by Reynolds, hybridity becomes a problem only when thinking in terms of purity and unnatural mixtures, when the physical (and metaphysical) dangers of artificial grafts threaten a presumed original cleanliness with the risk of infection, contamination and bastardisation. [5]
Ritual rhythm: Old infections and the becoming-animal of dance
As a space of physical and cultural contamination, the Mediterranean Sea has always been crossed by multiple vectors and exchanges of ships, bodies, musical instruments. [6] Across this woven space, millennia of migration and colonisation have mixed not only people and cultures, habits and tales, but also sounds and bacteria, germs and animals (many of which, such as spiders, have never been domesticated) invading and conquering alien ecosystems. (De Landa, 2001: 20) One particular example of rhythmic spread across different times and places is the contagion and propagation from North-African drumming rituals to South Italy's Tarantella dances. From Southern to Northern Mediterranean, hallucinogenic sounds and poisonous Tarantulae travelled together with different instruments of perceptual amplification (such as drums), across several miles and centuries of rhythmic transmission.
After the first contacts with the Saracens (a North-African population coming from the Maghreb desert in the 11th and 12th centuries) and up to the 1960s, a dancing ritual spreads in the whole Mediterranean, together with the belief that the bite of a particular spider (the Taranta) provokes an illness which can only be cured through music and dancing. Although the reactions to the Taranta's poison can be very different according to the disposition and physical constitution of the poisoned person and also to the weather and the geographic area, after the tarantula's bite the Tarantata (the person possessed by the Taranta, usually a woman) falls into a state of catatonia and disordered bodily movements, accompanied by other symptoms such as convulsions, fainting and even delirium.
If the irruption of a physical and psychological crisis can be considered as the manifestation of a disturbance in the usual flow of life, a cure is needed to re-establish the natural cosmic order and bring back the person to a healthy state. This cure is obtained through a ritual in which the sounds of the tarantella, together with the contemplation of particular colours, incite the Tarantata to evoke and exorcise the force of the spider's poison through dance. In the magic and sonic machine of this dance rite, the image of a Spider's Web is echoed by the position of the Tarantata as a central Black Body surrounded by sounding and rotating atoms like thin layers describing a vibrant multicoloured web. Depersonalising the subject as an element of the cosmic whole, the Taranta ritual intervenes on the irruption of subjective and personal feelings of sadness and exhaustion by assembling an animistic-sonic machine, a microcosm where the orchestra, the sick person, sounds and colours contribute to the reconfiguration of bodily and social relations and to the restoration of the shattered equilibrium. Reconfiguring the disordered agitations of the body, the intensive rhythms of the tambourines and their dialogue with violins, guitars and street-organs organise a multicoloured dance where the link between sequences of neural excitations and affects provokes a continuous passage from compact and crystallised identities to progressive states of dissolution. Like a virus, sonic vibrations are transmitted to the body and spread according to laws that establish different power relations. In this sense, the tarantella dance performs a sort of rhythmic bodily contamination, while social integration and physical recovery can only be obtained, paradoxically, through the movements of the infected and possessed body in a multifaceted 'viral' and 'medicinal' dance. Accordingly, the contagious spread of tarantella's rhythm across both physical and social levels of the contaminated body determines a series of unnatural participations troubling and re-organising social life in an autonomous, local way.
According to Ernesto De Martino, Tarantism must be read as a cultural-religious phenomenon going beyond its medical interpretation as a 'real' illness (arachnidism [spider's poisoning], psychical disorder or even sun stroke).(Milano, 2002) [7] In De Martino's analysis, the main element which contradicts the medical interpretation is the annual repetition of seasonal crisis and musical therapy: after a first bite and after its cure through music, dance and colours, the crisis and cure cycle is renewed every year, producing a regular series of bites and de-toxifications which could not be reduced to any toxic syndrome. Rather, this re-lapse and repetition appears connected to the respect of a tradition and to a seasonal repetition in which Christianity plays a fundamental role, by bending a pagan event to its religious calendar and by disciplining the emergence of the crisis through the introduction of a more precise temporal cadence. De Martino's interpretation gives the bite, poison, crisis and cure cycle the character of mythic-ritual symbols culturally conditioned in their functioning and efficacy, explaining how possessed people totally invent (or add to a real toxic syndrome) a series of behaviours modelled by Tarantism and imitating the real symptoms of a poisonous bite. The symbolic crisis becomes autonomous from real intoxication in the course of a cultural and religious history, exploding as a culturally shaped event in particular critical moments of life such as epidemics, famine and death.
'It has been shown, ', that being possessed derives from a training; that the gestures, words, or cries of the possessed are coded; that the beginning of the crisis is governed by a set of rules.' (Gil, 1998: 136-7) In Josè Gil's anthropological analysis of dance rites, cultural training codifies the behaviour of dancers, but it is not enough to explain the mysterious trance of the possessed body: how can a discourse act on a body and its organs in such a powerful way? How is this 'remote control' possible? In Gil's words, what transforms a ritual into something more than a symbolic structure is the link between signs and forces, and the investment of energy which the body imposes on symbols. In this sense, being possessed by a spider derives from the transmission of a force (rhythm) infecting the body and provoking a pathological condition physically and socially realised and resolved through dance. The symbolic imitation of a poisoned person or of the spider's movements dissolves then into an energetic contamination relating the dancer to the qualitative traits of a particular Taranta, i.e. to the particular colours and sounds by which she is possessed.
On the same theoretical line, Deleuze and Guattari oppose to cultural symbolism and imitation the notion of 'becoming' as an alliance, an energetic symbiosis between beings of totally different scales, species, worlds (from sound molecules and human cells to animal and human bodies). (Deleuze and Guattari, 1992) From this point of view, the Taranta rite appears as a 'becoming', a transversal communication or a contagious event. Beyond human identification and beyond cultural resemblance or imitation, the 'becoming-spider' of the dancing body lies in itself, in the metamorphic process cutting across all fixed positions (woman-tarantula). Deleuze and Guattari's notion of 'becoming' highlights the modes of expansion, occupation and contagion of a body as a molecular population. Through its becoming-spider, and then its becoming-sound and colour, the fascinated and possessed self of the Tarantata reaches a molecular dimension of imperceptible sound and light molecules. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1992: 248) Following a continuous line of energetic (chromatic, acoustic) waves and vibrations, she stretches from human to animal, from animal to molecules, from molecules to particles, up to the imperceptible:
It is already going too far to postulate an order descending from the animal to the vegetable, then to molecules, to particles. Each multiplicity is symbiotic; its becoming ties together animals, plants, microorganisms, mad particles, a whole galaxy. Nor is there a preformed logical order to these heterogeneities. ' That is how ' sorcerers operate. Not following a logical order, but following alogical consistencies or compatibilities. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1992: 250) (...)