Semblance and Event

<b>An investigation of the occurrent arts through the concepts of the semblance and lived abstraction.</b><p>Events are always passing; to experience an event is to experience the passing. But how do we perceive an experience that encompasses the just-was and the is-about-to-be as much as what is actually present? In <i>Semblance and Event</i> Brian Massumi drawing on the work of William James Alfred North Whitehead Gilles Deleuze and others develops the concept of semblance as a way to approach this question. </p><p>It is he argues a question of abstraction not as the opposite of the concrete but as a dimension of it: lived abstraction. A semblance is a lived abstraction. Massumi uses the category of the semblance to investigate practices of art that are relational and event-oriented--variously known as interactive art ephemeral art performance art art intervention--which he refers to collectively as the occurrent arts. Each art practice invents its own kinds of relational events of lived abstraction to produce a signature species of semblance. The artwork's relational engagement Massumi continues gives it a political valence just as necessary and immediate as the aesthetic dimension. </p>