Post-convergent

Post-convergent literally means "after convergence". Theories of Post Convergence draw on the Material philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri, explicated in A Thousand Plateaus: Anti Oedipus, and its later companion volume A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The basic concept is to use material thinking to re-examine ontological problems of being. Post Convergence sets itself against a Cartesian world view, summarised but the edict 'I Think Therefore I am.' Post convergence interpolates materialist notions of embodied interaction, examining that way that our behaviours, processes and presence in a material world co-shape our relations with each other, our environment, our tools and systems.

Following on from Gilles Deleuze’s conception of the relations between differential elements in an assemblage or agencement, theories of Post Convergence argue for a need to use material thinking to interrogate dualistic thinking, for example exemplified by the socially constructed polar oppositions such as nature/culture, mind/body, subject/object, inside/outside. Viewing these positions as situated in a shifting network of relations, rather than as fixed oppositions in an ontological scheme, is key to Post Convergent thought. Post Convergent thinking utilises a Transdisciplinary methodology.

Other key texts are Donna Harraway's A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century (1985), N. Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (1997), Anna Munster’s Materialising New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (2006) and Karan Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007).

Real time 3D MultiUser Virtual Environments (RT3D MUVEs) are an example of an early 21st-century post-convergent medium. RT3D MUVEs present a complex matrix of interdependent relationships among such media elements as sound, vision, network, time, interactivity, and other prior technologies. In this view, no individual media element comprising 3D MUVE's exists without the others and all affect each other, albeit not equally. Although this complex system contains many types of media, a user may choose to focus on only a single aspect, such as streaming an audio file. The potential for a rich engagement within and between agents within a medium that is best characterized as Gilles Deleuze’s network of relations between differential velocities that are not distinguished by form or functionality and Anna Munster’s differential relations between embodiment and technics, in which both artist/composer and user become nodes in this interdependent network, satisfying Luciano Floridi’s test of successful observability and backward and forward presence at different Levels of Abstraction.

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