ISEA - The opening keynote

I arrived at ISEA in the afternoon, nicely in time to attend the opening keynote by Brian Massumi. The keynote turned out to be a flow of thoughts, without a visual (powerpoint) presentation to back up the words. In general, without a visual presentation, it is extremely difficult for me to follow a lecture.

That was no different here. There was not much of the keynote that stayed in my mind... Or maybe it is better to say, I didn't understand much of the lecture at all...

The only thing that I understood from the hour and a half event, was that Massumi was philosophizing about events and their relation to each other. The main point of the lecture, at least as far as I understood, was the question: if two events happen at the same time, but without any relation to each other - for example I am working in my garden and at the other side of the world a plane crashes - how do these two events influence each other? What is their relation to each other? And what is their relation to art? How do different (random) events influence art?

Okay, that might not even seem such an unusual question. You could even say that there were already many  philosophers discussing this theme. But the way how Brian Massumi was explaining his thoughts, was surely different. This question was only the starting point for his talk, but it was as much as I understood from the whole presentation.