Some of what I have found in my academic research, especially around the notion of sensation and sensory becoming have really resonated with me and how I feel when at times I have reached a stage of flow and peak-experience (peak-flow) while creating/producing an artwork.
Below references in particular are relevant. Full citations are in my literature review titled Manifestation of the state of flow in sensation in the creation of Screendance:
Deleuze and Guattari called the artist’s ‘becoming’ or ‘man’s nonhuman becoming’ when ‘affect goes beyond affection’ and percept beyond perception, bordering within two sensations coming together in “a light that captures both of them in a single reflection” resulting in the work of art. This is what they specify as sensation., that “art is the language of sensation”, the “being of sensation“, that art alone can reach and penetrate the indiscernible and indeterminate zone where the subjects of the works of art can exist in an “enterprise of co-creation”.
Deleuze’s theory of ‘lines‘ and which according to him we are all made of. The first and second lines are about our social lives and events, the third line is “more strange: as if something carries us away, across our segments, but also across our threshold, towards a destination which is unknown, not foreseeable, not pre-existent, This line… is the most complex of all, the most torturous: it is the line of gravity or velocity, the line of flight and of the greatest gradient… this line has something exceeding mysterious. It is nothing other than the progression of the soul of the dancer…”
Maslow said “Expression and communication in the peak-experiences tend often to become poetic, mythical and rhapsodic, as if this were the natural kind of language to express such states of being…”
Maslow referred to ‘Cognition of Being’ or ‘B-cognition’ in peak-experiences as when “the object tends to be seen as a whole unit”, in such a way that “the percept is exclusively attended”, when “the figure becomes all figure and the ground, in effect, disappears”, resulting in “identification of the perceiver and perceived, a fusion of what was two into a new and larger whole, a superordinate unit”, which is to say that “as the essential Being of the world is perceived by the person, so also does he concurrently come closer to his own Being” and “more able to fuse with the world”. This is when “the creator becomes one with his [created] work… the appreciator becomes the music (an it becomes him) or the painting, or the dance” and “the person becomes more a pure psyche and less a thing-of-the-world living under the laws of the world”. These characteristics correlate with Deleze and Guattari’s observation “it is difficult to say where in fact the material ends and sensation begins; preparation of the canvas, the track of the brush’s hair, and many other things besides are obviously part of the sensation”. (What is Philosophy: 166).
Cezanne said “We are not in the world, we become the world; we become by contemplating it”.”
Maslow’s regard for creativity as a “fusion between the person and his world which has so often been reported as an observable fact in creativeness, and which we may now reasonably consider to be a sine qua non.”
Maslow stated, is the ‘isomorphism’, a ‘molding’ of the artist with the artwork
Hokusai said “if you want to draw a bird, you must become the bird”.
Walter Benjamin referred to “the traces of the story-teller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel” and the thing conveyed sinks into “the life of the story-teller, in order to bring it out of him again”.
Gallese and Guerra’s theory of Embodied Simulation (ES) and how ”we map the actions of others onto our own motor representations, as well as others’ emotions and sensations onto our own visceromotor and sensory-motor representations.”
‘cross-communication of senses and things’ -Seremetakis
“Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle, put water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can flow, water can crash. Be water my friend.” – Bruce Lee
Lisa Nelson’s ‘kinaesthetic’ use of the camera as she moves her body with the dancer to magnify “the sensation of looking”
What appeals to me, connects with my cognition and senses, mind and body is a sense of ‘becoming’ with the artwork, when the artists, the medium and the work are one and the same. When temporarily nothing else exists or matters. When I’m lost in the process. There is no disturbance, no fear, no judgement, and everything just flows and my body and mind seem to become one.
When to the filmmaker, the camera and the editing process can become the paintbrush and the screen becomes the canvas.