Arts? Look around: Assemblage

Conceptually the word 'Assemblage' means to gather everything together as a whole, to convey particular meaning to the public. In this process, it must involve actants to activate the performance in order to extend further actions constantly. In other words, actants potentially cause repetitive making and re-making and eventually it comes to the final result after everything has done its job by adding certain effects. However, we cannot see how each of the actant induces the subsequent movement, only if we theorise this process, extracting the key elements from this involvement. Actor-network theory externalises this perspective and that reflects the networks of relation coherently and how this affects social relations.

Theoretically, actants can be classfied as human and non-human actors, they both distribute partially during the production in this process. There is no such a difference when we talk about human factors and non human factors in this theory as they contribute, act, engage equally, the interaction has no hierarchy. That means, every factor virtually is a small component react and cause change to other components, to make up the whole complex system rather than competing against each other to create conflicts.

The quote has taken from Wikipedia sums up the whole point:

ANT is often associated with the equal treatment of human and non-human actors. ANT assumes that all entities in a network can and should be described in the same terms. This is called the principle of generalized symmetry.

It's like a teamwork that things connect and exist or possibly dependent on each other, namely 'flat ontology'

The other term 'Latour Litany' demonstrates the same semiotic meaning, it has taken from Bruno Latour's book, Politics of Nature. The central idea of the book implicitly conveys the same idea of the Actor-network theory. His book focuses on the creation of assemblies and collectives all around our nature and the very basis of our lives.

Other than that, according to Manuel DeLanda's theory, he suggested that all the matters are rational decisions made by individual persons in isolation from one another. Also each entity's capabilities are as real as its properties. 'Assemblage', in other words, constitutes by heterogenous lower-level assemblages. The theory advocates that entities always results in "populations", in a sense of forming a society. So when we use the term 'society', we are not talking about in a broader sense of totality, but it's considered to be the relations of all atomy is happening in any actual occasions. They are capable to produce temporality and spaciality and bounded to demonstrate 'flat ontology', this principle to higher level of realism.

Interestingly, in my own understanding of the term 'assemblage' could be the patterns that carries an artistic value. To get rid of the boredom from reading so many texts, i searched for a few images to further analyse the core idea:

This image is appealing because it expresses further personal and human level of a larger social assemblages are made up of some small-scale units, the beauty of this image is subjectively becomes a plausible model emerges as an established distinct and separable sense impression once you look at it

This second image suggests a process of association from the formation of identical individuals, also it generates a sense of simplicity in the way of changing how each of the individual displays. In terms of assemblage, it relates back to the reflection on every entity equally powers up the entirety and that it leads to our attempt to neglect the details when we look at this image

The last image embodies the theory of 'Latour Litany' which is associated to the idea of each entity produces certain effect and its chaotic formation has an emphasis of the 'freedom' of every entity. So when we look at this image, we do notice all the eyeballs and each of their location as well as the shapes of different curves displaying in this image.

So when we see publishing as an assemblage, there are three layers should be included in this process which are:

the invention of the printing press, materials are texts, images, painting etc
the advent technology influences enormous changes, such technological devices are ipad, ereaders etc actively updates a newer version of publishing
following by the development of digital changes, publishing becomes more well known by a wider range of audience in different fields, hence we have a stronger intention to adapt to the new contents produced by new environments

The following video provides a further demonstration of the Actor-network theory, in brief, this system is an unbreakable chain that each actant intertwines one another.