From the ancient Greek ‘nous,’ meaning knowledge or mind, ‘noo-power’ refers to the power exerted over mental labor; the capacity to reconfigure perception, attention, and memory. The paintings in Flow-Break explore the possible gestations of noo-power in visual abstraction. Painted with gouache on paper, each assemblage is a minor demonstration of attention disciplined by the movement of brain-eye coordination. Through the quasi-mechanical modulation of painted parts (a yellow tile, purple block, half-red bar) Flow-Break imitates the input/output language of technological devices meant to mobilize our attention.

Felix Guattari theorized the life of sign particles before their signification, describing how signifying and a-signifying semiotics determine subjectivity under capitalism. Signification individuates the subject with linguistic categories such as identity, gender, and social function. A-signification corresponds to pre-subjective forces; the abstract signs bypassing language such as diagrams, money, or machinic code. According to Guattari a-signifying semiotics can access the real because they avoid the neutralizing effects of language; appealing directly to our unconscious. “These semiotics have no meaning but they set things into motion.” Capital rides the sign particle through our unconscious in order to control infra-personal behaviors.

These rhythms of electric flow determine the conditions for our collective subjectivation. The abstract signals organized in Flow-Break do not represent systems of signification but fields of a-signifying semiotics, capable of catalyzing the memories and repressed affects of the unconscious. By augmenting these patterns and refrains we are able to bend social life away from its current determination and towards an emancipated communist subjectivity.