Immanence and its Distortions

Continental philosophers, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari wrote about a cosmic kind of creativity that exists in all things, the recognition of which demands of us a special kind of responsibility and action. Deleuze described a pure existence founded in this truth as the plane or plan of immanence. He was influenced in part by Henri Bergson who proposed the term ‘Élan Vital’ which is often translated as ‘vital force’. Bergson thought that this force was behind biological and inorganic evolution. However, this line of thinking is often criticised by some philosophers and scientific positivists as naive ’panvitalism’ or ‘hylozoism’. The meaning of these terms is: in the case of the former, that all things are part of a living universe and, in the case of the latter, that material things may possess life and life is inseparable from matter. Deleuze thought that immanence can be distorted in different but related ways by both religion and by science. These ideas were playing on my mind when, influenced by Mexican assemblage art, I began to draught and render virtual models based on coral polyp forms that could be 3D printed to decorate an altar for reverential homage to the wonder of spawning coral. Access to scientifically controlled experimental conditions for documenting a spawning coral colony at the Australian Sea Simulator were gained with the assistance of my scientific collaborator, Ruby Holmes, who also provided imagery useful for the conceptual development and facilitated provision of lab data used in the final product