We all exist on a kind of “PLTØ - Plateau.” This plateau is both a promise of an eco-friendly utopia and an indeterminate zone where the smooth space of global capitalism intersects with striated space, where the logic of capital and the inertia of systems still operate. This “green room” plateau may be a physical space, a social assemblage, or a self-constructed belief system, but it is never a completed world. In the attempt to trace a line of flight toward a blurred potentiality, we may already be slowly burning out within the existing territorialized order.
The desiring, psychotic subject produced by, or seeking escape from, this machinic system refuses molar homogenization imposed under a single political signifier, “green.” PLTØ is not a single sign but a multiplicity of potentials with various intensities. It reveals the gap between physical necessity and ontological indeterminacy, an eternal disjunctive synthesis, symbolizing a constant deterritorialization and reterritorialization that crosses the fixed terms of self-other-transcendence in a rhizomatic rhythm.
This project does not approach so-called “green cities” like Freiburg as singular success models in an arborescent structure. Instead, it explores multiple plateaus where heterogeneous elements connect, diverge, and repeatedly generate and dissolve. Here, “sustainability” is not a fixed goal. It is the dynamic process itself, where territorialization (eco-friendly policies, green branding as machinic encoding), deterritorialization (capital’s endless flight and exploitation, unpredictable ecological mutations, nomadic subjects drawing their own lines of flight, experimental communities formed through rhizomatic connections), and reterritorialization (greenwashing, standardized eco-tourism as a new form of striation) constantly intersect and operate like a war machine.
The works reveal the endless loop of natural exploitation and recovery/destruction, the pressure of an abstract machine that reconfigures itself like a replicated brain, and the deception of “green” as a cultural simulacrum wrapped in eco-friendly signifiers. Beneath the repetitive fantasy of “idealized optimism,” the pursuit of paradise deteriorates into superficial, mechanical repetition. The entities that exist on the plateau called the green room attempt to resist, deconstruct, and reconfigure their existing selves through becoming-other, but the excess of subjectivity sometimes collapses into a self-consuming black hole in the cyclical process.
In a world where structure and law are fluid, the yearning for stable essence paradoxically generates new intensities of the sublime, and that sublimity harbors the potential for the Body without Organs (BwO) to create new life. In the pervasive uncertainty where the center has vanished and absurdity (the entanglement of order and chaos—chaosmos) prevails, we confront assemblages that attempt to generate new relations and meanings from broken fragments. Sustainable tourism, too, is presented not as the consumption of an idealized paradise, but as an unstable yet creative assemblage in which visitors, communities, and environments break down boundaries and experience becoming-other. It is always in process, a network of singularities.
Will we discard everything and undertake a complete deterritorialization, or will we, as fluid objects, connect to new assemblages? Is sustainability a single path, a converging answer, or a multiplicity of possibilities that diverge endlessly, a rhizome that always begins and ends in the middle?
Seungsoo Jeon is a Multimedia artist born in South Korea and based in Germany. He is currently pursuing a degree in Media Art at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG Karlsruhe), where he explores the intersection of technology, philosophy and contemporary artistic practices grounded in Posthumanism. His Video and Augmented reality AR, showcased at the Freiburg Biennale, embody these multilayered reflections.
