Common Birds

Following the publication of A Thousand Plateaus, a work that marked a highpoint in his creative partnership with Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari began working on a screenplay for a science-fiction film, Un amour d’UIQ. This script, which preoccupied Guattari’s attention for seven years, represented a blueprint for a subversive popular cinema through an imagined hyper-intelligent infra-cellular life substance—“UIQ” (Universe Infra-quark)—capable of controlling global communications networks and plugging into the “desiring machines” of a community of squatters. After discovering the unpublished script, Paris-based artists and filmmakers Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson initiated a multiform research project that culminates in their film essay In Search of UIQ, which takes on Guattari’s central quandary: how to give shape to a bodiless entity, seemingly without spatial or temporal limits.