A text describing artistic practice that combines performative and ideomotor actions aimed at comprehending and revealing the problems of the concept “Gap between Image and Reality”, analyzing the process of formation and transformation through the prism of A. Meneghetti“s ontopsychology, K. Barad”s onto-epistemology and K. Anokhin’s lectures about the hypernet theory of the brain.

Reactivation.

In the modern world, a person is included in a powerful information flow, in most cases the meanings of which are manipulative, aimed at constructing a subject that is conveniently integrated into the socio-political system, through the formation of an image, a complex assemblage that captures a person’s consciousness temporally, distorting the perception of reality, creating a gap between image and reality.

A person has an image about himself in a break with his real existence: consciousness does not reproduce what is happening as it really is. The human organism is in constant self-movement, reveals itself, transmits information, openly expresses its needs through a voluntary and conscious choice to reflect reality with consciousness at any given moment. But of all the perceptual streams, signals and codes sent by nature to man, consciousness is able to reflect only some of them, and then in a distorted form.

Art often played the role of state religion, instead of fulfilling the function of nature, being indifferent to any form of judgment. The artist is able to understand reality and change it, relying on reflexivity, rewriting and rebuilding his own "I" in accordance with the intentionality of Being.

"August 2018, Zermatt.

… Hiking to the peaks of the Swiss Alps, I often felt the impact of natural agents. It all started with a touch… The feeling of the presence of Attention and capture by a warm energy wave inviting you to join the assembly to participate in a magical performance: the barely perceptible sounds of unknown notes produced at subtle frequencies, included in the rumble of a powerful wind flow, importunately caught the perception, informing about Presence; or a pine tree drawn by a “recoiling wave” into the space-tunnel, turning to which, dousing with an oncoming perceptual “stream of hospitality…”

Matter is not just matter or an inanimate given, just as feelings are intended not for detached cognition, but for participation. Matter is a substance in its repetitive intra-active becoming, it is not a thing, but an action, a clot of agency.

"… Submitting to the magnetism of the Matterhorn, the main symbol of the Pennine Alps, I set off on another ascent, seized by the idea of ​​touching and stroking one of its flat faces. Very soon, the everyday step along the path turned into a performative gait, leaving a trace of sensations about the passed invisible border, after which, for three hours, I was circling along the serpentine, led astray, landed, deflected and returned to the path to the goal. The sun, the wind, the smells… everything was hot, pushing, cooling… The boundaries of my body dissolved, I became a solid breath, there was a dizzying feeling that everything was changing, rebuilding, and only the mountain hanging like a huge iceberg, which captured my perception, clung even to the corners of my eyes. Gradually blurred the line between my desire to touch the mountain and the feeling that this mountain was luring me to say something. On the next hill, unexpectedly cutting off the invisible umbilical cord that binds us, the mountain abruptly moved away, switching my attention to the anti-zoom and leaving me in the bed of a glacier that had dried up over the summer. At that moment, my body became heavy not only from fatigue, but also from a powerful perceptual stream that loaded into me a “file” in which I considered only the phrase “the gap between image and reality” and a clear realization that the mountain that “led " me, this is a “static” image, but a constantly changing landscape, this is a dynamic reality in which all forms of life, including inanimate ones, are in constant intra-active becoming, when one is the cause of another…”

The assembly of a concept is not just metaphysical statements about the world from an assumed external position, it is a living and breathing reconfiguration of the world. Thinking has never been an incorporeal or exclusively human activity. The concept of ecology is also touched upon here: ecologically clean thinking implies the joint and interdependent existence of subjectivities within and in relation to the environment. It requires openness to the world, allowing yourself to be seduced by curiosity and wonder, being in touch, performatively reflective, taking time to feel.

All forms of life, including inanimate ones, make a theory. The sense of touch is the main instrument-guide. Touch is what matter does… Matter is a condensation of the ability to respond. Touch is the answer…

Embedding.

Agent realism postulates that this reality is dynamic and responds to our requests in ways that make it impossible for a final or total representation of reality to be possible.

Too much power has been given to language…every “thing”, even materiality, becomes a matter of language. Various philosophers and sociologists, including K. Barad, B. Latour, D. Haraway and others associated with the new materialistic literature, called for renewed attention to how non-human materiality affects culture and knowledge.

" September 2019, Engadine.

… Rejecting logocentrism, entering the field of animism, turning to the art of immanent attention… another performative ascent to the mountain peaks. For three days, interacting with the space of the mountain landscape through an art object, I imitated the process of “embedding”, comprehending the concept “Gap between image and reality”.

Tense bodily and ideomotor actions, deep breathing and performativity of movements for feeling, are able to activate consciousness, which is also our body, contributing to the reassembly of information into concepts and insights, starting the process of subjectification, formation and transformation… "

Animism, as one of the ways of knowing the world, is neither anthropomorphic nor anthropocentric, or a call to irrationality, it is only a temporary passage through animistic thought in order to get rid of the ontological dualisms of modern thought. The artist, and artistic perception in general, separates and deterritorializes the segment of the real, forcing it to play the role of a partial agent of utterance.

Matter, in its iterative materialization, is a dynamic game of uncertainty. Animism, as a magical animation of all nature and objects, a tool for entering the fourth dimension. The artist’s performative actions, like “magic craft”, are always experiments with uncertainty. Interaction with the outside takes place not only by suggestion with explicit words and visual gestures, but also by his subtle bodily impulses, setting the movement, the artist, being included in the “flow of participation”, is seduced by it himself, starting the process of “unbewichment”.

Art endows the assembly of the perceived world with the function of meaning and otherness, as a result, the statement embodied in a work of art reshapes both the artist and the viewer.

Consciousness is a flow, movement, process… All processes associated with the reassembly of information are accompanied by our subjective experience, which is diverse: it can have the character of sensations, perceptions, have the properties of thinking or emotions, experiences, desires, feelings of pain or despair… All these components of subjective reality are our ultimate reality.

Questions about free will, how psychological and mental processes can be causes in the surrounding world… What is "I"? Subjective experience is one of the main mental processes.

The body is the most accurate radar, rediscovering it for yourself, you can learn to influence reality, including the perception of all receptors and organs of the body. The semantic field is a constant flow of information, a means of communication between different agencies. Everyone“s existence is organized in a plexus of information. To have semantic knowledge of one”s organism means to be able to penetrate with consciousness into every part of one’s body… “organismic perception”. Is there a place for a person himself in his reality… For this, it is necessary to be internally free, to know who you are and where your roots are.

Notes:

1. Karen Barad. On Touching—The Inhuman That Therefore I Am (v1.1), 2012

2. Antonio Menegetti. Introduction to ontopsychology / Roma, 1992

3. Lecture of K. Anokhin on youtube. Lecture 2. Hypernetwork theory of the brain and consciousness. 2018

4. Isabelle Stengers. Reclaiming Animism / e-flux journal Issue #3, July 2012

About:

Lena Sholokhova, the curating artist, graduated from the Higher School “Learning Environment”, the Faculty of Contemporary Art and the Moscow Anthropological School, the laboratory “How to Weave New Materialism: Quantum Ontologies.”