Three things Anne

VIDEO: A person sits cross legged performing a crystal bowl chakra meditation. There are bowls sitting around him. He is using an instrument and lets it slide over the bowls and it creates a sound, growing higher in tone as the meditation carries on. I have been watching these kind of meditation videos recently, the ones where objects are used to acces other states of mind. I think this act of performing (meditation) with objects can function as a way of accessing other ways of being in an almost magical kind of way. I believe it can offer you another / a different relationship to the things around you. The things being used become like instruments for sensitivity to transcend. In this sense, I also look at shamanic rituals and the objects that are being used and activated.

TEXT The text is on matter (how matter comes into matter). It's from "Meeting the universe halfway" written by Karen Barrad. It touches areas of string theory and philosophy - time and being an perception - that i am interested in. A question that currently has a hold of me is how one can relate to matter / the objects around you. I understand objects as different entities being amongst one another, generating, offering and demanding all kinds of relations. What happens at the site where to different things meet? I imagine the encounter between things to be a crossing point of exchange. I am interested in what these relationships evoke (being with objects, the experience they offer and the way of existing with each other). Karen Barad talks about exchanges as relationships that materialise. On this note, she introduces the term 'Intra-actions' (you can read about that in the interview with her by Adam Kleinmann).

ARTWORK The video I am showing is a registration of a work of Yvonne Droge Wendel called "A Lunch with Objects". The camera observes interactions of different objects in a field of play. Some of them are moving around, snoring and drawing patterns with pencils they carry. It seems like others have magnets inside them that make them drawn to one another or pushed of. On some objects you can sit. There is a constant ambient sound of a lunch room mixed with the sound of these little machines. There is a sense of choreography to it all, that seems to be driven by randomness or chaos.

I talked for a moment about a previous work of Yvonne Droge Wendel: a huge black ball she made - a big black nothingness. She let people interact with that. An interesting thing occurred when she let businessmen play with it. It turned out that they liked to lie down and be rolled over by the black ball. There seemed to be a specific longing for that amongst businessmen especially. It raised the question of how interaction relates to professions, and how different demographics might interact with the same objects.

In relation to the subject of being amongst objects I decided to show a picture circulating on the internet of Harry Mulisch, a post world war II writer with a Godlike attitude and a narcissist. He has a habit of mythificating himself as a person in interviews. He talks about himself as being an entity, more than a man. This image shows him on vacation, posing on a wall with on the background the Vesuvius. By naming the picture “Left: Harry Mulish, right: Vesuvius” he kind of puts himself on the same levels as this great mythic volcano, making himself more of a phenomenon then a man. This picture for me is about the distance between him and the volcano. I think he appropriates it. It seems like he wants to become it. This wanting to become the other is also something present in my way of thinking. I find myself sometimes to be really driven by the longing to be or to become the other thing that is there; the thing that is not me. I think about things as being subject or object to your thinking or action. What separates us? The photograph is visualising a connection / a relation with the volcano, I believe. The volcano can also be thought of as the surface which reminds us of the molten core inside. When you think of what the volcano is, the perception on the writer transforms.

I talked briefly about people (in Asian culture?) making a pedestal for a stone, treating it as a totem. I think there is something really beautiful about us meeting our limits, and the longing, and being aware of the fact that something will never be achieved. projecting life into the object (projecting lifeless properties onto me). By transforming myself or putting characteristics of the objects onto myself, is how I try to relate to materially I guess.

Some things to do something with still: Someone mentioned intersubjectivity. Haptic, to grasp, to gain access through touch, The space in between as being as important as the objects in it (one does not exist without the other). Laura mulvey writes about … in terms of film.

I also talked briefly about the idea that thing can not exist as things without the space in between them (to separate them from one another). Charging objetcs by performing certain actions. We can never become the crystal but I can vibrate on the same level. The connection is haptic rather than optic, it is through the senses that we can connect with the object. Charging things by touching. Let the object act. Manipulation in which the word hand is linguistically incorporated a wish for transformation transmission of characteristics

the intangible material that is always in movement, circling each other exploration of crystal structures, molecules, etc. marble as a definite foreign structure that can not be incorporated into your body

Media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCPoG3EGwVw Text which has a useful relation to your work: http://humweb.ucsc.edu/feministstudies/faculty/barad/barad-posthumanist.pdf and https://www.academia.edu/1857617/_Intra-actions_Interview_of_Karen_Barad_by_Adam_Kleinmann_ also: picture of Harry Mulish next to Vesuvius Work of art which delights or infuriates you: Yvonne Droge Wendels A Lunch with Objects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZE3umX6wx_U