INSPIRATION

philosophy

Hedgehog Dilema

“On a cold winter’s day a community of porcupines huddled very close together to protect themselves from freezing through their mutual warmth. However, they soon felt one another’s quills, which then forced them apart. Now when the need for warmth brought them closer together again, that second drawback repeated itself so that they were tossed back and forth between both kinds of suffering until they dis- covered a moderate distance from one another, at which they could best endure the situation. – This is how the need for society, arising from the emptiness and monotony of our own inner selves, drives people together; but their numerous repulsive qualities and unbearable flaws push them apart once again. The middle distance they finally discover and at which a coexistence is possible is courtesy and good manners. In England, anyone who does not stay at this distance is told: ‘Keep your distance!’a – Of course by means of this the need for mutual warmth is only partially satisfied, but in exchange the prick of the quills is not felt. – Yet whoever has a lot of his own inner warmth prefers to stay away from society in order neither to cause trouble nor to receive it”.

Schopenhauer, Similies, Parables, and Fables
Not only the porcupine, but also Schopenhauer’s overal concept of the body regarding the reciprocal subject and object relationship are the crucial foundations of my study. With the imagery of porcupines in mind, human intimate relations are physicalized in the body itself, with horns, sensual qualities and actual distances. The parable is pretty simple but profoundly makes the concept tangible and more vivid with the storytelling qualities.

The Intertwined, the Chiasm

“...Now why would this generality, which constitutes the unity of my body, not open it to other bodies? The handshake too is reversible; I can feel myself touched as well and at the same time as touching, and surely there does not exist some huge animal whose organs our bodies would be, as, for each of our bodies, our hands, our eyes are the organs. Why would not the synergy exist among different organisms, if it is possible within each? Their landscapes interweave, their actions and their passions fit together exactly: this is possible as soon as we no longer make belongingness to one same ·consciousness" the primordial definition of sensibility, and as soon as we rather understand it as the return of the visible upon itself, a carnal adherence of the sentient to the sensed and of the sensed to the sentient. For, as overlapping and fission, identity and difference, it brings to birth a ray of natural light that illuminates all flesh and not only my own. It is said that the colors, the tactile reliefs given to the other, are for me an absolute mystery, forever inaccessible. This is not completely true; for me to have not an idea, an image, nor a representation, but as it were the imminent experience of them, it suffices that I look at a landscape, that I speak of it with someone. Then, through the concordant operation of his body and my own, what I see passes into him, this individual green of the meadow under my eyes invades his vision without quitting my own, I recognize in my green his green, as the customs officer recognizes suddenly in a traveler the man whose description he had been given...”
“...Thus since the seer is caught up in what he sees, it is still himself he sees: there is a fundamental narcissism of all vision. And thus, for the same reason, the vision he exercises, he also undergoes from the things, such that, as many painters have said, I feel myself looked at by the things, my activity is equally passivity-which is the second and more profound sense of the narcissim: not to see in the outside, as the others see it, the contour of a body one inhabits, but especially to be seen by the outside, to exist within it, to emigrate into it, to be seduced, captivated, alienated by the phantom, so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen. It is this Visibility, this generality of the Sensible in itself, this anonymity innate to Myself that we have previously called flesh, and one knows there is no name in tr~ tional philosophy to designate it. The flesh is not matter, in the sense of corpuscles of being which would add up or continue on one another to form beings. Nor is the visible (the things as well as my own body) some "psychic· material that would be-God knows how-brought into being by the things factually existing and acting on my factual body. In general, it is not a fact or a sum of facts "material" or ·spiritual." Nor is it a representation for a mind: a mind could not be captured by its own representations; it would rebel against this insertion into the visible which is essential to the seer. The flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance. To designate it, we should need the old term "element," in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, ano fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being. The flesh is in this sense an -element'" of Being. Not a fact ...”

Merleau Ponty, The Intertwining, The Chiasm

Phenomenology is the crucial core when one needs to look at the subject-object relationship between the self and its surrounding environment regarding their bodily relations. Merleau Ponty, through the use of the hands touching each other example, perfectly illustrates the reversible agency of the body itself with conscious that overlaps the difference bewteen myself and other bodies. The corporeal space that thus unveils is the foundational landscape that is being explored in my final installation. By separating the two participants in different spaces with tangible experiences attached, I am trying to embody such imminent experience.

biology

meiosis

researchgate.com

It’s all about the body. Cells are the microscopic building blocks of our body. By tracing reminiscent to the origin of life on the cell level, one can notice the creation of membrane that splits beings apart. I think the membrane formed in meiosis for procreation signifies the very first biological boundary that differentiates self from the other. It is the very first membrane that makes us distanced and distinct. Thus the cell division is used as the major metaphor for the different phases of the experience’s workflow.

psychoanalysis

Collective Unconsciousness

Not only the porcupine, but also Schopenhauer’s overal concept of the body regarding the reciprocal subject and object relationship are the crucial foundations of my study. With the imagery of porcupines in mind, human intimate relations are physicalized in the body itself, with horns, sensual ualities and actual distances. The parable is pretty simple but profoundly makes the concept tangible and more vivid with the storytelling qualities.

Mirror stage

“...This form would have to be called the Ideal-I,1 if we wished to incorporate it into our usual register, in the sense that it will also be the source of secondary identifications, under which term I would place the functions of libidinal normalization. But the important point is that this form situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone, or rather, which will only rejoin the coming-into-being (le devenir) of the subject asymptotically, whatever the success of the dialectical syntheses by which he must resolve as I his discordance with his own reality.
The fact is that the total form of the body by which the subject anticipates in a mirage the maturation of his power is given to him only as Gestalt, that is to say, in an exteriority in which this form is certainly more constituent than constituted, but in which it appears to him above all in a contrasting size (un relief de stature) that fixes it and in a symmetry that inverts it, in contrast with the turbulent movements that the subject feels are animating him. Thus, this Gestalt – whose pregnancy should be regarded as bound up with the species, though its motor style remains scarcely recognizable – by these two aspects of its appearance, symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination; it is still pregnant with the correspondences that unite the I with the statue in which man projects himself, with the phantoms that dominate him, or with the automaton in which, in an ambiguous relation, the world of his own making tends to find completion...”

Lacan, Ecrits

Lacan’s discussion on the relationship between the self and other is super fascinating for me in terms of the alienation of the ego under the social construction versus the most innate and premordial recognition of the self with its subjective agency during infant’s stage of mirror observation. How is a self formed with the presence of others is one of core concept of my thesis project.

art critique

Folded Screen

“...My example in this investigation is the screen, whose chief virtue lies in its multiple reference: a screen can be an object, a painting medium," a pictorial representation, or all three. In other words, a screen (as an architectonic form) occupies a three-dimensional space and divides space; a screen (as an art medium) provides an ideal surface for painting and is actually one of the oldest painting formats recorded in ancient texts; and a screen (as a pictorial representation) is one of the favourite images in Chinese painting from the beginning of that art. With its diverse roles and ambiguous identities, the screen has offered artists multiple options to develop an artistic rhetoric; it also challenges an art historian who, instead of seeking straightforward answers to historical problems, wants to explore a complex trail which, he hopes, will cut through familiar routes and offer fresh views...”

Wu Hong, The Double Screen

The screen will be treated as the major site of interaction on the installation. Wu Hong’s take on the screen being as both material conduct and pictorial representation gives life to the screen’s materiality with spatial and time expansions. Such idea on the screen is another major inspiration for my thesis, since I want the installation to have its own agency and subjectivity, as if it is a living form of organism as well as the audiences.

Essays

Cyborg Manifesto

“...Cyborg imagery can help express two crucial arguments in this essay: first, the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now; and second, taking responsibility for the so cial relations of science and technology means refusing an antiscience metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts. It is not just that science and technology are possible means of great human satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex dominations. Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess...”

  Donna Haraway, Cyborg Manifesto

Using the cyborg as a lens, Donna Haraway studies how to blur the boundaries between binary poles and embraces the monstrous yet beautiful world comes out of hybridity. Another lens to access the thesis as a “technical lens” in the crafting experience but also conceptual in terms of how to test and even break boundaries. Donna Haraway is also noted as one of the most significant scholars in affect theories

The Affect Theory Reader

“... ‘The body is not even a means or a vehicle for the mind, but rather a ‘molecular sludge’ that adheres to all the mind’s actions’ (1997, 123). In this we can’t forget how proud Lawrence was of his physical strength, nor can we forget that he was tortured and belatedly admitted to having been raped by the bey in 1917. Deleuze sees in Lawrence’s account a particular form of shame: ‘The mind depends on the body; shame would be nothing without this dependency, this attraction for the abject, this voyeurism of the body. Which means that the mind is ashamed of the body in a very special manner; in fact, it is ashamed for the body. It is as if it were saying to the body: You make me ashamed, You ought to be ashamed . . . ‘A bodily weakness which made my animal self crawl away and hide until the shame was passed’ ’
Melissa Greg, Gregory J. Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader
It defines affect with multiple references from past and current theories relating to different realms including psychology, politics, art, tehcnology, etc. Summarizes groups of theories that are inspired or anchored their research on affect theory.
The major anchor point of the thesis project. Affect is the core concept when we are discovering human boundaries and interactions regarding bodily engagements since the affect theory discusses the in-between-ness of bodys in being shaped and shaping with relation to the forces. It also provides further references of different branches of researches that are based on affect theories which could be extremely helpful. For instance, in the 8 branches it has briefly summarized, the sixth one regarding the attempts to turn away from cultural anthropology to communication stuties to performance-based art practice and later on have encounters with new technological lures are resources that I can further dive into.