Bodies of Work

Light Forms

In deep antiquity, rhythms of the passage of light were marked by megalithic monuments, “pillars of light” raised across the globe. These structures inscribed the experience of time through a codification of human orientation: relations to the cardinal, the horizonal, and the vertical sky of celestial lights, as well as to ancestral and seasonal cycles. These artworks introduce a new dimensionality into such cosmographies, replacing the prototypical calendrical technologies of stone with the perceptual medium of optico-geometric glass.

Optical-instruments

Light-Mobiles are optical instruments that tune the intermediary rays and sympathetic resonances between the psycho-physical body and its environment. Using suspended glass elements, they create a kind of visual chord that reverberates in the light cone between the three-dimensional sculpture and the two-dimensional projected image, spatialising the fundamental photographic process of light mediated by the lens.

Confronted by technologies of control that seek to automate sensibility, the work de-instrumentalises technological light, whereby light is once again understood as that enigmatic signifier of consciousness—not subject to the program, but that prior luminosity in which it first appears.

Fragments

‘Fragments’ are a body of works that reflect the present as a time of disorientation. When we turn our lens to the contemporary, we are confronted by a scattering of light—a fragmentation that veils the future in a cloak of unknowability. But, as René Char asks, “how can we live without the unknown in front of us?” The act of becoming conscious consists not in the resolution of any fixity, but in an unknown, around which our symbols circumscribe. Gazing through this fractured lens - through the play between orientation and disorientation; form and fragmentation - the paradox is held open.   

LENSGRAMS and SPECTROGRAPHS

Perception is a photosensitivity. Our minds and bodies are overexposed to a world shaped by the mediated light of information. Our work in the darkroom registers how tonalities and hues of light impress themselves on the embodied mind. ‘Lensgrams’ are lens-only mediated photograms, whereas ‘Spectrographs’ are unique print editions that register the optical signatures cast by our sculptural forms, inscriptions exposed to the light of consciousness.

Phōtagōgia and the Dimensions of Attention

Whereas in the empty space of attention light follows its own law, contemporaneity is governed by an economy of attention in which informational light—structured by the logistics of perception—conditions consciousness in a spectacle of algorithmic mediation. Attention, as the site of the possibility of a clearing in which illumination appears of its own accord, is a space of vulnerability. Whereas phōtagōgia cultivated an open, receptive state of attention—precisely because it can be opened dimensionally—attention can also be flattened into a mono-dimensionality devoid of resonant interiority. 

The human, as filter and cave—as world splitter—mediates light at the interface of attention. The light that we mediate is dual-aspect: mental and physical, hence its pharmakological character both to blind and to reveal. The mesmeric screenification of perception and the large-scale optics that militarize the play of light foreclose light’s ontology, necessitating a return to the methods of phōtagōgia—not a redoubling of the programmatics of the digital spectacle. This return would be an intuitive ‘tuning’—beyond the geometrization of perspective, it would gesture toward an embodied, resonant encounter with luminosity in the open space of attention—one that dimensionalizes not according to the constraints of space-time, but toward that prior non-dual non-space at the heart of the psycho-physical.

The Signature of All Things: The Digital Skin

Excerpt from The Signature of All Things: From Authentication to Authentic Meaning

Abstract (Excerpt)

In an age mediated by digital streams and intelligent agents, the nature of authenticity is in flux. The lines blur between the original and its echo, the tangible thing and its digital twin, the lived experience and its data shadow… The ways in which objects carry meaning, and the confidence we can place in that meaning, are being profoundly challenged and reshaped.

• Prelude: The Crisis of Authenticity

• Chapter 1: The Signature of the Real

• Chapter 2: The Culture of Identity

• Chapter 3: The Theatre of Memory

• Chapter 4: From Authentication to Agency 

• Appendix: Symbolic Infrastructure in the Age of AI (A Technical Translation)

THE DIGITAL SKIN (EXCERPT)

Every artwork today is born into duplication [...] it immediately and inevitably spawns a stream of digital emanations that accompany it and gather with it at every step of its lifecycle. Reproduced photographically, published on algorithmic platforms that program its reception and contextualise its dissemination, or even just archived privately in the studio: images, metadata, and documentation surround the work from all angles, like a digital skin.

The work itself may be a physical thing, but it bears a relation to this digital skin so incessantly and so immediately that we must question where the one ends and the other begins.

[…]

At the heart of the artwork is an irreducible presence—an experience that is embedded with the tangible presence of an object in a particular time and space. But around this core conscious experience of the object […] is a mesh of digital shadows.

“The act of becoming conscious consists in the concentric grouping of symbols around the object, all circumscribing and describing the unknown from many sides.” — Erich Neumann

Where Neumann’s concentric groupings emerge organically, today’s symbolic surrounds are often algorithmically stratified—mechanical, extractive, and disembedded from conscious integration.

This rupture is encoded into the very architectures of the digital systems we have inherited […] This escalating crisis of authenticity compels us to look deeper into the nature of the signature itself. […]

—

The full abstract and structure for the manuscript can be viewed here: The Signature of All Things. Full manuscript available on request.

Horizons (of Day and Night)

In deep antiquity, rhythms of the passage of light were marked by megalithic monuments or “pillars of light” across the globe that were intended to inscribe the experience of time through the codification of human relations to seasonal temporality, the cardinal, horizonal directions of East and West and the vertical sky of celestial lights.

Referencing these perennial cosmographies, monumental glass geometries can replace the prototypical calendrical technologies of stone with optical interfaces. Glass monoliths or ‘glyphs’ are oriented as axial points towards the rising and setting of stellar lights on the horizon's circle and their relational azimuth. Of these lights the sun is chief, being the symbol of consciousness, governing the temporalities of astronomical and seasonal cycles and illuminating experience. The universal symbol of the sun is also a double symbol: the model of light is that of the diametrical relation; both seasonal passage to opposite and the shadow of eclipse. Light is always doubled. Vision is both the vision of the inner eye of the mind and of the eyes of perception. The sun’s illumination is blinding to the direct gaze. We can’t look directly at the sun just as we can’t look directly towards the subject of our gaze; the seat of consciousness is a blind spot. The sun is always-already mediated in our experience. It is the producer of difference and differentiation, just as light is diffracted and refracted by media into spectral rays of colour. Working through mediation, light creates openings for spectralisation. 

The ‘twilight language’ of optical patternation, which changes due to the individual’s orientation to the artwork, the sun, and to the flux of temporality, celebrates the opening of individual consciousness in relation to a cosmic time: a transformation of axial cycles through the multiplication of temporal experiences. The artwork provides an orientation in which the geographical and anthropological realities of contemporaneity are translated through the visionary dimension of a mandala in which the cardinal, horizontal directions are orientated to the vertical dimension of supra-sensory light. Against the crisis of mono-technological culture, the work multiplies cosmotechnics in support of a corresponding diversification of forms of coexistence: “before the falling of dusk” - Yuk Hui.

(adapted from 2017 text)

Infinitising Space

At the origin of cosmology, Anaximander describes the earth suspended in a nothingness. This geometric inscription of a sphere in a void—this originary articulation of a luminous life-world suspended in a boundless abyss—is the ‘boundary giving boundary’ by which origin and end are drawn together: temporality is articulated against an absolute horizon in which it is eclipsed. 

Hegel, writing on Anaximander, affirms that the infinite abyss is thereby always-already the negative principle on which any articulation of difference is first posited. Bracketing history at both ends, the arche-inscription that enframes all subsequently differentiated space-time is articulated first against a horizon that is void—an “abyssal cosmology”, whereby finite differentiation is predicated on a boundless abyss, which thus implicates finitude as always-already effaced—because the abyss is the negation of that very conceptuality by which the threshold of the horizon is first articulated.

This tragic vision thus posits a “negative horizon” that is the unground of any and all inscription and therefore any memorialisation on which narrative identity may be poised. Thus the optico-geometric boundary of the perspectival cosmos—both the circle of origins and the entire program of cosmotechnics that follows—delimits the threshold of luminosity against this horizon of darkness. 

“In the firmament that we observe at night, the stars shine brightly, surrounded by a thick darkness. Since the number of galaxies and luminous bodies in the universe is almost infinite, the darkness we see in the sky is something that, according to scientists, demands an explanation […] the explanation that contemporary astrophysics gives for this darkness [is that] in an expanding universe, the most remote galaxies move away from us at a speed so great that their light is never able to reach us. What we perceive as the darkness of the heavens is this light […] moving away from us at a velocity greater than the speed of light.” (Agamben)

[…]

Reality is presented to consciousness as like a multi-faceted crystal. 

This cosmotechnical play of infinities is not present to consciousness through any simple reflection (because simple reflectivity is primarily negated through this play), but moreover by a technique of gazing that would be as though through the negative prosthesis of a “clear mirror”. Through this gaze the crystalline interface of the temporal horizon may be brought to the light of consciousness fractured and spectralised in its reflectivity, apprehended, then, as an ‘imperfect tense that never becomes a present’: thus Nietzsche identifies contemporaneity with the crux of the matter on which one must stand in dys-chrony.

‘This light that strives to reach us but cannot - this is what it means to be contemporary’ (Agamben). The immediacy of the present is the coming face-to-face with the fixed stars in infinite regress: an in/determinacy, which is the tragedy of apeiron. Thus the revelation of contemporaneity is that ‘the limit is beyond the limit’: knowledge apprehends the limit such that the cosmological horizon converges with the simulation of a “black light” (Virilio). […] Even as boundary-making cosmotechnical instrumentation may effectively ‘pour negentropy into the vessel’ (like Maxwell’s demon), any explanation of reality must include this black light of the non-conceptual void. 

And here, at this limit where light-time crystallises, meeting its shadow—de-void of conceptualisation, void of spatio-temporality; suspending the totality of that which stands-in as totality, as its excess—here the gaze of consciousness crosses the barriers of immanence in apprehending the spectral play of lights that overflows that very horizon. The limit-horizon of the crystalline edge is disappropriated by the surplus infinity that is present to consciousness in spectrality (just as ‘it is precisely the disproportion between the idea of infinity and the infinity of which it is the idea that this exceeding of limits is produced’ - Levinas). Thus the surplus infinity of our passion is revealed to consciousness via phantasmagoria spectralising at the limit. 

(edited July 2022)

The Empty Aeon

Technologies of control reduce the singularities, of which processes of individuation are constituent, into calculabilities, to such an extent that they overdetermine the horizon of reality and can no longer be recognised as such. But to what extent is the human already technologically predisposed - to what extent is the human calculable in relation to itself and therefore predisposed to its technological overcoming?

Human life is constituted by tertiary retentions that are always-already technical determinations through the relation of Anamnesis and Hyponomnesis - a ‘default of origin’. The ‘pharmakology of spirit’ turns technologies of control into technologies of individuation. The screen has become the paradigmatic pharmakological space and the digital the form of informational light that is brought to focus by the gaze of consciousness in this space. The pharmakologies of light-time that operate at this interface constitute Stieglerian ‘new weapons’.

[…]

Practices that subject pharmakology itself to a clearing inherently only occur outside tradition. Outside history, they are occult. Can such practices be said to be individuating and what is their relation to technological apparatus? Such practices, which evade philosophical writing, can be unearthed through an archeology of meditative praxis. Such an archeology reveals examples of a performative, perceptual clearing that is achieved through a yoga of light, which considers embodiment as the spectral interface. Such techniques, which are theurgic arts, manipulate demiurgic instruments of control in their dual capacity as optic-dimensional and geometric. Here, pharmakological suspension is achieved through a perceptual interfacing where consciousness as such is opened to itself. Both technical-perceptual apparatus (prosthetic instrumentation) and apparition are already apprehended here - natural light already corresponds to that possible radiance revealed in the psycho-physicality of the practitioner.

Archemastrie

In his Mathematicall Praeface to Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, John Dee describes Archemastrie as the “sovereign science.” Of the disciplines of Archemastrie, which bridge the emerging experimental sciences and the worldview of hermetic natural philosophy, Dee considered a kind of esoteric optics—whereby immanent experiential effects were brought about through experimentation with optical interfaces—to be central, making light itself the paradigmatic ontological intermediary of his methods.

Dee proposed that by using light as his primary medium, he could co-implicate Nature and Psyche through resonant reciprocity, thereby transforming ‘passive vision’ into ‘active vision’. The experimental methods of Archemastrie generated experiences that were simultaneously ‘natural’ and psycho-spiritual. Materiality, when apprehended through these experimental conditions, revealed its immanent potential for transfiguration. This syncretism merged the proto-scientific method of experimental observation (Baconian optics, after Alhazen and Alkindi) with the medieval metaphysics of light (Grosseteste) to creatively reconcile extramissionist and intramissionist theories of vision through a dual-aspect conception of light, considered as the principle mediator between realms.

Dee envisioned two ‘cones of vision’ to articulate the duality of Nature and Psyche: one governed by natural light, perceived by the physical eye, and the other by the inner light of imagination, corresponding to the ‘I’ of the psyche. Archemastrie sought to creatively intervene with this duality through a third principle: the optical interface. This interface functioned as a spectral mediator, corresponding to the psycho-physical embodiment of the practitioner. As light bridged the material and immaterial realms, the practitioner underwent a phenomenological transformation, experienced in the immanent transfiguration of light as consciousness.

Dee represented this interplay between dynamic psycho-physical thresholds and optical-dimensional effects using the symbol of the equilateral triangle, which he used as his signature, with the triangle often inscribed with radiating light. Such geometric ‘hieroglyphs’, which proliferate Dee’s private diaries, mapped the correspondences between the experimental processes and the immanent transformations.

Archemastrie, then, was a practice of resonance—an attunement to the spectral sonorities of light through an art of the interface, which generated correspondences that were cryptopoetically encoded. Through improvisational assemblages, experimental compositions of heterogeneous elements were entered into relation with the practitioner, through the interfacing of light. By bridging material content and immaterial expression, the transformation of perception was thereby an echoing co-transmutation, a reverberation.

“If, having fixed the original form in our mind’s eye, we ask ourselves how that form comes alive and fills with life, we discover a new dynamic and vital category, a new property of the universe: reverberation (retentir). It is as though a well-spring existed in a sealed vase and its waves, repeatedly echoing against the sides of this vase, filled it with sonority… filling it to its limits, into a vibrating sonorous world… What is secondary [in this image], what makes [this image only an image], are the sonorous well-spring… the sealed vase, the echo, the reflection of sonorous waves against the sides—in a word, all that belongs to the material and palpable world.” (Minkowski)

Techniques employing optical devices to establish correspondences include scrying (catoptromancy, crystallomancy, cyclicomancy, hydromancy) and catoptrics. Scrying involves gazing into reflective, translucent, or luminescent substances—crystals, stones, glass, mirrors, water, fire, or smoke—to produce oracular or cryptesthetic visions; catoptrics, the study of reflected light and image-forming optical systems using materials like mirrors or glass.

“If you were skilled in catoptrics, you would be able, by art, to imprint the rays of any star much more strongly upon any matter subjected to it than nature does itself.” (Dee)

Dee theorised that the effects of Archemastrie would naturally transcend the laboratory with implications extending into the societal and macrocosmic spheres. Through this work, he articulated a transversal ontology, applying Archemastrie to cosmogonic Architecture. If matter arises through reverberations in a microcosmic-macrocosmic network of correspondences, then the Archemaster’s role was to harmonise these relations through optical experiment, orienting the co-transmutation of Nature and Psyche.

Twilight Language

Whereas the history of metaphysics was inscribed through routinised cycles—the passage of the sun, calendrical structures, programs that generate rhythm from repetitions, imprinting the character of being-in-the-world—these externalised cycles have accumulated across succeeding generations, converged and inverted through the programmaticity of the present: a ‘play of the void’. The stellar course that is the mystery of the ambiguous horizon coincides with a destining conducted by cybernetics (“steering”) that is a pharmakological play of limits. By following the telematic-stellar course we arrive at a spectral horizon that is barely distinguishable (barely to art, barely to philosophy), a haunted space in which calculation and play become indistinguishable.

Thus the revelation of contemporaneity: the limit is beyond the limit, revealed to consciousness as phantasmagoria that spectralise at the crystalline edge. A play of lights that overflow. A surplus infinity that disarticulates the instruments of knowing, projecting a sensual knowing-no-thing that escapes from necessity and in so doing enables consciousness to assume its cosmic character in a relational passion of care.

Consciousness, as such, emptied of conceptualisation, negates technological programmaticity. In pharmakologically tracing the limits of reality—construed according to its informational limit-state—it delays the articulation of all and any limit, making a break at the horizon between embodied conceptuality and its emptiness. By tracing the play by which this horizon is made susceptible to the gaze—through the spectralisation at the interface of infinite space—we open onto that negative space of conceptualisation such that consciousness can pass-through.

This is the site for the spectral poiesis of passage because it is the horizon of light-time (both as limit-state of informational transmission and signifier of cosmotechnical temporality insofar as it appears to phenomenal consciousness). The poiesis of this interface—that would open-up along this horizon—has a luminous resonance. Just as the reciprocal nature of light and sight qua chiasm constitutes the ontological event that comes to resonance not by the acting of ‘obscure forces’ but by their emptying, so the interface can be opened and emptied so as to allow it the free space in which to resonate. The resonance that occurs in this free space, devoid of those forces that hold the psycho-cosmic body in panicked tension, is an emergence consistent with a direct ontology that passes-through dependent causality. Through the empty space of the threshold of being, it is an opening towards the enstatic.

In consciousness, this luminous reverberation maintains relational correspondence with perceptual affectivity, such that the optical spectrality that plays out along this shattered threshold produces ‘active visioning’. Techniques of gazing qua crystallisation unite prophetic and enstatic visioning. This luminous diagrammatics traces that which surpasses the optico-geometric in haptic function, moving through ‘diagrammatic agency’ towards the radiance of the inter-world itself.

The application of those ‘uncanny powers’ passes-through impotence, so as to find oneself capable of action in relation to psycho-cosmic embodiment. Through the gaze, the pharmakological medium of the interface in which opposites are opposed is opened—an opening that is imminent to the luminosities of the psycho-cosmic body (that embodiment of prior mediation; the potential space of reciprocal engendering). Thus one might impossibly consist as the being-towards that ‘strange relation’ signified by the performative utterance of a poiesis of passage, passible to the other through twilight language.