Let It Skin In (Droning Synaesthesia)

There’s too much of every-thing, isn’t it? Too much o(ra)cular shit: they get me, at times, but I keep having issues with formal gobbledygook contributing to bad infinity. Too many altars, too many symmetries, too many kitbashed totems, too many sloppy ready-made incantations, too many easy crafted speculative summoning—uncommitted prayers. Too many blunt vibes clutter the scene, all showing off their plumes and plethora of associated .obj(s). I made many myself to cope with reality, to present the Real; to reveal my-self. Now I’m tired. Immanent solar magnetic flare is around the corner, so let’s make it meaningful, egoless, it’s worth a try.

It’s a lost battle most of the times given the saturation, the amount of self-indulgent speculations, and the quantity of ready-to-spawn frictionless micro-worlds. All that entertains the eyes but badly sedates the Spirit; let alone my heart. There’s a lot around trying to make sense of the world, as we are all differently struggling to give form to the impossible, the paradoxical reality, the real and the dyad finitude/alterity. We are finite beings all trapped in fear and desire, and form (as art) instinctively always comes to the rescue. Speculative forms are particularly important to fill in the void, in getting us to travel through, yet in the process of constructing quickly the speculative imago something gets lost. Speculations are everywhere, and most of the time, they are used to offer easy resolution. The word speculative gets seriously bluntly mistreated nowadays, and the more I see it used to signal out one’s work’s meta-vanguardism, the more I move towards a special form of art, a kind of non-form, a (speculative) self-sublimating neo-rational hyper chromatic generic black(ness). Particularly, I look for works that are very present yet hinting at absences, pure presences shimmering the void of the real through tones of iconoclastic noise, reflexes, and metallic resonances.¹

Easy speculations are everywhere; there are exceptions though, and I think they are necessary. Regardless of a certain feeling of hopelessness in seeing art and the aesthetic domain suffering—becoming decorative, powerlessly sublimating into automated ocular-centric circuits, feedback mechanisms churning cheap neon-cuteness gesturing memetic allures—the only way out, the only way to be other-wise, remains through the senses. The senses, a modality for tunneling through this epistemological mess we are living, a channel digging matter whist aiming at a more transcendental form of rooting. Radical aisthesis is needed, as the way out is not only through rational discourse, or sarcasm, post-irony, but by enabling feeling qua action, and seriously, by digging speculative tunnels to reactivate once more another form of sensation,² to induce other forms of feeling (it, the fullness of that void we all bear within), ultimately other forms of thinking to enable positive forms of alienation.

Once in a while something, a work, an aesthetic presence of a sort forms a consistent alterity. A visionary chromaticism presents itself whispering phenomenologically, in the midst of despair, the possibility of hope—leaving nothing behind but what is sufficient: the mark of a shiver. In those moments, I see the power of art brought back to its raw base, and from time to time I’m transported, “withdraw(n) into an enclosed and secret intimacy without producing anything but an empty object and a dying echo”.³ This is the absolute intimacy I look for. I look for meaning in artworks that in their simplicity make us suspend for a lapse, the linear processing of events, what we take for granted, givenness. I look for environments or objects that are just asking to perform the simplest of suspensions: breath in, wait, hold it, breath out—feel that void begging to be recognized, let it skin in.

I look for truth in artworks that are not something, that initiate something instead. Once in a while an artwork speaks softly and differently, a suspenseful intensity is formed, a phenomenological crack gets joyfully inflicted, altering the bluntness of aesthetic and rational apathy, the smooth continuum of our fractured contemporaneity, one without narrative, and without time. When that happens, the usual culprit is the heroic presence of a strange kind of object, an ob-ject that fails before the eyes, that lacks on both registers. One that presents a form of formlessness, one that is there but not quite, fully abstract yet also quite material, a kind of im-material.⁴ Both ubiquitous and singular at the same time.

Out of Stardust Into Love by Alexandra Koumantaki possesses or is possessed by a certain kind of weird, almost divine qualia that reverberates in the in-between. It’s dead and alive, it’s matter and spirit. It’s not an object, it’s an atmosphere inhabiting an aesthetic dimension that is both digital and physical. It is held, and it holds reality, suspended. It’s simply there staring at you in an almost vibratory state, with its humming textures and reflexes deployed for initiating an experience, or awaiting for someone to start an elegy, a ritualistic trance, … awaiting for action to happen, becoming a tabernacle for summoning, for hoping that a messianic event will have been made. I have hope for artworks that are visually singular yet iconoclastic and are, by analogy, somewhere in the sonic spectrum spanning between immersion/softness/diffusion and rupture/intensity/confrontation.⁵

Out of Stardust Into Love is not a portal, but it may become one. It is lingering there, awaiting, seemingly silent, drooning, humming. It’s a monolith of sorts, its sense of being borders that of its disappearance. Such form is something, not sure what. It is not an object but something still. It has no clear anthropomorphism, no clear behavior or function. It is something. Not a form but something that releases the possibility of forming: for the sub-ject to be undone. It’s a hyper-light material density in which both ob-ject and sub-ject are implicated becoming something, negotiating the space for the outside to speak, for that nameless something to reveal itself, to finally say something as meaningful as the ruling sound of wind bashing the shore. It is there for that only, to whisper to the sense, an asemic form of presence that cannot be instrumentalized and made an object, some-thing. It drives and thrives, reminding the viewer to be an attentive listener, to await for a gesture or a sound to happen, as a reminder that there is something always restless at play. It’s mundane and molecular, it has hope, it sings a melancholic tune, for that something that may never come. Perhaps it’s a reminder of the ür absence/absence, of g()d. Perhaps, in its finitude, it gestures towards an initiation: it crafts a ground for meaning, marking a space and a threshold, creating a place for a cult to start moving, instantiating the possibility for thought to think, at last, a new coming, a different one: non-dual transcendence, (non-)divinity; g()d.⁶ But anything that claims to be a god, although it may be a (non-)god, should be eaten—Dogon knew it, Georges Bataille died with it, Clarice Lispector lived through it.

I look at Out of Stardust Into Love and I imagine a banquet, a minimalist table of messianic derangement in which words are suspended and food is molecularly absent. Maybe it’s me. Yet a fire keeps charring and cracking with intensity when I look at it emanating purity from its whitest slit. The work doesn’t speak a specific truth, it’s rationally silent, meaningless, yet it makes me trust it’s saying something. I should not attempt to describe, should I? Wouldn’t that equate to killing it? I’ll speak so indirectly about the artwork, but also of the many other nameless artworks that transcend with similar moves the apathy of the world, with elegant brutality, and in similar fashions/fictions. The aesthetic assemblage resists sense, not because it is paradoxical or irrational, but because it is intensely sensible, a strange object torn on both sides by the couplets close/far and loud/silent, too much and too little to be named. What it leaves on thought is a subversive speck of dust, a kind of immaculate disturbance, a pearly spit on the regime of comprehension.

A golden scar is left on the flash of perception. In it I smell the metallic dust of a meteorite. It’s strangely beautiful, but it doesn’t claim to be recognized by usual popularity indexes. It is in fact minimal, like it’s ready to dissipate—as a rock hit and eaten out by waves. I imagine it on its way to exhaust its drive, seemingly ready to give away its finitude and presentness.

Roger Caillois, in The Writing of Stones,⁷ initiates us in the reading of the geological as a form of non-human inscription. Out of Stardust Into Love can be read through such lenses. It is a strange mineral world that is not silent. It murmurs with obscure syntax, vegetal rhythms, and crystalline metaphors; with a lithic grammar made not to be decoded but experienced to transform our mode of seeing. It produces an encounter with geomorphic intelligence, where design ceases to be anthropocentric and begins to echo the slow erosions and accidents of matter that compose the Earth and the beyond unconscious artistry. Perhaps that’s its secret: you should and can only experience it as a landscape.

I glimpse at its black concrescence juxtaposed to the ephemeral halos of its visceral light. I can imagine it as a pure sound, one immediately distorted by too much electric drive. I open my eyes again, and the contrast between the brutal purity of its non-black materiality and the digital and lyrical voice of its neon-opalescent white becomes a ring modulation. It equates a sound that is produced raw, primal, and wave-folded through additive and subtractive synthesis. I look at it and I feel a metallic kind of warmth, like the continuous modulation of four saw-tooth waves, detuned and captured together and juxtaposed to the virtuous meandering of a cello string, out of tune and resonating in solitude. The work is imaginal and sonic; as such, it allows a leap of synaesthetic fiction to kick in. I try to describe it, but language screams, deserting a barren body, fleeing by flirting with the dull complicity of its host, a lacerated thought, both quivering to the point of non-return. It’s a force that thought has to reckon with, needing to articulate the shimmering affirmation of a non-signifying noise. That it needs to be modeled (internalized and made rational), which makes it attest its own absence—consuming its entitlement to be something, its delusional transcendental presence, its self-granted necessity. Once it lets this skin-in, it once and for all devours all presupposed transcendental necessities: the subject, the world, and g()d.

These last sentences are perhaps less a concrete assessment of the artwork at hand than a general sentiment that arises when glimpsing at certain kinds of artworks: work in which thought is gently taken down by the senses working at unison to accentuate a weird presentness. Seeing sound through the perception of material form is a meditative experience. It is not always possible, but when it is, it is an index that the artwork is a special object, both abstract and feral. The real and reality are cloned and instantiated in the work, held in a non-dual tension reminding of a primal scar left on being.

The work presents this non-dual id-entity hinting at a uni-lateral difference, one not definable through philosophical jargon, rather hinted at aesthetically. Why is it non-dual? It is for the fact of being aware that the work must render out with a certain objective purity an ontological otherness, a gap in signification,⁸ whilst being aware of the innate subjective posturing of any fabricated artwork. It is not a rock or a deep time sediment, but it looks like one. So in other words, it should declare it is aware that no matter what, subjectivity is always folded inside the (re-presented) object. The light at its center signals out to my reading, this truth. The object speaks to the Real in a non-dual manner, neither abusing philosophy nor risking to become aesthetic commodity. Playing with the senses, it absolutizes its ontological realism and embraces shamelessly its very subjective and extravagant fashion—the latter the inextinguishable mark of the artist that conceived it.

What kind of truth does such artwork hold? Let me say directly and in simple words, truth is an encounter that happens when something is both mundane and absolute, held in a uni-lateral meta-structure. What in essence an artwork should call for thus is such tension, a suspension of truth in itself without renouncing the possibility of hinting at the most immaculate of truth, the vibratory silence of an absent presence. Or, as I wrote many years ago in an unpublished manuscript, truth in itself is not nameable, yet the knot (… or hole) of truth could be found in the process of digging, of morphing oneself with what is(-not), with what has yet to be encountered. This is why feeling should still retain a place in the metaphysical undoing of the subject. Go for it. Get enmeshed in the density of a situation. Get implicated. Dig. Truth is both the process and the penultimate question that transmutes, that changes as/qua thought at the threshold of exhaustion and, sensing the possibility of stasis, makes a leap into true otherness. It’s the last drive, the last pulse steering away from the otherwise passive acceptance: nomo-logical rigor-mortis. Truth is the impenitent sense that something transcends any end, any logical absence and closure. It is the keep going keep giving, regardless of good and evil. Is it love?

Truth is nothing but the reiteration of the swerve, as an ethical procedure that attempts to unground the knot. What then, once the juncture, the known, after many years of research, has been found? What happens to thought and the body undergoing such exposure once the presence and absence of thought is exhumed, showing itself out not as a figure but as process in/or formation? What happens when this figure lays open, displaying even more intimate figures, recesses, folds, and interstices? What is the question when the question finds vibrant silence and intimate muteness as an answer; when it finds out that forming the question is not dua-logical knotting—the interweaving of one rope with two extremities—but pure fibrosity that goes beyond recognition, representation, and judgment? Or that what forms the knot is nothing but a concretion of contingencies once sensed/disguised as “decisions” that only an analysis based on the Peircean triad reiterated at infinity can assess? Truth is pathos, the patho-logical operation requiring restlessness: the knot connecting an interiority with an exteriority; the instantaneity of an I uttering itself out, emerging from its locality and immediately fusing with the milieu of suffering, the world, where the sub-ject restlessly searches for an ob-ject, following a phantasm, thus becoming an it, and (un)knowing “it-self”.

But, enough with romantic formulas and meta-materialist rants about the para-doxical meaning of truth. Ultimately what counts is the possibility of a shiver for the opening of a portal: for the soul’s immersion into a burning bath of icy deliverance. An experience delivering in the mist of ontological absence a sense of a priori presence, a pulse, the possibility of love. I’m not for all things flattened ontologically and kept in a state of constant alluring tension. Ontologically, truth is bleaker. There is no way out, yet even the most chauvinist of the eliminativist materialist would have humbly at some point to accept the paradox of a reductively dry framework—and wonder in search for an altar to start praying (or meditate). The more hardcore the naturalism, the more open to panpsychism; of course, a non-anthropomorphic, and formless, generic panpsychism would be desirable. We should be humble and let art transport us there. Some art is able to do so.

Silence, encore. It’s black out there, meaning got ontologically burnt in the last century, regardless, guys, we need to make something to get the Geist out in the wild once again to beg the real to help us change this reality. Stop reading obsessively in order to subsume more knowledge. You’ll not be able to eat alive the world (in-)itself, but only the written (and not practiced) translation of the world that philosophy has constructed for you, providing you with a false image of the world. Stop inhaling pre-digested knowledge. Live instead by making form through concepts. Call in through them new realities. Treat them as art forms, the purest art-forms. As in their essence lies a base materialism, which, tinted with a certain esoteric messianism, is ready to forgo the world whilst living into it. Dig a tunnel through the landscape of the unknown instead of waiting for an angelic Godot. Make it pulse. Don’t bend, ascend [GSBE!]. Leap, don’t look for truth, dive in, instead.

Make your philosophy become an art form, a form-of-life. Set up rituals to play with. Invent an army of fantasies. In the most mundane of settings you will find the most refined version of the sublime, uncharted and unmapped. The extra-ordinary will scare you, appearing within the fabric of everyday experiences. Play with reality, and the Real will reveal itself from within. Play your game, life, a solitary glass-bead territory made of alien thoughts flowing, morphing you into action, and coming back thereafter to mess up with the totalizing self-assured ego of your other-(in-)thinking. This should be the mantra fueling the enigma of art. Cave digging. Let’s do it, let’s keep going, let it reverberate. But not for the sake of just making. Avoid making restlessly more just to re-affirm what you already know: your own identity. There is so much ego all over the world endlessly defecated through .obj forms. Just wait for the right moment and dig the fangs in. You don’t have to make a hundred songs. Think and practice in obscurity, rejoice through transcendental opacity. I would just wish the world to remain a little more silent. If all of us would be more patient and less driven by that anxious lingering feeling of having to make an absolute statement too soon, always too young … always wanting to quickly be, and so obsessively throwing it out. Take time. Work to make that one artwork that encapsulates your being other, a defection and desertion of the given world, and the ritual to initiate another form, of life(-form). Don’t be afraid of dying before, or without, having left a mark. Wait for the right moment to do so, to leave a mark on the world. If the moment does not come, if that’s the case, let it be, the universe will rem-æmber you regardless. Don’t despair if that were to happen only once throughout life, the world is full of uncredited revolutionaries and nameless angels that worked in obscurity. Make art and be anonymous. Embrace a uni-lateral axiom: being is both immanent and transcendent, a singular and dual presentness. Have faith, we are all generic victims, and as such, we are all uni-versal creators by default, even when we do no-thing.

Nature cannot be known, it can only be constantly mapped, modelled, analyzed—and given temporarily some names. And forms. Art practice is an act of believing, holding bleakness at bay and giving name to what ex-ist. As such, any act of naming is one of world building, driven alas by default, by an absolute genetic conditioning: any art-form must constitute itself as the ultimate life-form, vision, a cult to submit to. But it can only be absolute art as a privative function, as it performs its own affirmative sublimation: to stop being art and become a vehicle to activate life. A truer art practice is one that captures such a paradoxical mechanics, deciding in the last instance that the only absolute meta-position is a non-reductive resolution, neither the humiliation of absence (full rational withdrawal in privative negativity) nor happy fullness everywhere (obsessive making and all things alluring). We have not seen such art-forms yet. I’m not sure if it is in our capacity, in other words, if any of us is ready to sublimate the self and the ego to make for such a leap. But I trust some artworks are initiating a dialogue in that direction. Yeah, I hope sculptural artworks can become the equivalent of an orchestra performing aural bliss, making place with minimalist and visceral pieces eclectically fusing sources and rhythms in uni-vocal tension. I hope to encounter the simplicity of primal ecstatic sounds, growls converging in synthetic streams of rapture, tonal moments of eerie quasi drones, glitches becoming spectral (in-)human voices deployed like memories from the Deep. I hope for artworks to be hissing affiliations to the unknown, hums by the other, prayers never made—Artaudian screams, melancholic and hauntingly beautiful.

An absolute cult starts from that uni-lateral difference grafted on a soul that wants to be able to formulate a thought, that wants thought to emanate in the last instance, the simplicity of it all, in the midst of eschatological formlessness, the possibility of unconditional love. Or as Nicola remembered, ultimately and in the last instance, believe that “all manners of being are the same to fire”.⁹

Let it radiate, let it skin in.