If you knew who you were (Original text)

Caroline said; if you knew who you were, you wouldn’t give a rats-monkeys what anyone thinks of you.
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or, The agony of everywhere and somewhere.

It’s become fashionable to add dimensions to our thinking. Not 3, or 4, but 5, maybe 10, 11, it seems we can’t agree, but, we agree, it seems, that they are limited in number. But, it seems to me that the implications of multiplicity are that there are rather infinite dimensions, that is, infinite potential to exist. And that the ‘turn,’ is not that these other dimensions are other dimensions of me, but that I am the collective dimension. The expanded self. Neither do these dimensions exist chronologically, not past lives or future ones, but rather that these are generated simultaneously and coextensively in time and space. Because there is no time and there is no space. Indeed, it is not even that I am those collective dimensions which coalesce my expanded self. It’s not that I am conscious. It’s that I am consciousness.
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In some moments the threads that hold me grow so tenuous, that I may come apart. Am I supposed to act now? And what would be the point? In this moment of utter disconnection, the way back seems impossible, the thought so exhausting that I only want to sleep. Forever. Like you lived too quickly and now you must wait til time catches up. Immobilised, suspended. Stiff, no breath. And the panic that you’re missing it, that you’re fucking everything up. But the thought of being practical, of making progress seems so distant and so strange that it is laughable. But on the other hand, what’s the choice? Because you are here, even when you’re not here. And you came here. For a reason. And you don’t get to bail out.
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Alone together. Alone together. Everywhere somewhere. I can’t sleep. I can’t wake up. I can’t breathe. And I can’t stop, breathing. I can’t cry. And I can’t laugh. And you keep asking me for words. But there are none. And the connection I so wanted, simply passes on. And I miss it. And I’m alone. Alone together. Everywhere somewhere. I can’t sleep, I can’t wake up, I can’t breathe and I can’t stop. Touch me. Touch me so that I remember that I’m real. Touch me to bring me back. Because I’m slipping. Because I am the slippage. Is this madness? Am I all there? Because I’m not all here.
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And the longing, oh my god. The longing. The desire to be here. I used to do it. Somehow I used to perform and you loved me for it. You couldn’t get enough. I was your darling. But when I stopped. So did you. When I became strange, you backed off. I don’t know how to make it. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. Or why. And god damn it, why am I still alone? How on earth am I supposed to pull this off? Because I don’t know what I’m doing. And it’s all too much. And I don’t know how to tell you. And what I wouldn’t give to be touched.

The agony of everywhere and somewhere.

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Project details

It isn’t what it says. It’s what it does to you. Forty thousand words and counting, yet what is it that communicates? A tone of voice, a glance, a gesture, that place where close collapses into touch and kaleidoscopic rebounds into otherness.
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With one foot in the real, another in the elsewhere, the transportive capacities of digital effects create space for an opening, by dislodging the senses from the known. In defamiliarising reality, such effects draw on Viveiros de Castro’s notion that, ‘in the act of becoming, what changes is not the subject but the world.’ Rhythm and repetition provoke mesmeric effect, reinforcing the intention that the work be experienced rather than understood.
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Purposefully minimalist, my RCA Graduate show installation marks an important step forward in a practice which seeks to sculpt with intangibles. Upending expectations, the sonic precedes the visual, energetics precede the physical, creating a space suffused with sound and light that through motion, becomes alive.