[-empyre-] Cartesian dismantling and Persephone

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

Maria,

I was pondering your comment about overturning the Cartesian subject object
through the mechanism of exposure...

> you brush quite close to our original idea of exposures while
> stating 'uncovering through visualisation' .
and
> Could we go as far as to completely turn, rip around and
> 
> dismantle the cartesian status quo of subjects and objects in respective and
> opposite cages in proposition to each other and suggest 'the
> 
> Artist' to become the object / mirror. By stating this objectivity we do not
> relate the modality of becoming an object to any useless
> 
> vulnerability or perforability that should be harmful (or indeed
> 'objectifying' in the everyday-language).

The unfolding of the object/mirror ontology of the artist: is there any
connection to the feminine trope of Persephone? I was intrigued by the
connections explored in a piece just online today by a scholar at the
Bartlett School in London, Peg Rawes.  She writes of architecture, but I
think her remarks relate to your work in Mechanisms as well:   discipline
has 
> used binary ideas to define, organise and differentiate its practice, for
> example, the relationship between; subject/ object (e.g. designer/ user, and
> user/ building), form/ matter, system/ programme, reason/ unreason, stasis/
> event or, inside/ outside. But there are also practices that are not
> restricted to the fixed oppositions of the binary system, allowing more
> dynamic operations and modes to exist. These are tales of transformation
> within matter that is both perceptible and imperceptible, real and imaginary,
> concrete and virtual, and propose qualitatively different relations in which
> architecture can be realised....

> Persephone, daughter of Zeus and Demeter (Goddess of the Harvest) moves
> between the world of air and light and the underworld of gas and dark because,
> since eating pomegranate seeds, which are the food of the dead, she is bound
> to Hades. Not only does she live between the upper and lower worlds, both
> inside and outside the earth in the realms of the living and the un-living
> (she is Queen of the dead), but she also has two names: Persephone and Kore.
> As Persephone she is intrinsically sound taken from the Greek word, perse,
> meaning in itself and phone, meaning voice, sound and combining form. And as
> Kore she is girl. Girl and sound come together. Persephone, then, has more
> than one identity or mode in which to be, and each name refers to her inherent
> multiplicity. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari
> have used this girlish potential in their concept of ?becoming-girl¹ to
> challenge the primacy given to the single male subject or author. For example,
> in Freud¹s analysis of sexual difference, girl is the most marginal state in
> the system, since she is always either castrated or substituted and therefore
> always incomplete; Deleuze and Guattari propose, by contrast, that
> becoming-girl represents the most radical state of difference that disrupts
> psychoanalysis¹s symbolic system of the movement of desire.1 In a similar
> sense, the sound-wave is a continuum or vibration moving through matter in
> space and time (i.e. Persephone or Alice¹s voice), rather than the static and
> unchanging relations between the subject and object (i.e. Hades wish to
> possess Persephone as an object).. In Persephone, then,
> sound states reveal a more complex structure of the subject that unravels time
> and space to become a story of transformation and change. and into an
> architecture in which the single autonomous subject becomes amplified into
> continuous folds of different kinds of girlish intelligence.

http://arch.virose.pt/writings/peg01.html

Through these continuous folds it seems as if the artist-object is always
then in a state of becoming, the perfect avoidance pattern against what you
call "useless vulnerability".  And what about sound in your work? How does
the sound function--like an unraveling of time and space, an exposure of
continuous folds?  moving through matter in space and time?
How does this relate to digital expression...is there an elision (that word
again) between continous enfolding and revealing and the digital?

Christina
-- 
Christina McPhee
<http://www.christinamcphee.net>
<http://www.naxsmash.net>