On selective memory erasure...
Taken from the text Hamlet by W. Shakespeare
" ...Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there;
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix'd with baser matter: yes, by heaven!
... "
"...and we fools of nature
So horridly to shake our disposition
With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?
Say, why is this? wherefore? what should we do?
..."
HORATIO
"It beckons you to go away with it,
As if it some impartment did desire
To you alone. "
....
HAMLET
"It waves me still.
Go on; I'll follow thee. "
....
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon,
Making night hideous; and we fools of nature
So horridly to shake our disposition
With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?
Say, why is this? wherefore? what should we do?
GHOST
"...But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood..."
"Angels and ministers of grace defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn'd,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell, ...
.... O, answer me!
Let me not burst in ignorance; but tell
Why thy canonized bones, hearsed in death,
Have burst their cerements; why the sepulchre,
Wherein we saw thee quietly inurn'd,
Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws,
To cast thee up again. What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon,
Making night hideous...."
Biopoetics require decentralization of life to allow them to decomposition and cyclical of materials that cause death. The processes and practices of death are of great importance in this type of work where the ephemeral and perishable are given. The type of death that is valued is not the human that brings pain and drama, but are the “small deaths of everyday life” (Cavell 2005: 128) that do not carry out individualization or succession. They are those that we normalize and aim for the harmonicity of their progress; those of distant organisms that occur collectively on a different temporary scale. .
The concept of life after death is often explored in art through themes of cyclicality, decomposition and transformation. In the context of “Biopoetics” and performances such as “Three Food Performances,” these ideas manifest through inherited materialities and the exploration of different states.
Likewise, in works such as "Hamlet", the absence and departure of life are contemplated, reflecting on notions of existence beyond mortality.
The concept of "transience" is closely linked to the idea of continuous transfiguration in the context of figuration and disfiguration. Explores the ever-changing nature of forms, symbols and representations in art, emphasizing the fluidity and impermanence inherent in artistic expression and interpretation.
The "Hamlet syndrome" is a concept that embodies the themes of absence, departure and deviation in relation to Hamlet's character. It explores how Hamlet serves as an absent center around which dialogue and diffractions occur, reflecting on the multifaceted nature of his identity and its impact on narrative structure.(KOBI)
the British zoologist Hugh B. Cott brought the term coincident disruption, referring to the occurrence of blending and disruption in nature. Those compositional devices and theoretical demonstrations about appearance, the processes of embedding figures in their background and the combination of these techniques with displacement, helped to develop Razzle-dazzle patterns, used in war ships and aircraft.
Despite the notorious graphic design of those camouflage techniques, the aimed result was to disrupt sight, with the combination of movement, making it difficult for others to define the outer lines of ships and aircraft.
In Hamlet, the concepts of heaven and hell are intertwined with the themes of departure, kidnapping and deviation. These ideas reflect the absence of a central authority in the game, creating dialogue and diffractions that challenge traditional interpretations of heaven and hell as fixed entities. The characters' internal conflicts mirror this fluidity, blurring the lines between salvation and damnation.
Paul Celan (2014) (KOBI)
“In night’s free matter. / In Griff-debris and -operation, / in slovest origin, / in the wisdom-shaft Never. / Wateredless / sew the burst / shadow together – it fights its way / deep down, / free” (74).
This is about entry the in-side. In the night-debris of unexplodable grip and in the depths of insensitive sewing, supply waters of the planetary ecology, read a true release counter. With/in this ecology, a relationship becomes possible to the darkness, enebling life and freedom. The alertness of becoming entangled and being carried by the Other before implicates breathing non-air (Solstreif-Pirker 2020) in all its fullness. Non-air doesn't mean the denial of air, as if air had somehow been extended; rather, it means the mutation of air, and points to a relationship with those strata that have, so far, stabilized any form of life.
Looking non-air allow the Other to be carried with/in the body and to count a space that takes one back before established elements, taxonomys, and ideologys.
Non-air is the air equivalent of François Laruelle’s “One” as an instance before any assignment. It is impossible to be, feeling, thinking, acting “assenting to the Real” (Laruelle 2013, 223), advancing “deeper down” (Celan 2014, 74).
It refers to a pre-individual, archaic state and to the in-side of the maternal womb-space, where breathing has not yet been learned. In becoming-inside and breathing non-air, an investigative, artistic form of practices emerges that include not only ethics and aesthetics, but also poor and healing, oppression and freedom, death and life. It talks about the need to relate to the threads, forces, and agencies that could potentially kill – in order to live with/in an erach of post-anthropocenic barbarism. .
Hamlet became a base for continuous departures, raptures, deviations, fugitives and layages. Hamlet is there, but it is an absent centre, where it cannot be the dominant subject; its power is decentralised and covered into a more dynamic process of intra-subjective relationships.
In this evanescent trajectory, something seems to impart permanence and clarity - the memory of an image—its failed memory?
An example of a work that incorporates the concept of transit is "Rituals in the Dark" by Tatsumi Hijikata, a pioneering figure in Butoh. This piece delves into the trance state and embodies Grotowski's notion of the "Total Act", emphasizing the physical and psychological transitions within performances.
Dark matter is a hypothesis for an imaginary form of matter, which does not emit or reflect radiation, and there cannot be observed in any normal way. The concept of dark matter explains why galaxies rotate much faster than they should. 5% ordinary matter, 26% dark matter and 69% dark energy. That's the recipe for the universe. Nobody knows what exactly dark matter and dark energy are. .
The relationship between dark matter and inner hell can be understood through the metaphorical exploration of invisible forces and hidden depths. Just as dark matter and energy are elusive but influential in the universe, the Inner Hell represents the enigmatic aspects of human consciousness, both with profound implications for understanding existence and perception.
Tatsumi Hijikata's work "Rituals in the Dark" explores the concept of repetition, ritual and dark materiality. It delves into the ambiguity of perception and the importance of expression in performance art, reflecting on themes such as protest, cycling and automation in a context of darkness and listening.
We perceive a dark material – a texture of the world including everything and everyone who perceives it, and impossible to finally tell apart where we end and they start. The dark material includes the unwanted, the hidden, the forgotten, and the ambivalent, which is subject and object interchangeable. .
