This research project investigates how a speculative approach to scientific/mathematical models of physical dimensions and their interrelationships can be used as a generative tool in contemporary art. The exploration is situated within a cross-disciplinary arena that incorporates artistic strategies from New Media Art, Interactive Installation, and Performance, merging them into an expanded and interconnected site that I have chosen to call a “performative installation”. Throughout, I engage with formal, digital, narrative, and interactive practices to investigate how speculative fabulation and interdimensional movement can work as reflective tools within these performative installations.

The narrative and digital installation-based structures in the performative installation constitute the mediums from which one can explore movement between various dimensionalities: from the very concrete one (line), two (plane), and three-dimensional (space), to the more complex, expanded dimensionalities of Hyperspace. [1] These geometrical modulations in experiencing and sensing point towards possibilities for physical embodiment and movement in the space of the artwork, which are entangled with movements in thinking and imagination. Here, the research project explores a methodology of interdimensional artistic speculation designed to traverse established aesthetic, formal, and conceptual boundaries, and in turn, possibly offer a way to reflect more broadly.

The digital object to the right renders an approximation of a four-dimensional cube, a Hypercube. If a fourth spatial dimension exists, we cannot experience it from the perspective of our three-dimensional constitution. It occurs in theoretical physics, as a mathematical possibility, and in speculative fiction as a potential of being embedded in something beyond our senses. [2] We can only seem to grasp a fragmented approximation. The avant-garde explored various possibilities of depicting this impossible, hidden, extradimensional perspective throughout the first half of the 20th century. [3] I am interested in dialoguing with this history and explore how to work with hyperspace as a contemporary artist. Especially now, as our physical selves merge with the virtual information sphere and we navigate the complex, unseen fabric of today’s physical-digital entanglements.

So, I look at this 3D computer rendition of the fourth spatial dimension. It uses movement and change to point towards the inaccessible, making the cube fold into itself, so that the central cube becomes the surrounding one, and back, repeatedly. I look at it. I meditate on it. I speculate on how to make the PhD work into an artistic space — a “performative installation”, an entangled perspective, operating exactly like this. And because it is an impossible space/perspective I want to reach, I return to the attempt again and again in my artistic research, much like the folding hypercube itself.

In this return, I can identify that my artistic practice and research gravitate towards articulating a related folding of subject and object: a place where the surroundings become the central agent, where an individual becomes a network or context, where the artist becomes the artwork, or the audience becomes the generators of art. [4]

As such, the project is curious about how things are interconnected. How do we put ourselves in an active, entangled relation to that which is both within and beyond our reach? Can a hyperspatial perspective be a way to reflect on our contemporary hybrid, networked, complex lives? How can that be done? Who or what is it that does that reflection? Why is this important?

Why is this important? Behind and around all our activities as humans—as family members, professionals, artists, academics, going about our very important daily activities—there are a range of interconnected crises brewing, imploring us to respond: Our climate cannot sustain the human-made waste anymore, biodiversity is plummeting, pandemic waves flow through human/animal biologies, socioeconomic inequality is increasing, and democratic mechanisms are eroding. Our responses, both on an individual level and through the constructed nation-states and institutions of the western, international community, seem staggeringly inadequate. How, then, is it possible to respond?

This project suggests that we need to find a way of thinking and experiencing differently, a way of moving out of fixated worldviews – or, as Donna Haraway says, it is most pressing that “we invent new practices of imagination, resistance, revolt, repair, and mourning". [5]

How then, is it possible for the performative installations to heed this call for new practices of imagination?

Initially, the project suggests that engagement with expanded dimensions can place us at the edge of the known and invite us to relate to what lies beyond our cognitive or perceptual scopes. Instead of negating or othering, we might connect, even without fully comprehending or owning it in our understanding. In this way, the project aims to offer a reflective tool for exploring how we relate as part of our environment, which is complex and entangled between the physical, virtual, technological, and biological realms.

ENTANGLED MIND

To substantiate this approach, I have drawn on the network perspectives of new-materialist and object-oriented thinkers such as Haraway, Karen Barad, and Bruno Latour. However, what helps me grasp this best and historically situate the thinking is how cybernetics thinker Gregory Bateson discussed the concept of Mind in the 1970s. [6] Bateson repeatedly emphasised that our epistemological view is skewed and that this is detrimental to both the climate and social equality. He suggested that the problem lies in how we view the relationship between organism and environment. He proposed a larger mind, a basic cybernetic unit, that transcends the body of the organism, which he called “organism-plus-environment”. [7] You cannot explain any behaviour by drawing the line by the human alone. The mind or consciousness at work in any situation must encompass all the elements that contribute to a particular behaviour. A famous illustration of this idea, introduced by Bateson, is the image of a blind person and their walking stick. To explain the action of the blind person walking, you would need to include the street - the stick - the arm of the person - the brain of the person - the feet of the person - the street - the stick - the arm - the brain - the feet, and so on, in an ongoing loop. [8]

I have been exploring this cybernetic approach as a playful, speculative practice. When I write this text on the computer, I attempt to be aware of the mind that encompasses the table - the laptop hard drive and processor - the laptop screen - the keyboard - the fingers writing - the arms – the eyes - the brain – the back – the chair – the table - the laptop hard drive and processor - the laptop screen - the keyboard – and so on. When the activity changes, so does the mind that is involved, leading to a shifting, expanded, entangled way of being. 

Bateson suggests that our default as humans might be to align individual, subjective agency with the need for a neutral, objective position; a feeling of being separate and distant from our surroundings. We think we need to have a completely conscious, rational overview to respond adequately, or that such a “conscious purpose” [9] is even possible. Bateson argues that, since this might not be how things are, the output of our otherwise well-intended actions ends up being different from what we anticipated, even quite detrimental. If we are, in fact, an entangled part of the world, we have to actively relate to what we do not have a conscious overview of. In one way, decentralising the importance of our conscious, rational brain as only a small element in Mind, and in another way, expanding ourselves to include blind spots and half-perceptions. A subconscious outside of the body, instead of a psychoanalytically internalised one. [10] As this project suggests, it is a bit like being in this hypercube, folding into an invisible dimension, or as close to it as can be.

A curious thing that Bateson often repeats in his transcribed speeches is that, even though he can lecture about this “organism-plus-environment” as the smallest unit of Mind, he still feels separated from his audience, aware of himself as a singular person on a podium. Likewise, I experience that this entangled position rings true, yet still feels impossible to fully embody, at least rationally. But what about aesthetically?

This project proposes that one response can be a speculative, imaginative, embodied artistic methodology that is not fixed but constantly moving towards, within a field of paradoxes and contradictions, shifting between the virtual and the embodied. Moving towards or attuning ourselves to this ‘impossible’ way of experiencing our position/constitution might have the potential to influence how we reflect and thus change how we act. There might at least be potential for a more embodied, insightful reflection on where we divide and cut our consciousness and the world. We might become more response-able, as Donna Haraway would put it. [11] This is what I wish to invite the audiences and participants into when entering the performative installations.

And here we come to the question of how this can be done through artistic research specifically.

While mediating my artistic research project, I attempt to communicate transparently and generously, without cutting and isolating areas in a way I find counter to the premise of the project. On a fundamental level, the project assums that our spatial and mental perspectives are connected: that the way we are embodied and embedded in time and space is entangled with our understanding and ability to reflect. We understand the world through our physical embeddedness, and vice versa. When we perceive the way in which we are embedded differently, this might also change our thoughts and actions. Additionally, if we find ourselves in a new material/digital/biological/spatial constellation, this will, in turn, affect how we perceive the way we are embedded. This is why an artistic research project that builds physical environments, worlds, and experiences might offer something complementary to a purely theoretical proposition in academic research.