Praxis #3 'Move to zero'

I started the year with an unsettling feeling. January seems to always lure me into some strange, existential territory. But in the pool of uncertainty I found a foot on the ground, some time in my studio and no resistance to making sound. I’m curious about how these recordings mark this time of weirdness and what making them gave me in the process. I’ve commented on the therapeutic qualities of being with sound in previous posts and I’m continually preoccupied with the space that manifests in making art and how it stands in contrast to our everyday lives, which feel so intensely contracted by thoughts and doingness.

In unthinking, a knowingness emerges. If 95% of our cognition is unconscious we are seriously limiting our experience by funnelling attention towards that slim 5%. Our world is dominated by visual culture and data, what we see is what we think. Education, in all its coercive hierarchy, tells young people that writing, rational and analytical thinking are the marks of intelligence and societal value. But welcoming the conditions for other forms of knowing and being seems increasingly important to maintain a sense of humanity. Doing so connects us with our body-mind and the more than human world. Anxiety and disassociation can be suspended to welcome a grounded human experience. A reminder of who we really are.

The 'folly of art' narrative only serves the status quo, the less we engage in our full humanness the more we give up to the inequity of our capitalist world.

Create a sensory sanctuary, it might be the most radical thing we can do right now.