Fossils of a Dream
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Fossils Of A Dream Gerrit Rietveld Academie Jewellery Department Het Sieraad Thesis Advisor: Alena Alexandrova Zindzi Wijminga ‘Fossils of a Dream’ Bachelor Thesis 2 Table of Contents Introduction p. 5 Part One The Living Object p. 7 1. Imagination p. 7 'Seeing the World in a Grain of Sand' Suspension of Disbelief Making Things Come Alive Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable 2. The Hybrid p. 13 Animation as a Hybrid of Life and Death Cabinet of Knowledge The Living Object Fossils of a Dream Part Two Human Relationship with the Living Object p. 23 1. Animism p. 23 Transitional Object Transitional Object in Macro Perspective 2. The Human Being as a Living Object p. 27 To Create or to be Created? Invisible things 3. The Human Being as a Hybrid p. 31 Evolution of things Equilibrium Conclusion p. 33 Bibliography p. 35 3 4 Introduction I have always been interested in the human ability to get emotionally attached to objects. In the search for why I make jewellery I realized I have a predilection for things, especially three-dimensional objects. When I came across the term ‘The Living Object’ I realised that all the concepts and questions I have around my own practice could come together in this idea. In my latest project I am working with plastic cutlery. I consider plastic as the ultimate fictitious matter typical of our time. I see plastic, pressed into a cutlery mould in the factory, as a corset the thing is forced into. By melting them I allow the object to move again, to reorganize their molecular structure in the way they would prefer to. This way I treat the object as a creature and listen to the voice of its substance. This creates an interesting play in the search for balance between leading and being led by material. The following questions arise from this eXploration: are we leading or being led in innovative/making processes? do we create or are we created? to what eXtent is the possibility to restrain matter a human illusion? This balance play between me and the material made me interested in contrasts and how they are paradoxically existing within one object. I got interested in the tensions between: sustainable and innovative, conservative and progressive, mass and individuals or uniqueness, rationality and imagination, known and unknown, left and right hemisphere of the brain. I came across a lecture from Iain McGilchrist on his book ‘The Master and His Emissary’ about why our brain is divided. The left and right hemisphere do not have completely different brain functions and tasks, as scientist used to think that rational thinking is associated with the left part and imagination with the right part. But McGilchrist states that the brain is divided because its specific way of perceiving the world differs from left and right and so they are both needed to function and to do tasks like imagining. After watching this lecture animated by RSA1 the following question arose: how are two contrary elements able to be embodied within one object? In the first chapter of this thesis I will eXplore different aspects of the living object and its hybridity to discuss our relationship with this object. In the second part of the thesis I will go deeper into the subject of the human relation with objects, how this came to eXist and what this means for humanity. 1. http://www.thersa.org/ 5 Photographer: Gary Greenberg, from noon clockwise: a pink shell fragment, a foram, a microscopic shell, a volcanic melt, a bit of coral and a seashell in the middle. (magnification 200X) 6 Part One The Living Object During the Rietveld Uncut project 2012 in the Flemish Cultural Centre ‘de Brakke Grond’ in Amsterdam Kris Verdonck introduced the term ‘living object’. This project started off with reading Von Kleist’s essay ‘On the marionette theatre’. It made me realize that all the concepts and questions I had around my own practice came together within the idea of ‘The Living Object’. In this chapter I will eXplore the animate qualities of an object. 1. Imagination Seeing the World in a Grain of Sand The phrase ‘Seeing the world in a grain of sand’2 can be seen as a metaphor of how structures in the micro cosmos are repeated in the macro cosmos. The thought of a grain of sand will differ from person to person. Did you grow up at the seaside or did you only see sand in a sandboX? If we collect sand and take it with us, it makes us see it as a possession and we consider it as something we will use, perhaps functional or for decoration. If you see a lot of sand together one little grain of sand might not seem to mean anything, to have no value, but if you come closer and you will look at each grain separately you can see that they differ from one another. Differences in shape, form, material they are made of and origin. If you look even closer you might see a feature that can tell you where it came from. Maybe it is a minuscule little piece of shell. Something that at the first sight seemed to be lifeless or dead appears to be coming from an organism. There has been a great history on how it came to be, from growing into a mature sea snail, then maybe the shell even became the house of a hermit crab for a while, to breaking down by the waves of the sea that polished it all the way down to the size of this little grain of sand. What we recognize in the appearance of the grain can also make our fantasy run wild. The shape can remind us of something else, something completely different that looks alike. So the meaning of a grain of sand depends on what happens in our minds. How do we interpret what we see? And is that based on fact or perception? Suspension of Disbelief Imagination is an interesting capacity of the human brain. It makes humans able to create a fictional world around and beyond what eXists in their real environment. There is a thin line between imagination as a conscious choice and the deceiving character of our subjective perception. The performance installation ‘Inner Beauty’ from the French artist Frédéric Braham is playing with this thin line. It is based on the healing effect of minerals that are dissolved in water, in a similar way as homeopathy. In his performance he gives the audience a little spoon with a drip of the liquid that contains either diamond, ruby, sapphire, emerald, pearl, gold, meteorite or Yves Klein blue. He claims that if you swallow the substance it will find its way in the body to have a healing effect. It deals with the phenomenon of the placebo, where it is most important to believe in the effect of the substance. Only if we believe in it, will it have the effect we want it to have. Our imagination is then so strong that it can fool us and we consider the effect as being true. We secretly want these things to be true and really want to believe in it. I find it fascinating that this only eXists in our mind. This raises a lot of questions: Is it not always necessary to be aware of things being fictitious? Do we doubt wether something is true too seldom or too often? Can we switch between different realities? Is it limiting to be too aware of our subjective perception? Can we still be deceived by our own imagination? Are we aware of this and able to control it, or does it happen automatically as a result of what we sense? Do we fool ourselves, or do we get fooled by ourselves when looking at the world? 2. The first line of the poem ‘Auguries of innocence’ from William Blake (1757-1827) 7 Applied Fiction, ‘Pygmies’, 360 X 500 X 435 cm, Aparna Rao and Søren Pors, 2006-09 8 What is the importance of knowing, judging, defining, categorizing? How big can the open space between objective observing of what we sense and the subjective recognizing and categorization become? For this thesis I chose to focus on the questions I feel are most important. As we saw in the grain of sand it is the imagination that plays an important role in making this object come alive. In the following art piece our imagination is triggered by the imitation of human behaviour. The interaction-designers duo Aparna Rao and Søren Pors have created high- tech art installations under the name ‘Applied Fiction’. In the piece called ‘The Pygmies’ they have installed different sized panels on three walls of a room, behind them hide little creatures. When it is quiet in the room they creep out, and after a longer quiet period even stretch their necks out. But at the slightest sound they hide again. After a while they get familiar with sounds they hear more often, so they get less ‘scared’ of the sounds they recognize. Rao and Pors have tried to make them as lifelike as possible by providing each creature with its own individual character. And because they installed each single pygmy different, they all have their own way of reacting on sounds. This makes it even more feel like we are looking at a tribe, because they act like a group. Because the pygmies imitate humans we recognize their behaviour and start to see them as living creatures. As Aparna Rao describes in her TED-talk3, she found that people were quite playful and childlike with the pygmies.