Theoretical concepts
•Our affects – such as our emotions – fundamentally determine the way things appear to us, through and in conversation/feedback loop with our bodies – we are embodied beings- in the way they can project an atmospheric element onto the world. Our ‘feeling’ in that moment builds a field in which we are more, or less able to relate to our senses of specific objects.
•Before we can ‘access’ certain memories, for them to stand out from the ‘background’ to us in terms of our perception of their importance/significance – we have to project a world around ourselves, an anonymous, impersonal field that we are inhabiting.
•An example given by Merleau-Ponty being – a man who can’t remember the location of an object that bears significance for him through his relationship with his wife, due to them fighting/falling out at that time. The field of significance he is inhabiting has become ‘deadened’ in terms of objects, memories, spaces etc that have significance to him in the form of that relationship. When they make up, that world of relational significance regains ‘clarity’ for him, or, to put it another way, he once again fully inhabits the world of his relationship.
This work is based on loss of self and dissociation. I wanted to create a visual representation of how it feels to enter a state where time, memory and self become scattered and distorted and where it feels as if you have become untethered from the world. The reason for creating this work was to attempt to get to know this version of myself better in the hopes that this might alleviate some of the fear this state of mental freefall can bring. There will always be a part of me that is afraid that one day I might find myself back in a place between sleep and wakefullness, where I fail to recognise my reflection in the mirror and no longer be able to find the way back.
I created the hologram effect by creating a small-scale plastic prism and placing a screen under it with my animation duplicated and angled to project onto each face of the prism (as seen below), in order to create the illusion of a tiny 3D person when viewed from the side:
