Out of Urgency (Discussion)

Out of Urgency is a proposal for a spatial writing session on “seeing,” or what it means “to see,” its permutations and re-articulations. Conceived as a discursive and performative happening, Out of Urgency explores shared sensorial faculties where “vision” includes vegetal modes of perceiving. Provoked by the idea of being caught “somewhere” that feels both too early and too late, this state of being dislocated provides an unfamiliar perceptual, conceptual space from which to think anew. A proposal for another frame of perceptual reference, we begin to dwell in the optical and temporal mechanisms of seeing, and we become part of translation processes. We actually experience a transitioning of proportions and sizes, their temporality, resolution, depths, and colors. No longer are we looking at spectacular scale jumps from the cosmic to the molecular. We calm down. We perform modest, tiny gestures, with a curiosity about the turbid in the image, the machine, the material. In the many efforts to turn into “more-than-human” beings, what realities, what perspectives open from/within our perceptual incompatibility with others? Out of Urgency is part of a larger artistic research project that investigates vegetal modes of perceiving through the phenomenon of sleep. We focus in particular on atmospheres and conditions of sleep, complicating the sense that “the-subject-who-sleeps” is a static individual in isolated separation from the world. It may well be plant behaviors that provoke different conceptualisations and understandings of human experience, and our co-habitation with other species. Out of Urgency, then, is less a series of encounters between what was previously machinic, human, non-human or technological, or (for example) an aggregation or disaggregation of perceptual modalities; instead, it is more of an exploration of how a living, working sensoria — a perceptive synaesthesia — can generate new forms of attention, translation capacities, and modes of inquiry.