axial video

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comprises a range of works, including axial objects, speaking portraits, verbal objects, axial landscapes, and axial performance. Among the works are: Confingering Figures (Axial Drawing Music 1), I Don’t Understand Language (Verbal Object 7), Axial Hands (Somamudra 1), Alana (a speaking portrait), and Pulp Friction. They aim to transport the viewer by way of the axial principle–sometimes abruptly, sometimes incrementally through a series of barely perceptible thresholds—from the realm of ordinary time, perception and expectations, to that of the axial, where figuration gives way to the configurative, and open process is the operant dynamic. To be at the threshold—the limen—of the emergent event and experience the possible release into singular presence.

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If the act of seeing something turns the thing seen into an object, looking long and hard at it can transform it beyond recognition—that is, beyond “object” into something closer to “entity,” which in some way talks back. Becoming openly configurative, it generates its own further nature. As William Blake said, “The eye altering alters all.” Perhaps the intentionally altered object alters the eye that sees it, reflexively performative, since, as Blake also observed, “We become what we behold.” “Objects” are perceptual, cognitive, and linguistic configurations. Neither fixed nor stable, perceived reality may be free to turn on an invisible axis. That objects—whether words, sounds or images—are only liminally what they seem can be frightening and disorienting, but when viewed consciously they become intensifiers… or perhaps intentional objects, instances of stepped-up intensity that reveal mind as excitable in its nature.

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