Out of urgency

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 towards 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?


The sheer impossibility of its coincidence, inevitably failed expectations, and the resolution (Auflösung, through the grain to near nothingness) of any kind of shelter, collective, or “innovation” temporarily liberates another, strange, terrain to return to. Is it a return, respectfully, to the process and methods of asking? The delicate kernel of this proposal comprises the opportunity to critically speak through a cross-disciplinary fabric of voices. Alike the paradox posed by the conference theme, the many is neither a simple addition of more nor its division. Rather it could be a moment of suspense. Philosopher Gerald Raunig (Ungefüge, transversal texts, Vienna/Berlin 2021) exquisitely elaborates on this precise nuancing of the polyphonic, by differentiating the collective conformity from an understanding which allows the dividual voice both to discord and correspond (or, what in German resides in the term “fügen”). Another language of the many that accommodates practices of writing and speech will be necessary to think new forms of co-existence. From there, we trace and situate the tubercles engendered through the artistic research practice established during/as “Unstable Bodies”. In the building of a grammar for and with the different disciplines’ languages, resonate their mis-readings, un-listened overtones and synesthetic imprints. Rather than being a retrospective, Out of Urgency is the attempt to direct the attention to these signatures, often overlooked, due to being encapsuled in the logic of the “pressing”, the “innovative”, or simply being too early, too late.


Context and Method


Out of Urgency is as part of a larger artistic research on investigations of vegetal modes of perceiving, looks at the phenomena of sleep. Especially focusing on atmospheres and conditions of sleep, complicating the sense that “the-subject-who-sleeps” is a static individual in isolated separation from the world. Brain and therefore animal-centric explanations of sleep begin to sway by recent suggestions that plants, which have no brain or neurological system, can respond to environmental contingencies using similar strategies. Plants also sleep, but what sleep is and does for vegetal life remains as mysterious as it is for humans. It may well be plant behaviours that provoke different conceptualisations and understandings of human experience, and our co-habitation with other species.


What emerges is an image of the body as a moving landscape: disassembling the body’s spatial coordinates, its upright vertical and frontal orientation is no longer held in place by the domination of gaze and speech. Falling asleep. Fall of sleep. Reconfiguring the human being as trans-individual alive to an implicated kinship with other species and a chiasmatic intimacy with what appears outside and elsewhere, thus reframing locality and identity. So, we enter the physical and perceptual states of sleep, falling asleep, and sleeplessness. In close exchange with sleep neuroscientist, Vlad Vyazovskiy, the artistic research team of Unstable Bodies asks “what is sleep?”. More specifically, how changes the relationship to the environment, if sleep is assumed as disconnection from the surrounding world. What and how can we learn from falling asleep with a (pea) plant? What new forms of conviviality might arise when considering a vegetal sensory perception system that also sleeps, dreams? To do this, we will draw on experiences, conversations and footage of a recent and ongoing process that negotiates notions of sleep, wakefulness and consciousness. Vlad Vyazovskiy studies the physiology of sleep, speculating about a continuum of wakefulness and sleep, its messiness regarding scale and time.


The difference between wakefulness and being asleep, the transitions through different states and the manifestations of sensory perception without sensory input (e.g. dreaming), in some ways reflects the riddle of plant perception, where the vegetal appears to see, to hear, to recognize and remember without the requisite organs of perception. Out of Urgency therefore is not so much a series of encounters between what was previously machinic, human, non-human or technological, or, for example, an aggregation or disaggregation of perceptual modalities, but an exploration of how a living, working sensoria - a perceptive synaesthesia - can generate new forms of attention, translation capacities and modes of inquiry.