I have been wondering over the past couple of days about the nature of the agency I am working on for the project proposal. My work is not performative in a kinetic way. It is still, passive, motionless. Sound disrupts this passivity by moving through time, projecting onto corporeal senses perceived through vibration. It cannot be avoided. No longer does the work’s agency wholly rely on the viewer’s volitional behaviour.
But what of the three-dimensional object itself? I see the agency in the bodily work I make as presenting a passive resistance. The viewer, unless an iconoclast, cannot change the work at the point of viewing. This implies the exertion of a power to affect the viewer through its own stillness, its own passivity, particularly since the works have an ambivalent organic correspondence with human anatomy.
I often deal with the relationship between passive resistance and the projective quality of sound. The context and aims determine the balance between the two, between stillness, silence, intangibility and a state characterised by their disruption.
The project proposal is planned with this dynamic in mind. Aimed at bringing to light the content of the work through an engagement premised on distance, as I wrote in the previous blog, it is designed to alter the index/recipient relationship or object/subject balance.