"To feel everything in every way. To feel everything excessively"
-Fernando Pessoa
Lightness explores the depths of the human psyche, embarking on a journey through cycles of life, death, and rebirth. By combining traditional drawings and computer generative imagery animation, my work navigates the delicate balance between existence and non-existence. It portrays the conjoined processes of creation and destruction through abstracted symbols and dimensional forms.
I invite viewers to immerse themselves within the installation space, considering how their reality intertwines with this piece. Each frame is a portal, revealing a web of emotions and sensations. Images flicker and dance over each other and across the walls, mirroring the sensations of our existence.
My practice affirms the power of introspection and self-discovery. By confronting the uncomfortable truths that lie within us, we can awaken to a deeper understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. I find peace in the fullness of the unknown and hope viewers may appreciate this moment of stillness amidst the chaos of our lives.
Video of installation space courtesy of Grunwald Gallery
Photograph of installation space
Mediums
2D and 3D animation, 3D modeling, computer generative animation, and graphite
Research
The psyche, the unconscious mind, drives this research by examining the idea of void in a psychological, psychical, and philosophical lens. In my practice I attempt to explain my own introspection and self discovery in hopes the viewers intertwine their own realities with my work. Through this intertwinement I view the intrinsic value of connection and vulnerability come to life.
Influences
Poet Fernando Pessoa was born in Lisbon, Portugal in 1888. Pessoa is well known for his use of heteronyms or literary personas. Although other writers in his time period used literary personas, Pessoa’s are distinct as he gave his heteronyms entirely separate lives from his own, ones that even interacted with one another, each persona consistent with their own lifes, individual psyche and identity. Pesso’s writing would adapt to these personas, the three most well known heteronyms being: Alberto Caeiro a rural uneducated poet (which the quote above is derived from), Alvaro de Campos an English naval engineer, and Ricardo Reis, a physician who composed formal odes.Pesso’s writing would adapt to these personas,
the three most well known heteronyms being:Alberto Caeiro a rural uneducated poet, Alvaro de Campos an English naval engineer, and Ricardo Reis, a physician who composed formal odes. It is through Pessoa’s writing and concept of heteronyms I find inspiration in my own examination of human connection, the psyche, and identity. Pessoa’s heteronyms demonstrate his view of identity as something to be flexibly created, following his rejection of traditional ideas of individuality and authorship. Through Pessoa’s heteronyms I see an examination of the psyche , and the search for self introspection. Pessoa believed we all were made up of these personas, as he stated,
“Countless lives inhabit us. I don’t know, when I think or feel,who it is that thinks or feels. I am merely the place where things are thought or felt”
Pessoa’s most infamous work, The Book of Disquiet, described as a “factless autobiography” is a compilation of Pessoa’s personal reflections about life and demonstrates his fascination with the themes of loneliness, introspection, and alienation. Throughout his work Pessoa repeatedly denies his existence as an individual, “ “I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist,” and in his explanation “I am the indifferent narrator of my autobiography without events, of my history without a life. These are my Confessions and if I say nothing in them it’s because I have nothing to say.” This highlights Pessoa’s revelation of his indifference to life and his belief that he has not lived a life worth being seen as lived. Through Pessoa’s imaginative world of personas, that interacted with one another and his dissociative perception and rejection of living, I find influence in my work.
I seek introspection similar to his and in my interpretation Pessoa’s previous statements appear to describe my personal experience with the concept of the void. However, departing from Pessoa’s seclusive practices, I find the act of reflection through vulnerability, acceptance of all emotions and connecting with others to be the goal. This goal being as Pessoa once wrote, "To feel everything in every way. To feel everything excessively”. My insistence on exploring emotions in my work not only comes from the overwhelmingness of my own feelings but also my lack of emotion. This is where I find the importance of the duality between wholeness and nothingness or everything and nothing. Duality to me is important as we tend to organize perceived reality in terms of opposites such as, light-dark, life-death, and day-night. The opposite of everything being, nothing.
Greek philosopher Parmenides argued the non-existence of nothingness. Parmenides believed that “eon” also known as the essence of “Being” existed everywhere thus the concept of the void was impossible. This was further agreed upon by other Greek philosophers such as Aristotle who believed the void was impossible as he believed in the existence of aether, an infinite substance that fills up all space in the cosmos. And even in present day physicists such as Marcelo Gleiser, a professor of physicist and astronomer at Dartmouth College, argue that empty space does not exist in physical reality.
Gleiser explains that fields permeate all of space, that even electric charges create their fields. An example is how our bodies create a gravitational field that “ ‘spreads’ throughout space and falls within a distance”. Particles are seen as excitations of fields similar to how waves are produced when a rock is tossed in a pond. As Gleiser states, “physical reality is now seen as consisting of fundamental fields and their excitations”. Furthermore in the argument of the nonexistent void, space is filled up with dark energy, a mysterious entity that accelerates the expansion of space. This can be thought of as something similar to Aristotle's aether as discussed earlier.
American scholar David Loy offers a distinction between the fear of death and the dread of the void through examining the lack of self in psychotherapy and buddhism. Loy argues that within Buddhism the worst problem is not death but rather the,“terrifying suspicion that each of us has that ‘I’ am not real right now”. Which he describes as the “dread of the void” through the denial of self. According to Sigmoud Freud, “the essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious”. Repression can be described as denying some part of the self, which Freud discusses one can choose to ignore and concrete on other things, yet these repressed thoughts often return to consciousness.Repression can erupt in obsessive ways which
affects consciousness with what is being ignored. This returns to duality by repressing an aspect of self yet it impacts the conscious with what is repressed. In Buddhism repression can be seen as “anatman”, the denial of self. Self consciousness is seen as a mental construct in psychotherapy and not “self existing” (also known to the Buddhists as wabhava). Loy explains that if the sense of self is a construct the issue that occurs with this is when the self consciousness wants to make itself “real” which results in the ego-self entering a never ending cycle of attempting to objectify itself into the world. Furthermore, Loy explains this when the self creates a shadow, a sense of lack which it “always tries to escape”. This lack manifests as guilt or anxiety. As American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker explains,
"the irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation: but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive”.
During my process I drew a graphite sketch to create a more narrative piece to help me make more sense in how I wanted to convey each different stage of a cycle within the video (the drawing was then digitally modified and used in the program TouchDesigner to create a computer generative animation). This graphite drawing is inspired by Parmenides' poem “The Proem”.
Inertia, graphite on paper, 11x14 in., 2024, Part of Indiana University campus art collection
I found the poem was similar in the journey I was trying to create within my video. The poem is about Parmenides' figurative journey to see a goddess which he describes as a “far-fabled path of the divinity” as he is guided by the daughters of Helios, the sun god, whom take him to the the “halls of the Night” by “the gates of the paths of night and day” where he is greeted by who is assumed to be the Night goddess . She welcomes him to “our home” and she offers revelations. The Halls of Night is described by other Greek poets as the place where the goddess Night and Day reside as they alternate as one travels the sky above Earth. I see this poem as a mystical journey to the afterlife, however
in Parmenides' description of the Halls of Night the idea whether this place is heaven or hell appears more ambiguous. Greek Poet Hesiod describes it as the “horrible dwelling of dark Night” as the place is traditionally meant as a place of judgment. According to Hesiod and Homer the house of Night is located in the underworld and the imagery connected to it is dark and terrifying. However in Parmenides interpretation he is guided by maidens with “gentle words” and is welcomed warmly at the Halls of Night as he explains, “the goddess greeted me kindly, and took my right hand in hers, and spoke to me these words: Welcome, noble youth, that comes to my abode on the care”.
