Dune Whispers

Abstract

Dune Whispers was a drawing performance employing the shifting nature which both generates and degenerates earth as a navigational space where change is continuous and re-imaginable. The performance engages the ethereality and ephemeral quality of thought processes and the fragility, and other times elusiveness of memory in the constructs of building orientation. It explores trajectory of space and action as an intuitive development of reflection and reflexivity. It engages with internal reorientation for external navigation. The space, the work and the experience serve as charging points. The work explores space as a platform, laboratory, communion point, and living phenomenon that is poetic, infinite, generative, evolving and morphing, shifting, incalculable and non-linear, everything that is born of story. To do this, reflexivity as well as the processes of comprehension, perception, remembrance, and reflection are used. Performance in this context refers to any available drawing medium or technique, as well as a broader idea of mark-making. It links phenomenological perspectives of its closeness to cognitive expression and spatial comprehension and perception. It serves as a tool for problem-solving, problem-coping, caring, and developing higher levels of cognition.

The drawing interaction with earth as means of generation, degeneration and regeneration of the presentation references experience and applied theories of action, and shared deductions. It ponders on expanded narratives through experiential states. These are action-based theories of perception such as Rick Grush’s disposition theory that exonerates deductions and does not define perceptions. The effective participation or retreat through experience of the drawing installations engender the trigger element of memory for reflection. Here memory serves through its several characteristics. This is in consideration that memory can change, mutate, be inserted, broken, expanded and so forth through the senses. Memory may not be explicitly interpreted, however it is emphatically impactful as a functional element in forming judgment, perceptions, principles, notions and so forth. This may be linked to concepts of the Enactive Approach Theory defended by Kevin O’Regan and Alva Noë who proffer that “a person will have encountered myriad visual attributes and visual stimuli, and each of these will have particular sets of sensorimotor contingencies associated with it. Each set will have been recorded and will be latent, potentially available for recall: the brain thus has mastery of all these sensorimotor sets.“ Noë further expresses that “seeing depends on appreciation of the sensory effects of movement (not, as it were, on the practical significance of sensation)…. In this process actionism becomes the order of things where the actor loses control in action as he/she become obsessed with and let action of creating a performative artwork take over all senses. Thus, actionism seeks to convey reality in its own right, and exhibit the real idea behind the acts conveyed in the performative artwork. Actionism is not committed to the general claim that seeing is a matter of knowing how to act in respect of or in relation to the things we see”), thus leaving an openness to apprehension, impact and affectation.