Art making is a natural liminal space/state where artists experience flow, and access an altered or “restructured” perception of time with a “porous” open Kairotic texture. For humans art is a practice that helps them process/integrate/transform the past, mirrors the present and pushes the boundaries of the future.
While working with my hands in the studio I enter a timeless space. I deeply connect to the time/rhythms of matter through the use of paint, water, glue, paper and canvas, clay, threads… I work with the time of the earth and the rhythm of my body. The process of art making must attune to the intrinsic characteristics of the medium I use and its relationship to time. When creating with hands-on medium my body/mind/nervous system come into coherence. I enter a flow state in which I naturally retrieve timeless human gestures practiced since the beginning of our time, just like the first shaman painting the walls of a sacred cave.
I am in fact deeply connected to the past through collective unconscious practices, which I process into the now when producing new works. I might experience moments of slowing down or speeding up, random association and deconstruction, synchronicities and emergences, yet my creative experience is conditioned by a temporal historical relationship between my body and the medium I use.
When creating with digital tools I experience a totally different temporality, every thing is speeding up and my sense of flow is accelerating. It is rather exhilarating, just like driving a car with all windows open and music on after walking barefoot on the side of the road for hours. Options and possibilities are multiplied while effects are happening within seconds or minutes and exploration constantly extends towards new territories. Experiments, random associations, compositions, deconstructions and re-constructions can be endlessly replayed, which in turn multiplies exponentially the potentials for new emergences. Once one masters the tools there is so much playfulness and fun in the exploration. In this space/time I am processing the future into the now, I am a hunter of new possibilities running after myriads of inspirational waiting to be born butterflies.
While my mind is surfing at full speed I have more or less disconnected from my body, time as disappeared, and my nervous system is probably highly activated by the intense flow of data unfolding on the screen in front of my eyes. I am in a kind of trance, a playful state of flow in which I surf wave after wave of future possibilities. I have entered a rabbit whole in which each new discovery opens many doors to many more discoveries … I am hooked. Long hours of joyful digital play often ends up in burning out of circuits, volatile sleep and what I call a state of hyper activation/inspiration. When the future downloads to fast, the cup starts to overflow …
If our mind process the waves of innovation at great speed, our body/structure has taken 100000 years to evolve and has difficulty adjusting to the pace of continuous data and digital flow. Long hours of digital use get our body out of synch. We become fragmented and disconnected from natural physical functions and emotions while the mind is hyper active. The nervous system has difficulty to regulate and get back into a state of relaxation. There seam to be a collective perceived difficulty in finding coherence and attunement between digital/virtual time speeding up, and the time of our body whose structure is still functioning and regulating according to the clock of our planet, sun light, moon cycles, seasons …
This difficulty seams to be experienced also on a collective level. Despite the incredible progress new technologies are offering, their actual implementations are being slowed down by the “heaviness” of old social structures, from administrations to corporations, as if our old collective body could not adjust so fast to the evolution of our global brain.
I am interested to explore in my art making, and in my teaching, if there is a liminal temporality where past, present and future can be processed and integrated in a balance sustainable way. Conscious movements between digital and hands-on “time zones”, moving from the brush to the screen, seam to support a better regulation of my whole being, a rhythm that allows me to integrate the new and rapidly evolve without burning my circuits or getting lost in to many options.
Hands-on work, like an out breath, brings me back to myself, to my body, to my grounding, while digital media, like an in breath, open a door to the excitement of the future and our collective evolutionary pull. Moving back and forth between hands-on to digital, I intent to pull both past and future into the now. I create hybrid works born out of multi-temporalities and rhythms, in search for a liminal space/time in between timelessness and timeliness. Harvesting emergences from both sides enriches my creative process and produces works that reflect on our con-temporary tension between past/present/future.
In cultivating a mindful Kairotic numinous relationship to time in combined digital and hands-on practices could we support a process of adaptation/integration of our “contemporary multi-temporalities”, and explore ways to resolve our collective tension between body/structure/past and mind/data/future?
To be continued ….
Below you can read a description of the art works I feature in this article and their creative process.