Through the hole is the way “Out-of-This World”, 2019

Through the hole is the way "Out-of-This World", 2019

Through the hole is the way ‘Out-of-This-World’ is a site-specific interactive installation presented by media artists Patricia J. Reis in collaboration with Lukas Vincent Walcher, first created for the open-air segment of the experimental station Kulturdrogerie in Vienna and, later installed and adapted to the nature site-specificity of Flora Pondtemporary, Stiftsteiche in St. Florian, Austria. The work explores the concepts of temporality, communication and translation in heterotopias – culturally, institutionally and discursively ‘othered’ spaces, inviting the interactors to have an embodied experience of the movement of a flag in the sky that can be observed underneath a temporary pavilion. The visual and physical information of an object’s movement — the oscillation of the flag — is translated into sensorial and haptic codes that the interactor can physically receive through motion feedback, embedded in a sculptural object that serve as a seat, at the intersection of the public and private space. The issue of sense, has long occupied the philosophical minds. Galileo Galilei asserted, that it organises sensation and gives bodies their meaning. Deleuze, on the other hand, considers “incorporeal” the high level of sense which is closer to sensation, positioning it as an event that happens between bodies through the movements of desire that he coins as “plane of immanence.” In an attempt to reconnect the body and mind, Karen Barad contends that discourse and matter come into being together, and that the apparatus which renders meaning to being is only a condition of possibility. She calls this process, that brings about the complex co-productions of human and nonhuman matter, time, spaces and their denotation, an “intra-action.” It is through the latter that the human subjects and non-humans / objects act as agents in a world that constantly evolves. Put more simply: not only individuals exist through interactions, but also the matter is a materialization of relationships. What role is reserved to human sense and sensations in the process of “intra-action”? How do they contribute to the communication and reunification of idea and matter? The artwork aims to address these questions by creating a space of “intra-action” as an event between human senses, objects, flags in this case, and the natural/cultural ambience - the sky, the wind, possibly the rain and the anthropogenic noise mediated by a machine. It is an emergency of creating conditions of possibility for all the human and nonhuman actors, that the golden flag as a “semaphore” attempts to signal in the artwork - towards the exercising their agencies in the re embodiment of the meaning and the re-making the being meaningful. Text by Taga Torosyan