The Uncanny Essay

Writing, 2018

The uncanny emergence of flat ontologies* has become the remedy for a confined, obsolete understanding of the world.” In the territory of flat ontology, the “object’’ is now heralded as a concept encapsulating both the artistic work and its spectator. Thus, the becoming of objects is now a sensual practice. This is the aestheticization of objects where each object is unique and projects its own reality onto the senses. In the interplay of objects and senses, the possibility of a fixed truth is suspended. Following Harman, art “...tells us about things but to present them to us in the act of executing themselves.”** The scenery below invites the reader to an interplay with textual objects. Consider this piece as an initiation to the nonce-objects*** to be encountered in this exhibition.

This is where the disorienting shadow play, so often named reality, steps onto the scene. The more you balance yourself the more the stage on which you stand will let you slip. Resist, and you will find yourself subtly immersed in darkness. Light dawns upon the façade of reality, but its beating heart is the heart of darkness. The parade of appearances gushes from the heart of darkness. Reality first absorbs the light pumped out of the dark, and radiates light as being. The radiated being of light then expands to the horizon of the senses and finally condensates to find its expression in matter as in a twilight. The appearance of reality is both a disclosure and an enclosure. Although light parades in appearances through reality, its heart of darkness remains obscured from the senses. The insensible is unnamable. To name the insensible is but a fool’s play. In the twilight, light is absorbed back into the dark of nothingness: a disappearance. As the heart of darkness beats, time contracts and the interplay of disappearances pulsate denser and denser. Yet in the pupil there is a mischievous grin, for the darkness is amused contemplating its own disappearance.

Light and darkness bind all things in reality, and metaphor emulates the binding of reality inspiring thoughts and feelings. Imagine a wine-dark sea with its various qualities: an adumbrating façade, whispering life out of its mysterious belly of water. Through the power of imagination, a metaphor effortlessly gives birth to other metaphors as their qualities collide with each other, and bring into existence new compositions. So go ahead and  absorb, like darkness absorbs light, metaphors so graciously presented to your experience. Touch, hear, see, smell the sensual qualities of this unique event. Indirectly observe in the mind’s eye how all these qualities transmute into an unforeseen reality. As particles appear and dance in the afternoon light, the mind and reality blend together and become translucent. Let that moment be and become translucent. The metaphor will initiate and merge you with the real, bringing you a pulse closer to the heart of darkness. Light and dark interpenetrate; vibrating matter becomes the ether, the blood in the heart of darkness.

* Flat ontology is a term used in the philosophical school of “object-oriented-ontology” or “new materialism”. One of its first appearances occurred in “The Democracy of Objects” by Levi R. Bryant. Flat ontology advocates for a reality, where each object exist in a non-hierarchical manner; without being reducible to other objects or its own constituents. 

** “Chapter 2.” Object-Oriented Ontology: a New Theory of Everything, by Graham Harman, Pelican Books, 2018, p. 83.

*** Nonce Object is a term coined by Ömer Pekin. As discussed in his “Nonce Object” project; a nonce word is a word coined for a singular occasion to solve a communication problem where a nonexistent word is needed. A nonce object is a term for a new type of formal organization that is indeterminate to the category it fits. It is an object that consists of more than one object that works its way toward a new whole without losing the unique attributes of the originating objects it is composed of.

Related project: The Uncanny. The Real. The Epiphany