ACT - An artistic research framework

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My work is research into consciousness, connection and disconnection, and into the condition we now live inside, where attention and data have become the new territories of extraction. The framework that holds it together is one I named ACT: Awareness, Communication, Transformation. The three words came to me in a dream in Singapore in 1997, and I did not question them.

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It began earlier, in a childhood where I learned that how something is said tells you more than what is said, that the body knows before the mind catches up, and that listening, real listening, begins much deeper than the ears. Years later, at an ashram in India, I was asked to help someone with communication, and I said: I only teach what I need to learn. It was true. I have always taught what I never had growing up, the experience of being truly listened to.

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Awareness is the foundation. You cannot communicate what you have not yet seen in yourself. It is not a philosophy but a physical act.

 

Communication is what becomes possible once you are present. To be heard is not a courtesy. It changes how people feel, think, and relate.

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Transformation is what becomes possible when Awareness and Communication are sustained over time. It does not happen in public. It happens in the quiet between one conversation and the next.

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There is no shortcut from Awareness to Transformation without passing through Communication.

 

The same is true of materials. Materials require listening. They have agency. They demand to be heard.

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The three floors of A doll house, from the Childhood Games series, map onto the three words: the kitchen where we nourish ourselves, the living room where we receive others, the bedroom where transformation happens in the dark while we sleep. Art reaches what words cannot. It speaks through image, material, light and form, before the analytical mind catches up, and it crosses every border without translation.

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The research in the work

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Each series gives form to the research, and carries its own line of inquiry.

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Amplify is where the three meet: with myself, with others, and with the environment. I cannot build a sustainable relationship with the environment unless it exists first with myself and with others.

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Childhood Games investigates echo chambers, and colonial theory extended to data, behaviour and attention as the new territories of extraction. A doll house is in conversation with Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Plato’s allegory of the cave.

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Kitsch Glitz uses what was thrown away. The sacred next to the mundane.

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Portraits is Awareness turned outward. Three works in the series arrived at their meaning before the painter did.

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Flags is Communication in its most public dimension, the language of belonging and place.

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References

Sashiko tradition: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sashiko

Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: thefilterbubble.com

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: shoshanazuboff.com/books/surveillance-capitalism

Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House, 1879: gutenberg.org/ebooks/2542

Plato, allegory of the cave, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato