A tool is defined by Marissa L. Greif in her book Tool Use and Casual Cognition as “any object wielded by the user that increases the extent of (their) physical interaction with the environment”. Humans have long used tools for a variety of reasons, but my favorite is the pursuit of understanding. We coexist with the need to understand our environment, and that environment extends from the Earth’s inner core to the furthest point we can imagine in the universe. Our environment encompasses the vastness of space and time and all that has and will exist and live within that, whether we are able to perceive them.
Unum Ens is a world that expresses itself as a landscape with living forms that slowly crackle and break. When I first came here, I spent time trying to understand the connection between these two forms. I walked around them, stood up close, and then further away, photographed them, listened closely. Through these slow interactions, I discovered something that defied what I had previously perceived; I believe that this world has only one being who split in two, probably long ago. The cracklings, an echo of this rupture.
Through my exploration of worlds and beings, and through a process of thinking about the meaning of “life” all while allowing my beliefs to be flexible, I have come up with a different definition for life: anything whose absence would affect something else. Meaning that one needs another, each serving as a witness to its partner. Because of this, I believe it is possible that there were once more beings on Unum Ens, and when they all died, this being was forced to split in two, to become a witness to itself. But… it can be a dangerous thing to prove one’s own beliefs.
I have created a tool, that I call Camera Revelatorium, that allows you, viewer, to perceive this being for what I believe it to be, one. I have recorded the sounds of its echo and sped it up to match the rhythm of your viewership.
Through my practice, I have learned to believe in simultaneously opposing truths, and that not everything I think I know is how I think it to be.
