In this essay I want to share some of the concepts and literary references that I collected my carrier bag over the years. In doing so, I hope to establish where my artistic practice finds resonance and has grown from. To come closer to my understanding of perception and imagination, I will let myself be guided by a phrase from the writer Octavia E. Butler: ”There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns”. A proposal to navigate from multiple centers, rather than the notion of an objective truth.

I begin to discuss the hierarchy of the senses and its connection to how the world is organized. While doing so I will jumping fast between references from Trinh T. Minh-Ha and Laura Mulvey, as well as my own gathering of visual representations on my phone and connect it to Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism. With the help from Tina Campt, I will emphasize on a reading of images beyond a singular meaning. This approach will appear through out the essay and develop further into a listening inspired by Campt and Pauline Oliveros; to tune into one’s body and surrounding; to be guided by your senses, not by an expected idea of something. Like the straight arrow of time. 

Through the monologue of a character in Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed, I will continue to elaborated on time in my artistic practice, like the co-existence of linear and circular time. This will be followed by a thought of interpretation as a listening field. A concept coined by Oliveros to describe how meaning is conditioned by our position within a force field. This is the crescendo to the finishing pages on my master project of a sound installation based on interpretations of a score. 

The score will be sung by an ensemble, based on Fred Moten’s definition of a changeable constellation, and at parts alter in duration and form depending on how the members of the ensemble organize their life or experience time. Echoed through out the essay is a quote from Edouard Glissant on utopia as a form of totality but without a pre-existing model, that is amplified in the end paragraphs with the significance of the input from the ensemble. By inviting other people to make sounds, I’m interested in the unpredictable elements of the interpretations; disturbing noises, dissonance. An attempt to fool myself to not follow my expectations.