This essay is a follow-up to my bachelor thesis in which I examined the entanglement between belief systems, art and technology, and how it influences western contemporary art. One of the underlaying themes was that the development of technology and culture has been historically interlinked with both warfare and magic throughout history as well as in our present.

In this essay I use some of the ideas present in that thesis, in order to explore what art means to me and how I view it, using a few key words to open up towards aspects of art-making and notions related to it that are of particular interest to my practice at this moment: A. Making, B. Magic, C. Thing, D. System, E. Sacral.

I depart from the ideas of Gilbert Simondon in On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, in which he develops a specific perspective for looking at the human world, by stipulating a sort of initial human existence as a mode of magical unity between ground and figure, which splits into separate phases, with figure splitting into the phase of technicity, and ground into religion. These are phases that then in turn split into further fields such as philosophy, ethics, etc. The aesthetic feeling, he argues, is one that originates from the initial magical state of unity, and which, through art, amongst other things, can merge perception of reality into something that is reminiscent of that initial state of unity.

Among other things, the quotes from the interview with Donald Judd and Frank Stella represent an attitude, a wish to make a clean slate with something which is no longer useful or valid.