About the show

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”. Throughout history we have used tools for a variety of reasons, but my favorite reason is the pursuit of understanding. Humans seem to coexist with the need to understand our environment, and that environment extends from the inner core of our Earth to the furthest point we can imagine in the universe. Our environment encompasses the vastness of space and time and all the things that have existed and lived within that, whether we’ve been able to perceive them.

Unum Ens is a world that expresses itself as a landscape with living forms who slowly crackle and break. When I first came here, I spent time trying to understand the connection between these two forms, their cracklings felt like a tool for communication. I walked around them, stood up close, and then further away, took pictures of them, listened closely. Through these slow interactions, I finally, painstakingly, figured out what they were. And in fact, I was on a world with just a single being, who had 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 and consistently questioning my beliefs, I have come up with a definition for life that feels open enough yet concrete enough to have it shape my practice. Life, as I define it, is anything whose absence would affect something else. This means that one needs another, each a witness to the other. Because of this, I believe that there were once more beings on Unum Ens, and when they all died, this being was forced to split to be a witness to itself.

But it can be a dangerous thing to prove your own beliefs.

I have created a tool, that I call Camera Revelatorium, that allows you, the viewer, to perceive this being for what it is, one. I have recorded the sounds of its echo and sped it up to match the rhythm of your viewership. Please remember, not all that we think we know is what it is, and simultaneously opposing truths are possible. I have learned.