phenomenology

Locally grown musician and artist attempts a deeper interaction with her surroundings, she works through ideas of heterotopias, personal bubbles vs societal bubbles, questions of tradition and humanist expressions and those of the seemingly inanimate things that work on a parallel timeline. The artist uses a method of making a series of recordings using contact mics and then using cymatics to display those recordings in an attempt to expose the unknown nature of a building.

By examining phenomenology and the work of Julia Kristeva along with outlining an historical progression of experiential artists stemming from the sublime and onto body artists, this thesis defends the rationale and methodology behind the performative endurance work 5 Day Fast: [My Theses on Art], also known as 5DF, by Nick Rivers. This body of work is influenced by research and exploration of perception, the body, 'self', and 'the other.' Being concerned with Ontology and existence, the desire to transcend our reality and existence through art, in art, and with art is taken up as a political statement; a reaction against the current socio-political climate, the mundane, and the trivial concerns of life. Instead, 5DF is a refuge into art; an examination of how we are all connected and related to one another. 5DF challenges the truth and clarity behind the individuals' perception and authenticity.

What is reality? To most people it is what you see with your eyes, what you hear with your ears, what you can touch, taste, and smell. Reality is what you sense of the external world that exists independently from your internal mind. The senses relay data to the brain via the nervous system and perceptions are formed. We consider our perceptions of reality to be an accurate depiction of how the world really is. But what if its not as simple as that? I am interested in perception as it is fundamentally related to both the human experience and art.

See Sound is the un-experienced within the negative space that surrounds us, that both appears to divide and connect bodies and objects. It presents a cymatic and mechanical interpretation of the visualization of sonic space, alluding to a moment of synesthesia, complicating what is heard and what is seen. Pitting the human body beside the fluidity of negative space, I observe the body's ability to sense a unified locatable self through its permeability. It drives at the positivity of what goes unexperienced--what is usually measured as negative.

Society is in a state of crisis as a result of phenomena related climate change. There appears to be a need to revisit societal approaches to problem solving, collaboration, and innovation. However, society is not armed with an awareness of the connection between perception and the sustainability crisis. This disconnect is a major factor in the destabilization of the environment. Sustainable change can happen when we create new narratives of social cohesion and empathy. Artists and creatives are uniquely qualified to create these through suspending disbelief and inviting others to believe in the possibility of different futures. Through phenomenological approaches, artists explore emergent properties of specific slices of the experiential whole through prolific creation of catalytic, creative prompts engaging metaphoric perception through artistic work. One example of a potential approach utilizing frameworks that serve to reorganize existing conceptual patterns in the media is organizing a replicable business structure that artists can use. A business of this kind could potentially amplify and multiply the natural capacity of artists to create socially cohesive artwork in the form of creative prompts. Multiplying the amount of artwork present in current society has the potential to foster more empathy in society, in turn fostering deeper connections to self, society, and planet. The presentation concludes with an exploration of an example hat applies the principles, theory, and sustainability frameworks into a renovation/reimagining of The Soap Factory - a Minneapolis based art fixture.