in this assignment, I will try to present the "shadow of a doubt" phenomenon as necessary and vital, I will demonstrate using methods I have developed and established how one can develop a feeling of doubt and how doubt can be used. How a shadow of a doubt is related to Schrödinger's cat, taxidermy animals, and knocking doors. what are the benefits of being in a state of misunderstanding and how doubt is a necessary state in evolution. A shadow of doubt allows a critical perspective on the foundations of the world, allows to pull off the glasses of mathematics and complete forms in my research, I will try to brake down the fundamentals of the shadow of a doubt in order to addres DNA of information (I use the term DNA because I do not want to convey any complete information rather basic code for the evolution of ideas).
you are returning from a long trip back to your room, to the most familiar space. when you first enter the room the physical dimension feels suddenly foreign, the space that imprinted deepest in the place cells* in the brain becomes curved, not bigger not smaller. Different...You place your bag on the side , and sit down where the physical shape of your body has been assimilated into a foreign object. before everything is enough to return to normal dimension you look to the other end. A place you have never seen....a hidden layer of blue under your peeling wall. you start to wonder whats under the blue...scratching the wall for a few hours, discovering all colors of light, history itself And layers of physical knowledge.
A hole is created in the wall, hole that leads to the neighbors' apartment, to a world that does not belong to you at all.
We seek complete knowledge, pursue full understanding, a hunt for clear logical answers...
The strive for complete knowledge is an impossible desire, not only because every answer creates more questions because of the solitude of life in a consciousness...it is demonstrated in the impossibility to perceive the same picture the other sees. We are not able to crack the coded communication line with our environment through the use of words/objects/descriptions. We must involve our feelings/abstract thoughts/imagination...doubt. Through emotional communication, we are destined to believe, in a slight act of foolishness, that the person in front of us, and with whom we trust our most inner feelings, understands us. But the person in front of us perceives the world imminently different from us. when we are trying to answer...the answer contains much more than an explanation or result. it contains opinion, marking, despair, not clear knowledge. Even with the rise in the abstraction of communication, when the greatest messages pass through a medium of letters only, we will not be able to detach from the depth of meaning and enlightenment of word and its simplification, the attempt to transcend the emotional world and receive information in a white blank form is impossible. Every communication configuration contains a soul within it.
*A place cell is a kind of pyramidal neuron within the hippocampus that becomes active when an animal enters a particular place in its environment, which is known as the place field. Place cells are thought, collectively, to act as a cognitive representation of a specific location in space, known as a cognitive map.
Shadow: It is the inevitable echo of the possibility of seeing, it is the concealment and lack from the achievable, it is the absent part created from the essence of existence. A shadow is a poor representation of reality.
Doubt: is a momentary curiosity for not knowing, it s the attempt to understand, it the middle ground between knowing and not knowing, it is fundamental for evolution.
in the medical world for example - thousands of students are full of thirst to learn and understand the wonders of disease and health, they carefully follow countless written rules to bring healing to those of us who are fortunate enough to contain an error. we can pretend as something is true and create a functioning education system based on right and wrong. but In order to operate this system, we must be based on our memory only and not on interpretation. that's to say, that the education system and information systems like medicine, law, etc. operate on clear written laws, the only way to use these systems is by successful memory. Memory is that is linked solely to the more distant memory of other people. in the process of decision making doubt is not a tool, doubt stands far from the severe of efficiency. (Memory is a form of a shadow, a worthless representation that tries to simulate reality, but contains only its contours, shadow\Memory when undoubtedly constitutes a failure because it is close and glorifies the impossible attempt to represent)
The pursuit of full knowledge removes the possibility of using doubt as a tool for deeper, more incomplete, incorrect, extensive, broader, Unreal, helpful, more distant, creative, satisfying, special, unique "answer". Of course, the deeper we dig into a particular subject, the more and more questions we will discover, and the intention to answer one question in a human life cycle is clearly not possible, in science in nature, in philosophy, psychology, etc. As more we find out less we know, everything is a wave, changing by time by perspective.
Shadow of a doubt -(usually) we do not allow ourselves to be in that state, it creates instability, fear. We are looking for full understanding, clarity of knowledge... leaving no place for a new experimental look. in my research, I will try to brake down the fundamentals of the shadow of a doubt in order to addres DNA of information (I use the term DNA because I do not want to convey any complete information rather basic code for the evolution of ideas).
An example for a familiar case of a shadow of a doubt: We listen to a conversation in a language we do not know, our name comes up. the people who talk about us, do not evoke a clear emotion, these only mention our name regularly, and talk to each other without looking at us. Because of our familiarity with the structure of a conversation, with a dialect, we will implant a possible essence to such a conversation. offer a possible interpretation, we will complete the lack of understanding. create a complete truth, a whole story with a beginning, middle, and end about what was said. A conversation that is not completely familiar with us will cast a possibility, we seem to know what we clearly don't. the point I am trying to address is that if something follows a frame that is familiar to us but at the same time contains within it doubt, we will complete the void out of our imagination out of ourselves not by fallowing written rules, just by the impossibility to handle an empty space. It is something that is revealed only when it becomes wrong when an error is created when our doubt is examined in front of another truth. This error reveals itself in all sorts of cases, for example in our own memory. In Post-trauma, we hide memories from ourselves, or the memory itself remembers and suppresses at the same time. Memory has its agency. when something becomes wrong in a system of concealment, the "truth" will appear to us, only when we doubt in the face of persecution. we hide something from ourselves and at the same time create it. We are built from memory and its lack of success, from its manipulation and romanticization, we are based on doubt and its lack.
Shadow of doubt means a state where the senses are not aware but the mind digests and moves. Shadow of a doubt is a phenomenon that happens between the lines, it is directed behind the full system of interpretation, into a more immature and thirsty place. A shadow of a doubt is a kind of confusion, unease, something familiar and foreign at the same time. It is the sense of the Uncanny. From a desire to find additional meaning to the small details, from dissatisfaction with infinity. A shadow of doubt may sound or look like instability, as a fundamental change, but it is not - it is a slight movement in the angle of the head to the direction of awareness. To get out of the endless routine. It is the desire to resonate emotional information from normal experiences. The possibility of touching the polar points of the mind. To understand the necessity of this feeling, one has to look deeply at the structure of the contemporary catastrophe and the infinite hypnosis systems.
Shadow of doubt Is uncertainty, it's curiosity, it's a fine line between thought and delusion. Shadow of a doubt is a state that affects all aspects of life. It evolves to the point of creating a consciousness for the small details, hypnosis, the endless possibilities. A shadow of doubt allows a critical perspective on the foundations of the world, allows to pull off the glasses of mathematics and complete forms.
Shadow of a doubt uses a missing part void. Void is a doubt because of its initial instability, doubt can have great endless meaning within it. The part contains within it the whole. the lack, emptiness. I want to test the loyalty of our natural forces, our belief systems to try to use systems that go against the laws familiar to us. The systems rely upon the fact that in nature things strive for perfect balance, every point of the void will be filled from its environment. It is the power that drives our world. I try to move on a thin line, a stray line, a moment that does not fall into a convention, that is not processed properly, a moment of sudden confusion, a background to an existing situation. like a lamp that attracts a swarm of insects, they know nothing at all about the origin of their un-controlled desire and its end. The methods create absence, VOID. They demand from the viewer to reconstruct from their communal imagination a piece of the puzzle that is missing. In my research for example the absence of the character who is knocking on the door; the absence of life in the cat’s cadaver; the absence of the one who is speaking; The automatic completion operated by us through a communal destiny. Part of my research deals with extremizing the individual experience; generating a bridge over personal emotional content to reach further information that is based on fundamental human experiences that we all share, like knocking on doors, cats, and the nature of sound. Close, personal emotional contents include intricate thoughts. Further contents - as I have demonstrated - include collective fundamental human experiences. A shadow of a doubt is a basic need in the human experience, and we must empower it. Use it.
Just as every light source cast a shadow and every object we see makes a shadow, every information has its shadow - a doubt. information/image contains within it the opposite, the negative. The question is what happens when only the shadow is displayed, and not the source of the light or the object. is it possible to separate the two, can we from a glance at a shadow guess what is the object that casts the shadow? Or the opposite? Can we guess what the shadow is from looking at a source of light and an object? what happens when the object and the shadow it creates dont fit? Creating a shadow (of doubt) requires Taking a familiar object in the public consciousness and changing a well known parameter, the change should give the system itself the agency, an agency that does not exist. the manipulation should distorts the neutral well known shadow of an object.
As part of my research, I developed mechanisms that knock on doors. I presented the work as part of a group exhibition, "I hate it, where's the after party", Barbur Gallery(2021) in the work I check what happens once the audience realizes that the knocks on the door are not in hands of a person, they are tools. The work was presented along with another video work in the same space, the sound from the video work was dynamic, which means that most of the time, the knocks on the door were only instantaneous and barely audible. At some point in the video work the volume went down and people started noticing the knocks. From watching, I saw people trying to open the door with a strange doubt on their faces.
A year ago at the beginning of my research, I was interested in the taxidermy phenomenon of domestic animals, especially cats. To my surprise getting a taxidermy cat animal is a difficult task, in the end I found a private taxidermy artist in Russia that agreed to work for me. The reason for my interest in the subject is the idea of eternal life within a familiar domestic object, and the possibility of creating confusion in the presentation of the object, we all saw cats, some of us had one, what would it feel like to see the familiar animal as an object, without life?
Over the past year, I have developed and built a direct speaker system, the speaker allows you to create a non-linear sound in space, if a regular speaker acts like a lamp that scatters light in any direction, the speaker I build acts like a laser, wherever you direct the sound to it sounds as if was coming from there. I got to perform with the speaker two different times. exposing to an audience unfamiliar technology allows to create a doubt "were is this noise coming from? is it from my hands?"
"I want to understand what it is and how to create it.." whispering with the voice of few things
Creating a shadow of doubt requires taking a familiar object in the public consciousness and changing its significant parameter, the change should give an agency to the system, an agency that does not exist. conclusions of inclusion, that if AB and C think anything particular about the color I chose for my wall, also D thinking the same thing. I try to use this rule in my work, if A and B contain agency also U does "if the knockings are artificial, maybe the sound of the bus i am on is also designed, maybe its a song? i like the sound of this specific bus, I will go on this one next time. doesn't matter the TIME."… A shadow of doubt is uncertainty, it's curiosity, it's a fine line between thought and delusion. Shadow of doubt is a state that affects all aspects of life. It evolves to the point of creating a consciousness for the small details, hypnosis, the endless possibilities. A shadow of doubt allows a critical perspective on the foundations of the world, allows one to pull off the glasses of mathematics and complete forms.
"Freud long ago shown that the forces that govern our psyche can be conceived of as failures of presence — is not the unconscious itself not just such a failure of presence? — and failures of absence (the various drives or compulsions that intercede where our free will should be)" - The Weird and the Eerie Repeater (2017)p.64
During the writing and creation of the systems, I came up with some rules that the systems need to serve in order to create a shadow of a doubt
The fundamental of the system must be familiar with the broad society
The system should be able to produce a range of emotions
The system must be part of daily routines
The systems must be "frozen"
The change must happen while maintaining the essence of the system
The change should be sensitive to the moment of exposure to the audience, the exposure should be either very slow or too fast, bypassing our usual decoding system
I chose a few established terms to investigate and compare to a shadow of a doubt: Defamiliarization, eerie and Uncanny. First, I will analyze the “Eerie” term in comparison to the shadow of a doubt as presented in the article The Weird and the Eerie Repeater by Mark Fisher (2017)
Eerie is the wrong line in reality. The inability of reality to contain itself and represent itself at the same time. It is the fact that something is always missing but at the same time also the inability of the missing to be missing. when something is not there, we produce it in some form. For example our ability to hide something from ourselves, in post-trauma, we hide memories from ourselves, an obscure thing. Agency's distinction within a foreign object, for instance, the ability to recognize within a bird scream a baby's voice. The movie The Birds(1963) by Alfred Hitchcock works on the fact that we seek the familiar within the stranger, we try to put the ambiguous into a framework of understanding the world we know, as something does not fall into our framework of understanding it creates an ongoing echo of a failed attempt to contain the existing and the missing at the same time. The result of this process is fear, of course as has been written countless times, we are afraid only of the unknown. A shadow of a doubt, however, does not create fear, it creates attraction and curiosity
"Memory is already a story, and when there are gaps in memory, new stories must be confabu lated to fill in the holes. But who is the author of these stories? The answer is that there is not so much an author as a confabulatory process without any “one” behind it. This process isn’t a pathological deviation from the norm, but the way in which identity ordinarily functions. However, this functioning is usually obscured, and only comes into view when something goes wrong" The Weird and the Eerie Repeater (2017)p.72
We are always filling the void. In memory, it is something that is only revealed when memory itself fails. It happens because we do not live time in a linear way, memory has an agency of itself, we can not contain a vacuum in memory, we hide something from ourselves and at the same time create it we are built from memory and its lack of success, from its manipulation and romanticization
The phenomenon of taxidermy as a bridge of thought to the realization of a shadow of doubt within the art world.
I can place the taxidermy animal as a false object, it contains internal life, but also the stagnation, the shadow of life. Shallow representation, the memory only...object of passion from ancient legends. Eternal life and death at the same time. the lack of success in representation. Taxidermy is offered for three main purposes - one is conservation for research purposes, a showcase of hunting prey/status symbol. And the third, the inability to disconnect. The third reason is the most intriguing in the context of my research.
Almost every work of art creates a shadow of doubt on one level or another - leaving room for wonder and curiosity.
Art, at its core, seeks to preserve on the real level a representation of pure truth, trying to offer eternal life.
The artist tries to emulate reality as he perceives it. Represent it, reflect it, deliver, digest, change. But the base material-pillars are reality. Everything is history, everything is dead. The present has no effect and is always negatively represented. The present is almost irrelevant..not in reality nor its representations. Of course, any attempt to reflect reality destroys it, embarrasses it, and gives it a variety of interpretations and anomalies, manipulations. (Classic)Art like taxidermy works with a dead, frozen material, with its slight representation. Sometimes an imitation can surpass its influence on the origin. But, it is never the origin. The actual material undergoes a process of transformation into a taxidermy animal - the symbol of death, the standstill. As "popular" taxidermy "popular" art will most convincingly represent life, it will mark an unrepresented layer in reality and awaken it, like taxidermy.
We can use the process of taxidermy as an analogy to an artist in is work- a taxidermist at first observing the animal, collecting impressions, recalls the animal alive, then taxidermist strips the animal of all her organs, leaving only the skin the same as the artist tries to imitate the reverberation from the living idea.
“The word taxidermy is derived from the Greek words taxis and derma. Taxis means "arrangement", and derma means "skin" (the dermis). The word taxidermy translates to "arrangement of skin” Taxidermy, Wikipedia
"Memory is already a story, and when there are gaps in memory, new stories must be confabu lated to fill in the holes. But who is the author of these stories? The answer is that there is not so much an author as a confabulatory process without any “one” behind it. This process isn’t a pathological deviation from the norm, but the way in which identity ordinarily functions. However, this functioning is usually obscured, and only comes into view when something goes wrong" The Weird and the Eerie Repeater (2017)p.72