An Ontology of Things

From I to It: The Metaphor, the becoming subject,the becoming object.

 “we can no longer claim that our existence is special as existence.”(Ian Bogost 2012)

I Touch.

What it’s like to be a bat?

What’s it’s like to be me?

What it’s like to be a thing?

I would know if I am a thing.

I can be a thing while being ‘I’.

Sometimes small and others big.

What it’s like to be an ‘I’ without the ‘me’?

What it’s like to be united as ‘me’ and ‘I’?

From doorways of ‘me’, ‘I’ enter ‘it’.

I am ‘it’ when ‘I’ see you.

I am reaching you from here. I am touching you from here. 

This is the ontology of things, an collaboration between two artist : Joey Phinn and I -Ruby Law.

It is a dialog between the objects and subjects through the virtual to the naked space until it reaches the physical and back then to the intangible. This is the IT that bounds the subject I and the Object I.

The portable object, the becoming subject, through visual language and through reception we comprehend the production of images. “We read, but actually what we really do is see images. And what we see is constructed, layered, complicated by the reading itself, by us reconfiguring what it is in front of our eyes.”(FormContent 2014) We remember and collect all this information, we are able to see in this respect something we have not seen before. “Let’s assume a binary: ‘I’  is the subjective viewpoint of the human; ‘it’ is the inhuman outside of this viewpoint, indifferent to it.” (Andy Weir 2013) The FormContent collective proposed the idea of being a doubled or layered being through both the perception and production of an object - writing, drawing or any resources of production. Moving from ‘I’ to ‘it’, is consequently the fundamental connections between our relation and an object either subconsciously or consciously. If we decide to take this action, we would be stuck in a tiny whirlpool of paradoxes like the chicken and the egg, when the self projection - ‘I’ enters ‘it’, it ultimately becomes ‘for-I’, losing ‘it’ as a whole ‘itself’. Where, then, is the fine line between the ‘I’ and ‘it’? “Like Midas, transforming everything he touches into useless gold, we need to find ways of touching without touching, thinking without thinking-directly…What if fiction were deployed between’I’ and ‘it’? They could act as barriers (rubber gloves for Midas) and as honeytraps to catch ‘it’, lure it in.” (Andy Weir 2013)

This is a letter from me to you, an open letter of my thoughts to you through paper, drawings, my words and her’s.