TERRYL ATKINS and WAYNE EGERS

LUMIN-HAUS, RIVERSIDE PARK

In this collaborative video, Atkins and Egers were guided by the notion of making a visual-auditory scaffold for the audience to temporarily re-perceive the nonthingness of time and space. This occurs before we enter into language, when the “stuff” or “things” of the world are more alike than different and when experience is fresh, engulfing, confusing, and unarticulated. Nonthings is an invitation to enter into a space of p-l-a-y with the // signaling an unconventional binary opposition. hairball is the only word in the work, which acts as a linguistic symbol of the finale of Freud’s fort-da game and our human entrance into the symbolic-language―a primordial word from which cascades an endless chain of words separating ego from embodied sensory experience. The opposition-paradox between nonthings and hairballs is one of the main experiences we invite our audience to slip into as a re-perception before linear time and language.

Through our embodied sensory experience we are in the world, and the world is in us, by other ways of knowing. Our embodied-sensory knowing and imagining is universally continuousness rather than separation-ness has been the subject of many philosophies and religions, including Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, Mystics and Quantum field theory. It has been discussed by leading thinkers, such as Alan Watts, Carl Jung, , Merleau-Ponty (his understanding of the embeded-ness of our body in the flesh of the world) and David Abram (regarding “becoming animal” as our continuity with the more-than-human world).

Wayne Egers teaches Opening Learning at the Thompson Rivers University and Terryl Atkins teaches visual culture, photography, curatorial studies, drawing and theory at Thompson Rivers University.

Terryl Atkins and Wayne Egers
nonthings//hairball, 2014
digital video, sound intervention
5 min. loop

Photos: Devon Lindsay