Becoming World
Kenneth Newby and Aleksandra Dulic, 2014;
Situated in a world obsessed with speed, driven by desire for instant gratification, Becoming World, takes a radical departure from the culture of montage and juxtaposition by generating an image of continuous transformation and interpenetration that occurs so slowly as to elude conscious perception of the underlying change as it occurs.
The work, as an experience, situates itself around the boundary between experience and memory — spontaneous perception and cognitive conception. By subverting the flash judgment of direct experience within the psychological present a more discursive image emerges. A set of textural interventions then function to reorganize and enhance the portraits — becoming skins and spaces — making of each a merging of the human and the world we inhabit. The work functions as a generative system for a huge variety of hybrid personas.
A simultaneous characterization of multiple states of being expresses in its own simple way the complexity of being in the world — a state of being in which we at once carry an image of the world within us while, at the same time, are subject to the changes wrought on our selves by the external forces of an enveloping world. In this way Becoming World attempts to show an interpenetration of the human with the world — an interpenetration that might hopefully enter into a discourse on a transpersonal state of being conducive to a rethinking of our place in the world as continuous, cohabitant, participatory and fundamentally resonant with the world.