PRISM

I am curious about identity in relationship to another, an intimate other. I am curious as to trait and character, affect and sympathy that are generated in response to another. And what of this other is projection and/or reflection of the self? Is one able to distinguish the self in another – where overlap occurs, where the discretion of the body begins to waver? Furthermore, I am curious as to how this place between, where lack might occur, is inhabited by an alterity of the two selves, envisioned as a space where identities are constantly projected, absorbed, refracted and reflected, where the epidermal layer of self is translucent and transparent, creating a space between the two that acts somewhat like a prism. These bodies might at once be supported in special space by soaring, radiating light - harnessed, generated and expressed by each self in the rise to meet. The energies converging in this space may also have a different temporal life… if the bodies are at once absent, what remains as a trace? Might space be marked or carved by the movement of this dance, invisible yet present?

Properties of a prism:

+ refracts, reflects and disperses light into constituent spectral colors;

+ traditionally a triangle in shape;

+ as light enters it is slowed down and bent;

+ acts like a mirror;

+ polarizes light.

Man lives with things mainly, even exclusively--since sentiment and action in him depend upon his mental representations--as they are conveyed to him by language. Through the same act by which he spins language out of himself he weaves himself into it, and every language draws a circle around the people to which it belongs, a circle that can only be transcended in so far as one at the same time enters another one.

~ Wilhelm von Humboldt (from Prisms by Theodor W. Adorno)

urisov