Ontographic Art

Ontographic Art engages with questions of ontology. Ontology is that branch of philosophy that ponders the most basic and universal aspects of existence - “what is all this?” Some people say the world is all molecules, atoms, subatomic particles and waves, some people think everything is change and that objects are illusions of stability within the continuous flux of reality, some people think reality is a simulation, some people think everything is the work of god.

After thousands of years of mages of gods, saints, buddhas, bodhisatvas, sacred patterns, gnostic texts, new forms have emerged. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Metaphysical art of Giorgio de Chirico and Alberto Savinio was charged with Heraclitus’ ontology of natural concealment, the Cubist art of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque was associated with Immanuel Kant’s ontology of noumena and phenomena, and the Surrealist art of Andre Breton and Salvador Dalí wrestled with Kant’s phenomena seeking new modes of verification of the dreamy simulacra (long before Baudrillard brought up the slippery subject of the simulacra). Surrealist artists expresed their unconscious by lowering their conscious resistance to the unconscious’ wild and irrational ideas. Breton believed that expressing an unfiltered unconscious would be inherently subversive when it occured in a rigid and over-rationalised society. Today, Surrealism’s original agenda is obscured by time. New research in psychology, ontology and aesthetic philosophy, and the new jargon, means that if Surrealism was invented today, it would sound quite different. Continuing surrealism’s psychological, ontological and mereological agendas are the core of Ontographic Art.

“Ontological Withdrawal and the Symbols of Symbolism”
Senzacornice - Rivista online di arte contemporanea e critica, 23 “Simbolo”, Nov 2020 - Feb 2021.

Object Oriented Ontology

Ontology is that subset of philosophy that examines the fundamental components of existence, the most broad generalisations. For some, the world is fundamentally god, and all these things we see as objects and processes are all manifestations of divine will. For some, the world is fundamentally change, and the things we see as objects are illusions, processes so slow that we fail to see the impermanence of objects. Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology sees objects as the fundamental components of existence. Second, all contact between real objects is mediated by sensual objects. As a form of infra-realism, object oriented ontology sees reality as separated from perception. Our image of reality is produced by building objects. Within my Ontographic Art, there are therefore three different kinds of objects: objects that represent external reality, objects that represent images within the perceiver, and objects that represent perception.

“Art and Ontography”
Open Philosophy, Special Issue:“Object Oriented Ontology and its Critics” 3,1, 2020, pp.400–412.

Ontographic Objects: Feather-Leaf-Wings

Recurring in my dreaming, the feather-leaf-wing is an exemplary ambivalent object. These objects can easily be pinned down to one of three options, but are also objects capable of taking on these identities. When you look at a feather-leaf-wing, within your perception, you can watch it fall into one of its three identities. See it as a feather, for example, and at this ontologically (phenomenologically) decisive moment, the feather-leaf-wing acquires the qualities associated with feathers. Hence the feather-leaf-wings belong to a category of ontographic objects I call “objects of perception,” more specifically in this case, objects in the process acquiring and discarding qualities.

Feather-leaf-wings engage with the question of how we perceive objects and are based on Zenon Pylyshyn’s finsts. In visual perception, our mind builds a model of reality by beginning with a background scan of the environment and then seeking out objects. Perception places blank token objects, called finsts, onto the visual field and progressively adds qualities onto them. For example, when you first see a person in the distance walking towards you, your mind places a finst and registers the visible qualities. At first you just see movement, then the form of a moving person, as they get closer you recognise who the person is. Now this relatively simple finst has networks of associations appended. Changing this way through short amounts of time, we see that finsts are capable of transforming faster and more radically than the objects that they represent. And with this ability, this hyper-lability, Weir shows that finsts perform a kind of magic of perception which can be translated into magical art. In Pylyshyn’s model of perception, once the finsts acquire sufficient qualities to be recollected (in the Bergsonian sense), they become fings. The feather-leaf-wing is therefore not an object of external reality, but an image of a finst in the process of becoming a fing, or in the Kantian sense, a phenomenal object.