projects2020

my theory-research project 'Affective Vessels' (explored below) also delves into these topics ... the merging between the two of us was inspired by trying to think of a queered cabinet of curiosities , where the object's bellow , in all its autonomous and agential splendor , could be heard and respected ...

the object , like Timothy Morton speculates often , is "withdrawn" ... in my theory project , I make an argument for queer and dissident bodies as withdrawn , unknowable beings that shape-shift before our very eyes , who can't be reduced to coordinates on a binary XY graph , nor XY sex chromosomes ... this is what objects and dissident , queer bodies have in common : a historical misunderstanding , a victimhood of reductionist thinking , violent discrimination and brutal otherings ...

we sought out a space where objects , specifically objects that found the artist and myself , maintained their mystery yet were celebrated in a non-taxonomically devised space , where the humming immanence of objects could roar out as they commonly do , if we're observant and sensitive enough to tune in ...

rubbish , that which we deem dispensable , unnecessary , obsolete , doesn't just disappear ... our eyes stop seeing the things we throw away , but said things continue on a journey , and many things may even outlast us , live beyond us ... this transformative , magical capacity is what binds biological life to solid life : we are all subjects , and therefore subject to process , potentiality , change , mutation ... this recycling implies an epic continuity , connecting to Émilie du Châtelet's laws of energy and mass conservation : we never really 'end' : we disperse and scatter , transform into little bits , thus contributing to amalgamations of new subjectual bodies ...

this rather harmonious , frictional collaboration , connecting to Lynn Margulis' theories regarding simbiosis , is what occurs naturally in this 12th Century chapel we were given to work in ... it's a living garden of creatures who , before our very eyes , shape-shift , transform , regardless of human intervention ... Agustín's video shows a series of unusual still lifes , composed of some of the very objects found in the exhibition installation ...

the audio , composed of found sound bytes that the artist distorted and micro-percussive sounds recorded with an extra-sensitive microphone , celebrate the wonder of the gamut of sonic and textural phenomena in the objectual world ... he fuses objects that seem natural , natural elements that seem artificial , all to show the implicit ambiguity that defines biological and solid bodies ... the audio , with strong a strong base , was amplified using a subwoofer ... this together with our lighting design (weaved together with 4 neon lights , 4 focal lights , 2 LED lamps , 4 LED strips , 1 LED alarm clock , as well as the light from the screen itself) bathed solid , liquid , gas , mineral and biological bodies in sound and light waves ... therefore , both the spectator and the objects are rendered equally affected by said waves , making evident our mutual fragility and vulnerability ...

the installation was composed by the artist and myself , working tirelessly over 5 days , composing bit by bit our disobedient Wunderkammer ...

special thanks to Carolina Ciuti , artistic director of Loop , Josep Fèlix Bentz and Joan Abelló , along with Daniel , el Racó d'en Jordi , Esther , Jordi , Marc , Romy and Gabriela from the Reial Cercle Artístic , to Violeta Mayoral , to Raquel , to Hangar.org and to Centre d'Art Maristany

Research-theory project

Tutored by Jara Rocha ⟿

Presented as a dissertation project for the Digital Art Curation Master's programme at Escola Superior de Disseny - Universitat Ramon Llull

2020

Hello and welcome to Affective Vessels.

before getting into the summary , I’d like to talk about this seed of this project : Affective Vessels is birthed from heuristic , empirical and observational approximations to the world around us … I could even say that it has been in the making for some 25 years … when I began to manifest the project in writing , I suppose it was a kind of proof to myself that I too could do theory , and that theory can be an everyday practice for everyone …

Affective Vessels is a poetical-theoretical investigation, infused with a science-fictive flare, weaving an affective link between all subjects —understood as liquid, mineral, biological, gaseous and solid lives that are subject to change , that rub up against each other— who share the capacity to contain and carry things, and mutually constitute a chain of transformation and potentiality in said process: both carrier and carried change each other, can merge, and fertilize the becoming of a new thing or a multiplicity of potential things.

Affect, in this project, is understood as the causal phenomenon of subjects being influenced, nurtured and naturally affected by other subjects, physically (on an internal, mesoternal, external, subatomic, artificial, frictional level), positionally (context, displacement, spatially was-here and now-there), existentially (shifts in being, transmutation, magic, how we were when and how we are now), processually (different stages of the becoming, dialectical exchange and causality) and phenomenologically (change in sentience, receptivity, responsiveness, absorption, emptying). Affective dynamics and dialogues can occur locally or non-locally, on many levels, speeds and between anything tangible, intangible, conceptual, spherical, mystical, abstract, concrete and so on.

We are vessels, carriers of stuff that also carries stuff that also carries stuff and so on down to elementary particles, which suggests that we are affected, through friction, by said carrying of other things. Affect shifts how and who we are on these many levels and ignites the forward thrust of the constant becoming. This processuality is provided by vibrational friction, or frictional vibrations.

Affect is (like) a vessel and a vessel is (like) affect.

Poetry, as well as affect and vessels, knots together a relational web between us through the simile. The simile is plural, conversational, promiscuous, polyphonous; it brings other subjects into dialogue, subjects who previously may have been considered opposites or contrasts, and seeks out their commonalities, like an anomaly being invited to a conversation about anomalous representation in legislative decisions who then finds convergences between their plight and that of others.

Poetry juices words, milks their pulp, carves out their pith, reconfigures the lexicon, bends and warps meaning and definition and opts for a more affective, playful and dance-like relationship with communication, observation and process. Poetry invites the mystery in, respects the unknowability of all subjects and embraces complexities that go beyond scientific, taxonomic description as well as defies temporal anchorage, narrative and sequential accounts that are fuelled by historicity and self-appointed exactitude. Inaccuracy is queering space-time authenticity and the unnecessary reification of our unknowable reality.

Affective Vessels seeks to combat reductionist tendencies by understanding violence as a simplification of layered and complex relationalities, potentialities, presences and positionalities that is constantly exercised on minorities, the environment, objects, unusual, horrific combinations of things, Harawayan cyborgs and many more. The binary accusations against said subjects, the taxonomic animate versus inanimate, male versus female, alive versus dead, extinct versus extant, beginning versus ending, active versus passive, is said reductionism, and is said violence. For example, dissident bodies and contextual remixes are historically and commonly met with abjection, rejection and violence from a normative majority mass that scans the world and identifies subjects with a reductionist and sanctimonious gaze: who-what is supposed to be where-when. The shift and interruption of the habitus or the positionality of things is what we reduce to an unwanted disturbance that needs to be corrected; a censoring and policing that occurs everyday and consistently blinds us. We miss the point when we reduce and classify.

Bodies and objects can not be reduced to their mere functionality (what they can do for us and how well), nor a normativity (what something should be but fails or refuses to be). Disobedience is a queering of orthodox functionality and usability, like poetry which reequips words with new, affective functions and enhances the mystery. Poetry, and empirical theory can be the first step towards new relationalities with a multiplicity of realities and subjects given their disobedient, disruptive and awakening nature.

Affective Vessels is a hopeful call for the unification of phenomena, an active and generous search for commonalities between a plurality of realities and subjects that have historically been and currently are belittled, dismissed, classified hierarchically and organized feudally and taxonomically.

It is a signal to our mutual cores, our affectivities, the elemental-to-macrocosmic vibrations, our relationship to gravity, electromagnetism, sound and light waves, the wind, the ebb and flow, how we are all becoming in tandem with one another and because of one another, how we are all trudging forward in the gelatin of potentiality, our ability to transform glacially over eons or magically in nanoseconds, our malleability and tendency to mutate, adapt and survive, our capacity to withhold our mystery and unknowability which can never be described, debunked or revealed, our concatenating sentience that inspires a never-ending Russian-doll-cycle of frictional, polyphonous rubbings, our capacity to contain, carry and empty, our shared ability to feel and exchange, our passive desire to exist.

The continuity of the project is vital to its intention and purpose. Affective Vessels does not end with the website or its content. It is living theory, latent and amebic in form, ever-existing, meant to be applied to various projects, and meant to be put into dialogue with other projects that may contest and contrast my views. This is why I have included publicly editable versions of my essays, inviting anyone to add reflections, observations, updates, corrections, expansions and so on. This frictional juxtapositioning will help it grow and morph into other projects and also engender revisions and new theory. It is also important to understand Affective Vessels as a theoretical platform that can be applied to future exhibitions as a curator. As we can see through the selection of artistic and theory-based projects that are weaved into the website’s visual accompaniments, Affective Vessels suggests a curatorial framework and in itself can be considered an exhibition, a loosely-framed, bizarre constellation of intersecting and overlapping and merging stories, accounts, happenstances, phenomena, possibilities and improbabilities. Long live affective disobedience, long live passion, long live the anomaly…

In mid-2020 , I was invited by my friend Denise Parizek , a Viennese curator , to give a conference within the framework of an exhibition she co-curated (along with Mexican curator Luciana Esqueda) at her gallery 12-14 Contemporary ... "Utopía de una transformación" which explores gender , classist , cultural and symbolic violence ...

I decided to expand on several matters key to my investigation : the deception of biology and taxonomy (understanding these as colonialist and imperialist impositions and reductions of natural and unknowable phenomena) , the unifying capacity to absorb , to become and to radically transmute , the belittling of the vessel (that which welcomes , takes in and contains) and the prizing of the tool (that which penetrates , separates and destroys) which birth hegemonies and hierarchies that I then compare with those we use against racialized and dissident bodies , an argument against Lacan and his studies of semiotics , understood as a vastly reductionist tool and field of study , the other and the 'othered' body , the 'barbars' (Barbarians) seen from the Greeks , the disobedience of Pierre Bourdieu's Habitus , Sara Ahmed's oblique bodies , the dangerous notion of the normative and correct functionality of bodies and objects , a queer vision of Flusser's improbable images , symbolic and corrective violence , the radical relationality of Lynn Margulis and more ...

music by magic candy ➽

Artists: Alba Mayol Curci ⥁
and
Raquel Bautista ⤭
16_10-13_11_2020
At Tangent Projects

Collective exhibition co-curated with Margot Cuevas Orteu as the culmination of our 12-month curatorial residency in the space.

notes from the co-curator :

'As Above So Below' stemmed from an atmospheric desire Margot and I had ... knowing our 12-month residency would end with an exhibition gave us a lot of time to get close to the space that would harbour the show ... we were very interested --before even thinking of the artists we wanted to collaborate with-- in silencing the exhibition space , make the white cube an ambient-limbo space ... we never mentioned the words "black cube" or "grey cube" as it really wasn't conceptually what we were going for ... we knew we wanted to work with very sensitive , dim lights , with sound and with reflective surfaces , maybe something liquid ; all of this without defining discursively or formally any aspect of the show ...

in summer 2020 , we began a conversation between the two artists (seen in the neighbouring video ➳) after a series of studio visits and long , hot afternoon conversations over tea ... between the four of us , very fertile and generous ideas were beginning to sprout , helping the authoritarian ego merge into choral systems of possibilities and interests ... in fact , it was Alba who mentioned briefly the second hermetic law of alchemy , as above so below , in one of her emails , which then became the title of the project and the conceptual bed off which it grew ... Margot and I formalised the ideas , and worked to find several theory and poetic nodes to link the two artists together ...

we then began thinking about the content itself : along with Alba , we decided to include a version of her project 'Colette' which in this context took on a new activation ... 'Colette' talks about , in the words of the artist : "A libertarian vision connected to the poetic, which is embodied in an imaginary landscape of what is left of that utopia, nostalgia-free, a generation of new life forms. The libidinal and affective in the construction of a common spacetime appears in volumes, textures and colors, where the idea of generative ground has a specific power...What can be visualized and touched evokes the permanent “on-the-verge-of” state that things possess, like that place before euphoria that, even after its dissipation, will remain as a potential maker of possible realities."

from this emerged the interest in activating only two areas of the space : the ceiling and the ground ... Alba would work on the ground and Raquel in the air ... this ties in with as above to below : the mirrorings between different strati of existence , how that which resides above echoes that which resides below and vice versa ; a kind of trefoil knot of infinite semblances , repetitions and appearances ... this is what makes our world so mysterious , so sublime ... here , Margot and I wanted to introduce the concept of uncanny and Jean-Paul Sartre's "Le Nausée" ...

the uncanny describes that which titillates strange familiarity and comfortable alienness ... both artists work with materials that are rather ambiguous : Alba's different collections of mass are hard to define materially , leaving us no choice but to navigate emotionally or sensorially or even tactilely through these works ... are they ceramic ? plastic ? metal ? varnished wood ? cotton ? stone ? slime ? ...

Raquel Bautista's piece 'Luftmeer' is a play on landscape and perceptive reversal or inversal ... in her own words , "it is intended to be an accumulation of references to form an imaginary scape, and to speculate with the creation of environments to reflect not only on how the laws of nature and the elements of the landscape are reflected in the course of our thought, but also how this occurs the other way: how our minds always tend towards what is not possible on a physical level, how our minds transcend the experience of the world and what kind of metaphors come into play to make these spaces, such as, for example, the inversion of terms such as metaphor, the gesture of imagining a world upside down." ... as the visitors came to see the show on the opening and on the various guided tours we gave , I suggested they sit under the hay and look up towards it as this gesture caused a beautiful sensation of dizziness ... of Post-modern vertigo ... of Sartrean nausea ; obviousness as a kind of horror , objects which conceal and possibly conspire against us , or to help us ... a dubiousness of the benevolence and the servitude of every-day things ...

sound work by Alba that accompanied the show :

collaboration between Alba and Rubén Patiño (☟) :

the room sheet (⇑) took the form of a paper fortune teller designed and printed by Paula Illescas ⤇

instead of a traditional text , Margot and I weaved together an open-ended , winding poem that is meant more as an accompaniment to the exhibition , a manifesto for the atmospheric and poetic intentions , a summary of the many different inputs that were included in the show that came up in the research process :

"to kiss the friction between
a change in nuance
shifted perspective
do not drop up
a dialogue of the strata
latent nausea
the object within
hidden myths read when flipped
fractal fold
new ontology , ground reversal
rare clarity through moist landscapes
nexus rerum
as above so below
postmodern vertigo
Either but neither
The permanent on-the-verge-of state"

Artist: Enric Maurí ➟
24_11-23_12_2020
At Galeria H2O

"The thresholds of madness have never been well determined. The limits of what is classified as madness has, however. Although this classification varies according to the culture, the fact is we tend to break down attitudes and behaviors that then become norms. A deviation or disobedience, whether it be conscious or unconscious, is therefore considered out of the norm, out of place, strange, inexplicable… In the 20th century, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu developed a series of theorisations about social trends and common desires which are generated naturally —without a conscious agreement— due to lifestyle proximity and repetition. He called it the Habitus. Social norms are born from this un-agreed agreement, and therefore, what is considered dichotomously ‘good’ or ‘bad’. This can easily be transferred to the way psychology approaches the mind. Throughout the 20th century, there was a great movement by the psychological community called 'psychiatric taxonomy' or 'nosology' that sought to classify the abundant variety of mental illnesses and derive analysis and diagnosis schematically or mathematically in some cases. The Diagno I, a computer program that psychiatrist Dr. Robert Spitzer helped develop in 1968, operated using a decision tree (the same models used in Artificial Intelligence) in order to determine and diagnose a person who had to answer a series of ‘true’ or ‘false’ questions.

The margin of error in the mechanization of the diagnosis and taxonomisation of madness is considerable, indicated by the fact that a large percentage of mental illnesses have had to be reviewed, deepened and in many cases, demystified, such as female hysteria, racist craniometry, homosexuality and transsexuality. What does all of this indicate? That the way in which civil society has delimited madness has led us to believe that if we do not have specific ‘symptoms’, if we do not perform certain actions, we do not fall into the category of mad or insane. Herein lies the conflict: what actions do we perform on a daily basis that oscillate along the faint line between right and wrong, lawful and unlawful, civil and uncivil, normal and strange, familiar and alien? And how do we self-define, quantify and ratify these supposedly correct, lawful, civic, normal and familiar actions? How do we self-censor even when no one is watching us?

note from the curator :

Enric , a multidisciplinary artist from Cardedeu , contacted me in early 2020 to write a text ... writing it didn't go very well , I hadn't really gotten close enough to his work or him , couldn't find enough pulp to squeeze juice out of ... this text was going to be for the room sheet of a future exhibition ; I was very reluctant to go through with including it ... he liked the title I had given the text : "Happy Accidents" ... it was the only part I liked ...

one day , in a conference room at Arts Santa Mònica , after the quarantine in Catalunya had been lifted , we could finally meet and talk things through ... as he was showing me photos of his work and taking me through the process (he didn't quite have a portfolio) , the topic of madness popped up ... suddenly , I had a new direction for the text , thus setting the exhibition on a new track ... in that conference room , my role shifted into curator and Enric and I made a tentative selection for what would go in the show , and we agreed on the concept : the clinical understandings of madness --and their obsessive classifications and taxonomies-- versus every-day madness : actions , gestures and impulses which ride the fine line between clinical madness and innocuous sanity yet aren't accused of the former , or of being dangerous or indicative of onset insanity and therefore isn't diagnosed ... the artist , let's say , in his methodology , practice and personality would very much fall into the latter category ... linking form to concept wasn't so difficult after all ...

we finished the selection of his work via email , as it was difficult to get out to his workshop in the countryside during the fall-time COVID-19 restrictions ... we set up the show , improvising ... I knew I wanted a darker space so I turned most of the focal lights off , only letting specific moments illuminate ... I also got the idea to turn the some of the flaps of the focal lights inwards , generating geometries on the wall ...

the text that follows is the final wall text :

The multidisciplinary artist Enric Maurí turns a speculative light towards a series of sublime circumstantial phenomena and questions the definition and evaluation of clinical madness, understood as a slight or radical variation, drift or deviation from a balanced norm that has been established by (self)legitimised members of society. In the piece assaig D escriptura, the artist compiled a series of scribble pads from print shops on which people test pens and markers. A very simple gesture reveals the idiosyncratic decisions of the individual; the erratic, incongruous, unpredictable, senseless, inexplicable scribbles and sketches. These papers, thrown away and considered mere innocuous test pads, can act as unsuspected portals to our strangeness. Why the frantic stroke, a series of zig-zag lines? Why our signatures? Why the literal name of the utensil we have in our hands? Yet no condemnation of madness is made by ‘civil society’…

The remix is also strongly present in his work, which is understood as a series of elements with no previous relationship that have been forged together with slight or serious changes and distortions to generate a new whole. Instal·lació amb vídeos i mirall is a meta-remix: a tribute to various moments of madness and horror in pop culture, in our everyday visual landscape (Is it Laura Palmer? Is it Donnie Darko? Is it Jonas Mekas? Is it Nam June Paik? Is it Enric Maurí?). In flashes of this piece appear images of the brilliant hacker(s) who illegally published their discourse on Chicago public television in 1987 who still remain(s) unknown to this day. This act, investigated as a profane violation, rides the edge between incisive and critical performance art, and a vulgar and salacious interruption; it is an illicit remix made using the broadcasted television show mixed with the agitation by the hacker(s). This rule-shattering character is also shared by Maurí. It could be said that all his work adheres to the phenomenon of unsolicited remixes (appropriationism); both his videos and his sculptures. He grabs, drags, mixes, fuses, meshes and melts materials that come from his immediate digital or post-bucolic surroundings. Isn’t the remix, even in its most conventional use in pop music, an absurd act? An unexpected fusion of things that have accidentally —or not— appeared, that we mix to generate a kind of objectual or sonic Frankenstein? In this exhibition, we see the technical and methodological versatility that permeates through Maurí’s work. His skill as a ‘material DJ’ takes on a major role. There is a latent situational irony that makes the whole playful, exotic and exciting. Sometimes the most obvious and accessible is the most disturbing and suggestive.

the horror that is implicit and often undetected in objects. Just as filmmaker David Lynch, through mise-en-scène, atrezzo, positioning, lighting and sound design, lets the unsuspected object resonate with terror, Maurí lets the banal and the seemingly ‘inanimate’, howl. If we are able to listen closely to them, to pay attention to them with a more patient perspective, we will notice that objects have secret lives, peculiar positions, fooling appearances… In her book Queer Phenomenology, speculative theorist Sara Ahmed comments on Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel La nausée (1938) saying that it is "rather queer…in the sense that it is a novel about ‘things' becoming oblique. Nausea could be described as a phenomenological description of disorientation, of a man losing his grip on the world…as objects…come to ‘disturb’ rather than extend human action.” The objects are not what they seem…

The curator Gabriel Virgilio Luciani, along with the artist, have woven a selection of installation, audiovisual, photographic and actionist projects that displays his repertoire of works produced in 2020. The exhibition has been pieced together following the discursive thread developed between the curator and the artist. Welcome to a space where madness and horror are not as normative, noisy and apparent as they are thought to be, where unnoticed accidents, mistakes, inconsistencies and incongruities point to the natural and recurring variation of our tort, multiple, uncanny and polyphonous reality.

To close, an excerpt of 'I think I was Enchanted' by the poet Emily Dickinson:

“I could not have defined the change—
Conversion of the Mind
Like Sanctifying in the Soul—
Is witnessed — not explained—

'Twas a Divine Insanity—
The Danger to be Sane
Should I again experience—
'Tis Antidote to turn—

To Tomes of solid Witchcraft—
Magicians be asleep—
But Magic — hath an Element
Like Deity — to keep—“ "

Facing Discontinuity

Artist: Vanessa Pey ➺
8_10-13_11_2020
At Gallery L&B

"Tango 2", in collaboration with Nathalie Rey

notes from the curator :

in winter 2018 , Vanessa Pey contacted me regarding a collaboration between she and I that would involve me as a subject ... throughout the next year and a half , we held several sessions ... Vanessa , as a photographer , works more like a videographer , lightly sketching out the sessions thematically , giving me a series of objects to interact with , which then leads to me improvising ... she captures everything on video , then extracts still frames in post , which permits more flexible and fluid shoots , and more material to work with in future projects ... in early 2020 , an opportunity to collaborate with L&B Gallery arose , and Vanessa asked if I wanted to participate not only as a subject in the photos and videos but as a curator to help give form and coherency to the body of work ... due to Covid , the exhibition which was planned for April 2020 , was postponed until October ... this gave us a gracious window of time to create more work and refine the whole of the exhibition ... we did two more photo sessions which led to three new videos for the show ...

as I explained in various tours given by the artist and I , Vanessa's technique of extracting still frames allows for great plays on textures and figures ... in fact , most of the figures' traits are rendered null through heavy layering and distortion ... gender , race , place and time drizzle away in the slashes and frays of the materiality of the textured photos ... this gives way for her realm of focus : the mutating character of identity , its malleability and fragility , how easily it can be manipulated and lost ... these shadows , that are neither corpses nor clear human portraits , suggest souls in identitarian transition ... she meshes them with textures and other human-suggesting forms , like Western-style statues and cracks in pavement ...

we decided to hang the work almost always at eye level , inviting the viewer to engage directly with the characters ... the materiality of the plexiglass supports of the photos act as mirrors , the folds of the black figures help us see ourselves within these transitions , question our own identitarian states ... to dynamise the various supports , I proposed we print out a series of photos in small format and hang them in a more scattered , uneven way (partially visible in left photo ➣ and in the video below) ; another series of windows in the cacophony of clashing identities ...

as I state in the English translation of the exhibition text :

"An advocate of ambiguity as a poetic stance, Pey contorts the faces and bodies of her subjects in order to show their emotional turmoil. She freezes specific states of various atmospheric moods, capturing climates of horror, eroticism, ecstasy and delirium. These are all internal conflicts documented with fervour. They show both the beauty of the search and loss of identity as well as the contention that they bring about; the frustration towards discontinuity and the futile struggle to reach clarity or stability. She narrates these introspective processes in a dreamlike way; we lose our anchor to a recognizable or delimited space, forcing us deeper into these sensory typhoons. These are not documentary portraits; they are highly stylized with pop affect, infused with lipglossed crimsons, fetishistic violets and vinyl blacks. Characters in the midst of turmoil, anguish, anger and disorientation surround us, thus forcing us to question our own identitarian states.

As a whole, she articulates a choreography that tangentially speaks about how we consider identity in today’s world. With so many partial and filtered reproductions of ourselves, who are we beyond the aesthetisized versions that we upload to social media platforms? Discontinuity is defined by a kind of matter consisting of elements that were previously unrelated to each other; yet despite this, they spawn a whole. Since what we are is subject to this irremediable phenomenon, we will irrevocably mask ourselves with the intention of not showing that which is under the epidermis. Pey urges a celebration of the conflictual identitarian narratives we hide. The strongly superimposed layers in her work evoke the dense complexity of our chaotic ensemble; a dissonant web; a cracked threshold. It all addresses essential questions: who are we beyond the projections of what we should be or how we should behave inspired by cemented social constructs that confine us? Where is the burning need to break the virile inculcations that bind us to normativity? What happens if we remain as blurs? If we succumb to discontinuity?"