On Evaluating My Practice

Written as part of a study abroad course.

“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”

My art is a response to loneliness and a gesture toward connection. Yet when asked whether my practice actually brings people together, I remain skeptical.

I would like to believe that all art creates a connection in some capacity. Even through my premature introduction to the so-called “art world” of showing work online and within university gallery spaces, I still want to have faith–faith that people who enter museums or galleries are seeking some form of relation with what they encounter, however small or seemingly insignificant that experience may be. Even outside of the “art world", I want to believe we are connected through what we perceive, whether it is a terrible advertisement for an AI banking company or how a line feels in a postmodern sculpture.

If we are indeed not simply brains in vats, and life is proven through the experience of inhabiting a shared environment, then there must be a connection embedded within living itself. However isolated one might feel, however minuscule a connection may appear within dense urban environments, I would argue there is a relation in the simple act of perception. Two people seeing the same bird through different apartment windows, or two strangers standing before the same painting at the Tate Modern, are already participating in a shared world.

I am not arguing that perception must produce the same conclusion, emotional response, or moral evaluation. I am not arguing for universal beauty or consensus. Rather, I think there is a connection in the mere fact that bodies move through the world together, perceiving objects and environments simultaneously. We exist within networks of relation, whether we acknowledge them or not. This is where I come in as an artist, to make existing forms of relation feel slightly more tangible.

At times, I question whether the most honest way to live would be to leave urban society altogether and dedicate my life to manual wood carving, exchanging fruits and vegetables with neighbors for handmade wooden crafts. There is something deeply appealing about a life organized around communal support rather than competition structured through wealth, efficiency, or appearances.

This anxiety becomes especially present when thinking about technology. If technology’s ultimate aim is efficiency, can it begin to mitigate embodied connections between people?

“Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it's gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money.”

Technology and its appeal of convenience can replace the challenge of real social interaction. To connect with another requires vulnerability, awkwardness, or even the risk of rejection. Digital systems have made it easier to connect over distances, but this form of relation is one that does not require–or require a much dampened form of embodied presence. There is no denying that lying on your couch, watching Instagram reels or playing a video game, surrounded by giant computer monitors, provides the most immediate, reliable form of entertainment in this day and age. Yet, I fear that this reality has led to a decrease in intercorporeal relationships, prompted by shared moments of bodily synchronicity.

Maybe there is something beautiful in the struggle to connect. In awkward pauses between conversational topics, or in the desire to say hello before eye contact disappears, in the uncertainty of whether another person will respond to your gesture of reaching out. The possibility of rejection is also what makes recognition meaningful. Seeing and being seen by another person remains one of the most valuable experiences of living.

These questions have led me to think deeply about the relationship between the digital and the analog within my sculptures. There is undeniable seduction in kinetic sculpture’s ability to materialize intangible and fleeting experiences of relation. Yet I also believe there is room to reconsider what objects do socially. How can art become something other than an object for consumption? How can sculpture call people into a shared experience of presence rather than passive spectatorship?

I began thinking about instruments as a possible starting point. Traditional instruments inherently require bodily interaction. Sound emerges through touch, tension, and resonance. Instruments are relational objects: they need people to listen and respond to one another in real time. I became interested in whether digital or kinetic systems could amplify this interaction without replacing the human body altogether.

I want to avoid instruments that are completely automated, because that would remove the very thing that I care about: human presence. Fully automated instruments risk turning the viewer into a passive consumer, no different from watching a music video or a TV show. Instead, I am interested in systems that remain dependent on human or environmental input. In this sense, the digital element does not replace embodiment but echoes it.

I am currently working on creating a bongo drum with two drum shells physically connected. One side contains a vibration motor triggered by a microphone sensor, while the other side is played manually with drumsticks. When one side is struck, the other responds through vibration and resonance. The “automated” side cannot function independently; it still relies upon environmental and bodily input to produce sound. What interests me is that the object behaves less like a machine performing for an audience and more like a responsive body entering into relation with another body.

Jean-Luc Nancy’s writing on timbre in Listening led me to think about drums not just as instruments but as forms that mirror the human body in both their structure and their capacity to create meaning.

“A blow from outside, clamor from within, this sonorous, sonorized body undertakes a simultaneous listening to a ‘self’ and to a ‘world’ that are both in resonance.”

Tension is required to produce sound within the drum's structure. Within the anatomy of the human ear, the eardrum must be taut in order to vibrate when struck by sound waves. Nancy posits the body as an echo chamber, where relation with the world occurs through the process of one’s body vibrating with sound, preceding the cognition of the sound itself.

In creating instruments, I seek to understand the different ways in which tension physically produces sound while simultaneously exploring how play and affect can produce meaningfulness on their own.

Over the summer, I hope to continue developing this project by creating multiple instruments and experimenting with ways to incorporate technology into the structure of an instrument at appropriate moments to encourage relation. Through the euphony between two instruments, or the clumsy dissonance between them, I seek to create an approachable array of musical instruments in which embodied connection is encouraged.

I do not know whether kinetic sculpture can truly “bring people together” in the way I sometimes hope for. Art alone cannot overcome the larger structures of alienation embedded within contemporary life, or as long as I choose to participate in urban society, my art remains a response to the tension I feel about relating to others, about wanting to see and feel seen. Perhaps this tension is meaningful in and of itself.