Artless Magazine
becoming virtual ARTless is an artmagazine with a focus on collaboration and experiment. Each bimester the initiator Keke van de Ven enters a collaboration with another creative. This collaboration leads to a unique theme or concept that results in different types of content every issue.
For the sixth issue Keke entered a collaboration with philosopher Yael Keijzer. With text, images, video and play our perspectives on reality are questioned. We are both inspired by how the way we relate to the world is determined through our play with space, time, (im)materiality. Becoming virtual, a title for Artless #6, refers to the concept of ‘virtuality’, coined by different thinkers and ‘present’ all around us. By ruminating on the concept we have contributed with ways to visualise its (theoretical) content and effects. Through our own practices we try to offer views on what is infinitely out there, synthesized for Artless.
Our perception of reality comes from a unified experience. The relation between body and world is constitutive and affective, ambiguously conditioning each other. In this affair I-Other, the subject is always and already engaged with the unknown / non-being / virtual, there where possibility lies through difference - a breeding ground for creativity, an offering of infinity.
Virtuality is what is ‘not real’, but displays the full qualities of the real—in a plainly actual (i.e., not potential)—way. Just like a reflection in a mirror is already there, whether or not one can see it; it is not waiting for any kind of actualization. This definition allows to understand that real effects may be issued from a virtual object, so that our perception of it and our whole relation to it, are fully real, even if it is not. As embodied experience, perceiving involves microevents that take place in every engagement with space / world / Other.
“My head is presented to my sight only to the extent of my nose end and the boundaries of my eye sockets. I can see my eyes in three mirrors, but they are the eyes of someone observing, and I have the utmost difficulty in catching my living glance when a mirror in the street unexpectedly reflects my image back at me. My body in the mirror never stops following my intentions like their shadow [...]� Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty
This is a micro-event
“A life contains only virtuals. It is made up of virtualities, events, singularities. What we call virtual is not something that lacks reality but something that is engaged in a process of actualization following the plane that gives it its particular reality. The immanent event is actualized in a state of things and of the lived that make it happen. The plane of immanence is itself actualized in an object and a subject to which it attributes itself. But however inseparable an object and a subject may be from their actualization, the plane of immanence is itself virtual, so long as the events that populate it are virtualities. Events or singularities give to the plane all their virtuality, just as the plane of immanence gives virtual events their full reality. The event considered as non-actualized (indefinite) is lacking in nothing. It suffices to put it in relation to its concomitants: a transcendental field, a plane of immanence, a life, singularities. A wound is incarnated or actualized in a state of things or of life; but it is itself a pure virtuality on the plane of immanence that leads us into a life. My wound existed before me: not a transcendence of the wound as higher actuality, but its immanence as a virtuality always within a milieu (plane or field).� Immanence: A Life, Gilles Deleuze
#6 www.keke.be
2019