Platform | noun, often attributive

Platform | noun, often attributive (part 1, november 2020) was first screened during the process presentation that took place half-way into my research residency at Witte Rook in Breda

_{voor Nederlands klik hier
click here for the exploratory essay #2 A Matter of Time that forms the backbone for the video essay
click here for an interview that was prepared during my research residency at Witte Rook}


How do we experience the world? Our human cognition creates categories and anchor points to navigate mentally and physically through our surroundings. A category creates distance, in order for us to observe events and others ‘outside’ of ourselves. A platform usually serves the same purpose, but could we turn it around? Taking a platform as a chance to create distance to events and (non)human beings in order to observe our own role in the co-action? It would create a turn away from subtracting ourselves toward immersion. Our experiences would become part of the different modes of being in the world. This is not an easy task, theoreticians as Deleuze & Guattari, Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour have already bent their heads around it – is there a playful approach, one we can enact together? As an act of wandering has the capacity to fill us with joy of discovery and bringing us in resonance with the world, we can start teaching ourselves to be open for encounters, anticipating that we will be changed by them.

I would like to invite you to wander through the world with awe.

During this process presentation, I am sharing thoughts and sketches in the form of a video essay I made during the first period of my research residency at Witte Rook in October and November. This video essay will be projected from 9 till 15 November on the downstairs window of Witte Rook, and hopefully animate your strolls through the surroundings. After a short break I will return, in November and December, to further develop what I have started. I see this residency as a chance to establish a long-term research trajectory.

During the residency I am taking the online platform of Witte Rook as a small case study. I am looking into how other artists deal with publishing in an online format, share their process and maintain the poetic qualities of their work. As a theoretical framework for my endeavor, I am reading Bruno Latour’s book An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. Looking into various ideas of mapping and categorizing different domains in relation to how we experience the world, it proposes ways in how we can start to rethink these categorization systems and thus give room to experience the world beyond dichotomies, such as subject and object.

This research residency is made possible with kind support of STROOM Den Haag in the form of research subsidy.






“Can a platform encourage us to wander through the non-linear layers of the world?”

When events happen one after the other in close proximity our minds draw connections¹, applying visual and emotional cues that serve as anchor points. In the act of unconsciously connecting the anchor points, the framework for our reality develops – an (individual) experience of the world. I am deeply intrigued how we project our experiences onto the world, as we learn to recognize ourselves in the reflections of a mirror. The act of projection is one-directional, and keeps us from forming a relation that is based on reciprocity and transformation, which would bring us in resonance with others and the world. A meaningful relationship entails “the subject's experience of some Other calling upon it, which requires understanding or answering but also has the ability to change the subject.”² Humans desire to be in resonance, which becomes most apparent when we alter our own stories and retell them with other stories: called Serious Denormalization³ by Donna Haraway. It is an act of allowing an others‘ story to change one’s own, and thereby shifting the connections of the established framework of anchor points.

For the research residency at Witte Rook, I want to take the act of retelling our own stories as a starting point to look into the moment when our framework of reality shifts – the brief moment when we are in resonance.

taking place at Witte Rook in Breda, in October and December 2020
09 - 15 November: Process Presentation

made possible with kind support of Stroom Den Haag in the form of research subsidy

_{1) Naomi Klein, On Fire, p. 44: “When intense events happen in close proximity to one another, the human mind often tries to draw connections that are not there, a phenomenon known as apophenia.”
2) Hartmut Rosa, The Future of the New: Beyond the Echo Chamber, p.25
3) Donna Haraway, Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble, talk 5/9/14}