002: no answers. excellent.
I used to call them the Existential Dreadlings.
At the time, I was making objects from my own existential worry. Giving dread a body was cathartic. If I could externalize it, name it and examine it, perhaps I could understand it. Somewhere beneath the work was the hope that understanding might lead to certainty or closure.
Then other people entered the project.
Through exhibitions, conversations and diagnostic quizzes, the Dreadlings became less about resolving my apprehensions and more about how people live with their own. The work stopped moving toward an answer. It became about what happens when no answer arrives.
Somewhere along the way, I appear to have evolved, or possibly devolved, from an existentialist into an absurdist. Cool.
Existentialism asks how we create meaning in a world that does not provide it for us. Absurdism remains with the more irritating contradiction: humans continue to search for meaning while the universe remains under no obligation to respond.
The absurdist answer is not necessarily despair. It is to continue anyway. To make things, form attachments, perform rituals, care for one another and occasionally laugh at the spectacular mismatch between what we want from existence and what existence is prepared to provide.
That is where Strange Companions now lives.
The existential label began to feel too explanatory. The Dreadlings are not simply embodiments of specific crises.
They are guardians within a universe built around the absence of resolution. The oracle deck promises no solace. The field guide contains no definitive instructions. The companions cannot save us.
existentialism is on a time out
The absurdist shift is perhaps most visible in the Strange Companions oracle deck.
People consult oracles because they want insight, and usually because they would also quite like an answer. I have made one that offers the former, refuses the latter and may introduce additional uncertainty into a situation that was already doing perfectly well on that front.
It’s an impeccable service model. You’re welcome.
The deck does not resolve the contradiction. It gives us a structure for examining it. The Dreadlings offer companionship and perspective. The Conditions ask what is acting upon us. The Unresolved forces interrupt conclusions that have arrived suspiciously early.
It is a system for seeking meaning that remains honest about the possibility that no final meaning will be supplied.
Topical, no?
the oracle isn’t oracle-ing
This week, the first printed proof of the oracle deck arrived.
It is beautiful. It also needs adjustments, because apparently embracing uncertainty does not exempt anyone from correcting crop marks and choosing paper stock.
The field guide is nearly complete, the sculptures are multiplying, and the four landscape plinths are acquiring their first layers of plaster.
The universe is becoming physical one highly specific decision at a time.
This may be the most practical part of absurdism: the universe remains silent, the outcome remains uncertain and the work still has to be made.
So we continue.
light reading
Three books have moved to the top of my list. Together, they concern objects, language, institutional control and the unstable systems humans construct to keep reality coherent.
So, you know, just some chill reading.
Amatka by Karin Tidbeck
A dystopian world in which language holds physical reality together and objects must be repeatedly named to prevent them from dissolving.
The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington
A woman enters an institution and finds occult systems, strange rituals, ecological catastrophe and an entirely more interesting reality operating beneath the official one.
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
Objects disappear from an island, followed by the memories and meanings attached to them. Anyone who remembers is considered dangerous.
Burn bright, crash spectacularily,
B
