Research Project:
DEGENERATIVE KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION
It often physically hurts when I’m supposed to think, like perform a thought process. I can feel my jaws clenching, my eyes squinting and my anus slowly contracting as if my body is preparing for the impact of something big and world shattering. A partial explanation to this is that my brain exists throughout my body but the sensation I get, feels more like a military deception, theatrical misdirection or strategic diversion than any communal effort. My body resisting my sense of a head-based consciousness at a crucial climax to allocate my frustration.
Because I only experience thinking as a sensation when I’m failing at it, when I feel or act stupid. The slowness, the tiredness and the anger that arises when my body’s refuses to remember the difference between epistemology and ontology or how to spell institution. I can walk around in this state for weeks, trying to figure out; what it is precisely in my surrounding that makes me feel so agitated and dissociated; how the limits of my comprehension feels both megalomaniac and claustrophobic; and why I feel capable of learning and understanding everything and nothing at the same time.
But then suddenly the other month I spoke with a proper scientist and she explained to me that what I feel in these instances is the physio-emotional aspect of research, the ”researchers dividuation”, which is a naturalisation of ambivalence sub-consciously induced and encouraged by the academic system itself. Pointing to how result-based-universities aim to make the link between curiosity and knowledge production as seemingly inherent to human nature and society as the one between greed and capitalism. By simply claiming a vague version of primitive man to be biologically egoistic and driven by a curious long for progress - a society organised around capitalism and knowledge production becomes a ”natural” outcome.Thereby indefinitely chaining knowledge and capital to each other through an evolution-based-argumentation.
My artistic practice largely serves as an attempt to expose and disturb this psycho-social knowledge-based psychosis maintained by capitalism. Through art I’m able examine the notion of knowledge production as we would any other type of capitalist structure and furthermore imagine its destruction. In this process I often end up suggesting a complete restructuring of the sub-semi-non-fully-trans-post-meta-human thought process by inserting a productive cut in our understanding of and relation to “reality”.
My most elaborate strategy to halt the production of normative knowledge is to enforce the methodology of degenerative knowledge production unto my practice. The aim to transform my art into theoretical suggestions of decline, degrowth and non-linearity through the imagined body of the degenerate - a sexual pervert in a downward spiral in life. Through this contemporary rephrasing of degeneration I want to enforce a ”subversion through perversion” and express an apparent need for ”radical stupidity” in western societies. At its core degenerative knowledge production serves as a pre-emptive depletion of knowledge to destabilise the enemy, degenerate their regenerative structures and liquidate thinking right at the edge of sensicality to reach the limits of any chosen topic.
Works:
Degenerative Knowledge Production
Timewreckers
Exhibitions:
Radical Stupidity (at the workspace)