My definition of a useful concept
I measure myself
Against a tall tree.
I find that I am much taller,
For I reach right up to the sun,
With my eye;
And I reach to the shore of the sea
With my ear.
Nevertheless, I dislike
The way the ants crawl
In and out of my shadow.
Wallace Stevens – Six Significant Landscapes – III
From my village I see as much of the universe as can be seen
from the earth,
And so my village is as large as any town,
For I am the size of what I see
And not the size of my height…
Alberto Caeiro – The Keeper of Sheep – VII
Verily, I declare to you, that within this very body, mortal though it be, and only a fathom high, but conscious and endowed with mind, is the world, and the waxing thereof, and the waning thereof, and the way that leads to the passing away thereof.
from the Buddhist Angutarra Nikaya scriptures.
In 2001, I made a video and titled it Ontope / Nontope. More recently, I remastered it and renamed it N/Ontope.
Since I coined the word – combining ontos (being) and topos (place) – I thought I’ll define it as I understand it. I now feel that it best describes my attitude to many – if not most – of my video recordings. All of my videos which seem to be recordings – or documentations – of certain places or landscapes, fall under this conceptual heading – at least partially.
Imagine that you are standing somewhere. Even if you are blind and deaf, you still feel the weight and extension of your body and limbs. This sense is called Proprioception. I consider it the ultimate ‘sense of being’ – the sense which creates ‘corporeal existence’ in your root consciousness.
Even if you aren’t using your arms or legs, you can feel their weight and extension ‘away from you’ – that is, it creates the fundamental sense/feeling of space – dimensionality – a Here and a There – and the weight of existence.
Likewise, you also feel the pressure where your teeth are in contact with the opposing row of teeth. You feel the weight or pressure of your tongue and where it makes contact with the roof of your mouth and your teeth. You sense where your body makes contact with other objects, the ground – you feel grounded. Your socked feet feeling warm inside their shoes.
You feel the air brushing against the walls of your nostrils as you inhale and exhale.
Then you become aware of your hearing – the ocean of all those familiar and unfamiliar sounds around you. Sounds emitted by familiar objects and processes – like birds tweeting, the wind rushing against your eardrums, distant cars, the ticking of a radiator as it warms up, the sound of you inhaling and exhaling, the soft rustle of your shirt collar against your neck as you turn your head, the crackle of grit under your soles as you shift your weight. 1
Then you look around, and you firstly look at all the things within touching distance – including your chest, arms and legs – then your immediate surroundings, receding into the middle distance, and – if outdoors – the far horizon and sky.
You might be able to connect the sounds you hear to the objects and actions you can see, or the sounds might come from behind you – or from some indistinct direction.
All of the things that you can feel, hear, touch and see around you – that exist with / to you – that are actual to you – this is your Ontope. A sort of corporeal Mise en Scéne.
For me, the word Ontope liberates me from related words like, the world around you, your surroundings, landscape, place, environment. It encompasses all of them and it includes me in them. And my inclusion hi-lights the ‘act of being’ – that ‘leading edge’ of sense-consciousness where existence is created, where things come into being (to you) and are maintained – exist – both yourself and the things within your Ontope.
This is an ongoing, ever-changing process. The Ontope in its purest, is the ecstasy 2 of awareness… The simultaneous, direct creation and interaction of yourself and the objects around you.
And this ‘ongoing revelation’ is what I am trying to record using my video camera.
I am mostly not trying to record any particular objects in frame – rather, whatever falls in the visual field. In fact, that is why I often resort to ridiculous formal constraints like arbitrary zooming or panning – to avoid focussing on some particular object. Or sometimes, focussing on some arbitrary object to illustrate how arbitrary and fascinating it is at the same time. This is also the reason I keep the camera in auto-focus – so that the camera can ‘decide’ what is interesting; or not looking at the viewfinder at all while recording.
When I am standing next to a camera on a tripod; our ontopes overlap to a great extent. While a camera isn’t conscious of what it ‘sees’ or ‘hears’; it is certainly capable of recording the things in its optical field of view and surrounding audio – to a much better extent than my body can. I only retain vague impressions, an overall ‘feeling’ of the experience. The camera in contrast, has – within its technical limits – recorded my breathing, movements, it’s own operating noise; in addition to all the objects in its fields of view and hearing – which overlap mine to a great extent.
Readers will notice similarities – or resonances – between this view of the world and concepts of Buddhism, Taoism, Phenomenology and even Quantum Mechanics. So I am not claiming any original concepts here. The Ontope is only my personal word to describe an important aspect of my personal and artistic exploration of, and interaction with, the objects in the space around me.
Footnotes:
1: It is important to be aware of the fact that your central nervous system, and your cardio-vascular system – by virtue of them functioning – generate auditory sensations.
Just like any electronic device, when switched on, starts self-generating a low hum, and/or a high-pitched “peep”; your auditory system picks up the sound of your blood flowing through your veins, and your nervous system can generate high-pitched auditory phenomena like Tinnitus.
That means that even if we are sitting dead still in an ultra-quiet environment, we can never experience total silence. Our bodily self-noise, is always added to whatever external sounds we pick up on.
This is the auditory equivalent of our proprioception.
While on the subject of self-generated sensory phenomena, the human visual system is also known to create so-called entoptic phenomena.
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2: Ecstasy literally means – “Standing, or being outside oneself”.
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