nickk hertzog: on consciousness

It is pretty easy to say that everything has something to do with consciousness. It is easy and therefore useless. How then can we address consciousness as a theme for artistic research? There is plenty of precedent for a phenomenological approach, the questions of mind and body and how we relate to objects, space and the idea of other. But mine is not a phenomenological concern. The universal subject, the standardised “I” is an abstract discourse of unification. But consciousness, our understanding and our perception are not unified. I am not unified, I am a constant flux of competing aspects. Sometimes my self dominates the world around it, sometimes the world is the dominating force. Consciousness is a battleground. Working with this idea, I'm drawn to ideas of confusion and conflict in our perception of the world around us. Space is a creation of consciousness. The determination of “I” splits the world into self (in here) and space (out there). We are only ourselves because space is not us. But this determination is constantly questioned and constantly renewed. But the constant affirmation of our self is vulnerable to confusion and disruption. We create the world around us by projecting 'space' into our raw perception. We create it all. The buildings, the streets, the houses and parks. Zones of confusion in our urban fabric become questions of consciousness. The ambience, the unease, the silent fascination, the affect, this is the competing forces of our consciousness in conflict. By disregarding socially engrained spatial values, we break down the spatial prison we have constructed for ourselves. We explore the landscape, we transgress boundaries, we hang around abandoned places and investigate the incomplete. Collapsing concrete structures sprout mutated ecosystems from your deep fetid ponds. Lines of confusion travel beneath the great totems of the freeway and crawl along the sunken ponds of muddy urban run-off. We capture and translate moments of confusion so that others might be confused. Everything can become strange. Everything should become strange. From the urban fringes the dream and the nightmare collapse in on themselves and in this gaping hole we see ourselves as we truly are: fractured collections of perception and thought surfacing from that great ocean of fiction. We finally awaken from that boring nightmare of a unified self, toiling like Sisyphus, trying to separate itself from the world but never being able to.