xdbx on Nostr: ‘the make ‘Me’ machine’ mixed media study My focus at the moment, held ...
‘the make ‘Me’ machine’ mixed media study
My focus at the moment, held lightly, is to do with ‘not knowing’, in art and in life, and being curious and open to what shows up
It’s about surprising and entertaining myself - which leads to the question - What is myself? - a question I’ve been engaging with all my life and has taken me on a many decades long ontological, psychological and spiritual search
In recent years this enquiry has led, and keeps leading back to seeing that ‘I’ have no idea what ‘my self’ or ‘Self’ is - or if there even is one in the way we generally think or imagine
In the 90s I made a series of paintings called ‘The Make Wrong Machine’ - about the concept of judgment, of seeing that we, as human beings, have the capacity to make things wrong - a lot! It’s like we put something or someone - anything! - in at one end and out it comes, guaranteed to be somehow ‘wrong’ at the other end of the process. It’s a natural pattern that we can run and I became aware of it back then and ever since I often catch it running, sometimes even in time to stop it before it gets going…
Anyway, to make use of a ‘make wrong machine’ there has to be someone to operate it - a ‘me’ that, consciously or unconsciously, switches it on and puts things, people, ideas etc into it and it simply makes them ‘wrong’
So what I’m noticing and recognising now - or perhaps more accurately what is being noticed and recognised - is this ‘make Me machine’ - the mechanism we all have that interprets raw experience and adds meaning to it with names and labels and stories etc and in so doing constructs this sense of self, of a separate identity, somehow impossibly separate from the rest of experience, and this does seem to be the very root of all psychological suffering - and it’s canny and slippery and uses very clever disguises!
‘the make ‘Me’ machine’ mixed media study
Published at
2026-03-27 17:18:54 UTCEvent JSON
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