These devices are the narrow gate through which your metabolism passes.¹ They are also the doorways through which the world outside now travels through to you. The door is one of the most basic of all cultural techniques, being a switch that constitutes inside and outside spaces.² The door gives humans the ability to both separate and to connect, to divide or conjoin what is inside and what is out, what is personal territory and what belongs to the wider world. As limina or thresholds, doors not only demarcate and delimit, but also allow the joining of different spaces.³

As we close physical doorways in acts of solidarity, love and collective care, I have left this virtual door ajar⁴ in the hope that something may still pass through. So that something of another realm may flow into our concrete material world. Or verso, that a concrete world, no longer physically accessible, is animated in that most private and electric of places—the imagination.

If you choose, consider putting on headphones, closing your eyes as you allow this exhibition to accumulate via the linked audio file. The longer and slower you listen, the more uncertainty you listen with, the more this world will bloom.

Composition and sound design by Alyx Dennison, 1–7 April 2020, including fragments of Wet Matter, 2020 (composition and sound design by Evelyn Ida Morris with contributions from Alyx Dennison, Brian Fuata, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Evelyn Ida Morris, Lizzie Thomson); extracted Microsoft PowerPoint sound effects; at-home iPhone recording of select names from Every Artist Remembered, 2009, by Agatha Gothe-Snape; and an extract of Five Columns, 2019, by Wrong Solo with Sonya Holowell, Ruark Lewis, Sarah Rodigari, Brooke Stamp and Lizzie Thomson.  

1 John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds, Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2015, p. 26.

2 Ibid., p. 152.

3 Georgina Cole, ‘Painting the Threshold: Doors, Space and Representation in Eighteenth-Century Genre Painting’, PhD diss., University of Sydney, 2010.

4 To borrow from artist Mitchel Cumming’s project AJAR, https://cargocollective.com/mitchelcumming/AJAR.