While living on a small Irish island, I pondered the question: how do I become one with my environment?
Concerned by human-made ecological disaster, I wondered if our human collective could shift into this perspective, to an understanding that to damage our environment is to harm ourselves, could we then change our destructive ways?
Extended Abstract
An inquiry on the collective beyond the human scale that draws from Tim Morton’s concept of becoming hyposubject in the face of hyperobjects. In this research, rest acts as a gateway to becoming hyposubject, dissolving the ego self and finding an interconnected eco self (defined here as self-other-environment) — to understand one’s small self as part of the giant planetary ecosystem.
With the global rise of precarious labor conditions under late stage capitalism, the human collective has become increasingly exhausted and desperately needs radical rest. We often turn to nature for its relaxing and even healing effects. However, might our environment be tired as well? Could nature also be exhausted of the constant extraction, mining and polluting? Might it be in pain? And might we, collectively, share that pain, the same pain?
This research started from an interrogation surrounding care and rest concerning the collective body that encompasses both the human and the non-human. How does it rest? How is it cared for? Can it care for itself? However a more pertinent question emerged: how does one access the collective body in order to explore such questions?
Through a process of reflection, contemplation and introspection, I try to develop a methodology of rest. Rest as methodology searches for the quiet corners of our psyche where we can melt away our egos and see ourselves as an extension of broader systems and structures — where we become a dot in a matrix of dots. Here, this research arrives at an enmeshment of selves, both biological and ecological but also digital. The human self, the eco self, the digital self, all made up of entangled multiple selves become oceanic, tiny particles of a much larger body. And like the ocean, much is left unknown.