Twilight Language
Shuster + Moseley is the conceptual art studio of Claudia Moseley (b. 1984) and Edward Shuster (b. 1986). The artists create light-mobiles comprised of assemblages of suspended lenses, and sculptural installations of abstracted screens and deconstructed prismic geometries, using glass interfaces to mediate light. Central to the practice is an approach to a language of light, exposure and spectrality, through which the artists synthesise their engagement with the meditative traditions and related cosmologies; an esoteric approach towards space and place, which employs a diagrammatic poetics; and a critical engagement with technoscience.
“Mankind has become astral. This astral era no longer belongs to the measures of history” – Blanchot
The geometric arche-inscription of a sphere in a void, a ‘boundary giving boundary’ where origin and end converge: temporality articulated against a boundless, abyssal horizon against which it is eclipsed. The negative horizon is the unground of all optico-geometric inscription, the negation of conceptuality against which the threshold of the cosmological horizon is first articulated. The luminous life-world suspended in no-thing-ness.
Cone and Sphere, 2014
Light Paintings, 2014 (Credit Shuster + Moseley)
The limits of informational transmission inscribed by the instrumentation of cosmotechnical apparatuses comprise a logosphere—that same mathmatico-linguistic matrix from which artificial intelligence is mined—suspended in the boundless non-conceptuality of which we know no-thing. Hence totality and separation appear equally phantasmic: a surplus infinity permeates the core of matter, penetrating every act of instrumentation. Reality is presented to consciousness as like a multi-faceted crystal.
Expanding Cones, 2015
Techniques of gazing through the crystalline interface of the temporal horizon, fractured and spectralised, reveal the immediacy of the present in dys-chrony. Contemporaneity is disorientation.
Cinema of the Inner Eye, 2021
This is the tragedy of apeiron, refracted through the negative prosthetics of cosmotechnicity: the fixed stars appear in infinite regress. Whereas the history of metaphysics was inscribed through routinised cycles—the passage of the sun, calendrical structures, programs that generate rhythm from repetitions, imprinting the character of being-in-the-world—these externalised cycles have accumulated across succeeding generations, converged and inverted through the programmaticity of the present: a ‘play of the void’.
Twilight Language, 2019
The stellar course that is the mystery of this ambiguous horizon coincides with a destining conducted by cybernetics (“steering”) that is a pharmakological play of limits. By following the telematic-stellar course we arrive at a spectral horizon that is alien, barely distinguishable (barely to art, barely to philosophy), a haunted space in which calculation and play become indistinguishable.
The Cosmoscopic Key, 2018
Thus the revelation of contemporaneity: the limit is beyond the limit, revealed to consciousness as phantasmagoria that spectralise at the crystalline edge—in a play of lights that overflow. A surplus infinity that disarticulates the instruments of knowing, projecting a sensual knowing-no-thing that escapes from necessity and in so doing enables consciousness to assume its cosmic character in a relational passion of care.
What Matters (The Scattering), 2017, part of Lumiere Durham, produced by Artichoke and commissioned by Durham County Council. (Photo: Matthew Andrews)
In this way consciousness, as such, emptied of conceptualisation, negates technological programmaticity. In pharmakologically tracing the limits of reality—construed according to its informational limit-state—it delays the articulation of all and any limit, making a break at the horizon between embodied conceptuality and its emptiness. By tracing the play by which this horizon is made susceptible to the gaze—through the spectralisation at the interface of infinite space—we open onto that negative space of conceptualisation such that consciousness can pass-through.
Lights Through Paradox, 2020
This is the site for the spectral poiesis of passage because it is the horizon of light-time (both as limit-state of informational transmission and signifier of cosmotechnical temporality insofar as it appears to phenomenal consciousness).
Twilight Language (print series), 2022
Therefore the poiesis of this interface—that would open-up along this horizon—has a luminous resonance. Just as the reciprocal nature of light and sight qua chiasm constitutes the ontological event that comes to resonance not by the acting of ‘obscure forces’ but by their emptying, so the interface can be opened and emptied so as to allow it the free space in which to resonate.
(Plan of the Path of Light) In the House of the Hidden Places, 2021 (photo credit: Oskar Rosetti)
The resonance that occurs in this free space, devoid of those forces that hold the psycho-cosmic body in panicked tension, is an emergence consistent with a direct ontology that passes-through dependent causality. Through the empty space of the threshold of being, it is an opening towards the enstatic.
(Plan of the Path of Light) In the House of the Hidden Places (photo credit: Hesham Alsaifi)
In consciousness, this luminous reverberation maintains relational correspondence with perceptual affectivity, such that the optical spectrality that plays out along this shattered threshold produces ‘active visioning’. Hence techniques of gazing qua crystallisation can unite the prophetic with enstatic visioning. The luminous diagrammatics of archemastrie trace that which surpasses the optico-geometric in haptic function, moving through ‘diagrammatic agency’ towards the radiance of the inter-world itself. That is, an art of this interface would move through aesthetics to directly engage the infra-space as such.
Lensgram 2011 (far left), Expressions, 2020
Thereby we might apply those ‘uncanny powers’ so as to pass-through impotence, to find oneself capable of action in relation to psycho-cosmic embodiment. Through the gaze, the pharmakological medium of the interface in which opposites are opposed is opened—an opening that is imminent to the luminosities of the psycho-cosmic body (that embodiment of prior mediation; the potential space of reciprocal engendering). Thus we might impossibly consist as the being-towards that ‘strange relation’ signified by the performative utterance of a poiesis of passage—passible to the other through twilight language.
Spectre, 2022
“By whatever binds the world by that it must be freed” – Hevajra Tantra
…………………………………….
All images copyright and courtesy of Shuster + Moseley
Get the Full Experience
Read the rest of this article, and view all articles in full from just £10 for 3 months.
No comments yet.