Animæ

This penultimate part includes seven essays on the creation of, and reflection on, materialist art. Beginning with “Techne,” the practice of wire bending (only tangentially related to the Mas tradition) becomes a trope for considering the process of “unbinding” that was introduced in an earlier essay (“Conscientia”). This is followed by “Umbilici,” a series of art pieces with three corresponding poems and a reflection on the affective reach of witness. This is complicated by essays that emphasize transmediality as a rhetorical method for withholding and keeping secrets—of vernacular knowledge, specifically. “Animæ,” for example, while an exposition of the same wire bending described in “Techne,” also deliberately eschews explanation. “Charles Street,” as another example, shows a piece in which the full text of a poem is embedded. More abstract notions of exposition and secrecy—defined as “ex|interiority” and “in|exteriority”—occur in “Yard,” and with the design objects in “Orisa” and “Surd.”