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jeftavarwijk at gmail dot com
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In To Caress A Cloud, I construct clouds in the forest and film them at 500 frames per second using a decades-old 16mm camera, combining the footage with sound and voice to shape an immersive cinematic loop. The work unfolds as a meditative, sensuous experience—an invitation to feel, rather than resolve, the instability of perception.
To Caress A Cloud is an Expanded Cinema piece in development, mixing analog film, art and grounded in the sciences of perception with the help of the AttentionLab, run by prof. Stefan van der Stigchel
When is a wave, a wave? Is it at its crest, its trough, its breaking, or in the moment it disappears back into sea? Try to point to its edge, and it slips... always becoming, never fixed. A cloud, too, resists its outline. Drifting, dissolving, reforming, it flickers between presence and absence.
This instability is not only of waves or clouds, but of perception itself. Neuroscience tells us (through Predictive Processing) that what we see, hear, and feel is not a direct mirror of the world, but our brain's best guess. Perception is expectation meeting sensation, shaped by memory, attention, and uncertainty. To perceive a cloud is to surf uncertainty, to live in approximation.
But there is also the human weight of it: to know that everything we love, every face, every touch, every held breath, it will one day disappear. To live in this impermanence, while knowing we never even perceive things as they "truly are," only as shimmering approximations. The work asks: how do we stay with this fragility? How do we hold what cannot be held?
Underlying this work is what I call a Functional Gradient Ontology: nothing is fixed as a thing in itself. Objects, feelings, memories (like clouds and waves) exist only in gradients of relation, function, and attention.
A chair is chair until it breaks. A wave is wave until it is foam. A love is love until it fades, though no single moment can be named as its end. Everything emerges, shifts, dissolves; thick with becoming, thin at the edges.
This work does not resolve these questions, but invites the spectator to inhabit them. To feel, not define. To notice the instability of perception, the trembling edges of things. To dwell in the moment a cloud forms, dissolves, and becomes a cloud again.
Carlo Rovelli - Reality Is Not What It Seems Andy Clark - The Experience Machine
Anil Seth - Being You
Let‘s go a little further, into a world I know little about; physics. Luckily there is a physicist who also a good writer that can enlighten us. There is a wonderfull poetry in what Carlo Rovelli writes in his book Reality Is Not What It Seems, that perhaps could also apply to the abovementioned writings on rhythm:
“In the world described by quantum mechanics there is no reality except in the relations between physical systems. It isn’t things that enter into relations but, rather, relations that ground the notion of ‘thing’. The world of quantum mechanics is not a world of objects: it is a world of events. Things are built by the happening of elementary events: as the philosopher Nelson Goodman wrote in the 1950s, in a beautiful phrase, ‘An object is a monotonous process.’ A stone is a vibration of quanta that maintains its structure for a while, just as a marine wave maintains its identity for a while before melting again into the sea.”
Filmfonds
KFHein fonds
Fentener van Vlissingen fonds
Kees EIJrond Fonds
Gemeente Utrecht Cultuurfonds
Vevam