The use of phenomenology in revealing an artwork about birth and death

Abstract

How can phenomenology help me to access subtle emotions, affects and liminal qualities, as an art-practice research method, to investigate the possibility of an experience of the defining limits of birth and death? We are thrown into this world, into existence. Did I exist before my birth? Do I continue to exist after my death? Nobody can experience their own birth or death and our only relationship with death is our finitude. Existentialism and the subject of natality and mortality then become the primary movers in this art-research project and ‘being-in-the-world’ as being caught up between two defining limits, both beyond experience. Being-in-the-world is my encounter with the fundamental constitution of what it means to be human. This dissertation will investigate various meanings of birth and death : as limits; as possibilities of experience; as aporias; as liminal situations and uses phenomenology as an inquiry or approach to conduct an art-practice research in obtaining the tools and knowledge in revealing the production of art. The inquiry will also investigate how modern and contemporary artists interpreted this subject in the visual arts and the research will extrapolate useful methods of dealing with visual concepts of mortality and generativity and any other abstract notions associated with it. The research will also articulate the visual rendering of time and the idea of temporality. This will be central in suggesting that any serious considerations of the role that ambiguity, ambivalence and paradox play in discussions on birth and death nonetheless, may be the best way forward in presenting the unpresentable as a construct for a digital artwork.