From Noumenon to Phenomena

“The concept of a noumenon-that is, of a thing which is not to be thought as object of the senses, but as a thing in itself, solely through a pure understanding… is thus merely a limiting concept, the function of which is to curb the pretensions of sensibility”

Immanuel Kant from the Critique of Pure Reason

Kant places significant epistemological limits on what can be disclosed about the world independent of the mind which perceives it. A particularly conspicuous feature of the Kantian project is the apparently insuperable gap between phenomena in the world as they are experienced, and the world as it is independent of the mind, as a thing-in-itself… as Kant vaguely put it, as an unknown something.

The mind imposes order onto the world, making it legible by translating what is into what appears to be; from noumenon to phenomena. Phenomena are filtered through the senses, and it would seem, that a necessary precondition of all experienced phenomena is the faculty to discern differences between distinct entities in the world; between qualities and quantities within space and time. These qualities and quantities are bundled together, experienced, signified and given meaning. But the consequence of all of this is that our eyes, and indeed all of our senses and faculties, hide the noumenal world from view.

Consider the experience of space for example. Can we assume that space is a property of the world independent of the mind? It would seem that spatial distinctions depend on the cognition of absence, absence disclosed to the mind as a differential gap between things. One might say that this is the way in which the mind creates a place for the world to exist. However, in stating it this way, do we risk committing a reification fallacy? To what degree, if at all, does space actually exist independent of the mind?

The same question might be asked of the experience of time. We find ourselves always already within a continuum of time. It seems that a temporal awareness depends on the aggregation of memories, the relationship between moments bound together by the mind, within a continuity of past, present, and future. The same question is applicable. To what degree are these relational differences and similarities imposed onto the world by the mind? To what degree are they independent of the mind, if at all?

Consider an object…a pair of scissors for example. But before you do, consider the mind that considers those scissors. Consider the mind which experiences itself as distinct from everything and everyone else… a distinct subject, oriented towards discrete objects, objects such as those scissors…those scissors which cut, separate, and divide. Can it be that the mind is both the consequence of the conspicuous difference between itself and everything and everyone else, and that the mind is also a precondition of all apparent differences? Do the contours of the mind give shape to the world, or do the contours of the world give shape to the mind?

And as I become aware of those scissors, when they are signified as scissors, they detach and differ from everything and everyone else, taking on their own local identity and specific meaning. As I experience them, they disentangle themselves from other objects, making them distinct, placing them in time, setting them in space, and allowing an understanding of their qualities and quantities to emerge. They are useful too. They multiply the content of the world by dividing things into discrete and distinct forms, thus initiating a mellifluous plurality.

Consider a map… but before you do, consider the earth to which it refers. A map demarcates territories and signifies distinct entities, but these borders and boundaries are not a necessary feature of the world as it is independent of the representations which the mapmaker applies to it. The world does not require these distinctions to be imposed on it as a condition for its existence, and a world without distinctions and differences must necessarily be considered singular. So perhaps there is no ghost in the machine because there are no ghosts and there is no machine… at least not as things in themselves.

When the scissors are not framed by an awareness of them, where do they go? Maybe to the same forest where soundless trees fall? When those scissors shake loose from all differences from, and relation to, other things… when they are unframed and ignored…does it make any sense to speak of the intrinsic distinctions between one thing and another? If differences and distinctions are relational and mind-dependent, but also a precondition of all phenomena, then it does not seem unreasonable to speculate that the world undisclosed is irreducibly singular… ineffable but available to the mind as a hidden noumenal singularity, taking its shape in the formless form of the invisible, indivisible sublime.

Ian Gonsher- November 2009

RECENT WORK: "UNTITLED" CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE

RECENT WORK: "FROM NOUMENON TO PHENOMENA" CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLAR

RECENT WORK: "NOTHING GREATER" SELECT IMAGE TO ENLARGE

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I was a studio assistant with the Campana Brothers in 2003. Fernando and Humberto are as good teachers as they are designers. This is their signature Vermelha chair, and it is still one of my favorites.Check out their exhibit at MOMA

Fernando and Humberto at the Cooper Hewitt

                             The Writing on the Wall*                                                                            *with no trace of ornament                                                     

The entire 60 second duration of The Writing on the Wall corresponds to over a thousand years of Roman history; from the beginning of the Republic, through the Empire, eventually culminating in the collapse of Western Roman civilization… a civilization that is an antecedent of our own society and culture. This piece (which was featured in the 2007 Pixilerations exhibit) opens with the name of the eponymous founder and first king of Rome, Romulus, who according to legend ruled in 717 B.C.E. Midway through the Roman historical narrative, Augustus arrives, the first emperor. The Western Empire finally collapses in 476 C.E. under the reign of Romulus Augustus. It is an interesting and perhaps meaningful coincidence that the name of the last ruler of Rome is a synthesis of the first two… a dialectical synchronicity...thesis, the thesis restated in a similar yet different way, and a synthesis… a beginning, middle, and end.

 

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Excerpt  from my thesis "Things and Themselves" (2006)

Echo and Narcissus

      Here I am... I am Echo... but I am not here. ... neither who nor where. I, and by I, I mean you. You, and the echo of me within the mind of you the reader... a projection of us as meaning upon a page. I, the reflected first person, am a copy of  indeterminable origin, neither who nor where. I am an echo. Echoes have no intrinsic qualities. They take on the shape of empty spaces. Echoes are effects of plurality and difference... even here, I am neither who nor where.

      The last time I saw Narcissus, he was sitting beside the still surface of a lake. The two of us, alone together. The countryside was uninhabited for as far as a voice can carry.  We were both very young, unexpired by age, unencumbered by fate, and it was, quite simply, love.  It was love in that first moment you recognize it as love. It was love the first time, again. In some versions of the story, the place was called Eden and we had different names. But that is neither who nor where.  Narcissus was so beautiful,  new to me there.

       Often, it has been reported it was vanity that blinded him  to me. It has often been repeated that it was blank empathy that imprisoned us both. This was not the case. I knew of his ontologies. I knew  the depth of his soul. He was not motivated by vanity. Vanity was abhorrent to Narcissus. Vanity violated the profundity of his beauty. And of beauty and echoes, what can be said that is not already spoken as a question? Who are you?

        Who am I? This was the question in his gaze. I saw Narcissus there (who and where)  searching for the source of the reflection. He gazed into the stillness of the lake, a mirror in the landscape. Upon that synesthetic surface, sight became sound, echoes within  reflections emerged.  He heard a transcendent sound that  permeated everything and reflected everyone ...beyond the surface of the water. Beyond the echo of the ego and the id entity. Beyond the blank self. Beyond the self that is concealed when you look at it.  It was an echo. It was the most beautiful echo! I saw Narcissus sitting by the side of the lake, exchanging meaning for being.

Narcissus and the Reflection 

   Sunlight rebounded off the surface of the lake, beyond the sky, and into the void which borders the earth. The water remained still, occasioning unflawed reflections and speculations. Narcissus paused, and gazed into the water for an indeterminate amount of time. Then eight minutes passed, and it all changed.

     It arrived  as a  raindrop in front of my eyes. I saw it before I felt it. The projectile pierced the plane of the water, but water is liquid, more fluid than rigid, so the surface slipped away. A simple pattern propagated outward from the center where the drop had fallen. It had shape and frequency, simultaneously.  That raindrop and the others that followed, inscribed themselves upon the surface of the lake. It was peculiar that I had not noticed the surface before, now delimited by the light rain. And even more, that I had not noticed the difference between myself and the reflection. A fundamental distinction ignored! But  from distinctions, the initiation of meaning, differences perpetually  deferring, and the invention of  absence. Absence is nothing  if not the relative and imagined distance between two  entities. This is the manner in which the noumenon fractured. Surfaces appearing every place I looked. They separated one thing from another. Sometimes the surfaces were beautiful to look at, but most of the reflections had failed.

Narcissist Brand T-shirt

Things and Themselves Part I

    It arrived like a raindrop on the back of my neck. I felt it before I saw it. My focus arrested. Aware of the obvious for the first time, of the surface and my reflection across it. I whispered to myself, " I am here.... a distinct subject, incongruent objects, and the illusion that separates them."   In another version of the story, Echo asked, "Where are you?" But I could not tell if it was Eden anymore.

   Then all of a sudden, and for no apparent reason, it changed once again. I found myself just above the south pole, just below the infinite bend of the earth's surface. Water and ice, sometimes light... the landscape lacked scale and lay abruptly flat. It reminded me of the surface of a page or a screen.  Anxiously, I tried to imagine Greenwich. Then thinking of the surface below my feet, I remembered something about the transitions and translations of surface tensions… You can walk on the surface of water if you wait for the surface to freeze.

Things and Themselves Part II

At the south pole  there were rumors of the penultimate antithesis of the infinite stretch of the globe. And I forgot my name, or at least misplaced my position. Who and where? Lost at the bottom of the world I wondered if it was a fool's errand to search for the culminating surface of a sphere. But then it occurred to me that all positions on the earth's  circumference were equally removed from the spinning center of the planet. And I imagined the inaccessible core as a thing in itself. It can be recognized (albeit amid the debris of the imagination) by a circular movement that is neither fully present, nor completely absent. I imagined the internal orbit as such, obscured by the rotating surface upon which all humanity plays out.  And I stood there, feet positioned against the surface of the ground.

And surfaces were everywhere apparent. Surfaces coincided with the ordinary sensations and separations of things. Upon the periphery of common things, installed amongst the disregarded obvious and the manifestly supererogatory, the echo reemerged as a hint,  a reminder of the  premise of repetition. Surfaces and their doubles, echoes everywhere apparent. Surfaces as a ceiling concealing. As a wall or a floor. As a gesture to the ground against the sky. Surfaces in space and in time, and in practice and in discourse. Surfaces as apriori distinctions, transitions, and positions. Surfaces signifying the appearance of  common things.

The surfaces of common things articulate the useful distinctions of accrued experience. They fasten us all to the banal spectacle of ubiquity. And when we speak, we make mention with souvenirs of conspicuous divisions, by which we know one thing from another, and from which the universal meaning of knowledge, and the local meaning of identity are both derived and sustained. But, these common things are not things in themselves. They are contingent upon an awareness of the relations positioned in their design.

Then all of a sudden,  as if for no apparent reason, it repeated once again. I found myself just above the south pole,  just below the infinite bend of the earth's surface. Water and ice, mostly light... the landscape was flush enormous against an inconclusive sky. It reminded me of the original premise of repetition.    And these common things everywhere apparent.  A position? A point... attenuated into an edge, usurped by a surface, that when disregarded coalesces into a simple noumenal volume. Eternal even then, in the beginning which was before the end.

Showtime Networks and Metropolitan Home present the Showtime House: a transformation of a $20 million, 19th century Gramercy Park townhouse into a beacon of modernism inspired by six Showtime original series. To create this fusion of entertainment and high style, Metropolitan Home has enlisted design's top stars- Jamie Drake, Tori Golub, Laura Kirar, Amy Lau, White Webb, Vicente Wolf, Johnny Grey, Luca Andrisani, Kristen Brant, and Jim Zivic, and Enea. This September, these exceptional talents will create visionary spaces that evoke the spirit of Showtime's original series- Dexter, Californication, The Tudors, Weeds, The L-Word, and the United States of Tara- for inspiration as they transform each room into a modernist masterpiece.

Table Displace was featured in the Showtime/Metropolitan House.

The Box/Table packaging concept was recently featured in the book Cool Green Stuff

ID Magazine 2005 Student Design Review

 

Jurors: John Maeda, Scott Henderson, Paul Carlos

"Ian Gonsher's exploration of wood's elastic properties led to this flexible fruit bowl of laser-cut wood joined in an accordian-style band. It's a nice industrial process that's turned into something warm and lifestyle-based."

Indie Designers on the Rise 

by Jeannie Choe 

(click here to read the full article)

La Technologie Invisible

Quelles formes auront ces objets "robotises"?Seron-il vraiment des objets devenus "robots", come la table imaginee par Ian Gonsher? Seront-il au contraire semblables en apparence aux objets et aux meubles qui peuplent aujourd' hui notre quotidien, mais dotes de pouvoirs nouveaux? Selon le principe que tout bon outil doit se faire oublier lors de l'activite qu'il permet d'entreprendre, Mark Weiser, du centre de recherche americain Xerox PARC, militait pour une technologie devenue invisible, hors de notre champ conscient. C'est ce type de magie que les recherches sur l'intelligence ambiante et les technologies calmes nous promettent. Demain elles permettront peut-etre d' <> les meubles et les objets de notre quotidien.