flaming creature, electric face
Electricity translates the matter which makes us into being here and now
We find them unfolding halfway between gesture and thought. Stretching towards not the beginning nor the end, but the long middle. A place that contains us all. It is here where an electrical impulse begets a spark, igniting a language that forms inside us before we gain the capacity to learn words– one which guides the matter that propels our bodies into a state of locomotion. Charged yearnings spread across a membrane, bending cells into small, radiant regenerative arcs.
Finally, they wake up– belly down in the bed of the pick-up wearing nothing save for a red thong. Mosquitoes have laid waste to their flesh overnight. They suddenly realize they’re in the company of a thousand men in denim tuxedos and ten gallon hats. Standing along the tideline, the men cast their nets and rods into the sea.
We are prone to veer and swerve upon our own tending. Caught like a fish at the end of a line, the cycle is disrupted, manipulated to accommodate the comfort of others. That is, accompanied by a primordial fear of consequence; the leash that tethers the limbic system to a familiar strategy of self-preservation. This is a well worn desire path. Trespassing in a mercurial-zone, the notable thing about a flaming creature is that they’re on fire.
“When an embryo is just developing, before it gets a face, a pattern for the face lights up on the surface of the embryo. [...] The face-to-come of the embryo flashes in electrical patterns across its surface. It is important to take in the fact that the “electric face” appears and disappears before any actual features develop, that is, prior to cell differentiation. For example, the eye field electrically paints out the location and structure of the eye and vanishes prior to differentiation.” (Barad, 405).
Electricity guides us through the process of becoming. It does so by harnessing a current of energy to translate the matter which makes us into being here and now. This is how an arm learns to become an arm, an eye an eye, and a brain a brain. By way of this phenomenon, matter is galvanized into the forms of Earth's myriad inhabitants, who take shape as salamanders and dolphins and you and me. We now possess the ability to eavesdrop on these conversations between cells and in hotly contested settings, we can even alter them.
The bioelectric layer of our developing being can now be re-written to new outcomes. Increasingly, matter is painted with algorithmic intervention; the tire in New York is the tire in New Orleans is the tire in New Mexico. An errant body flexes to fit hubris’ suit, all while the sleeping dog laughs. She knows that the only semblance among us is all our trajectories eventually bending towards the ocean.
It so happens that the shape our substance takes is more than just a matter of taste, it’s a matter of an electric face.
Tyna Ontko (she/they) is an artist and aspiring writer from the Kitsap Peninsula of Washington State. Her practice in sculpture + extended media explores space as it exists in countless forms– as a blueprint, a dream, or a real and lived experience. Tyna is a second year grad with VCU who is looking forward to relocating to the Hudson Valley this coming summer.