Hybridity and permeability

Two related ideas have become central to my own art practice and they are both formal and political in their implications. They are 'Hybridity' and 'Permeability'. Both these concepts suggest that a clearly defined, sharp edged, entity with boundaries is a problem and that rather than looking at the world as a collection of things, or atomising experience so that you can break it down into smaller components, you instead look at interrelationships, entanglements and processes that show how systems depend on their different parts working together. This means that for instance an image of a human being is something that needs to acknowledge the fact that it is in reality a hybrid form that is over 50% bacteria and that it is always in a process of becoming, which is an event rather than a thing and that it can never in reality separate itself out from its entanglements with everything else. 

Hybridity has in contemporary theory several readings, and I have also had to take on board the fact that certain writers claim 'hybridity' as being of a particular importance to themselves too. I would therefore like to acknowledge all their contributions to various readings of the term as further evidence of 'hybridity' as a fertile term, out of which a more sensitive understanding of life emerges.

Hybridity can be seen as a cross between things, as a formal mixture of elements.  This could be biological, for example a cross between a male lion and a female tiger is a 'liger', a hybrid plant emerges from the seed that is the result of a cross pollination between different plant varieties, in order to achieve this the female (pistil) of one plant variety receives pollen taken from the male (stamen) of a different plant variety. Hybridity can also be about human cultures. A hybrid is simply something that is a mixture between one thing and another. Hybridity has been a feature of virtually all civilizations and is created by trade, conquest and the fact that at certain times different people rub up against each other.  Cultures borrow ideas that they find useful, this includes religions, philosophies, and science, but also art and languages. Our word 'hybrid' is derived from the Latin 'hybrida' or 'ibrida', which meant the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar. In music Edward II is a wonderful example of a hybrid fusion between English folk music and Jamaican reggae.  

Edward II 'Miles away'

In cultural theory hybridity has been re-appropriated by social and cultural critics as a challenge to fixed or essentialist accounts of identity and culture. Radicalised claims of purity of origins, such as those advocated by nazi theorists are refuted by ideas of hybridity that understand the breaking down of racial and cultural boundaries is a normative feature of societal development. Hybridity as a sociological concept recognises that identity is formed through encounters with difference. In particular, the condition of cultural hybridity has been explored by examining the post-colonial cultures of migrants which are based on fusions and translations between and of different peoples, cultures and places. If you are interested in reading more about this idea, one of the most developed theorisations of hybridity is by Homi K. Bhabha (See: The Location of Culture, Routledge, 1994) which does not consider it as merely the fusing of existing cultural elements. For Bhabha, hybridity refers to the process of the emergence of a culture, in which its elements are being continually transformed or translated through continuous encounters. 

My own interest in the term also embraces how it was thought about by Mikhail Bakhtin, who used notions of hybridity to celebrate the idea of multi-vocal stories. This polyphony of voices was part of his idea of the 'carnivalesque' as (Clark and Holquist in Mikhail Bakhtin,1984: p. 4) put it, ‘a boundless world of humorous forms and manifestations opposed the official and serious tone of medieval ecclesiastical and feudal culture’. So yes, a hybrid can also be transgressive and funny and in being funny it helps to break down the rigid boundaries between things. Bhabha's ‘Third Space of enunciation’ (1994:37), is also a space for jokes, for freudian slips and a bit of daftness. 

Permeability has traditionally been a term more related to science than art. It is defined as the ability of a substance to allow another substance to pass through it, especially the ability of a porous rock, sediment, or soil to transmit fluid through pores and cracks. However I have been rethinking it as a term that is essential to all life and its ability to maintain independence whilst at the same time acknowledging that interdependence is the only possible condition if that life form is to survive. If I look at myself, I am very permeable. I have a skin that surrounds me that is permeable, I intake solids, liquids and gases through the various mechanisms that my body has evolved to ensure that I am being constantly interpenetrated by the environment around me. I am designed to be very permeable. The science of Markov blankets suggests that all life forms or self-organising systems rely on an ability to interact with their surroundings in order to survive. It is argued that this ability to self organise is in fact an emergent property of random dynamical systems, which means that at some point order will not just emerge, but a type of order that likes to keep itself in that very order, as well as being able to interact with all the other chaos around it, will come into being. It has been argued that in order to maintain themselves, these orderly systems need to possess Markov Blankets, permeable surrounding areas that allow for interchange between various states of order and disorder. Therefore a human being's Markov blanket touches and interacts with the Markov blankets of other things and becomes part of a system that both includes it and these other things, in order to help itself self-regulate, whilst also forming necessary parts of other regulation systems that in turn help in the process of maintaining a state of homeostasis. 

The formal consequence of this for my own thinking is that hard sharp edges between and around things are suggestive of organisms that are cut off from each other and therefore liable to die off and softer more open or vibrating edges that allow for things to pass through them are more likely to suggest permeability and states of entanglement with other systems and events. 

Amoeba

The amoeba has a flexible permeable membrane, this allows it to exchange and interact with its surrounding environment, sometimes extending itself to surround 'food' whilst at the same time being able to allow waste products to pass back out into the surrounding waters. In order to visualise this it is better to use a dotted or dashed line to represent its edge or boundary rather than a hard continuous line. 

Body as flux and spatial movement

One way of thinking about larger organic forms is to treat them in a similar way to how you might draw an amoeba, however very quickly the independence of the body begins to dissolve into its interdependence with the surrounding environment. This has created for myself a conundrum, and this is how far do I take the visual implications of my thinking? Hybridity might mean that I bring together different ways of visually representing an idea and this is where I am at the moment, making a series of images whereby I explore how hybrid visual methodologies can be used to create what I see as perceived images, or perceptions of the imagination. My current project is an attempt to set out an idea that suggests that images that arrive from or come from imaginative play, have exactly the same status for our decision making processes as images that arrive as direct perceptions. 

An amoeba human hybrid

Hybrids meet

Our skin is not only porous it is a surface with embedded hair follicles and these are organised in such a way that the hairs take patterns or directions over the body. These patterns have evolved over millions of years as the best way to quickly direct rain water off a moving mammal's body. 

Hair direction, front and back

We rarely think of this pattern when making representations of humans, but it is a reminder of our animal nature as well as visually a way of thinking about the dynamics of movement over and around a body. As an image it is both an imaginative interpretation of empirical research and a representation of perceived experience. I was very interested in how by keeping the two halves apart, this allowed the space surrounding the body to dramatically enter it from above and below as both invisible penis/anal hole and extension of the head's crown chakra down into the body. The previous idea I had of the body as a form of Klein Bottle would only work in four dimensional space but I still like the idea of it, perhaps though it needs to be animated so that time is more clearly present. 

From worm to human Klein bottle to walking amoeba

As thoughts about forms evolve, so do thoughts about life itself, the one allowing the other to become what it becomes. This is a sort of evolutionary philosophy, a way of developing a reason for formal invention that is also a way of developing an attitude towards the world. It is not though a fixed idea, more a process that perhaps we all go through at some point, some people going through similar thought processes at a very early stage in their life and others much later on. In this case I'm reflecting on my own process at quite a late stage in life, and I am aware that it is a way of working that is idiosyncratic and which is no more 'right' than the millions of other similar processes other humans are also engaged with at this very moment. Perhaps by comparing and contrasting with your own approaches to these things it may help you become more aware of your own working methods, what it is unlikely to do is advance your analytical thinking and be useful as a 'proper' research methodology; this is art and not science and one of my personal guides in this process is whether or not it could also be funny. 

See also:

Paul Klee and Markov Blankets

Qualia

Benjamin Brett and Geometrical Psychology

A talk on drawing for the drawing dialogue symposium

Marion Milner: Art therapy and perceptual research

Alien phenomenology 

Lines in the road