Subscendental Birth

'Subscendental Birth' is a two-channel video installation exploring emergence, rupture, and the disorienting limits of self-formation. Inspired by Timothy Morton’s concept of subcendence — the collapse into entanglement rather than ascension — the work stages two parallel encounters with becoming.

In the first channel, a black-and-white slow-motion sequence depicts a large inflatable balloon on a blank photographic backdrop. From within its soft, resistant membrane, the artist’s head suddenly breaches the surface, gasping fresh air, hair tousled, and grinning in relief. The only sound — the deflationary rasp of escaping air — punctuates the moment with absurdity and release, evoking birth, vulnerability, and the precarious humour of emergence.

On the second channel, a failed photogrammetry attempt becomes its own accidental cosmology. Originally intended to digitally map the balloon and body into an AR object, the process collapses, leaving only fragmented images of the artist’s face suspended in orbit. A nebulous centre drifts amidst scattered data-points, suggesting the self not as a fixed form but as a gravitational field — an exploded archive of perception and memory.

Together, the two channels propose a vision of selfhood as dynamic, contingent, and unfinished: part breath, part glitch, part cosmic event.