Meditations (On Being)

This piece is inspired by the premise of Closeness and Distance. In order to capture this theme I turned to Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, in which he examines, through a lens of doubt, the three faculties of reason in determining what actually exists. One of the main features of this text is that Descartes is doing all of this ‘out of body’ thinking and rebuilding of all of his beliefs from an armchair in his study. Descartes began this experiment with the belief that he didn’t need any connection with the world and environment outside of his own mind in order to attain the truth about existence. To me this demonstrates a fascinating example of both closeness and distance – closeness to one’s own mind and assurance in it’s ability to internally discover absolute truth; and distance for the measure you have to push your mental capacity to in order to strip away all of your own beliefs in order to rebuild them within a frame work of that absolute truth. This second point, of course, also creates a distance between the meditator and the rest of the world.

Work Details

Duration: 3 minutes

Composed: 2020 

Commissioned by: The Australian Voices 

"Far and Near" project