Manual
This platform invites you to engage with a metamorphic world through multiple assemblages of relations across words, where each encounter catalyses new distributions of agency. The essence of Metamorphic Zone lies in the interplay between two main components:
- Matters of Concern:
A curated lexicon where each term shows its capacities to act.
- Field Notes: Descriptive and reflective notes that reveal the intricate web of terms.
To explore, start anywhere that intrigues you—there's no prescribed entry point. The highlighted terms draw connections with other terms and notes. The interface is visually presented as two spreads, side by side, allowing for parallel reading. We encourage you to embrace non-linearity as you navigate from spread to spread. Follow the lead of the words, allowing yourself to drift within the flux where metamorphosis constantly unfolds.
This project never reaches its final version! As a trajectorial endeavour, new matters of concern and field notes continually emerge. We invite you to revisit us regularly and share your thoughts and research with us. For collaboration inquiries, please contact us via email.
Introduction
Metamorphic Zone
represents an ongoing practice that embodies the agency of words to inquire, translate, and articulate various modes of existence. It weaves together multiple streams of knowledge, unveiling intricate fields of relations.
There are two ways of rendering our choices for the inquiry into existence, a state of bifurcation: one is the real but meaningless matter named nature – or the material; the other is the meaningful but unreal symbol named culture – or the mind. However, these two are in a relationship of shaping and being shaped by each other. To overcome the oppositional yet inseparable relationship of this bifurcation, we must recognise that the world is composed of hybrids of both the natural and the cultural. The world acts in multiplicity. To engage with the world, we must sharpen our sensibility through drifting, acting, and metamorphosing along with all other agents. Words are one of these agents, with semantic capacities that contribute to mediating our relationship to the world.
From the Nature of singularity to the World of multiplicity, we must learn to inhabit the metamorphic zone. Metamorphism is a fundamental attribute of the world itself; it can be understood as any entity, agency, or phenomenon undergoing transformation, whether human or non-human, material, or immaterial. Metamorphic Zone is where different actors exchange features, leading to new distributions of agency.
From metaphor to metamorphism, words are actors, agents, and institutional processes that navigate us within the world where existence and signification are synonyms, embedded as properties of all agents.