Invisibility Phial (Dead Sea Scrolls) questions the ontological status of death as the binary opposite of life by tracing attempts to encounter a process of becoming invisible. As a non-dialectical abstraction, death is a thing that is imagined as finite and fixed. When ‘death’ is abstracted dialectically, it is a process that contains its history and possible futures, and a relation that contains its ties to other relations as part of what it is. A narrative is contained within the grid of images: transformations emerge and fade through the rows, and relations are cross-imprinted in each column. The grid is conceptualised as a structure of temporal relationality that exists both in the present moment and infinity. The content of the grid re-states this relation. As the web page launches, the music begins to play. The background of the webpage is black and at the top of the web page is a terracotta coloured border. The two columns of images are positioned off-centre, towards the left hand side of the page. The left hand column contains images or indexical traces of Patrick: the second column contains images or indexical traces of myself. Like November the work traces the three stages of rites de passage. The first row shows images of Patrick and I making a place within which the transformation can emerge. We hold chicory plants, the main ingredient in the invisibility spell, and symbolically state our intention to temporarily separate from our ordinary cultural conditions and states. Rather than a gradual movement through the passage from one psychic state to another, as in November, there is rupture and violent displacement. The second row registers the shock at this unexpected encounter with processes of becoming invisible. The third row documents the beginning of the liminal phase in which threshold people slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. The fourth and fifth rows show a variety of symbols that ritualise the transition from living to dying: that liken liminality ‘to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness.’ The sixth row and the seventh row document the re-aggregation and re-incorporation of the subjects into a relatively stable state. The passage is enacted. The subject behaves in accordance with customary norms, protocols and ethical standards that bind individuals in a system of organisation.

Extending the exploration of a non-binary ontology, the work explores the transgression of boundaries between differing modes of intentional organisation and the Real. It refers to protocol and the grid as self-referencing forms that organise pure relationship, and to the co-existence of being, non-being and transformational movements between now and infinity.