The Dewey Decimal Dowsing Project: Meaning Inside the Event

My art practise is shaped by a desire to encounter felt understanding through a processual methodology. My keynote speeches delivered as made-up Professor Kimey Peckpo, are an experiment in transmitting affect within a region of ritual as an intra-relational part of the world. My research into vibrant matter (Jane Bennet) and agential realism (Karen Barad) have contextualised an intuitive idea to help students expand personal agency via an intra-relational encounter with apparatus (books) and specific region (library). I developed the Dewey Decimal project in which students are asked to transform their names into a number using numerology. Upon locating this number’s shelf in the library students dowse using water divining tools for three books. An object is made to verify the new knowledge and a report presented using a simple format of Title, Apparatus, Method, Result and Conclusion. Synchronicity abounds and students as a collective frequently report a strong sense of connection to the material and this is the agency the project seeks to promote. A processual methodology entangles a performative form of ritual event with classical epistemology. Through speculative art practice I have become aware of how this whimsical means of helping art students engage with the library has resonant implications to how attunement to non-linguistic frequencies of matter is fundamental to intuitive agency. The ritual creates a performative entanglement helping students to make materially vital research as a form of what Barad calls onto-epistem-ology. Dowsing and divination then are a means of augmenting intuition as an extra-embodied way of making meaning inside the event.