Abstract

How to make visible the imperceptible? In particular, how to make visible the imperceptible language of the non-human, within different environments? This research is an exploration of a language beyond words.

I want to see the manifold memories of the water I drink, the water I exist of, the water of my environment. I want to meet the many faces of the water of which we are.

Fluid Syntaxis follows the interaction between thought, physical investigation, artistic intuition and dynamic reflection. It is shaped not only in this text but also in print, paper studies and film. Intrigued by the theory of water memory by Jacques Benveniste, a Deleuzian mapping process flowed through art, engaging with the values and precarities of fixing and flowing, which water represents. Through investigation of different perceptions and forms of meaning-formation, I ask how we can shape a new practice of relating to our bodies and surroundings. Faces of the rain are like façades of all languages of the non-human that ask us to question the dualistic mindset, forming a new understanding and practice of human and non-human relationality.

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Into Fluidity

How to make visible the imperceptible? In particular, how to make visible the imperceptible language of the non-human, within different environments? This research is an exploration of a language beyond words.

I want to see the manifold memories of the water I drink, the water I exist of, the water of my environment. I want to meet the many faces of the water of which we are.

Fluid Syntaxis follows the interaction between thought, physical investigation, artistic intuition and dynamic reflection. It is shaped not only in this text but also in print, paper studies and film. Through investigating different perceptions and forms of meaning-formation, I ask how we can shape a new practice of relating to our bodies and surroundings. Faces of the rain are like façades of all languages of the non-human that ask us to question the dualistic mindset, forming a new understanding and practice of human and non-human relationality.

Fluid Syntaxis

The Fluid Syntaxis research is a spatial investigation of different forms of meaning-formations in water. ‘Meaning-formations’ refer to forms of water-language that are written in multiple types of media. The research explores what it means to fix and what it means to be fluid. It embraces the constant tension and flow between an anthropocentric view and a relationality of being with, of becoming. Between identification and change, control and flow.

I explore memories of water and, in a broader sense, the language of the non-human, while embracing forgotten and rejected methodologies and their aesthetics. The anthropocentric approach of rationalising and categorising leads to a concept of what is rational, what belongs, what is right, and what is true. Pollution takes its toll on the environment of which we are part. But have we lost the respect and appreciation that we had for water in these last centuries? How do we care for our waters? What do they mean to us? This research is thus an investigation of how we can build a new understanding and practice of human and non-human relationality through making the memories of water visible.

In times of drastic climate change, water—the most intrinsic element to life on Earth, the element of change—is the element that can teach us to care for change. Thus, this research welcomes the constant interplay between fixing and flowing. What does it mean to be fluid, to change, and to become? What does it mean to fix, to control, and to categorise?

This research follows a Deleuzian rhizomatic mapping process^[1] in which questions do not result in answers but in new questions that lead to further mapping and questioning. This rhizomatic process teaches us to care for implications, to not be satisfied with fixed answers. Like the shapes of fluid water, answers are only temporary.

Water Memory and Fixing Methodologies

‘If water had a memory, the glacier would know about the sea, the river about the spring, the flower about the root.’^[2]

Water is intrinsic to life on earth. 71% of the Earth’s surface is water; oceans hold 96.7% of all water.^[3] Our bodies are made of approximately 60% water.^[4] Water is in the ground, water is in the air. Water knows three states: fluid, solid and vapour. Much is still to be discovered about the qualities and behaviour of this matter.

Researchers discovered that water has memory. Water has the ability to reflect its environment in the form of the formation of its molecular structure and so store information. Every element that gets in contact with water leaves a trace in its molecular structure. In its fluid state, water is in a continual movement in which its molecules are constantly connecting to and disconnecting from each other. This movement makes water able to dissolve and absorb other elements. In this fluid state, it would seem impossible to hold any recordings of its environment when molecules are connecting and disconnecting. But looking at the structure in this state, it is a formation in which molecules can leave and others take their place. The structure can change in different encounters.^[5]

The idea of water having memory was first raised in the 1980s by biologist Jacques Benveniste.^[6] He worked with homeopathic techniques in which formulas are diluted in water. A medicinal element was added to water, and the formula would be diluted multiple times. These dilutions would not contain the actual medicinal element anymore, but the water would remember it and could function as an actual medicine using only this memorisation. His research was picked up years later by Nobel-prize winning virologist Luc Montagnier. He applied Benveniste’s techniques to his own research by detecting and applying electromagnetic signals to water to teleport (or rather ‘recall’) DNA waves.^[7] Water was able to recall past information as if it was a memory.

Bernd Kröplin^[8] used single dried droplets from different environments to look at the structure of water. His research showed that water was able to adjust to its environment in its structural formation. Figure 1 shows that water from the same source but sampled by four different individuals, resulting in different water structures.

Masaru Emoto^[9] researched water memory by freezing water samples and observing the crystallisation that showed itself when defrosting. He exposed water to ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ emotional factors. Every sample showed unique crystals in which the positive emotions resulted in water with hexagonal crystallisation and the negative emotions in water with distorted crystallisation. Figures two and three show water that has been exposed to the music of Vivaldi. Figure two shows ‘The Four Seasons (Spring)’ and figure three shows ‘The Four Seasons (Summer).’^[10] Emoto explored the healing properties of water in relation to the human body, which consists of up to 60% water.^[11] He developed Hado Water, with which disharmonious energy is detected in the human body and balancing vibrations are transferred to water. By repeatedly drinking this water the body heals itself from within.^[12]

These pieces of research were critiqued by the mainstream scientific world. Benveniste approached the scientific paper Nature to publish his research ‘Human Basophil Degranulation Triggered by Very Highly Dilute Antiserum Against IgE.’^[13] After publishing the article, Nature set up an investigation to perform the procedure with Benveniste’s team. Nature’s team existed of Nature editor John Maddox, a sceptic illusionist James Randi, and a scientific fraud expert Walter Stewart. The experiments failed and the research was known as the Benveniste affair.^[14] Benveniste said on the matter: ‘Their amateurism, the climate they created in the five days of our ordeal, their inability to get to grips with our biological system and their judgement based on one dilution series dismiss this inquiry altogether.’^[15]

Maddox concluded that the results were taken blindly by Benveniste’s team, and that his team frauded their research. He admitted that his investigation had set out to detect scientific fraud.^[16] Still, Benveniste said: ‘Our publication of our paper was a cry for help to explain these puzzling results. Instead we got a fraud squad, an unsound (…) insult to respected scientists, who from the start and thereafter were treated as criminals.’^[17]

All research on water memory received harsh criticism from scientists, water memory would be nonsense.^[18] Thus, investigating these approaches to water memory would question not only the power relations within science but also, and most importantly, the methods that we are accustomed to taking as true and valid.

If water had a memory, would certain scientific research still be valid? What would water mean to us? How would our relationship with water change?

Written by the Waters #1

‘Written by the Waters #1’ is a material study that I based on the techniques of Bernd Kröplin to capture water memory. Waters from different environments are collected and single drops of the samples are dried on microscopic slides. The dried image that remains is a reflection of the water’s environmental encounters (its memory). Each encounter changes the water’s structure and shapes a unique appearance. The images show a history of the water’s environmental context that has been written down in a cryptic language. Light, temperature, containment, dissolved elements within, the person who touched the water. They are inscribed.

These formations are shaped by reflecting the surroundings, but they constantly change. Placing the same water in different conditions (in this case, the same tap water in differently shaped glasses in the same place and with the same time period) results in a different outcome, even though it is water from the same source.

Flow of Thought

The process of making an image comes with a sense of awareness of my own environment; the materials, the air, the light, the time, the space, the temperature, my hands, my breath, me as a human, me as a person, and how I feel. I see how these factors are reflected in the water with such sensitivity. The complexity of the relations between water and its environment formed a density that became out of reach of my rationality. The environmental factors become unmeasurable.

‘The desire of water to morph, shape-shift and facilitate the new persistently overflows any attempts of capture.’^[19]

How do I measure air when it is a moving thing, light when the sun shifts, time when it has already past and how I feel when I move? How do I measure the water’s history? These are all movements that blend and flow into one other.

Flow of Thought

Working on ‘Written by the Waters,’ I collected many water samples from many places, but the one sample that amazed me most was of rain. I tried multiple times to catch an image of the rain, but they never left an image that could be seen by the naked eye or the microscope. This raised many questions.

Does water clean itself from its history when it turns into rain? Are there no images because water reflects the empty skies? Does it hold any information at all, or is it invisible in the way I approach it?

If language could not be found in the way I examined rain by drying it, I would have to search for different techniques to capture the language of the rain.

Written by the Rain #1

To capture an image of rain, I used the photographic technique cyanotype, which develops by exposure to UV light and water. Leaving the light-sensitive emulsion set onto paper out in the rain so it is developed in, during and by the rain itself. Capturing the density of rain, the light that needs to go through rainclouds, wind and time. Each image tells the heaviness and density of the rain and the clouds, the light that depends on the type of season.

Written by the Rain #2

Coureur paper is sensitive to water and very porous. When it comes into contact with water, it wrinkles inextricably and easily rips. Different rains show different textures. The making of an image of the rain asks for two people holding the sheet of paper in the rain. Rain engraves the paper and wind rips the corners.

‘The effectiveness of the one without the other would be lost, since they feed each other’s definition.’^[20]

Is there rain without air? Rain without wind? Rain without gravity? Rain without temperature? There probably is rain without me.

Written by the Rain #3

October 2019 was a rainy month which turned my backyard green again. I followed the rain that sunk into the earth, into the roots of the plants and into the leaves. I collected leaves of every kind of plant in my backyard and pressed the rain out of the leaves onto paper. It created a new formation that the rain had taken, becoming a part of the plant. The images are arranged in the formation of my garden, like a map, in which they are placed in the spot they grow.

Fixing Fluidity

It seems that the only way to measure the fluid is to fix it. To take a drop and wait for it to dry until there is no water left. Only its traces. Only an image. I capture and preserve things that are not its true form anymore. I capture speech, not speaking. I fix fluidity.

What are the implications of capture? The implications of the fixed?

Aristotle and New Materialism

New materialism: ‘The term proposes a cultural theory that radically rethinks the dualisms so central to our (post-)modern thinking and always starts its analysis from how these oppositions (between nature and culture, matter and mind, the human and the inhuman) are produced in action itself.’^[21]

In new materialist thinking, it is not the essence that guarantees identity. It argues against Aristotle’s idea of identity, which determines a thing by its essence. New materialist thinkers ask: Where does essence come from and how is it determined? Does the essence have borders, beginnings and endings?

Aristotle’s epistemology is built upon sameness.^[22] This concept of sameness serves the idea of essence and the necessity of it. Aristotle’s philosophy is still deeply embedded in our societies today, in how we build categories. We think in the general (genus) and the specific (species). New materialist thinkers, following Deleuze’s philosophy, question this construct of sameness and the importance of categories.

‘At stake is the question of whether difference ought to be thought of in terms of prior categories or whether categories presuppose and illegitimately ignore a deeper form of difference.’^[23]

New materialism means thinking in differences, allowing for change and adaption to occur.

Flow of Thought

Of course, we now know what the concept of evolution means to our environment and ourselves. We know that it is not only the survival of the strongest and a competition between species. But even a symbiogenetic process of synthesis and mutation of heterogeneous organisms^[24] that merge and form alliances, becoming organic systems. We know that animal or plant species can cease to exist. We know of our own possible annihilation. But how do we look at matter? How do we look at water? Is water a species to us?

The genus of minerals and the species of water? Or the genus of water and the species of rain? Are all rains the same? Or are differences in rain to be omitted because they address to the properties of the essence of rain hood? Or the genus of rain and the species of raindrops? Or the genus of raindrops and the species of raindrop molecules? Or are they the species of water molecules?

And when rain ceases to be rain, what species does it become? Are the waters different or the same? Singular or shared? Common or individual? Identified or unknowable? Fluid or a Syntaxis?

Language of Bodies

We use our verbal language every day, maybe even every second in our minds. We do not think about it, we think in it. It is how we learn, communicate, gossip. There are so many languages that we can learn and even translate, crossovers between languages. Could we even say that language is our ‘hallmark of being human’?^[25] Would we be human without our human language? Are humans capable of speaking or understanding non-human languages?

Language: ‘A body of words and the systems for their use common to a people who are of the same community or nation, the same geographical area, or the same cultural tradition.’^[26]

The meaning of language is mostly concentrated around human connotative verbal language. This language has become vital to building our relations to the world around us. Language is also seen as ‘any system of formalised symbols, signs, sounds, gestures, or the like, used or conceived as a means of communicating thought, emotion, etc.,’^[27] and is therefore also ‘connected to the means of communication used by animals.’^[28] Language is an accepted realm to the world of the human and the animal. Humans and animals both speak in verbal and body language. Mothers calling their children can send out the same meaning, in their own language, human or animal. Both verbal and body language. This language is intended; it is created for its meaning to be understood. To travel between cognitions.

Humans and animals also speak in languages such as scent, touch and taste language. Aside from pheromonal exchanges, without telling or seeing we can taste, smell and feel if our food is good to eat. Is that a conversation, when food tastes bad which means we should not eat it? Is it a conversation with ourselves, our taste, smell and touch, or a conversation with our food?

From mind to mind, but what if there is no cognition, can there be language? In the book The Language of Plants, Monica Gagliano writes about the communicational exchanges between plants and their environments:

‘By rapidly changing the shape and colour of its pollinated flowers and thus reducing their attractiveness, this plant directs pollinators to the unvisited flowers to be pollinated.’^[29]

This is meaning-exchange between cognition and non-cognition. Still, a plant is a living thing that seeks the best sunlight to grow. Is seeking sunlight a wish? Do our own bodies tell us to seek sunlight? And is a plant seeking the best sunlight having a conversation? With sunlight? If so, does the sunlight say what is best or the plant? And when dark clouds cover the sun, did it tell the plant about a storm? Dark clouds mean rain, right?

‘There is a language older by far and deeper than words. It is the language of bodies, of body on body, wind on snow, rain on trees, wave on stone. It is the language of dream, gesture, symbol, memory. We have forgotten this language. We do not even remember that it exists.’^[30]

The language of the waters in the cryptic structures. The language of the rain onto paper. The language of the juices in plants. The language of the tap water in our mouths. Speaking in a silent language, water tells about its encounters.

Flow of Thought

I start a conversation when I touch water.

It is a conversation in which the water ripples and temperature is felt through skin. It is a conversation about movement and sensing.

Frozen Morning Dew

Frozen Morning Dew is a short film on a collector of specialties of frozen morning dew. Changing ice into liquid, into breath. Frozen fingers. Becoming frozen dew. Mapping capacities of capture. Will it stop being frozen morning dew when captured? In my mouth to change, in a bottle to remain? Can I take it? Keep it? Preserve it?

Flow of Thought

When I drink the river’s water, it becomes a part of me. But if I drown, do I become part of the river? And when I drink, do I drown the river or does the river drink me when I drown?

Morphogenic Times

There have been given many names for the time we live in: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene, Plantationocene, Gynocene.^[31] These are attempts to identify a time of change, a time of times. The currently most used term is Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene^[32] states that the human is the primary cause of major permanent planetary change and has become a geological force in its own right.^[33] That our human identity is carved in the tectonics and aquatics. But what could be dangerous about the Anthropocene?^[34] That by the godly minds of the human it can be restored and maybe even erased. That the ones with clean hands are not to blame. That our bodies are pure. That infections are disgraceful. That human language is complete. That it is the sacred task of the wise Anthropos to decide the Earth’s fate. Human, all too human.^[35] Does the human want to save itself? Is saving other species and restoring nature an act of saving earth or an act of sustaining the human image? Is anthropocentrism dangerous in times of climatic change?

‘But if we are not anthropocentric, then who are we?’^[36]

Can fluidity be an answer to navigation in times of change? If I only knew fluidity, would I be lost? Is water lost? What could we learn from the waters? Can water be an inspiration to us? An inspiration of morphogenesis, of trans-corporeality? Of how the agencies of our environment and bodies are perpetually interconnected with the movements and flows of other substances.^[37] That our bodies are not pure, and they never have been. They have always been constantly infected and contaminated by our surroundings in order to adapt and mutate.

The ever-ongoing change of water amazes me in how the rain changes the dry air, the ground to mud, to plant juice, the plant to grow, to vapor, to clouds, the sunlight to shadow, to snow, the warmth to cold, to ice, the lake to be frozen, to melt… It morphs, it morphs, it morphs…

‘Bodies constantly mingle and adapt to their surroundings. They blur trans-beings’ boundaries and reveal unexplored forms of relationality, communication and intelligence.’

Being in this entanglement of the mess of life and its fluidity, where do bodies end?’^[38]

Where do bodies end? Does my body end at my skin? Does it end at my mouth? Is the air inside my lungs mine? Our bodies are mostly made of water. Our bodies change, our surroundings change. And as we move through our watery world with our watery bodies, should we be afraid to drown or should we be afraid of desiccation, drought, thirst?^[39]

In Fluidity

How do we navigate in a fluid world with our fluid bodies? Can we trust our memory? Our language? Purity? What do they mean? Who would I become and what would I believe if I would acknowledge that the unknown and unrelated are touching me, flowing through me, that they have always been within me?

‘“Who am I?”

Now I can clearly answer that question: “I am water.”’^[40]

What does it mean to be water, to have a watery body, to be ever-changing, morphing, shape-shifting? What can water teach us in times of change? Can we learn its language? Can we learn to speak a non-syntactic language? And if we do, how will our beliefs and values change? How will our conversations change? Our conversations with each other, with water, with our environment, with our own bodies?

To be water means to keep asking questions. The continuum of fluid change makes the comfortable answer temporary. It means to flow with doubt and suspense, in a continuous search.

Figures

Figure 1:

Kröplin, Bernd, ‘The Impact of Individuals on Water.’ The World in a Drop. Accessed November 6, 2019. https://www.worldinadrop-shop.com/en_US.

Figure 2:

Emoto, Masaru, “The Four Seasons – Spring” Vivaldi. Office Masaru Emoto. Accessed November 11, 2019. https://www.masaru-emoto.net/en/crystal/.

Figure 3:

Emoto, Masaru, ‘The Four Seasons – Summer’ Vivaldi. Office Masaru Emoto. Accessed November 11, 2019. https://www.masaru-emoto.net/en/crystal/.

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^[1] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Rizoom: een Inleiding (Utrecht: Uitgeverij Rizoom, 1998).

^[2] Bernd Kröplin, The World in a Drop, trans. Elke Pahl(Barcelona: CIMNE, 2016), p. 13.

^[3] NGWA, The Ground Water Association, ‘Information on Earth’s Water,’ accessed November 15, 2019. https://www.ngwa.org/what-is-groundwater/About-groundwater/information-on-earths-water.

^[4] Brandon Specktor, ‘How Much Water Do You Really Need to Drink?’ Live Science, accessed November 15, 2019. https://www.livescience.com/61353-how-much-water-you-really-need-drink.html.

^[5] Bernd Kröplin, Water has Memory II, World in a Drop (Regine Henschel, 2017).

^[6] Jacques Benveniste, Ma Vérité sur la Mémoire de l’Eau (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005).

^[7] Luc Montagnier et al., ‘DNA waves and Water.’ Journal of Physics: Conference Series 306 (2007).

^[8] The World in a Drop, accessed November 6, 2019, https://www.worldinadrop-shop.com/en_US.

^[9] Water Crystals in Motion, ‘Messages from Water,’ Video Production Committee, Nihon Eiga Shinsya Co, Ltd.

^[10] Office Masaru Emoto, accessed November 11, 2019, https://www.masaru-emoto.net/en/crystal/.

^[11] Emoto, Masaru et al., ‘Double-Blind Test of the Effects of Distant Intention on Water Crystal Formation,’ EXPLORE: The Journal of Science and Healing 2, No. 5 (2006): p. 408.

^[12] Emoto, Masaru,‘Healing with Water,’ The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 10, No. 1 (2004): p. 20.

^[13] Benveniste Jacques, et al., ‘Human Basophil Degranulation Triggered by Very Highly Dilute Antiserum Against IgE.’ Nature 333 (1988).

^[14] ‘Hexagonal Water,’ accessed November 16, 2019, https://hexagonalwater.com/j__benveniste.html.

^[15] Jacques Benveniste, ‘Dr Jacques Benveniste Replies,’ Nature 334 (1988), p. 291.

^[16] Jacques Benveniste, ‘Benveniste on Nature Investigation,’ Nature 241 (1988), p. 1028.

^[17] Jacques Benveniste, ‘Benveniste on the Benveniste Affair,’ Nature 335 (1988), p. 759.

^[18] Masaru Emoto,‘Healing with Water,’ The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 10, No. 1 (2004), p. 20.

^[19] Henriette Gunkel, et al. (eds.), Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 89.

^[20] Marc Boumeester, The Desire of the Medium (Arnhem: ArtEZ Press, 2017), p. 142.

^[21] Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies (Michigan: Open Humanities Press, 2012), p. 93.

^[22] Manuel DeLanda, Deleuze and the New Materialism 1, No. 11 (Saas-Fee: European Graduate School Video Lectures, 2009), 9.53.

^[23] Williams, James, Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 59.

^[24] Bois Kozo-Polyansky, Symbiogenesis: A New Principle of Evolution. Trans. Victor Fet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 122.

^[25] Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan and Patricia Vieira (eds.), The Language of Plants (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), p. 90.

^[26] Dictionary.com, s.v. ‘Language.’ Accessed November 3, 2019. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/language?s=t.

^[27] Ibid.

^[28] Ibid.

^[29] Gagliano et al 2017, p. 90.

^[30] Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words (Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing Co., 2000), p. 7.

^[31] T.J. Demos, Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Gynocene; The Many Names of Resistance. Fotomuseum, 2015. https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/articles/27011_welcome_to_the_anthropocene.

^[32] ‘Anthropocene,’ accessed December 5, 2019, http://www.anthropocene.info/index.php.

^[33] Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal, Nick de Pencier (dirs), Anthropocene: The Human Epoch. 2018.

^[34] Agnieszka Wolodzko, How on Earth: What’s Wrong with the Anthropocene? (Enschede: Studium Generale ArtEZ, 2019).

^[35] Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 [1878]).

^[36] Sjoerd van Oevelen, Mapping the Anthropocene (Enschede: AKI ArtEZ Enschede, AKI Week, 2019).

^[37] Stacy Alaimo, ‘States of Suspension: Trans-corporeality at Sea,’ Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19, No. 3 (2012), p. 476.

^[38] Sonja Bäumel, Nourishment, Xenobodies in Mutation (Enschede: TETEM, 2019).

^[39] Alaimo 2012, p. 476.

^[40] Masaru Emoto. The Shape of Love (New York: Doubleday, 2007) p. 31.