Dasein is a yearlong process in which I have made images of my own aura, or energy field, in order to form a collection of evidence – of the past, present, and future. The images are descriptors of what has happened in my own life but also the pieces of a system with which to explain something inexplicable. The German term dasein roughly translates to “being there” or “presence” but with an emphasis on the anxiety of being. The works, broken up into 26 images (an aura for every two weeks in a year) and a video, are a set of impossibilities. The aura is a belief and a bridge between the physical and emotional. The image is formed from a thermal reading of the subject’s hands transferred to light and film. Sympathetic magic holds a certain power – this hand has been read, its touch transferred to another’s touch – like affects like. The spiritual becomes science and the scientific becomes spiritual. In a Lacanian-Marxist theory of ideology, you believe through your material practices, which means that you can believe even if you have a cynical relationship toward those practices. We need but do not need, want but do not want; we toe the line looking to the “other” for answers while weighing it with skepticism and writing it off, only to return to vague proclamations to see where we fit. The aura as photograph is a visualization of the desire to believe.
