“I’m inclined to talk about what I believe about existence. I think that existence is first and fundamentally energy-based, energy- and frequency-based, and when you break down matter into its components, eventually, you get to frequencies, to energy. I think this is also kind of a cheesy thing to say, like all the spiritual gurus, about frequency and energy, but they are onto something, scientifically.

I believe that everything is made of energy; that we are first energetic beings and that everything in this 3D reality consists of energetic components… if we stopped seeing the boundaries between ourselves as bodies and inanimate objects like a wall or a rock or an animal, we would see that we are made of the same materials with the same ingredients that go into creating this recipe that is ‘Alice’ or this recipe that is ‘Monica’, this recipe that is the kitchen counter, or the floor. The recipe is different, but the ingredients, I think, are a lot of the same things.

There is a plethora of things we can do to work with that knowledge. This is also why I am very attracted to ANT, actor-network theory, because I love de-centering the human perspective and seeing the world through a way that puts us not as the most important thing, how we characterise the world is not the most important thing, so… How can we understand the world if we do not look at it through human eyes, or eyes at all – what if we experienced the world differently? I also like about ANT that it acknowledges how everything has agency, everything has agency in my worldview. Everything has energy, so it has frequency, it has the ability to do something, to enact.”

It took me a long time to come up with a proper idea for Monica's smallest. Since everything is made of the same, would it even matter what I made Monica's smallest out of? First, I was thinking of painting a still life showing a kitchen counter, a recipe, an ant crawling on top of it... and for us co-creators to intra-act with this little still life (where still life gets another layer of meaning, because even inert things are still life in the sense that they a composed of energy and have agency like everything else). I found this idea very intruguing and wrote about one metre about it (you can the gist of it below if you want).

Then, I decided to make it out of clay. Shaping different figures out of clay, everything made of the same matter. Perceiving life through touch, not through eyes. But the clay proved to have too much agency directed against my artistic idea. Not that I could not have played with that and integrated it into the concept, but in the end, the tiny ant and the tiny cup on the kitchen counter fell apart and it just looked a little sad.

"How can we understand the world if we do not look at it through [...] eyes at all [...]? ANT [...] acknowledges how everything [...] has the ability to do something.” Now, Monica's smallest consists of a kneadable anthill. You can perceive it without your eyes, touching the homogenous mass that represents how everything is made of the same components, and you can keep shaping it, interacting with it as you become part of the actor-network constituting co-creator, smallest, Monica's belief, and more.

At its centre is a little painted ant. Does a painted ant consist of the same components as a real ant?

Addendum: What is ANT?

Of course, you can google it! But here is a short wrap-up in my own words: Actor-network theory is a perspective on the world that highlights the relations between humans, technology, objects, animals – basically between any discernible entity, and considers them networks of action that constitute themselves through influencing each other, through "power" relationships (in French, this makes a bit more sense, it would be relationships of "pouvoir", of the ability to influence other entities). These connections are not necessarily hierarchically caused by humans. Recalcitrant matter (like the clay), measurement tools (like a microscope), or stubborn computer programmes causing crashes shape reality in relation to all entities connected to them.

The gist of one metre:

Monica's smallest takes me back to Karen Barad’s idea of intra-action. How everything intra-acts with everything. Which also raises the questions of boundaries and delineations. And so on. Now this is the time where I would be very happy to create a picture that does indeed say more than a thousand words, because these mind-boggling concepts and ideas seem to have too many dimensions to explain them in the linearity of a text. But what is text, after all, if not yet another picture in which we derive meaning from perceived (word and letter) entities?

It is one of the things that I have never understood, this idea that everything is ultimately made of the same stuff. I could follow so far as to say, alright, maybe of the same chemical components in different ratios etc. But then it would not be the same.

Re-reading Monica’s belief after some months coincided with me studying colour theory. The most astonishing one I found was Küppers’ theory. He explains that colours do not exist per se, but that our eyes as sensory organs “code” light frequency information which the brain “decodes” into what we refer to as colours. Küppers’ theory is built on the fundamental distinction between energy radiation and matter. Energy radiation with a wavelength between 400 and 700 nm is what we call “light”. Said light gets partly absorbed by matter, i.e., molecular structures. The not-absorbed light hits our eyes and then gets translated into colour perception. But this theory assumes there is at least two basic entities: Energy and matter.

But what if there is no such thing as “matter”, if what we call “matter” is just energy, and the real difference hence would not be between light and matter, but between different energy densities? I will stop my thoughts here and call you, dear co-creator, to continue, correct, amplify, and please do share what you know about this with us here.

Today (again some weeks later), I thought: There is only matter. Or energy. Colour is just the effect of matter. Matter is very slow energy.

P.S.: Monica's belief also reminded me of a the essay “What is it like to be a bat?” by American philosopher Thomas Nagel.

P.P.S.: I once went to a museum where a painting was translated into a 3D shape for blind people. The person I was visiting the museum with saw this before I saw it, and asked me to close my eyes before seeing the painting and first trying out the blind 3D translation. And to tell the colours I feel. I felt the colours! I spoke what I was feeling and it was correct.