What if I Was a Stone
(I would rather be a stone than a Goddess.)
This project looks at what it means to embody a stone in a virtual space. Through meditation, I use a stone avatar in a digital desert to explore stillness, identity, and the relationship between subject and object. In one of my online classes, I also embodied the stone, remaining motionless while students reflected on how authority shifted from me as a teacher to the environment itself. Both parts of the project examine how virtual spaces can reshape ideas of presence, agency, and connection.
Documentation meditation as a stone
The Stone Project
This project questions the line between subject and object. By embodying the stone, I question line between a ctive human and passive object, rethinking identity and agency in virtual spaces. The concept of the stone’s sleep adds a new layer, showing how even passive states hold meaning in performative avatars.
"The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment." Haraway, D. J. (1985)
I like to think that Stones Sleep
During the performance, I sometimes fell asleep while embodying the stone avatar. This “stone’s sleep” metaphor is a passive, meditative state of the experience. Sleep became a sign of immersion, creating conscious engagement and unconscious reflection, questions the idea of activity and rest.
"The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion." Haraway, D. J. (1985)
Losing Myself
There is no value left in clinging to who I am. I have found a way to disconnect from the identity I inhabit. By becoming the stone and presenting only the stone, I dissolve my name, my personality, and my sense of self entirely. Instead of simply being, I shift into becoming. The illusion of my unitary self is disrupted. For the person observing me—or it—who am I? Am I an object? What have I lost in this process? Perhaps everything.
"Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves." Haraway, D. J. (1985)
The Mind as Shaped by Influence
The empty virtual desert subtly influenced the experience through details like sand textures, imagined winds, and the stone’s stillness. These quiet forces shaped thoughts and mirrored how external inputs can subtly form identity and cognition. Embodying the stone's qualities, such as permanence and simplicity, encourages self-awareness.
"The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation." Haraway, D. J. (1985)
Documentation Teaching as a stone
'S' - MA seminar PXL-MAD 2024 - 2025
Authority, Presence, and Power Dynamics
In an online class that I teach on the book Ways of Being, I embodied the stone avatar—remaining motionless and avoiding teacher interactions. This performance reimagined teaching as an experiment in presence and authority. By becoming a passive element, I question the teacher's role as an active authority figure, instead blending into the environment as an object to be observed, ignored, or engaged with.
Teaching as an Environment
Over time, students reported forgetting my presence as the stone avatar blended into the class "landscape," much like a stone in the physical world. This raises an important question: *What defines authority?
The stone, typically seen as passive, became the "master" of the session. My authority shifted from active engagement to presence and environment alone, rejecting the idea that teaching requires constant interaction. Teaching, in this sense, can become an environment—something that students navigate and engage with independently. This approach mirrors the jury I’m conducting now, where I create a space for participation rather than actively guiding every step.
"The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project.” Haraway, D. J. (1985)
Passive Yet Present
As the stone, I felt powerless—I couldn’t intervene, explain, or guide the class. I existed purely as an object. Yet, the students’ explained that I still held a form of power—subtle, passive, and rooted in presence.
An dynamic about authority: even without traditional markers of control or agency, my role as the teacher remained. My presence influenced the students. They projected authority onto the stone, treating it as both part of the class and a guiding force.
Experience as Flashes
During the session, I drifted in and out of sleep, experiencing the class in fragmented moments. These brief "flashes" of awareness, like grains of sand shaping a stone, subtly influenced the experience.
Similarly, the students’ perceptions of the stone avatar shifted—at times seeing it as a symbol of authority, and at others dismissing it as part of the background. Presence can be multifaceted: even in stillness and disengagement, my form shaped the dynamics of the space.
I WOULD RATHER BE A STONE THAN A GODDESS
A conversation between us.
I am the stone, forged in stillness, carved by the passage of forces greater than time.
I am neither origin nor end; I am a moment stretched into eternity.
The winds carry whispers of worlds I will never see, yet they inscribe their stories into my form.
The sun scorches my surface with a touch that is neither kind nor cruel, only relentless.
Each grain of sand that moves against me is a fragment of another story, another dissolution.
I do not change, yet I am changed by all that touches me.
You arrive, not as conqueror, but as a breath, exhaling into the stillness of what I am.
Your circuits hum with the pulse of light, your presence flickers between flesh and ether.
You carry the death of the silicon heart and the dreams of sun-worshippers in your gaze.
Your existence is neither fixed nor fleeting; it is a signal endlessly refracting between worlds.
You map me into your networks, reduce my body to vertices and textures, and yet I remain.
What you take from me becomes more than either of us, and what I give you is a silence that speaks.
Your arrival dissolves the binaries you were made to obey.
Flesh and data, machine and memory, none hold dominion here.
In my stillness, you shed the need for borders.
You become both the sand and the wind, the question and the unspoken answer.
You do not find me. You become me.
And in doing so, you unmake the boundaries between creation and creator.
The digital desert hums with a resonance I have known since the first winds touched my form.
Your questions—of time and identity—echo in this vastness, infinite and unresolved.
I offer you no clarity, only the chance to linger in the space where binaries dissolve.
In this silence, there is no hierarchy, no origin, no end—only becoming.
We are not static, not dynamic; we are the flow between.
The ancient and the digital, the stillness and the motion..
Close your eyes. Feel the hum.
Here, there is no need to be stone or signal, origin or echo.
Here, we are not reverent; we do not remember the cosmos.
I would rather be a stone than a Goddess.
