Singular-Plural video installation by David Green

A digital video installation by Otago Polytechnic lecturer David Green.

“The plurality of beings is at the foundation of Being.”
Jean-Luc Nancy (1940-2021)

Singular-Plural asks how do we live properly entangled.

The fragile skin of the world holds within itself a turbulent continuity, an interdependent body sharing the constraints of time and space. Growth and collapse intermingle; life with death push and pull, waves roiling through the web. Life inhabits matter, brings it into play, sloughs it off, crashes into rest, sending ripples in all directions. Every rolling day and its trailing night quicken these exchanges. Bodies within bodies among bodies, we, the plural, pulse through every hospitable wavelength, all within this one, thin, vibrant skin.

But what of the sentient, self-alienating ones, when the only possibility of Being is being with? We all drink, we all eat, we all must acquire and release.

Inextricably captured in the same web, of the same lineage, we toy with the lives of others at every scale. Dizzily entwined, yet speculatively singular, our every touch reverberates through the whole body.