Writing an application to EGS. The fourth question concerns an extrapolation of my submitted work samples, an analysis of a painting by Clifford Still. This is an attempt to write through a method I have devise. We think of painting as a predominantly visual experience with analytical thought coming secondarily, if at all, and likewise consider writing about art to be a critical experience conceptualizing the experience of seeing rather than a process of vision itself. I write as an artist - I am interested in philosophy but do not hold allegiance to the discipline. I prioritize the intelligence of the senses, but I still need to make sense of them, to reconcile them my vision with the knowledge inherited from other disciplinary observations. We are more than constellations of feeling and it is of profound importance to attempt to transmit the profundity of our subjective experiences, even if only as symbolic attempt, for sake of poetic enrichment. I maintain that artworks perform a potential beyond the scope of philosophy of complicating and amplifying our experiences through the senses, not merely confined to linguistic models and abstract concepts: art is more than an enactment of philosophical theories, not literally performed texts, and related primarily to the body, the haptic. This is why I have devised a way of working across media and disciplines, attempting to engage all of the senses to explore the possibilities of new modes of sense, to thoroughly activate the mind and body as a unified system. In this particular essay I am having a visual experience while attempting to expand my encounter with a painting into a more holisitic understanding of vision: to see the painting and see the painting seeing me, both immersed in a field of vision even while recognizing the painting consumes/fills my entire field of vision, becoming the entirety of my current cosmos, or is it I or my eye that becomes the center of the cosmos for the painting, becoming activated as I remain entranced in seeing it? My work - the opera - is a direct continuation of such a scenario. I would like to treat every media employed as an opportunity to break open - even destructively - and then piece back together - in acknowledgement of their fluiditiy - each sense and the objects of those senses, the artistic practices which attend to the reflexive experience of sensing, and the philosophical capacity to comprehend the proprioception and communicate our experience across the abyss separating the entities, beings, and perspectives of populating the field. I ask questions which inform my artistic process, but hope to also enact these questions as praxis, deferring back to philosophy the response-ability to make sense of my senses, not to legitimate so much as enunciate the ineffable threshold defined by the painting on hanging on the wall: a portal to another dimension. It was soon after writing this essay that I realized the need to depart from the 2D picture plane in order to explore the "expanded field" of considerations. I could no longer merely consider the painting on the wall as an inert object but an active and activating point of reference, always already a locus of relation to the wall, to the eye, to the museum architecture and corporeal infrastructure, of the maker and the viewer, all as support of its hanging on the wall and as a dynamic node of oscillatory experience. My own field then came into question: just as I considered the painting on the wall in necessary relation to my own being, my being in turn became the object to be scrutinized, the self as a model needing to be unpacked into the diaphanous atmosphere my I and eyes are swimming around in. My trajectory of continued research is located there, here, in, the time-space coordination of my self differentiating from the field. It has taken me this long to articulate a project which has been able to align my artistic and philosophical trajectories in such a manner where form and content collide into a convergence of meanings: not empty speculations or strictly superficial aesthetic enjoyment but existential questions concerning the relation between these attributes, not merely illustrating concepts or performing texts. Post-destruction, with all the pieces laid out, trying to figure out how to put the puzzle of awareness back together, a unified understanding of how they work, of how work works.