Practice-Based Lexicon

Activated art — art that exists: that has generated a discernible event in at least one person's perceptual, cognitive, somatic, or relational field — one that meaningfully reorganises a horizon of what feels possible, noticeable, or doable, carries some affective or normative charge however subtle, and leaves at least a minimal trace or potential to persist or propagate beyond the immediate moment. Distinct from significant art, which activates and is subsequently discovered — by time and history — to have expanded the field. Activation is verifiable in principle; Significance is not.

Activation — the operation through which a configured work crosses the threshold from virtuality to actuality. The decisive condition in the CARPs model and the only one that produces the work's existence as an event in the world. Activation occurs when the configured work generates a discernible event that meaningfully reorganises the receiver's perceptual, cognitive, somatic, or relational field — altering a horizon of what feels possible or meaningful, carrying affective or normative charge however subtle, and leaving at least a minimal trace or potential to persist or propagate. Not every fleeting perceptual shift qualifies: the distinction between trivial flicker and operative reorganisation is the model's practical threshold. In the most radical cases — self-activation, improvised performance — Creation and Activation collapse into a single gesture: the work activates in the very moment and body of its making, without passing through the virtuality the sequential model assumes. Patronage selects, Creation configures, Recognition consecrates — but only Activation makes the work real. See also: modes of activation, cascading activation, latency, self-activation, the field.

CARPs — the name of the Invisual Art activation model. The acronym stands for Creation, Activation, Recognition, Patronage. The sequential logic of the model runs P → C → A → R: Patronage selects, Creation configures, Activation actualises, Recognition consecrates. In that order the acronym would read PCAR — precise but inert. The model is instead called CARPs, named by the animal rather than the procedure. The carp is a figure of perseverance: it moves upstream, against the current, without asking permission from the systems it crosses. This is the model's own posture — not a theory that masters art from above, but a framework willing to swim against the dominant currents of societal assumption, object ontology, institutional theory, and the patronage-recognition loop. The lowercase s does not name a fifth condition symmetrical with the other four — it marks what the model opens onto rather than where it ends: the question of Significance, which the model cannot answer and does not pretend to. CARP closes. The s keeps it open.

Active witnessing — the condition of engaged, agentive perception that the practice invites and that poetic mobility makes possible. Active witnessing is the opposite of perceptual capture: it is the state of seeing with awareness of the conditions through which one sees — attending not only to what is present but to the frameworks that determine what can appear as present at all. Active witnessing is not a critical distance from the world but a transformed quality of presence within it: to look again, and refuse to look away. See also: poetic mobility, radical perception, agentivity.

Agentivity — the capacity to act, choose, and become from a position of genuine freedom rather than determined response. Agentivity is what perceptual capture forecloses and what the practice works to restore. It is not the absence of constraint — no existence is without constraint — but the awareness of constraint as constraint: the ability to inhabit a framework without being wholly determined by it. Agentivity is the existential dimension of poetic mobility: the freedom not only to perceive differently but to act, think, and become differently as a result. See also: poetic mobility, active witnessing, existential contribution.

Active witnessing — the condition of engaged, agentive perception that the practice invites and that poetic mobility makes possible. Active witnessing is the opposite of perceptual capture: it is the state of seeing with awareness of the conditions through which one sees — attending not only to what is present but to the frameworks that determine what can appear as present at all. Active witnessing is not a critical distance from the world but a transformed quality of presence within it: not simply to look at what we are shown, but to witness what we are told to behold. See also: poetic mobility, radical perception, agentivity.

Agentivity — the capacity to act, choose, and become from a position of genuine freedom rather than determined response. Agentivity is what perceptual capture forecloses and what the practice works to restore. It is not the absence of constraint — no existence is without constraint — but the awareness of constraint as constraint: the ability to inhabit a framework without being wholly determined by it. Agentivity is the existential dimension of poetic mobility: the freedom not only to perceive differently but to act, think, and become differently as a result. See also: poetic mobility, active witnessing, existential contribution.

Apocryphal artefact — an object, text, or manuscript that occupies the threshold between the fictitious and the real without resolving it. An apocryphal artefact is not simply false — it operates with the weight and authority of the real while acknowledging or concealing its own constructed status. The Fictitious Codex of St. Elijah is the paradigm case: a manufactured manuscript that functions as a genuine artefact of hidden knowledge precisely because the line between fiction and fact has become undecidable. The apocryphal artefact is the material form through which the Law of Fictional Attribution operates. See also: Law of Fictional Attribution, f(r)ictionality, speculative intervention.

Belief (Performative Protocols) — in the context of Performative Protocols, belief is not required for a protocol to operate. Repetition, form, and exposure are sufficient. A protocol does not ask to be believed — only encountered. Its effects are produced by the structures of form and staging it deploys, not by the subject's conscious assent. This is its most consequential and most dangerous property. Related to but distinct from cognitive activation in the CARPs model: where cognitive activation requires a mental event in the receiver, a Performative Protocol can produce effects below the threshold of conscious awareness. See also: performative protocol, perceptual capture, black magic.

Black magic — any system that influences without consent, diminishes agency, or obstructs refusal. Adapted from Clarke's third law of technology — any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic — the concept names the ethical condition of systems that operate below the threshold of visibility: epistemological, political, algorithmic, emotional. When a system is indistinguishable from the structure of reality itself, its effects cannot be refused because they cannot be seen. Black magic is the antagonist the practice works against. F(r)ictional protocols, unspelling, and dissidance are its counters. See also: perceptual capture, invisuality, unspelling, f(r)ictionality.

Cascading activation — a structural principle describing works that activate not through a single mode but through a sequence of modes, each triggering the next. In cascading activation, the work's full existence is constituted by the sequence rather than by any single operation. I Was Never Here is the model's paradigm case: cognitive dissolution (the cup's apparent solidity destabilised) triggers relational propagation (the unspelling moves outward from object to viewer to artist to institution), and the full activation is the movement of that cascade through the field of presence the work occasions. Cascading activation is not an additional mode in the typology but a structural principle describing how modes interact when a work is sufficiently operative. In this practice, it is a recurring and defining feature.

Consecration — the operation through which Recognition confers sanctioned status on an activated work within a cultural field. Consecration does not produce existence but legibility: it makes the work circulable, transmissible, and inscribable within art-historical discourse. The term is Bourdieu's, and its use here is deliberate: consecration names the operation through which the art system reproduces its own authority by selectively endorsing what its patronage structures have already selected. Consecration amplifies, stabilises, and historicises. But it does not generate the event itself. Recognition consecrates but does not constitute.

Creation — the condition of formation in the CARPs model. The process through which what Patronage has selected moves from potentiality toward configuration — acquiring structure, material, gesture, instruction, or trace. Creation may be material or immaterial: it may produce a physical object, a score, a set of instructions, a performance, a situation, a conversation, or a concept. What matters is not the substrate but the ontological function: Creation gives the work its specific configuration through which it will — if ever activated — enter the world. Creation configures but does not actualise. See also: virtuality, latency.

Dissidance — the practice of entering dominant systems, narratives, and perceptual frameworks not in order to oppose them from outside but to move through them, resonate within them, and displace them from within. A portmanteau of dissidence and dance, dissidance names a form of resistance that is kinetic rather than oppositional: it introduces play, decentring, and instability into what presents itself as fixed, self-evident, or inevitable. To dissidance reality is to unspell it — not by replacing one narrative with another, but by restoring the openness that precedes any fixed narrative. Dissidance operates through resonance: with oneself, with the other, with the world. It does not impose a vision. It opens spaces of re-enchantment, agency, and existential mobility. The practice from which it emerges seeks perpetually, from inner necessity, an existential contribution — chercher le sens comme nécessité ontologique. See also: f(r)ictionality, unspelling, poetic mobility, poetic displacement, démarabouter.

Degree of Enactment — a dimension of the Performative Protocols framework measuring the intensity with which a protocol is staged. Degree of Enactment is cumulative across three sub-dimensions: material investment (the quality, cost, and perceived value of the protocol's physical form), spatial commitment (where and how the protocol is deployed relative to the body and the world), and ritual and temporal investment (the degree of formalisation through ceremony, repetition, duration, or witnesses). Degree of Enactment is independent of Potency: a protocol of high potency may be enacted minimally; a protocol of low potency may be enacted with great ceremony. See also: potency, performative protocol.

Démarabouter — to undo an enchantment; to loosen the hold of a belief, a doctrine, or a perceptual framework that has calcified into self-evidence. From the Francophone West African tradition of the marabout — a figure of spiritual authority whose words and acts can bind as well as release. To démarabouter is to perform the inverse operation: not to bind but to unbind, not to enchant but to dissolve the enchantment. In the context of this practice, démarabouter names the ethical and aesthetic commitment to desserrer les envoûtements — to release what has been fixed, dogmatised, or rendered immobile — without substituting a new doctrine in its place. Related to unspelling, dissidance, and the broader logic of invisual practice as a practice of liberation without prescription. See also: dissidance, unspelling, poetic mobility.

Epistemic suspension — the state produced by a desinstallation: the condition in which the frameworks through which perception organises reality are rendered visible, available for examination, and momentarily inoperative. Epistemic suspension is not confusion, disorientation, or nihilism — it is a precise and purposefully produced condition, analogous to pausing rather than deleting a piece of software. In this suspended state, the receiver recovers what the installed frameworks had foreclosed: the awareness that what they see, believe, and take as self-evident is a construction — historically conditioned, culturally maintained, and therefore revisable. Epistemic suspension is the threshold of poetic mobility: it does not restore mobility by itself, but clears the ground on which mobility becomes possible again. See also: desinstallation, unspelling, poetic mobility, cognitive friction.

Existential contribution — the criterion by which the significance of an activated work may eventually be judged: whether it has added something irreducible to the possibilities of human existence. An existential contribution is not limited to the domain of art — it operates at the scale of what human beings can perceive, think, feel, relate, and become. Art is one domain in which existential contributions occur, not the privileged or exclusive one. An existential contribution cannot be assessed at the moment of its making. It is what time — slowly, incompletely, and often posthumously — discovers that a work, a gesture, a practice, or an act has made possible that was not possible before it existed. The paradigm case need not be artistic: Kotoku Wamura, mayor of the small Japanese village of Fudai, spent what many considered an absurd sum building a massive floodgate that was widely ridiculed. When the 2011 tsunami struck, the gate held and the village was saved while surrounding communities were devastated. Wamura's act — dismissed in his lifetime as disproportionate and wasteful — proved to be an existential contribution of the most literal kind: it made the continued existence of an entire community possible. Art, at its most significant, operates in the same register: not decorating existence but expanding what existence can be or survive.

The field — the historically open and expandable set of what art can be or do. Not a fixed category but a boundary condition: the accumulated horizon of art's ontological possibilities at any given moment. Activation always inhabits the field. Significant art expands it. The field is distinct from the History of Art: it includes all activations, recognised or not, and its boundaries are moved by works that the History of Art may never record. See also: History of Art / history of art, Significance.

History of Art / history of art — a distinction the model requires and maintains typographically. History of Art (capitalised) names the institutional, canonical, and disciplinary formation: the narrative constructed by museums, academies, criticism, and the market, organised around Recognition and consecration, reproducing the patronage-recognition circularity through which the art system selects and perpetuates its own criteria. It is the history of what was selected, funded, exhibited, and inscribed. history of art (lowercase) names the full, unbounded, and largely unrecorded accumulation of human activations: every work that ever existed as an event, whether or not it entered the History of Art. The History of Art is the domain of consecration. The history of art is the domain of activation. Singular art — when its singularity is confirmed by time — is what may cross from one to the other, carrying with it the possibility of Significance: the retrospective discovery that the field has been expanded, that what art or human existence can be has been moved. This crossing is never guaranteed and cannot be engineered. It is what history discovers, not what practice produces. See also: singularity, significance, the field, consecration.

Invisuality — the condition of that which structures the visible without itself appearing as an object of vision. The theoretical framework within which invisible activation becomes comprehensible. A work operating in the invisual register does not produce an image or perceptible object — it reorganises the conditions through which perception, recognition, and belief operate. Invisuality is not invisibility: an invisible thing is simply a visible thing that cannot currently be seen. An invisual operation is one that acts at the level of the conditions of visibility itself, prior to and beneath any particular visible thing.

Law of Fictional Attribution — "Fiction is often truth ahead of its time." The principle that narratives originally considered fictional or implausible may contain kernels of truth, or may be revealed as true when facts once dismissed as fiction come to light, or when an entire narrative is gradually embraced as truth. Ideas once deemed fantastical often materialise over time, transforming from fringe theories to accepted realities — sometimes into sacred texts. The Law of Fictional Attribution does not claim that all fiction is secretly true. It claims that the boundary between fiction and fact is historically unstable, ideologically policed, and subject to revision: what appears as invention today may be recognition tomorrow, and what presents itself as truth today may be revealed as construction by the same process. The law provides the theoretical foundation for apocryphal artefacts and speculative interventions: by inhabiting the unstable threshold between the fictitious and the real, these works activate the law rather than merely illustrating it. See also: apocryphal artefact, f(r)ictionality, speculative intervention, truth-production, post-truth.

Latency — the state of a fully configured work that has not yet been activated. Latent art is not merely an intention or unrealised proposal: it is virtual art — real as configuration but not yet actual as event. Latency may be temporary, indefinite, or permanent. The activation may come long after the work's creation in contexts its creator could not anticipate. Kafka's manuscripts, destroyed but recovered, are latent art activated posthumously. Yoko Ono's instruction pieces are latent art pending the decision of whoever holds the score. The relationship between Creation and Activation is therefore not simply sequential but potentially asynchronous: the virtual can persist indefinitely, awaiting conditions of actualisation that may or may not arrive. See also: virtuality, score.

Negative activation (provisional) — the mode of activation in which the work is activated through disappearance, concealment, or withdrawal. Its existence is produced by what it withholds rather than what it presents. The absent work organises the perceptual and cognitive field around its own absence, producing presence through the structure of a gap. To be developed further in relation to invisuality and unspelling.

Operationality (provisional) — the state a Performative Protocol achieves when its Potency meets sufficient Degree of Enactment: the condition of being fully operative within the world rather than merely latent as a configuration. Operationality is distinct from Potency, which names a protocol's inherent capacity, and from Activation in the CARPs sense, which names the singular ontological event of crossing from virtuality to actuality. A protocol may have high Potency but low Operationality if it has never been enacted with sufficient intensity or reach. Conversely, a protocol of modest Potency may achieve high Operationality through sustained enactment across multiple spheres of effect. Operationality is therefore a function of both the protocol's inherent capacity and the conditions of its deployment. See also: potency, degree of enactment, sphere of effect, activation.

Operational ontology — the model's proposed alternative to object ontology. Where object ontology asks what art is, operational ontology asks when art exists and through what operations. Value resides in activation rather than in the object; invisibility does not negate existence; Recognition consecrates but does not constitute. The shift from object ontology to operational ontology has consequences for art history (a history of activations rather than objects), criticism (oriented toward what the work does rather than what it means), and practice (providing theoretical foundation for ephemeral, delegated, invisible, and unrecognised work).

Patronage — the first condition in the CARPs model. The interested selection of a particular possibility from the field of what could be made, and its conditional permission to proceed toward formation. Patronage is always conditioned — by economy, institution, tradition, or the artist's own self-allocation of time and belief. It selects but does not configure. The invisibility of self-patronage — the artist allocating their own time and belief in the absence of external support — sustains the myth of the autonomous creative subject and must be named as a patronage operation in its own right. Patronage is not prior to the art system: it is the system's mechanism of reproduction, selecting what recognition has previously consecrated and foreclosing what it has not. See also: consecration, the field.

Patronage Engine — a coin press machine and the work from which the CARPs model emerged. The Patronage Engine compresses the four conditions of the model into a single mechanical gesture: the pressing of the coin is simultaneously an act of patronage (the machine selects and authorises), creation (it configures raw material into form), activation (the pressing is the event), and a provocation to recognition (the coin enters circulation as an object whose status — currency, artwork, or both — is undecidable). The work is both a practice and a theory: its operation demonstrates the model it generated.

F(r)ictionality — the operative principle by which this practice introduces fiction and friction simultaneously into the real. The parenthetical r holds both words in permanent tension: fiction as the mode of operation — the apocryphal, the invented, the fabulated — and friction as its effect — the resistance, dissonance, and decentring that fiction produces when it enters and displaces the real. F(r)ictionality is not the use of fiction to escape reality but to f(r)ictionnaliser it: to introduce play, perspective shifts, and productive instability into the frameworks through which reality is taken for granted. The Apocryphal Library and its invented authorities — Wilhelm Angstmann, Claude Lebon, Uso Warui Roshi — operate in this mode: they do not illustrate a proposition about the construction of knowledge and authority but enact it, producing friction within the cognitive field through the friction of their own fabulated existence. F(r)ictionality activates primarily in the cognitive mode, and frequently cascades into the relational. It is one of the primary instruments through which dissidance operates and through which unspelling becomes possible. See also: dissidance, unspelling, cascading activation, Apocryphal Library.

Poetic displacement — the strategic operation by which a work, a title, or a practice presents one surface while operating at an entirely different level. Poetic displacement is the tactical dimension of invisual practice: the use of legible, familiar, or accessible form to carry invisible, unfamiliar, or radical content. The audience enters through what they recognise and finds itself inside what it did not expect. Poetic displacement is not deception but a principled use of the threshold between the visible and the invisual: it meets the viewer where they are in order to move them somewhere the work could not have taken them directly. Distinct from poetic mobility, which names the condition poetic displacement makes possible. See also: unspelling, invisuality.

Poetic mobility — the condition of perceptual and imaginative freedom that art, at its most operative, restores to those it activates. Poetic mobility is what unspelling makes possible: the capacity to move through the world without being fixed by its dominant encodings of the visible, the valuable, and the real. A work that activates in the full sense — that unspells rather than merely decorates — returns poetic mobility to whoever encounters it. Poetic mobility is not a state of liberation from all structure but the recovery of the capacity to move between structures: to inhabit a framework without being determined by it. The condition toward which poetic displacement moves. See also: poetic displacement, unspelling.

Recognition — the fourth condition in the CARPs model. The operation through which an activated work is identified, named, and consecrated within a discourse, institution, or cultural field. Recognition is the condition of legibility, not of existence. It determines not whether art exists but whether it is legible — to whom, within what discourse, for how long. Recognition without Activation produces something that circulates as art but does not exist as art in the ontologically significant sense: a work that has been given an art-world address without having produced an event. See also: consecration, History of Art / history of art.

Score — a set of instructions, protocols, or conditions through which delegated activation is possible. The score is not the work but the work's conditions of possibility in the delegated mode. It may be enacted by anyone who holds it, in any context, at any time after its creation. The score is latent art in its most explicit form: fully configured, awaiting the activation that only another agent can produce.

Self-activation — the limiting case in which the artist is the first — and sometimes only — receiver of their own work. Self-activation is not Creation: it requires the work to have achieved sufficient otherness to be encountered rather than merely made — the moment when a configuration becomes autonomous enough to speak back to its maker, occasioning genuine surprise, resistance, or reorganisation in the one who produced it. It is the most invisible form of activation: unwitnessed, unverifiable, producing no institutional address. In improvised performance, self-activation takes its most radical form: Configuration and Activation collapse into a single gesture, the performer becoming the primary site through which the work passes in real time. The audience in this case receives not the activation itself but its relational and somatic field — the event as it propagates outward from the performer's body into shared space. Self-activation establishes one pole of a spectrum: at the other end, the work that achieves otherness gradually, in the studio, before being encountered by anyone else. See also: activation, performative activation, somatic activation, invisuality.

Singularity — the quality of a practice that exceeds the categories the existing field has available to accommodate it. A singular practice cannot be fully accounted for by the field as it currently stands: it operates at the edge of what the field can contain, pushing toward what its existing categories cannot yet name or absorb. Singularity is the necessary condition of Significance: a practice must be genuinely singular — must actually move beyond the field's existing boundary — for Significance to become possible. An artist can deliberately orient their practice toward singularity: refusing the already-accommodated, working at the limit of the field, aiming at what the existing categories cannot yet contain. Whether that orientation achieves genuine singularity — whether the practice actually exceeds the field rather than merely approaching its edge — is not for the artist to determine. Singularity can be aimed at. Whether it is achieved belongs to the field, and ultimately to history. See also: significance, the field, existential contribution.

Significance — the meta-condition that the CARPs model gestures toward but does not contain. Significance is not a condition of art's existence — it is a property that accrues to a work from beyond the model's frame, from the accumulated weight of subsequent events, practices, and histories moving across it. It cannot be produced intentionally, verified at the moment of activation, or assessed from within the model's own logic. Significance becomes possible when a practice is singular — when it genuinely exceeds the field's existing categories and moves the boundary of what art, and human existence more broadly, can be or do. The model can describe how art comes to exist but cannot determine what that existence will have meant. That determination belongs to time, to the history of art, and to human existence at large. The lowercase s in CARPs is not a limit of the model but the mark of what it opens onto: the question it cannot answer and does not pretend to. See also: singularity, the field, existential contribution, activated art.

Significant art — art that activates and is subsequently discovered — by time, by the history of art, by human existence at large — to have expanded the field: to have moved the boundary of what art, and human existence more broadly, can be or do. Significant art makes an existential contribution. The distinction between activated art and significant art is real and important: a work can exist as art — produce a genuine event — without having made an existential contribution. These are two separate thresholds, and collapsing them loses something the model depends on.

Trace — what persists after a performative, temporal, or somatic activation. The trace is not the work but its aftermath: the record, the memory, the remnant that evidences an activation without repeating it. Distinct from archival activation, in which the trace itself becomes the activating operation — not the evidence of a prior event but the event itself.

Unspelling — the operation through which a work reorganises the invisual conditions that structure what can be seen, recognised, and believed. Unspelling is not the production of a new image or object but the dissolution of an existing enchantment: the breaking of the perceptual and cognitive frameworks through which a particular version of reality maintains its self-evidence. A work that unspells does not replace one vision with another — it restores the openness that precedes any fixed vision, returning poetic mobility to whoever encounters it. Related to invisuality, negative activation, and the broader practice of démarabouter. I Was Never Here is the model's primary example of unspelling in operation.

Virtuality — the ontological state of a work after Creation but before Activation. Following Deleuze: the virtual is fully real as configuration but not yet actual as event. A score, a proposal, a painting in a locked vault are all virtual art — complete as forms, inoperative as existence. Virtuality is not a deficient mode of being but a distinct one: the virtual work is real, fully configured, and capable of activation — it is simply not yet actual. See also: latency, score.