Opening Reception: Mike Calway-Fagen: Tool Use for Passion Project

Mike Calway-Fagen: Tool Use for Passion Project
opening reception Friday, March 8, 5-8 pm
on view: March 8–May 12, 2024

CO-OPt Research + Projects presents works by Indianapolis-based artist, writer, and curator Mike Calway-Fagen!

“Passion Projects” are less serious, diminished in the eyes of the professional class by their lack of capital production and contribution to the GDP. Passion is sensual, even animalistic, not of the mind but of the body. Historically it, and words like it, were, and still are, used to identify less human, savage, or animalistic attributes, those that could be assigned to whatever race, class, sexual preference the hegemony needed to devalue to maintain their perceived supremacy/primacy.

“Tool Use” is a phrase that has been used to distinguish more capable non-human animals from those less capable. More recently, this understanding has expanded and more behaviors are considered to be tool utilization. In turn, more creatures have been elevated to an evolutionary plane more near to humans. But many non-human animals’ capabilities are far more sophisticated than those of humans.

But what constitutes a tool? What about language? It’s a tool but also more. Words are magic instruments for bringing the world under human capture. A thought can’t be thought in the absence of language. Try it.

And where does the tool end and the user begin? If the world is an endless network of causal systems then are tools and users reciprocal and continuous?

Wouldn’t that make everything a tool, used by everything else, and driven by a human animal and non-human animal passion?

That is the project.