‘Our task is not to solve enigmas but to be aware of them, to bow our heads before them and also to prepare the eyes for never-ending delight and wonder’ – from a letter attributed to Jan Vermeer.

This project is a large-scale participatory artwork concerning Jan Vermeer’s enigmatic painting Girl with a Pearl Earring (c.1665). This work constitutes the founding moment of IPCRES and as such holds some of our central ideas, particularly the problem of fixity in objects, ideas and systems. One of the strategies that we have is that of conversion – from stasis to mobility via mutability and undecidability. 

Another way of perceiving this is the translation of object into event. Here we are talking of ‘object’ in the widest sense, from physical object, to an object of attention, to an idea or concept. It has resonances to what philosopher Anne-Francoise Schmid and her collaborators call a contemporary or integrative object. This is a way of perceiving an object that dispenses with the divide between subject and object, allowing for a dialogue where the object both gives and receives communicative resonances. Thereby allowing the object to oscillate with vitality and give up its depths of difference, or more pertinently différance (Jacques Derrida), which allows for elasticity between noun and verb, ‘thing’ and ‘doing’. Différance refuses a thing an essence, instead generating a movement of undecidability. Objects are put into play with subjectivities and become sites of adventure.

For this project we purposefully chose an artwork that is continually evoked through its essentialist qualities, Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (c.1665). This participatory pedagogical artwork was situated in an art school with a core group of 5 students but with the participation of many others from across disciplines. The task was to create a expansive participatory art experiment conducted over a lengthy duration to convert the singular essence of Vermeer’s painting Girl with a Pearl Earring into a serial artwork. 

Designed by IPCRES, the work took the form of 18 thetic performances, happenings or interventions based around the virtual narratives that were detected in the ‘girl’s’ imagined situation, beyond the ‘snapshot’ glance that she presents to us. 

The ‘conversions’ were devised weekly by committee and events were publicly performed unrehearsed in the art school on Friday lunchtimes; sometimes by the central group and sometimes as large participatory happenings. Event themes included; obsession, beauty, silence, reading, love, aura, distance and awakenings. Some of the project posters can be seen below:

Each devised happening allowed for a camera to be installed within the design of the event, facilitating 2000 portraits to be taken over the entire project of participants in the pose of the painting. The walking of the infinity symbol emerged as a central metaphor within the work, providing a bridge between the disembodied projection of pictorial space and potential experience imbued with emotional investment. 

A complex and mutable matrix was formed between the original representation and its performative or non-representational serialisation. The final event was staged outside the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, Netherlands, where the painting resides. Over 150 participants took part in the project as a whole, which was recorded as an annotated document and eventually constituted an IPCRES ‘file’. 

The hypothesis is that it is possible to reanimate classical art historical artefacts by looking beyond their ‘objectness’ and translating their singular essence into a mutable seriality. This is beyond mere interpretation or critique of meaning, this was an attempt to interpret or translate an art object (Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring) into a series of performative ‘affective compositions’ that resonate within an open-ended multiplicity rather than a singular essence. In this case, the painting was the originating concept and the serial events that were drawn/imagined from it form an ‘event function’ of that object,  revitalising the concept and extending the singularity Girl with a Pearl Earring into an open-ended and potentially infinite series. A hitherto latent seriality illuminates the virtual network of potentialities inherent in what appeared to be a static art historical or cultural event. 

The concern of IPCRES et al. was with trying to bring to legibility the questions the painting infers beyond or perhaps through its materiality. The encrypted messages that are held in the frozen visage of the Girl as her moment collides with our own. Not through any sense of essence or presence that might be perceived to reside within the static materiality of the painting, but through the multiple potential interpretations or possible folded worlds that it holds secret as part of its enigma. The many psychological perspectives or inflections that produce vibrations, possible events constituting a multiplicity (infinity) of harmonics and rhythms that stirs the individual and collective consciousness. 

It took Vermeer six months to paint a ‘snapshot’ of a girl interrupted in the moment of her present. In this IPCRES project we took six months to compile phantom narratives as imagined from the painting, utilising them to devise and perform 18 intuitive events/situations. This allegorical serialisation of the object of the painting brought to bear upon it a ‘continuous temporal molding’ which had the effect of converting the paradigm of spatiality inherent in the object to one of temporality. Through this process the object becomes mutable, it becomes ‘contemporary’, integrating itself into potential lived experience and reanimated for a new generation. This is a process that the philosopher Gilles Deleuze might have called performance or a non-philosophical project, and concerns the crucial relation of the one to the multiple. 

Others might consider this as an experiment in the concept of the performative encounter, an area of arts inquiry that is informed by situation-specific practices located between performance, activism, the visual arts and philosophy. To this end, IPCRES replaces the art object with an encounter that brings participants to thought and thought into a new materiality.