Grounding

Collective research project exploring how bodies, materials, technologies, and communities orient themselves within environments that can never be fully perceived. Orientation is approached not simply as locating oneself in space, but as a continuous practice of sensing, connecting, grounding, and negotiating relations with what surrounds us. At the centre of the project is the notion of grounding, understood not as a single concept but as a field of overlapping meanings and practices.

In metaphysics, grounding describes relations of dependence: what makes something the case, what underlies it, and through which more fundamental conditions it comes into being. In psychology, grounding refers to practices that reconnect attention with the immediacy of the body and its surroundings. In communication, it describes the establishment of a common ground of shared knowledge, assumptions, and references. In electrical systems, ground provides a common reference potential and a return path through which currents can circulate. In computation and artificial intelligence, grounding concerns the relation between abstract symbols or generated information and the external sources, objects, data, and conditions to which they refer.

Across these different meanings, grounding repeatedly describes a movement between abstraction and materiality, signal and environment, representation and reference, individual experience and collective understanding. It asks what allows something to become situated, connected, verifiable, perceptible, or shared. Grounding is therefore less a stable foundation than an operation: a process through which relations are established between things that would otherwise remain disconnected. Hapjeong itself is approached through this layered perspective: today’s transport, information, and cultural infrastructures overlap with an older landscape once defined by agriculture, streams, and waterways. The medium of movement changes, while the principle of circulation persists.

Contemporary hydropathy offers one way of thinking through these relations. Water moves between bodies, landscapes, and infrastructures while carrying minerals, chemicals, biological matter, and traces of previous conditions. Other strands of the research approach orientation through magnetism, sound, electromagnetic fields, electronics, and technological infrastructures. Magnetite responds to invisible fields; electrical grounding creates a reference through which differences become measurable; radio and field recording reveal environments saturated by signals beyond ordinary perception. Orientation emerges through sensitivity to forces that are already present but not immediately visible.

The same question appears in contemporary AI. Grounded systems connect generated outputs to documents, databases, live searches, or other external sources rather than relying solely on a model’s internal patterns. The related symbol grounding problem asks how abstract signs become connected to perception, objects, and experience. A signal, diagram, recording, word, or dataset becomes meaningful only through the relations that anchor it to something outside itself.

The project therefore treats sensing, listening, recording, transmitting, retrieving, and constructing as forms of research. Rather than a conventional exhibition, it develops as a temporary shared infrastructure in which installations coexist with workshops, jam sessions, field recording, radio, performances, talks, and informal encounters. The space itself becomes a ground on which materials, knowledge, sounds, and relationships temporarily accumulate.

Grounding here is an operation: establishing temporary relations between bodies and environments, signals and sources, symbols and experience, individual perception and collective knowledge. The project does not search for a single stable ground, but for different ways of becoming oriented within systems that remain only partially accessible. Perhaps orientation does not require a more complete map. It may depend instead on learning how to listen, connect, verify, recognize a field, and establish common ground. Somewhere beneath every apparently stable surface, there is always a secret waterfall.

Concept and conceptual framework: Irene de Boer
Annotation written by: Karolína Voleská