The 12 Steps of Rupturelogy

Artists metabolize existential pressure while others defend against it. Existential pressure is the psychological force generated when awareness of mortality, impermanence, and the constructed nature of meaning exceeds the capacity of denial to contain it.

Rupture as Lived Experience: A Phenomenological Inquiry into Creative Meaning-Making.

This is a brain dump of ideas I’m playing with as I develop this idea around my creative experience. In a nutshell, questions and comments about what happens and why.

1. RUPTURE

What it is:
Something breaks when a belief, identity, relationship, certainty, or sense of meaning no longer holds.

What it feels like:
The experience can be characterized by shock, disorientation, grief, or a sudden thinning of reality.

Example:
A death. A creative block remains unresolved. Boredom. Frustration. Realizing the story you’ve lived by no longer fits your life.

2. EXPOSURE

What it is:
The protective stories fall away. You see something you were previously shielded from.

What it feels like:
Rawness. Vulnerability. The sense of being “too open.”

Example:
Sorting through a box of family photographs after a death, you realize the images aren’t preserving anyone. They’re evidence that preservation fails. The camera didn’t stop time. It only recorded its passing.

3. ANXIETY

What it is:
The nervous system responds to exposure. This is not pathology; it’s the body registering uncertainty.

What it feels like:
It manifests as restlessness, dread, agitation, and an urgency to either fix or escape.

Example:
You may find yourself wanting to distract yourself, overthink the work, or abandon it entirely.

4. THRESHOLD

What it is:
It represents a critical juncture where one must choose between avoidance and staying.

What it feels like:
Tension. There is a feeling that a significant event could occur or potentially fail.

Example:
You enter the studio anyway. You sit with the materials instead of turning away.

5. HOLDING

What it is:
It involves staying present and not rushing to resolve the discomfort.

What it feels like:
Uncomfortable steadiness. It's not a state of calmness, nor is it one of flight.

Example:
The individual persists in their work despite the lack of progress.

6. METABOLIZATION

What it is:
The rupture begins to be processed through action, material, repetition, and attention.

What it feels like:
Engagement replaces paralysis.

Example:
You remake the image again and again, not because the first one failed, but because the act of remaking stabilizes something internally. Repetition becomes containment.

7. RESIDUE

What it is:
The residue is what remains after exposure has passed through the body and into matter.

What it feels like:
Traces rather than answers.

Example:
Examples include stains, cracks, discarded drafts, broken plates, and half-formed ideas.

8. TRACE

What it is:
The first visible sign that something is taking shape.

What it feels like:
Recognition without clarity.

Example:
An image emerging in the developer. Suddenly, a phrase resonates with truth.

9. FORM

What it is:
The work coheres enough to stand on its own.

What it feels like:
Provisional stability.

Example:
A finished plate, painting, or piece that carries more than you consciously intended.

10. WITNESSING

What it is:
You step back and encounter what you’ve made as something separate from you.

What it feels like:
Surprise. Sometimes discomfort. Sometimes relief.

Example:
Seeing the work and realizing it knows something you didn’t know how to say.

11. PROVISIONAL MEANING

What it is:
Meaning emerges—not as certainty, but as something livable.

What it feels like:
Enough ground to stand on, for now.

Example:
Understanding that the work isn’t about solving death but learning how to stay in relationship with it.

12. RETURN (TO RUPTURE)

What it is:
Meaning never seals the system. Life introduces the next rupture.

What it feels like:
Familiarity with instability.

Example:
The next plate breaks. The next loss arrives. The cycle begins again.

Ruptureology describes how meaning is not found by avoiding breakdown but by staying with it long enough for form to emerge.

These questions are not meant to test a theory, measure outcomes, or confirm a model. They are descriptive prompts designed to invite artists to speak from experience, in their own language, about what actually happens for them in moments of rupture and creative work. The sequence reflects a pattern I have observed in my own practice over decades, not a set of steps anyone should follow. Artists may recognize parts of it, skip others entirely, or describe the same experiences in different terms. The value here is not alignment, but articulation. This is an inquiry into how creative work is lived from the inside, especially when meaning breaks down, rather than a framework imposed from the outside.

Ruptureology

Open-ended prompts for conversation, not data collection

1. Rupture

• Can you recall a moment when something in your life or work stopped making sense in the way it used to?

• What tends to bring you into the studio during those times?

2. Exposure

• When that kind of disruption happens, do you feel more open, raw, or sensitive than usual?

• How does that show up for you when you’re working?

3. Anxiety

• What happens in your body or mind when things feel uncertain or unresolved in the work?

• Do you notice urges to fix, avoid, distract, or control at that stage?

4. Threshold

• Is there a moment when you’re deciding whether to stay with the work or step away from it?

• What helps you cross that threshold, if you do?

5. Holding

• How do you stay with the work when it’s uncomfortable or unclear?

• What does “not knowing” feel like for you in the studio?

6. Metabolization

• At what point does working with materials start to feel like it’s doing something for you, even if you can’t name what that is yet?

• Are there repetitive actions or rituals that seem important here?

7. Residue

• After working through something difficult, what tends to be left behind?

• Do unfinished pieces, discarded materials, or failed attempts matter to you?

8. Trace

• Can you describe the moment when you first sense that something is beginning to emerge?

• How subtle or tentative is that moment, usually?

9. Form

• When a piece starts to take shape, how does that change your relationship to what you were working through?

• Does the work ever surprise you?

10. Witnessing

• What is it like to encounter the finished (or nearly finished) work as something separate from you?

• Do you recognize yourself in it, or does it feel like it knows something you didn’t?

11. Provisional Meaning

• Does the work ever give you a sense of meaning or orientation, even temporarily?

• How stable or unstable does that meaning feel?

12. Return

• After a piece is finished, what tends to happen next for you?

• Do similar disruptions return in new forms?

Closing

• If you had to describe what the studio does for you when life or meaning feels unstable, how would you put that in your own words?

What Remains: On Meaning, Mortality, and Making in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

I've been thinking about what happens to meaning when we can no longer justify our work by its output.

For the past several years, I've been researching the relationship between creativity and mortality, how artists use their practice to metabolize the knowledge of death. The work draws heavily on Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death and Terror Management Theory, which argue that much of human culture functions as a defense against existential terror. We build, we make, and we leave marks, not just to create beauty or communicate ideas, but to convince ourselves we matter in the face of annihilation.

But what happens when artificial intelligence can produce those marks faster, better, and without the mortal stakes that gave them weight?

As a doctoral student, I am currently preparing to write a dissertation that has taken years to research and work through. If I'm honest, I'm also someone who's started asking, "Why am I doing this when AI could knock out a more comprehensive version in an hour?” Or, “Why spend months in the studio wrestling with fragile nineteenth-century photographic chemistry when an algorithm can generate a comparable image in seconds?” Why make anything at all when machines can produce better books, paintings, and theories without effort, without mortality, and without stakes? This is the edge I'm working from now.

This isn't about Luddism or nostalgia. It's an existential question. If the things we make no longer function as proof of our significance, what's left?

The traditional answer from Terror Management Theory is that creativity serves as a form of symbolic immortality. We make things that outlast us. We contribute to a field, leave a body of work, and inscribe ourselves in culture. But AI destabilizes that entire framework. If machines can produce superior contributions without bodies, without death, without the mortal urgency that supposedly drives human creativity—then what was our work ever really for?

I think the answer is hiding in the materials.

I work with wet plate collodion, a photographic process from the 1850s that involves pouring light-sensitive chemistry onto glass, exposing it while still wet, and developing it immediately. It's slow, unpredictable, and failure-prone. Plates crack and break, and collodion lifts and peels. Silver fogs. Images are damaged. I also paint, and I've started treating my studio as a research site. The material disruptions are not a hindrance but rather an integral part of the process. The cracked plates, the unruly paint, and the collapsing sculptures are not mistakes. They're data. They're evidence of what it means to make something while subject to physics, time, and entropy.

AI doesn't experience this. It can generate images, text, and even simulations of failure. But it doesn't confront materiality the way a mortal body does. It doesn't feel the anxiety of a plate that might not develop, the exhaustion of revising a chapter for the eighth time, or the vertigo of realizing your entire theoretical framework is wrong and you have to start over. It doesn't live with the knowledge that the work will end because you will end.

I'm starting to think the meaning was never in the output alone. It was in the mortal struggle with the medium. The labor of a finite being attempting to say something true before time runs out. The refusal to look away from fragility: ours, the world's, the image's, and the decision to create anyway.

This doesn't resolve the problem. If anything, it makes it sharper. Because if meaning lies in embodied, mortal labor, and if AI can produce everything that labor once produced without the body or the mortality, then we're facing something far more unsettling than obsolescence. We're facing the possibility that human meaning-making itself becomes optional. A kind of performance. A choice to keep doing something the hard way when the easy way is infinitely more efficient.

Maybe that's where we are. Maybe the question isn't whether AI will replace human creativity, but whether we can bear to keep making things when there's no instrumental reason left to do it. When the only justification is the confrontation itself, the fact that we are mortal creatures insisting on witness, on presence, on the stubborn act of leaving a mark even when we know it won't matter in any measurable way.

I don't have an answer. But I keep coating plates. I keep writing. I keep working with materials that crack and fail and resist me, because the meaning isn't in whether the work is better than what a machine could produce. The meaning is in the fact that I did it. That I was here. That I chose to create not as a defense against death, but as a way of staying honest about it.

If AI can make everything, then maybe what remains for us is the one thing it can't do: be mortal, be afraid, and make something anyway.

“The Outline and the Drift,” half-plate Collodio-Chloride print on glass from a wet collodion negative. This is pre-fix - what a beautiful color.

The Outline and the Drift

I made this image today using a dead bird mounted on black-painted cardboard, then worked around the body rather than on it. The decision felt important. I didn’t want to manipulate the bird into meaning or turn it into a symbol that behaved too neatly. I wanted to acknowledge the body as it was and let my response happen in the space around it. The marks I painted loosely reference feathers, but only in the most unstable sense. They’re not meant to describe anatomy. They’re an attempt to register something leaving the body at death, not as transcendence or ascent, but as dispersal. Whatever animates a living being doesn’t depart cleanly. It destabilizes. It lingers as a trace.

I was also intentionally playing with the visual language of a chalk outline, the kind left at a crime scene. That gesture carries a particular cultural weight. A chalk outline is an attempt to fix an event in place, to impose order after something irreversible has already occurred. It marks where a body was, not where it went. In this image, that outline sits in tension with the radiating marks around it. One gesture tries to contain the loss, to hold it still. The other admits that containment has already failed. Together, they stage a familiar human dilemma: the impulse to document death versus the fact that death resists explanation.

The contrast between the bird’s spanning wings and the surrounding painted “feathers” matters to me. The body is heavy, finished, and unequivocally still. The marks around it are directional but unresolved, interrupted, and uneven. They don’t form a halo. They don’t promise meaning. They reflect the lag that often follows death, the moment when the body has stopped but our perception hasn’t caught up yet. Meaning keeps moving even when life has ended. The image lives in that gap.

I’m not making a claim here about what death is or what leaves the body when it happens. I’m more interested in the human need to respond once stillness becomes unbearable. The marks don’t prove that energy exists. They mark the moment when we can no longer tolerate absence without gesture. For me, that’s where the work begins: not in explanation or consolation, but in staying with what remains unresolved and allowing the image to hold that tension without trying to seal it shut.

Ruptureology

“Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead – when I exist in no one’s memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies, too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?”
Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy

Glass and Gold - Glass Prints

This piece grew out of a technical curiosity, but it didn’t stay there for long.

I’ve been experimenting with collodio-chloride on glass, using a wet collodion half-plate negative as the source image. What interested me initially was the reversal: taking a process already defined by fragility and asking it to exist as an object rather than an image alone. Printing onto glass changes the relationship immediately. The photograph no longer sits on a surface; it hovers within one. It becomes something you look into rather than at. I’ve printed on glass before—carbon, oil, and collodio-chloride. This gold addition was new.

That shift matters to me. My work is often in the unstable space between presence and absence, between what can be held and what can't. Collodio-chloride amplifies that tension. The image is there, but it never fully settles. It feels provisional, as if it could just as easily slip away.

Exposed, pre-fix.

After the print was finished, I backed the glass with gold. That decision wasn’t decorative. Gold carries a long cultural history of sanctification, permanence, value, and transcendence. Gold is what we use to signify that something matters and endures. In this context, it felt closer to a defense mechanism. A thin layer of assurance applied to something fundamentally unstable. The gold doesn’t resolve the fragility of the glass or the image; it frames it and maybe even tries to protect it. That tension is the point.

I’m aware that backing photographic images with gold carries the history of the orotone, a process designed to heighten luminosity and permanence. I’m interested in that lineage, but not in reviving it. Here, the gold isn’t about brilliance or finish. It functions more like a psychological gesture, an attempt to stabilize what can’t be stabilized, to sanctify something that is already slipping.

The skull forms in the background weren’t meant to announce themselves. They emerge slowly, almost reluctantly. That’s how mortality functions most of the time. It isn’t usually dramatic or explicit. It sits behind us, watching, shaping our behavior without demanding our attention. I wanted that presence to feel ambient rather than symbolic, something you notice only after spending time with the image.

The central figure feels assembled rather than organic. Stacked. Held together. I think of it less as a subject and more as a structure, a self-constructed one under pressure. The translucence of the collodio-chloride allows it to exist somewhere between solidity and dissolution, which mirrors the psychological space I’m often working in. Identity here isn’t fixed. It’s maintained.

From an arts-based research perspective, this piece feels important because the process itself is doing the thinking. I’m not illustrating theory after the fact. The materials are pushing back. Glass breaks. Chemistry misbehaves. The image resists control. Those risks aren’t incidental; they’re where the knowledge lives. The work knows something because it could fail.

What consistently resonates with me is the delicate boundary between reverence and denial. The gold can read as a halo or a shield. I’m interested in that ambiguity. It reflects the way we often try to stabilize what we know is unstable—through meaning, through ritual, through objects that promise endurance.

This piece doesn’t try to solve anything. It holds a condition. It sits with fragility rather than sealing it over. That feels honest to me.

Much more exploring ahead! I might break these and see what that produces. And I’m in the process of getting some front-surface mirror material to experiment with; I mention the technique in my book to make “faux” daguerreotypes. I’m going to use collodio-chloride to see what happens.

A Film You Should Watch

What I appreciate most about Flight from Death is that it doesn’t reduce death anxiety to pathology. It shows how mortality awareness fuels everything from cruelty to creativity. For artists especially, this film lands hard. It raises the uncomfortable question of whether making is a way of hiding from death—or a way of facing it honestly.

If you’re interested in why art matters at all, start here.

Watch it slowly. Let it bother you a little. That’s kind of the point.

It’s on my Vimeo page: Flight From Death

My New Books for 2026

Have you ever had an epiphany? An epiphany is a sudden, profound realization or insightful moment where the true meaning or essence of something becomes clear, often from a simple occurrence, stemming from the Greek word for "manifestation" or "appearance.”

I’ve had several over the past few weeks.

I wanted to share how I’m going to unfold these publications this year. I will use some of the 800-900 pages of text in these books for my 2028 thesis/dissertation—these writings will drive my dissertation.

“I’m building a psychology of artistic practice that takes mortality seriously as a formative force. And my three books, Glass Bones, Rupture, and In the Shadow of Sun Mountain, act as a trilogy: Theory → Practice → Witness regarding the theories and creativity.”

— Quinn Jacobson

This is how I see it transpiring:

June 2026: Glass Bones is published.

September 2026: Rupture is published.

November 2026: In the Shadow of Sun Mountain is published.

Allow me to explicate: I'm building a psychology of artistic practice that takes mortality seriously as a formative force—not as metaphor, but as the pressure that shapes how artists see, make, and live. My trilogy examines this from three angles: Glass Bones provides the theoretical framework, drawing on Becker, Rank, and Terror Management Theory to understand death anxiety and cultural defense. Rupture translates theory into practice, exploring the disciplines and orientations that allow artists to transform existential pressure into creative form. In the Shadow of Sun Mountain offers lived witness—thirty years of working with nineteenth-century processes, paint, clay, broken materials, plants, people, and the mountain landscapes as sites where mortality and imagination meet. Together, they map the terrain where awareness becomes art: Theory → Practice → Witness.

This research is situated within liminal space: psychological, material, and cultural thresholds produced by mortality awareness. Rather than resolving death anxiety through symbolic closure, the work asks what becomes possible when creative practice holds the threshold open long enough for transformation to occur.

Mortality awareness places me in a permanently liminal condition. I am alive, but never free of the knowledge that I will not remain so. From a Beckerian perspective, this is not incidental; it is the core destabilizing fact of consciousness. I am an animal capable of symbol-making who cannot fully believe in my own symbols, a being suspended between embodiment and abstraction, presence and disappearance.

I do not experience this condition as episodic or developmental, something to be outgrown or resolved. It is structural. Consciousness itself unfolds at the threshold. What culture often treats as pathology or anxiety to be managed, I understand as the ground from which meaning-making arises. Creative practice, in this sense, is not an escape from liminality but a way of inhabiting it with attention and responsibility, giving form to what cannot be stabilized without distortion.

I will be making new work—photographs, paintings, and mixed media for Glass Bones and Rupture. My work from the mountain will be featured in Sun Mountain.

I think you can wrap your head around that one, right? Just writing this out alleviates some of the “it’s in me, and it has to come out” stuff. To quote John Lee Hooker from Boogie Chillin’ (1948), a natural, internal force that must be expressed. 

The Dimmer Switch Explained

Holding Pattern

I made Holding Pattern without a clear image in mind. What I had was pressure. The sense that something was circling without resolution, asking to be held rather than explained. The painting emerged through accumulation and restraint. Layers were added, scraped back, and redirected. Each decision responded less to intention than to the condition the surface was already carrying. I wasn’t trying to resolve the image. I was trying to stay with it.

Materially, the surface itself is ruptured; cracked, weathered, and refusing integrity. The paint records its own breakdown. This isn't a representation of rupture; it's rupture as material fact. The painting embodies what it's examining by subjecting itself to the same forces of deterioration it's addressing conceptually. The medium becomes inseparable from the inquiry.

As arts-based research methodology, this is knowledge production through making rather than through language. I’m not illustrating a thesis about reproduction-as-death-denial that you arrived at discursively. I’m using paint, surface, gesture, and material breakdown to think through something that can't be fully accessed through writing alone.

The painting knows things my writing can't get to. It enacts the gravitational pull of the drive, the suffocation of the holding pattern, the way ideology fragments bodies even as it organizes them. The counterclockwise inward spiral isn't a metaphor I chose to represent an idea, it's a formal discovery that emerged through material engagement, and it carries meaning that exceeds paraphrase.

Arts-based research treats the artwork as primary data and the making process as an investigative method. The decisions I made; impasto that builds up and cracks, a spiral that compresses rather than expands, colors that register as bodily rather than symbolic, these aren't aesthetic choices decorating research findings. They are the research. The painting generates understanding about death anxiety, compulsion, and cultural reproduction (egg) that exists in formal and material relationships rather than in arguments.

The rupture also functions methodologically as refusal of traditional research's demand for coherence and resolution. Academic writing wants to arrive somewhere, to synthesize, to offer frameworks. The painting refuses. It stays with fragmentation, with irresolution, with the holding pattern itself. That refusal is epistemological; it insists that some truths about mortality and compulsion can only be approached through sustained engagement with what won't cohere.

What I’m doing is using the body's engagement with materials, the physical acts of mixing, applying, scraping, building, and watching paint crack, as a way to metabolize cultural and psychological forces that are otherwise difficult to grasp. The painting becomes a site where those forces can be witnessed and worked through without being explained away.

The Sacred Didn’t Vanish - It Migrated

Any system that becomes the sole container for existential meaning will behave like a religion, including its pathologies.

That’s not a moral judgment. It’s a psychological observation.

We tend to talk about religion as something people either believe in or reject. But from an existential perspective, that framing misses what religion actually does. Religion isn’t primarily a set of supernatural claims. It’s a symbolic system that helps human beings orient themselves inside chaos. It answers questions we cannot avoid but cannot solve: Why am I here? What matters? How should I live? What do I do with suffering? What happens when I die?

From a Beckerian and Terror Management Theory perspective, those questions are not optional. They emerge the moment a creature becomes aware of its own impermanence. Once that awareness arrives, some form of meaning structure is required just to keep life psychologically livable. The mind does not ask first whether a worldview is true. It asks whether it works.

This is why the story we often tell about secularization is misleading. People haven’t outgrown religion in any deep psychological sense. What they’ve lost trust in are specific institutions. The need for meaning, belonging, ritual, and symbolic continuity hasn’t disappeared. It’s migrated.

That migration explains why so many people, particularly millennials and Gen Z, don’t experience cognitive dissonance when they abandon Christianity but embrace astrology, Tarot, wellness spirituality, social justice activism, or even technology as a source of ultimate meaning. What’s changing isn’t the need itself. It’s the container.

Institutional Christianity, for many, no longer functions as a reliable anxiety buffer. Its moral authority feels compromised. Its hierarchies often feel rigid rather than containing. Its narratives are frequently experienced as entangled with shame, coercion, exclusion, or political capture. Even when the metaphysical ideas remain compelling, the psychological cost of belonging can feel too high.

When a worldview stops regulating death anxiety at an acceptable price, it loses its grip. At that point, coherence becomes secondary. Survival takes over.

Astrology and Tarot step into that vacuum not because they are intellectually stronger systems, but because they are existentially lighter ones. They offer orientation without submission. Ritual without hierarchy. Meaning without moral surveillance. They allow uncertainty to remain open rather than demanding closure. Most importantly, they do not force a direct confrontation with mortality, judgment, or finality.

These systems operate symbolically rather than doctrinally. They don’t insist on being true in an ontological sense. They ask to be useful. A horoscope, a card pull, a full moon ritual, or a crystal doesn’t claim to explain the universe. It offers a way to relate to uncertainty without being overwhelmed by it. From a psychological standpoint, that matters more than logical consistency.

What looks like contradiction from the outside is actually an efficient substitution. The ritual structure remains. The narrative structure remains. The identity structure remains. Only the metaphysical scaffolding has softened.

The same pattern shows up elsewhere.

In transhumanist culture, technology takes on functions once reserved for God. It promises guidance, omniscience, salvation, and escape from biological limits. The language is secular, but the structure is unmistakably religious. There are messianic figures,   sacred objects, and redemption narratives oriented toward immortality or cosmic significance. Death is not accepted. It is treated as a technical problem waiting to be solved.

Social justice movements can function in a similar way when they become the primary source of identity, moral orientation, and meaning. The impulse toward justice, dignity, and liberation is real and necessary. But when a movement becomes the sole container for existential meaning, it begins to develop religious characteristics: purity codes, rituals of confession, heresy boundaries, and forms of exile that replace repair. Moral failure becomes identity failure. Nuance becomes betrayal. Forgiveness becomes rare.

Again, this isn’t about whether these causes are right or wrong. It’s about structure. Any system that carries the full weight of meaning will behave like a religion, whether it admits that or not.

The danger isn’t that these new religions exist. It’s that many of them operate without the stabilizing features that older traditions developed over time: humility, elders, ritualized repair, symbolic depth, and limits on moral absolutism. Without those, belief systems become brittle. When they fracture, they tend to fracture violently inward, producing burnout, shame, or exile.

From this vantage point, secular modernity hasn’t eliminated religion. It has multiplied it. Meaning has been unbundled and redistributed across identity, politics, technology, wellness, and self-expression. The sacred hasn’t vanished. It’s fragmented.

The deeper issue is not belief, but awareness. When people insist they are “non-religious,” they often lose the ability to see how much power their chosen systems hold over them. Unacknowledged belief tends to be more rigid, not less. When meaning systems go unnamed, they can’t be examined. When they can’t be examined, they can’t mature.

This is where artists, thinkers, and creators often occupy a strange middle ground. Creative practice can serve as a way to metabolize existential anxiety without demanding total allegiance to a single belief system. Art doesn’t promise salvation. It leaves residue. It holds ambiguity rather than resolving it. It allows meaning to emerge without pretending it will last.

In a culture struggling to live without shared containers for meaning, that matters.

The question isn’t whether you’re religious. The question is what you’re using to orient yourself inside uncertainty, suffering, and mortality. What stories you live by. What rituals you repeat. What communities you belong to. What promises keep you going when things fall apart.

Any system that becomes the sole container for existential meaning will behave like a religion.

The work, then, is not to escape belief, but to become more conscious of it.