The Importance of Embodied Knowledge and Tacit Knowing

In making instruments, I have continued to ask myself: what is an instrument, and why do I make one?

As I pursued the question of where beauty resides — what a single maker should express among the many — and pushed further toward articulation, I found that the answer lives precisely where language cannot reach.

That place, I believe, is what is called embodied knowledge and tacit knowing.

What remains after everything unnecessary has been stripped away. A kind of core.

That is the beauty a person carries — known, but unspeakable.

Everywhere now, I encounter writing that asks: what is a human being, and what can humans do in the age of AI?

What is a human being.

What is sound.

Why are we moved.

When these questions arise from someone who knows through the body, they carry weight.

But most of what I read comes from a different place — from concern about status, evaluation, position.

Everyone, I think, holds the question of what it means to be human.

And it is probably unanswerable in words.

Because it is tacit knowledge.

Tacit knowledge can only be known through feeling.

I sense that we are entering a time that requires heart and thought.

But is putting it into words enough?

The pursuit of embodied knowledge. Of tacit knowing.

That is what I want to put into the instrument, and return to the work.