As contemporary artists begin to reimagine the nature of their agency in an art world humbled by Roland Barthes, performativity theory and ideas about constructed identity, this article explores the recent work of Dutch artist Hedwig Houben. In puzzling over her own role, and the nature of artistic practice herself, she opts to at once embody her own practice and obliterate herself as a party in the process. Maintaining a humorous yet fine balance between demonstrative expertise and utter doubt, her work presents itself as an artistic methodology for artistic methodology, and in this finds a means of settling with a fluid notion of what an artist can be: a facilitator, a ventriloquist, a blind scientist on the cusp of knowing.

Emergent technologies present us with ever more modes of being in our world, and challenge a valuation system based on the "real", "original" and "fixed". This article borrows from Hedwig Houben's response to these challenges the notion that being, along with the creative process, is a lot more fluid, continuous and distributed than Western philosophy has historically presumed.