The concept of using the body to move electrons is not new, but one can continue to wonder what effect those electrons have on the surfaces and connections they caress and provoke. And what of those electrons pushed into motion by “foreign”bodies. Are we witnessing a new form of parasitism, or is it rather symbiosis? And exactly when do we come up for air?
I am constantly going back to “Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Electronic Culture: History, Theory, and Practice)” by Siegfried Zielinski. In this great look at the history of the electronic-human relationship the reader visits with searchers who, for one reason or another, were not pushed to the front pages of the history books. It is the confluence of showmanship, electricity and affect.
At the studio tonight, just being here and looking at the stuff that I have been puking out for the last little while. Sometimes it really feels like that… You get a wonky feeling in the gut, it feels like a beast from “Alien” trying to pop out of you. You hold it back, it hurts but there is work to be done; work is an overstatement, it is more like continuing to jump through the hoops hoping that you will wake up to a job in the morning… anyway
Back to making work, kinda. I am here, trying to get a sense of the overall picture. I know that I am fascinated with ideas around scale and measurement. Firstly because it can fit absolutely any imagery or concept a person can think up. This makes things easy in a way. But the idea of measurement is more prominently linked to the idea of convention. A convention is something that everybody seems to agree on so it becomes true by default. The best example of this is 1+1=2, believe it or not, this has never been truly proven; it has been showed that defining the term 1 is impossible.
Historically, measurements were established quite arbitrarily. The architect Louis Etienne Boulée established a measurement called a boulée. A boulée was the distance between the tip of his extended index finger to his elbow, everyone of his buildings (there were only six) were built with this dimension as its basis.
This was a planned monument to Isaac Newton. It was never built.
With this in mind; what the heck is an inch or a centimeter? They are nothing but something a whole bunch of people called experts agree on. Everything we do, everything we make is based on the ideas of so-called experts. This is what I am getting at in the big picture. How do we decide who the experts are and why is what they say able to become the default of how we describe the world?
I have this job, it is called being a “professor”. What am I professing? As far as I am concerned, if I can teach people to doubt, to question, to refute in an intelligent and researched way, I have been successful. But at the same time, this means that I am asking my students to understand that I am a pro at B.S. and this means that I have to be ready to defend and discuss every single word that I say. THAT is work, that is me doing my job.
At the studio today, hard to believe that this is actually part of my job. I always feel like I am playing hooky or something when I come get some work done. Today, I am finalizing some work for a small showing of work around an upcoming talk by Gwynne Dyer from his book “Climate Wars“.
The work was chosen because of my tendency to photograph landscapes under reclamation. Reclamation landscapes is the term used by several landscape photographers who are interested in how the land eventually consumes and erases human passage. As usual, my contrarian manner of looking at things makes me turn this question into something else. For me it is more about our inability to see past a few dozen years into the future and think that if it exists after I am dead than it has existed long enough. We are such shortsighted animals.
The Clock of the Long Now is an interesting experiment in altering perceptions about duration (I tend to use duration instead of time, according to Henri Bergson it is a more accurate description of how we use the word). http://www.longnow.org/ Instead of writing 2009 we shoudl write 02009, that little zero will remind us of how recent of an apparition we are and of how short an influence we will exert on the planet. Chances are we will cause a whole bunch of harm, but in the scheme of things the planet will live on.
Still thinking of the title, images should be viewed in a horizontal line about 12 cm from each other.
What is a blog for? A good question, but at the same time one could ask what a diary or a journal is for. And we don’t tend to ask that question half as much. For that matter, what it writing for? It is all about communication, the only difference is how the words interact with an “audience”.
It is mostly about sharing process, most of the art made since the impressionists is about the process of its coming to being. A blog can be a way of recording thoughts and actions, and organizing them too. Sometimes things are quite personal, other times more like a rant, and yet another time… a collection of ideas.
And what about the video, and weirder still the image. They are visual ways of adding to what I am saying, or at least to get you to enter into my frame of mind.
