Reach for the Dead
These strange little gems have been warping my mind for the past decade or so. Worthy of as much reference as any text is.
(((Knowledge Ecology)))
@KnowledgEcology
Category: Art
October 7, 2012
Multivision: Florien Mueller
I’m writing about cities quite a bit recently; these photos are helping me do it.
[Photos: Florian Mueller] [Source: Faith is Torment]
September 6, 2012
Bruno Latour and Tomás Saraceno
When great art meets great theory it’s a good sign you’ve stumbled upon something worthwhile. Such is the case with the art of Tomás Saraceno and the writing of Bruno Latour. In his essay “Some Experiments in Art and Politics” Latour gives an extensive commentary on Saraceno’s 2009 exhibition “Galaxies Forming along Filaments, Like Droplets along the Strands of a Spider’s Web.” Latour’s essay focuses largely on the emergence of the concept of networks (“The word ‘network’ has become a ubiquitous designation for technical infrastructures, social relations, geopolitics, mafias, and, of course, our new life online”). Latour juxtaposes the concept of network with what Peter Sloterdijk calls “spheres” or “envelopes” (“Unlike networks, spheres are not anemic, not just points and links, but complex ecosystems in which forms of life define their ‘immunity’ by devising protective walls and inventing elaborate systems of air conditioning.”)
Highlighting the interesting tensions between networks and spheres, Latour thinks with Saraceno’s art suggesting, “What Saraceno’s work of art and engineering reveals is that multiplying the connections and assembling them closely enough will shift slowly from a network (which you can see through) to a sphere (difficult to see through).” I’m interested in the McLuhan-esque capacity of reversal that Latour is hinting at here — the network becomes a sphere when a particular node becomes an access point of enough connections; the sphere becomes a network when it no longer holds its solidity as a unity. That is to say that a network has an ontological boundary limit; the more “networked” a network becomes the closer it gets to becoming something totally different, a kind of phase shift occurs where, simply by adding more networks, at some point we are obliged to call the network something a else — a sphere, an enclosed space that itself might be a node in a yet larger apparatus.
Latour’s full essay can be found on Saraceno’s website here.
August 31, 2012
Reverse of Volume
“I’m interested in invisible things — like air, or time, or gravity, or some kind of phenomenon”
August 8, 2012
Naoya Hatakeyama
Naoya Hatakeyama produces a fascinating collection of ecological photography which I viewed recently at SFMOMA. There’s a Romantic impulse here depicting grand, crisp scenes of landscapes, open air, and undisturbed terrains. Discrete cars become a flow of electric light down a mountain road, small mushrooms grow from hardened surfaces, icicles carve rock in the background. But there is just as much attention paid to industrial themes — factory columns, ore smelting, city skylines at night, the sun illuminating the silhouette of a derelict factory the moment before its timed destruction — that suggest a blurring of nature and industry, and a turning away from pristine and undisturbed worlds.
Landfills, abandoned railways, and tsunamis also populate Hatakeyama’s canvas as the artist is just as at home using remote control cameras to record the demolition of slowly formed geologies destroyed in a quick blast, captured with analytic precision in the artist’s work. Destruction and the sublime abound. There is also a profound interest in the properties of different objects including limestones, factories, and dynamite. How do the properties of different rock formations interact with one another? How do they shape the landscape over time? How are they cut and formed with different (explosive) chemical substances? These are all questions asked directly by the artist.
Foregrounding the interactions between these entities is what makes the imagery so ecological. In this sense I disagree with the curator’s description which reads, ”Hatakeyama approaches his subjects in a calm and distanced manner, representing them from multiple viewpoints and across time.” These qualities — multiple perspectives, changes across time, distant observation — aren’t they more or less the contribution of most twentieth century art and philosophy? I read the twentieth century as the ultimate triumph of the eye, of visual re-presentation, refracted perspectives, kaleidoscopes of distant optical renderings overlapping one another in sometimes beautiful and often chaotic ways. What I see in Hatakeyama’s work is not so much a triumph of the eye, but a return to tactility and the sense of touch. Limestones, explosives, roads, cut mountains all have a very visceral, ecological, and tactile feel to me.
The paradigm sense of ecology is not the eye with its distant gaze, but hands, membranes, and cilia — senses for touching and being touched. These are all subtly hinted at in Hatakeyama’s photographic imagery.
June 28, 2012
Alexander Semenov: Dark Matter Photography
More of his remarkable photography HERE.
June 27, 2012
Medial Scenography: Glaciers
Medial scenography uses 360° shots filmed in high resolution to project an immersive visual environment generated by several projectors in an enclosed area. The latest version of this ongoing media project (curated by German group Tamschick Media+Space) is shown in the video above. It’s a strange testament to the even stranger fact that we seem to be getting better at visualizing and representing large ecological spaces at the very moment that those ecological spaces are ceasing to exist. There’s a sort of celebratory nostalgia that likes to accompany the death of ecological worlds, and it’s one that likes to talk about the importance of immersion in the context of the most abstract of spaces. I doubt the glaciers seem as real to polar bears.
May 21, 2012
Tamen Anggrek — Jakarta, Indonesia
The video comes to me by way of THIS art and design blog curated by one Jason Jose.
The installation announces a mode of visual beauty that approaches a geological scale. There’s a disorienting quality to it, as though the whole set up were the mouth of some giant manta ray hypnotizing it’s prey with a fabulous display of color and sound. Huxley would have marveled at its beauty, elegance, and ability to completely distract us from our crowded city lives.
