19 February 2012
above : "The high speed flash head was tested for 700 shots, one every 5 seconds, to detect irregularities in Flash power and light characteristics" from vimeo page description of the fascinating digital mediators factum arte
"the idea that i might already have gone blind struck me with sudden terror.... i might only be using people's words and voices to reconstruct the lost world of reality, just as our mind, at the moment we fall asleep, forms images resembling those of real life from the phosphenes that dance before our closing eyes. i stood on the threshold of reality and imagination, and i began to doubt which was which"
Figyes Karinthy [2008] Journey Round My skull. New york: nyrb classicsas quoted in oliver sacks [2010] The Mind's Eye, Picador, London, p180
"How often, asleep at night, am I convinced of just such familiar events — that I am here in my dressing gown, sitting by the fire —when in fact I am lying undressed in bed! Yet at the moment my eyes are certainly wide awake when I look at this piece of paper; I shake my head and it is not asleep; as I stretch out and feel my hand I do so deliberately, and I know what I am doing. All this would not happen with such distinctness to someone asleep. Indeed! As if I did not remember other occasions when I have been tricked by exactly similar thoughts while asleep! As I think about this more carefully, I see plainly that there are never any sure signs by means of which being awake can be distinguished from being asleep. The result is that I begin to feel dazed, and this very feeling only reinforces the notion that I may be asleep."
Rene Descartes [1641] Meditations on First Philosophy
as quoted in christopher grau's short essay dream skepticism
right : "Simulation of panoramic heads position and movement during recording: camera head and follow-on high speed flash head" from vimeo page descriptions of factum arte
Labels: conservation, descartes, dreams, experiment, history, light, oliversacks, photography, quote, vision
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hoarding hyperdetritus,
datamining dirty digital debris,
my sticky sockets soaked in sumptuous stimuli. indeed!
the peripheral versus the decentralised,
inspect inspiring ignored ignitions with
one extract, one reference and, one word;
anomalous visuals
proprioception
tenderpixel + squidsoup
phosphenes
the matrix
dreammachine
pie architecture
kodakclosure
Isidro Blasco
visualfield
seismanarrative
laura oldfield ford
savageredevelopment
Erik Desmazières
etch
olly moss
draw
words
virginia woolfmomentomomentum
francois morellet
neon
http://inbflat.net/
Darren Solomonconductor
Labels: conservation, descartes, dreams, history, light, london, oliversacks, periphery, photography, poetry, quote, vision
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5 July 2011
josef, étienne & i
"the search is what everyone would
undertake if he were not stuck in the
everydayness of his own life. to be
aware of the possibility of the search
is to be onto something. not to be
onto something is to be in despair"
walker percy, the moviegoer
[as quoted on page 1 of 'seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees' by lawrence weschler]
the image above is my submission to the copy/paste issue of matzine#09; it is of two beds, one for étienne and one for i - two characters from a short story i wrote for the previous issue. i had built part of a miniature stage-set for the piece but the simplicity of this spread, the strange divide of the spine, the butterfly and clone effect, the floating beds in paperspace and the questionable penmanship - these qualities won me over.in a 1968 interview, josef albers said something provocative, that has stuck with me and seems pertinent here :
"the source of art - or where it comes from - is the discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect"
Labels: albers, depth, drawing, dreams, irwin, matzine, quotes, square, vision
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19 May 2011
the city of oedipus
[as published in matzine #08]
like clockwork, étienne + i would spend two long days a month in studio monoculeure. always, the first studio day was the first friday of the month; the second, the second saturday
in turns, one would fall asleep, or employ chloroform. meanwhile the other, thirty three minutes later, would shake his friend awake, whereupon the dreamer would take his dream and put them on a page; the dimensions of their studio wall.
friday, my turn, i inhaled fully and closed my eye. a moment passed before i opened again. absurdly, both étienne and the fresh, wall-sized page were nowhere to be seen.
eight days following, in studio monoculeure, étienne and i met again, rather upset with one another. an emphatic, erratic explosion of airborne blame ensued. étienne defended that the previous friday it had been his turn to capture his dream on the page. only, when he opened his eye the room was empty of both partner and page.
disturbed and irreconcilable, we could agree on only one thing; to meet again twenty days later.
friday, the first day of the month, with little trust or patience surviving, we hung the page along the centre beam of the studio, ready to take a dream on both surfaces. we entered our respective unconsciousnesses simultaneously.
i was in a heavily-dark place; a vast and dense chamber. there was a sense of minutes passing, then hours. i navigated every permutation of turn and stride [ if one could call indeterminate movements navigation; my residual self-image was unrestrained, yet unable to move to anywhere ]. a numb intuition said my partner shared this space with me, just as the excited thought skimmed across the void; we had found it!
although consciously imperceptible at the time, an afterimage of the dream persisted - whole and familiar - though strictly unknowable. a double, a mirror, the eye that can view itself directly.
now awake, days later, stylus and knife in hands, both sides of the page were black with lead scratchings. there was no page left unwarped, only two un-placable, unfathomable maps; uncanny in dissymmetries; the city of oedipus
[this is a fictional foray originally presented in matzine #08 in response to the idea 'domestic exotic'. i really enjoyed writing this - and exposing my retina's to the matzine readers was an added delight]
Labels: borges, dreams, light, matzine, mythology, shadow
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