Entanglement - Series 1
Media Interventions on Aluminum with Poured Resin
The world of very big things and the world of very small things don’t play by our rules.
Big Things:
Black holes breach both space and time turning the outside world inside, taking in all they encounter, like a form of consciousness, or a form of rationalisation. Mapped on their outer edges is a copy of everything brought inside--a memory of its entire lifespan collapsed into one cacophony of time without time. Inside is both everything and nothing. Matter, light, time, and space are drawn together into one singularity. Here, not only is all connected, it is unified.
Small Things:
The world of very small things, likewise, rejects that which we depend upon to make sense of our objective realities. Here things can exist in two spaces, even in two states, at once. Only when we try to observe them do they commit to a fixed form. Light is both particle and wave (though we can only see one of these states at any given time). Light can also split into two, two photons emerging from one, forever connected across time and space. Regardless where each photon is located, even thousands of miles away from one another, to effect one is to instantaneously affect the other.
The implication is this:
The two concepts most fundamental to human being--space and time--are problematic. The practical issue of space and time is their objective existence. Space is an object that must be physically transcended. Time is a linear measurement of the duration of that transcendence: it is the duration for light to travel from the sun; it is the duration it takes for the earth to turn once; it is the duration between our first breath and our last. All which gives our existence meaning is embroiled in space and time.
Increasingly, outside the human mind, space and time are faulty constructions.
Entanglement - Series 1 is a first consideration of these issues.
During the summer of 2015 a programme of media investigations were performed while in residence at the Centre for Research and Creativity (CeRCCa) in Llorenc del Penedes, Spain. The series you see here thinks about the folding of space and time and our abilities, or lack thereof, to perceive “reality” outside of our limited human biology.
The images are simple: a present day rural landscape, a mirror reflecting an incongruity, a piece of red yarn connecting the object to the reflection of the object. The camera is the human viewer making sense of the spectacle from a very particular angle, perspective, and time of day.
Now, stop considering them as photographs.
The image, a copy of the spectacle as viewed by the camera, is coated in resin. The original spectacle is thus distorted, individualised through the physical filtres that mediate our perception of reality. We do not see a copy of the objective world. We see a mediated version of it. Our bodies, thus intervene in the perception of any landscape. But here we intervene even further.
We see, from our privileged position of the camera one space and one time. The mirror, however, folds space allowing light from one area to co-exist in another. As a result the object reflected exists both in its objective form in one environment, and in the form we see reflected and implanted into this landscape.
The interventions also recontextualise time(s). The camera snaps, captures an image, and creates a moment of time. This moment, this memory, only exists because it has been perceived. Time here is defined by the instant when this singular image enters our perception and consciousness. But this singular image and this singular time is made up of many times entangled into one. The light from the object reflecting in the mirror is older than the light of the surrounding environment. What we see, what we perceive at a singular time is the manifestation of at least two different times and two different places joined only in our viewing into one enduring singularity.