a hint of watermelon

 

 

After all, objectivity does not consist in
suppressing an unavoidable subjectivity, but in so acknowledging its intrusion

-Denis Wood

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nosaj Thing’s “Eclipse/Blue” official video. Simply beautiful.

 

 

 

 

Spanish artist Luis Toledo, aka La Prisa Mata, blends images of environment and culture to facilitate an interaction between objects and our subjective understanding of them. These interpretively complex pieces at once juxtapose and relate man and nature in aesthetically pleasing, unified compositions.

 

 

 

 

 

real

construction

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Recently I had a nightmare in which I was lost in a grocery store, unable to find what I was looking for. The aisles were a maze, complete with dead ends and misleading characters who “worked” for the store but ultimately sent me in the wrong direction, always. The shelves were tall, packed with items that overloaded my mind with labels screaming jibberish. Some of these items would deceive me, take the form of what I wanted (I want to say it was beer) until I brought them to the cash register, and looked down, and realized that what I had held onto was not the right thing. This cycle repeated itself as I searched that grocery store for hours, scared, frustrated and lost, wondering if it was too big for me to know, or if what I was looking for wasn’t there at all. But I couldn’t, wouldn’t let myself walk out of those big motion-sensor doors without what I came for. I woke up and felt like I was still looking. Now I feel very anxious in grocery stores.

http://www.staggeringbeauty.com/

At what point does the world unfold?

This song.

Where do feelings originate?
The immediate response is, well, the interior of course. The emotional center. The agency of the subject. “The eye of the beholder”.
But what if I was to say that feelings aren’t our own at all,
that they actually surround us, and move us, like water?
And we swim in them, and they saturate us?

Engravings & paintings by Albin Brunovsky, 1935-1997

Like waves, feelings— desires, anxieties, fears-- bring us together and pull us apart. We can only control so much of the current’s direction and its effect on us. Simply put, even the most private of feelings, and what they mean to us, are created by multiple people.
Sara Ahmed eloquently describes this phenomenon of “Collective Feelings” by showing how affect, or the “motion” part of “emotion”, blurs the line between interior and exterior, subjectivity and objectivity, you and I.

“Feelings are not about the inside getting out or the outside getting in, but that they ‘affect’ the very distinction of inside and outside in the first place. Clearly, to say that feelings are crucial to the forming of surfaces and borders is to suggest that what ‘makes’ those borders also unmakes them. In other words, what separates us from others also connects us to others. This paradox is clear if we think of the skin surface not only as that which appears to contain us, but as where others impress upon us.”

”For example, Durkheim considers the rise of emotion in crowds, suggesting that the ‘great movements’ of feeling, ‘do not originate in any of the particular individual consciousnesses’, but come from ‘without’ (1966: 4). Here the
individual is no longer the origin of feeling; feeling itself comes from without, from the thickness of sociality itself. As Durkheim’s later work on religion suggests, such feelings do not remain ‘without’; ‘this force must also penetrate us and organize itself within us; it becomes an integral part of our being and by that very fact this is elevated and magnified’”

In essence, emotion is brought about by motion, by the fluid exchange between two bodies, two minds. While friends, lovers, strangers may come and go abruptly, each one has made an impression on us, an impression that will be transferred onto the next. The only defense we have against an increasingly individualized, mechanized world is to remember to move and be moved-
“Movement does not cut the body off from the ‘where’ of its
inhabitance, but connects bodies to other bodies – indeed, attachment takes place through movement, through being moved by the proximity of others.”
Collective Feelings, Sara Ahmed

In case you needed a smile-
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mattbellassai/the-most-wtf-pictures-of-people-posing-with-animals

In case you were wondering-
http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/09/27/and-the-worlds-most-educated-country-is/

Reflections

“Mirrors do not primarily serve as the means of self-reflection and reproduction but provide another instance of the optically created dialectic of interior and exterior: ‘The way mirrors bring the open expanse, the streets, into the café, the living room—this too, belongs to the interweaving of spaces…’”

-Tom Gunning’s essay The Exterior as Interieur

Esoteric: understood or meant for only the select few who have special knowledge or interest
Cryptic: mysterious in meaning; secret; occult
I don’t know why but I just can’t get these two words straight. Maybe it’s because what is cryptic is necessarily esoteric and what is esoteric is necessarily cryptic. It’s as if one steps in front of the mirror and sees the other.

Unica Zurn

The Lovers by Remedios Varo

The image below is “Le Salle du Illusions”, an installation at the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris. Its arches are multiplied to infinity through the use of mirrors as spectators awed at this spectacular yet confounding glimpse of eternity:

“Let two mirrors reflect each other; then Satan plays his favorite trick and opens here in his way (as his partner does in lovers’ gazes) the perspective on infinity.”

-Walter Benjamin

“Sartre claimed that modern life had become ‘fantastic,’ as if it were made up of a ‘labyrinth of hallways, doors and stairways that lead nowhere, innumerable signposts that dot routes and signify nothing.’”

-James Naremore, “Film Noir: The History of an Idea”

“Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors. We have our images.”

-Jean Baudrillard

Optical Unconscious

 

 

“All the Sun that Shines” by Peaking Lights

 

 

 

 

“Clearly, it is another nature which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye. ‘Other’ above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious. Whereas it is commonplace that, for example, we have some idea what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms), we have no idea at all what happens during the split second when a person actually takes a step. We are familiar with the movement of picking up a cigarette lighter or a spoon, but know almost nothing of what really goes on between hand and metal, and still less how this varies with different moods. This is where the camera comes into play, with all its resources of swooping and rising, disrupting and isolating, stretching or compressing a sequence, enlarging or reducing an object. It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.”

-Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility”

 

Duchamp descending a staircase. Eliot Elisofon. 1952.

 

 

 

 

 

The incredible photographs below capture the ephemeral night sky of Victoria, Australia and its star-trail patterns. Photographer Lincoln Harrison takes photos over the course of 15 hours and combines these hundreds of images to wonderfully represent that which we would never be able to see with the naked eye.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The colourful spirals are the result of the earth's rotation, which gives the impression the stars are hurtling across the horizon.”

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2165358/Australias-big-sky-photographers-patience-lead-stunning-time-lapse-images.html#ixzz2INAzKUI6

LuckyLu of the Frontier

“De Mi Careta” by Palov & Mishkin

I adopted my cat LuckyLu from an animal shelter last March. Despite being one of the prettiest and fluffiest cats my friends have ever laid eyes on, with flowing gray and white locks of silky cat hair, I must say that Lu is no mainstream cat. One can tell from her dodgy approaches to social interaction and her affinity for unnecessary leaping that there is something more beyond those gleaming, crystal eyes and plumed tail. There are 3 reasons why the cat is out of the box:

1) Escape from the box
If I had to make a comparison, LuckyLu resists going into her carry-box with the urgency of a criminal trying to escape the grasp of a policeman about to put him in jail. To my dismay, I must use these authoritative measures to pack up and transport LuckyLu to her cat-babysitter Sophie’s house when I go out of town.
When I adopted her, the SPCA gave me a used pink box. If only they knew LuckyLu’s powerful abilities they would have given me a newer model.

On the train ride to her first vet appointment, she scratched, jerked, and rushed the door with force in attempts to escape this temporary cell. With its faulty door lock, it was only minutes before LuckyLu was able to break out of the box. I desperately looked around the crowded train for help as I struggled to shove her head back into the box, yet I mostly got looks of surprise and a certain old man who was laughing at me as he watched the chaos over the folds of his newspaper. After wrestling with the cat and my own personal embarrassment for what felt like the longest train ride of my life, I finally managed to get LuckyLu back into the box and innovatively used a hair-tie to secure the door until we got there. Disaster (somewhat) avoided.


Still too broke to buy a sturdier carry-box for Lu, the SPCA gave me a cardboard box to bring her home in. This box only lasted one trip until I found myself carrying a raging LuckyLu, frantically scratching a hole in one of the cardboard walls, trying to escape. Like prison break, I saw a furry white paw jut out of the side of the box, followed by her head tearing through the cardboard like the Hulk through a brick wall. Ditching the piece of shit box, I lurched forward to grab LuckyLu off the cold, dirty street. Once I picked her up, she relaxed in my arms and let me carry her against my chest four blocks home.

2) The Chamber of Secrets
Sometimes LuckyLu used to disappear for hours at a time. This made no sense, really, because she is a housecat, forever trapped indoors. Where oh where in this small apartment could she be?
Of course, LuckyLu, so opposed to being confined, had found an outlet for her thrill-seeking nature. Her need for mystery and adventure brought her to the Chamber of Secrets of my apartment, or, the internal labyrinth of pipes which connects the bathroom to my roommate’s closet. With a keen nose for excitement, LuckyLu discovered this passageway before we knew it existed. One morning, she appeared in my puzzled roommate’s closet and declared, “I know no boundaries, for I am LuckyLu.”

3) Subversive hair-do
LuckyLu has a dread. Since it’s always been her choice to do what she wants with her hair, and she grooms it all day, I figure that this is a purposeful addition to her appearance. Sometimes it makes me wonder—what is next? Colored fur? A tattoo of the Meow Mix logo on her lower back? However rebellious my little LuckyLu’s new look is, I’ve come to the conclusion that a little experimentation can’t do much harm, and that there are much worse things that she could be getting her whiskers into. I’ll have to keep an eye on that lower back though.

Movin’ right along.

One of the main obstacles while talking to my friends about postmodernism is that no one ever has a precise enough definition for it and we all end up talking about different things. Finally, I feel as though I’ve found a fitting description:

“…one fundamental feature of all the postmodernisms: namely, the effacement in them of the older (essentially high-modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture, and the emergence of new kinds of texts infused with the forms, categories and contents of that very Culture Industry so passionately denounced by all the ideologues of the Modern…

The postmodernisms have in fact been fascinated precisely by this whole ‘degraded’ landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Readers’ Digest culture, of advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature with its airport paperback categories of gothic and romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery and science-fiction or fantasy novel; materials they no longer simply ‘quote’, but incorporate into their very substance.”

Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson