Sunday 19 July 2009

exploding plastic inevitable



This video made me think of Warhol's EPI, and his Electric Circus club, Fabrizio Fiumi, allatonceness, and superarchitecture. In short, everything that spoke to me about super-position of images onto the real, ambiguity of space, disintegration of matter, etc. We conceive of the relationship between space and time in a bizzare manner- where cardinal space is permanent and time is in flux. This is why we associate, say, the photograph of a Leningrad street in 1941 with the same street today, because even though time has passed we state that it is the same location (the same point, place, reference- in terms of long/lat, elevation, etc). In reality, no space is static, and everything is relative, so from micro-second to micro-second all certainty of place is non-existent. The past is non-extant. I am reminded of a Borges fable, the tale of the people of an imaginary planet. There space is not conceived as having duration in time, take:
"The hypothetical case of nine men who on nine successive nights experience a sharp pain. Would it not be absurd, they asked, to pretend that the men had suffered one and the same pain?"
The continuation of a similar pain in the same location over nine nights is coincidental, and not evidence that it is the same pain. The same would be true of an object: a coin seen in a room by nine men over nine successive nights is, materially, equally non-continuous. Further, to claim that a lost coin on monday and a found coin on friday (that bears the traces of having spent several days in the rain) are the same coin is nothing more than the 'association of ideas'. Classic Borges. This is why the spirit of place is non-continuous in time, but exists only for the moment it is experienced. Try returning to any childhood holiday site and see if the essence of the locale remains...

When we realise that our association of time with space is ridiculous we will understand physicality anew. We will construct suburbs of concrete cubes and project, like the castle, whatever form or atmosphere we care onto their facades. We will have broken the solidity of middle-class suburbia and exploded into an era of physical uncertainty. 'Precise location' will mean nothing, GPS will be the only means of navigation, and Occidental society will drift as nomads through a shape-shifting, dancing, urban forest of light and matter.

Unrelated, news from Austin, Texas. Everyone's favourite cinema-restaurant (you sit in rows, but before each row is a bench and order slip), the Alamo Drafthouse, has added to their celluloid passions the International Air Sex Championships, think Air Guitar, but mostly naked.

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