Sunday 9 March 2014

On digital, repetitions, rosaries and time travel

The first day of spring always saddens me, I see the sun that is a year older, all the cycles of life seem so claustrophobic. I need to break that pattern, regain freedom, grow wings like a butterfly, time travel. I am not sure if my search is serendipitous, or if it is all a big grid of join-the-infinite-dots, where any image can appear and give you the illusion that it is exactly what you were looking for. Anyway, it seems that as soon as I see an obstacle, a solution comes up, an inspiration, a trail of thought that I can continue to tread on, making some kind of progress. Digital, like spring, has an intrinsic sadness. Mainly, I think, because it is disembodied, images on a screen, with no physicality, smell, texture, taste even. This lack of physicality has disenchanted me from photography and digital art. Because when I try to incarnate it into tangible prints, it kind of feels even more wrong. Cheap, or something, unnatural. As I was still exploring Burroughs's photography and collages, I discovered that he saw photography as time travel, a way of breaking the power of the grid, the control that they (whoever they are) have over us. Break the pattern. I started printing my photos and breaking the anonymity by painting them, ripping them, sticking them down with tape, overcoming the coldness of digital. And then, like a miracle, I went to a lecture by the German artist Thomas Bayrle. I took notes. He hates digital. I took bad notes, but here they are:
"The digital grid is boring to the eye... Our souls can perceive thousands of dots... Pixel is boring and it asks for more images... Our mind is bored in a nanosecond... The rosary is important, the boredom of the repetition. The rosary... rhythm... machine. Rhythm, repetition, rhythm... Dive into another area and see what comes out... I don't want to have an overview. I am always in the detail." And there was my answer, the freedom is in the detail, in mindfully following the repetition, as if it were new, and different, and see all the nuances, all the variations between cycles. "Everything is different, nothing is the same", concluded Bayrle "And this is God."

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