Maybe I should read Rousseau?
I've always been slightly hard of hearing. Not so much that I need a hearing aid, but enough that when we did a hearing test in high school, everyone else in the class could hear tones five pitches higher than I could. High pitches are a silent headache.
When I was 13, my parents allowed me to get a TV for my bedroom, so I asked for a black-and-white one. A color TV seemed too indulgent—too real. A black-and-white TV seemed more like TV! By then, black-and-white TVs were around, but they had stopped manufacturing them, so they were hard to find. My parents found one in Woolworth, the greatest store in the world until it closed in 1995.
Watching a black-and-white TV connects you to the entire legacy of TV. The boob tube. All the pretty pictures flying through the air. A nostalgic fantasy. Woolworth was the same. It was stuck in the past—a world that existed before I was in it. As you age, that experience is harder to find. Devalued spaces get demolished. Valued spaces get refurbished according to current tastes. You can only really find what you're looking for (raw material) in neglected spaces. It's easier if you leave New York.
I had perfect vision until I was about 17-years-old. First, my photography teacher started complaining that my photos were out of focus. Then, my driving instructor complained I didn't see signs. Finally, my math teacher demanded I sit in the first row.
I thought they were crazy. I gave in and wore glasses in college, but only in class. After I graduated, I tried to get contacts, but they were too difficult to put in, and I gave up. Most of my 20s were a blur. It's totally insane when you consider that my career is entirely visual. I was art directing photoshoots without fully seeing what was going on.
In hindsight, this was stupid. I justified my refusal to wear glasses with the idea that soft focus blurs out imperfections. A teacher once told our class that she preferred looking at us without glasses because she couldn't see our pimples. I thought it was clever because she seemed to be shaping her own experience. But, I drew the wrong conclusion from the story. I was delighting in the fantasy of demolishing and refurbishing—bending my world to my will. But I didn't consider...WTF is my will? Where does it come from? Is it even mine at all?
Last week, it was cold. I went outside wearing a covid mask, gloves, and sunglasses. I was listening to a podcast on headphones—ensconced in a blissful warm cocoon. When I went indoors, I suddenly felt too hot. Confused. Alone in the bathroom, I removed it all...washed my hands with soap, and splashed warm water on my face.
When I used to make films, I always loved the visual part, but the sound terrified me. Whenever I recorded anything, there was still a faint hissing or buzzing—a room tone—under everything. You could never scale back to a blank page. On the screen, it's either in the shot, or it isn't! The soundscape seems to stretch beyond my limited perception. What if there is something everyone else can hear and I can't? It's always a risk. It's out of my control.
Deep in Space, there are supermassive black holes, which are millions of times as big as the Sun. They're too big to see, but astronomers can detect them by watching for their effects on nearby stars.
I prefer working with raster images because pixels are single units that can't be divided.
In science class, you learn about infinite macroscopic and microscopic worlds you can't see—beyond perception. Then they ask you to extract a substance from a solvent.1 But, how can you know there aren't a few molecules left in the solution? You can't. Everything bleeds into everything else. Even our bodies are porous...shedding and generating cells.
If you repair a crumbling cathedral brick-by-brick, at what point does it become something new?2
It's easy to imagine slicing with such precision that the knife pulls out clean but so hard to actually do it.3 Your hand trembles. When the abstract becomes concrete, it is always affected by the tremble4. This is why the science experiment is so frustrating! You're ostensibly studying empirical truth, but science class is fundamentally abstract—like a game. It rewards the performance of proving what is already accepted regardless of what is actually happening. As if contemplating the Universe (astronomy) is only worthwhile with respect to making moves (astrology).
But, the Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you or care. The science class is a very small part of the Universe.
What Is It Like to Be a Bat? Thomas Nagel, 1974
The Reality Bubble, Ziya Tong, 2019
Metanarrative Obsolescence, Geoff Shullenberger, 2020
The Postmodern Condition, Jean-François Lyotard, 1979
Distilling
Detaching
Dissecting
I’m talking about making art.