Link number one is Google’s latest trick. Google Street View allows you take street level tours of five major American cities. It’s creepy and helpful and mesmerizing and a technological wonder. My only complaint is that there’s no Atlanta. I don’t know how long it will take them to add new cities, but for now I’ll visit the apartments of friends in New York.
Link number two is really two links. In my note to remind about posting this I wrote, “Artist has art down.” followed by the link to a Studio 360 interview with the artist Richard Serra. He makes these incredible, incredibly large, sculptures. His largest works allow you to literally walk around inside them, experiencing the curves and paths and light and sounds of giant pieces of metal. At one point in the excellent piece Serra says of being inside one of the sculptures, “The content and subject matter is your experience, not the depicted object of the representation….This is your experience unmediated in relation to your walking. You don’t have to know anything about anything. You don’t have know anything about sculpture; you don’t have to know anything.” Serra has hit on just what I think is most precious about art. If I were a better writer, this blog would be more about stuff I do than stuff I think and observe. That is to say, if I were a better artist, I could offer you, the reader, more experience than content. Serra has a show at MOMA. I wish I could go, but all I can do is encourage any of you in New York to check it out.
Diligent readers of this blog will know that I am a little obsessed with how memory literally changes your perceptions of your environment. Last week I got locked out of our apartment and I had to call Beki. I looked through my wallet and found the number and code for a calling card that I bought over a year ago. Handling the piece of paper brought back the feeling of being back in Sarasota, working at New College. I dialed the numbers and everything around me shifted. The light seemed different. The feeling of air on my skin felt different. I was experiencing things as though I was in Sarasota, even though I’m on the other side of the country, 7000 feet above sea level, with little to no bodies of water within twenty miles.
I struggle with describing these kinds of events. Once again it’s something were art triumphs over mere description. A good artist could create a work that would allow you to somehow share in the experience. At best I can tell you how to create it yourself. It’s conceptual installation art.
1) Don’t prepare yourself for the experience
2) Stumble upon some kind of artifact from another part of your life. This artifact should be closely tied to an environment. I primarily used my calling card in Sarasota. I remember using it in the strong light of Florida and the crisp air of “Spring” (which, in Florida, is from February to June).
3) Let the change in perception take hold. Don’t try and keep it or think about too much in moment.
4) Focus a little on just where the memory is coming from.
5) Wait for the feeling to wear off, it won’t take long.
