a_place_to_be_02

You may notice one little detail in this one - one of the glitch textures actually crosses over into being a structural element. In my early work I did a lot of this, feeling that I needed the kind of destruction that glitch could provide to tear down my certainty. Geometry is a kind of certainty - and sometimes when we present (for example) just a circle, it feels like we've neglected that this circle is just an approximation using some rounding, that our idea of it - even if it were perfect - couldn't be matched by any real-world object composed of atoms and molecules. I needed the ASDF imperfections and pixels in this to relieve me of the responsibility of showing you shapes that I could pretend were real, or that I understood as they really are.

It's interesting that when we consider the most basic of needs - and here I'm thinking about our "place to be" that we find we need - what do we need that place to be like? The indulgent little places we feel we can really be ourselves in now are for - what? - showcasing collections and large televisions? We are encouraged to imagine ourselves as larger-than-life consumers, as a giant audience member in an impossibly cushy chair, that in the place where we are most ourselves we are consuming the most gourmet delicacies, the most indulgent and copious snacks, the strongest and most rarified drinks, and maybe invite a friend to wallow with us. Does that sound awfully judgmental? I'm like that too, maybe - but there's also the place we are in our workshop, in our studio, our sun room with plants we've grown or the garden we've nurtured - we have strong vibrant places that we feel we exist, too. When we don't have any of those things, I think we start to depersonalize, we lose our embodied presence, instead floating from work to home to bed skittering across glass surfaces and networks and feeds like gnats that don't even know what to do with a bright screen once they've lit on it. I think - at least for myself - I need a place to be. A place to just be.