Found this picture via This Isn’t Happiness who got it from The Thought Experiment. I was unable to find its original source but a hi-res cropped version of it can be found over at Erase Me, an unofficial fansite.
 | The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we’re alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments. |
And yet, and yet : when one’s alone, “lost in memory”, one could feel compelled to write.
Previously on Skandalon: Point Omega, Don DeLillo.
| What is considered most fundamental about relationships is their formation and their subsequent withering, faltering and disintegration. Before that, they change enormously in increments inside the lapses of time necessary for any of them to become memories. It means the causalities attributed to define relationships are, at best, superfluous if their goal is to help understand their qualities. It also means that to understand their qualities, a careful attending to those almost forgotten moments constituting them (Novalis’ “differential of the function of future and past”¹) has to be undertaken. Once this perspective is adopted, relationships become incredibly rich and complex, and require the refinement of distinctions and observations a mind can rarely afford to maintain for a stable period of time. Hence the underlying stream of most change and notable exceptions demands much effort to be attended to, and some of life’s most fantastic glimpses of itself are apprehended in the form of illumination, when a moment is lived long enough not to be possibly remembered in its tainted and impaired state. ¹Novalis, Werke, ed. Ewald Wasmuth, Heidelberg, 1957, vol. I, p. 129 (fragment 417) |
Artist’s statement: “Taking inspiration from Dutch Vanitas paintings, these photographs incorporate personal artifacts within the tradition construct of still life. Pairing objects that belongs to my gandmother with my own possessions speaks to memory and the legacy that one leaves behind. Both the decomposition of the nature (rotting fruit and wilting flowers) and the break down of the man-made-objects, reference the physical body and mortality. The objects bear witness to a spiritual trace or imprint that is left behind or residual.” (visit Justine Reyes’ official website).
Sometime photography is inspired by painting, sometime painting seems to imitate photography.
About this art instllation:
“In 1925, Freud wrote a text that compares the faculty of memory to a child’s toy known as a Wunderblock. It consists of a wax slab stretched with cellophane, upon which a text may be inscribed, and just as readily erased by lifting the cellophane layer up and away from the wax slab. In contrast to Freud’s model, in which the pressure of the act of inscription onto the cellophane surface continues in the direction of the underlying layer of wax, in „The Wunderblock, the original selection and entry of data has been concluded in the past. The movement originates from ROM and is held in RAM, before travelling up towards the surface. Quite independently of our own states of presence or absence, the installation searches and inscribes autonomously. One has the impression that the underlying textual sources can never be perceived in their entirety. Because the many texts fragments are inscribed and erased simultaneously, one can read a given fragment only with difficulty before it vanishes. The model of memory demonstrated here is at once highly unstable, fragmentary, incomplete, perishable and ephemeral. The sentence fragments appearing and disappearing on the screen describe a process of finding and loss, safeguarding and destruction.” (more)
About Arnold Dreyblatt:
“Arnold Dreyblatt (b. New York City, 1953) is an American composer and visual artist. He studied music with Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, Alvin Lucier and media art with Steina and Woody Vasulka. He has been based in Berlin, Germany since 1984. In 2007, he was elected to the German Academy of Art (Akademie der Künste, Berlin).” (Wikipedia)
“A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’” is a very short text written by Freud in 1925 and first published in German the same year (PDF).
This text is the subject of an essay by Jacques Derrida first published in 1967 as part of the volume Writing and Difference (Google books preview, Amazon). It was translated to English in 1972 and published in the Yale French Studies (no 48, pp. 74-117; PDF available upon subscription to JSTOR).
“HE WAS A TOURIST, a quarter-million miles from home. And like any traveler, he wanted to bring home a special memory.
So Apollo16 astronaut Charles M. Duke Jr. came up with a plan. Several months before his scheduled 1972 mission to the moon, Duke receveid permission from NASA to leave behind a family photograph. The picture—of Duke, wife Dorothy, and sons Charles III and Thomas—was taken by a friend in the Dukes’ Houston, Texas, backyard several week before the April 16 liftoff.
Astronaut Duke was given intensive photography training prior to the mission. He was taught about f-stops, exposure, and learned how to operate a custom Hasselblad camera. He took thousands of practice pictures and hundreds on the moon. But he never considered himself much of a photographer. “Just a point-and-shoot man,” he said decades later.
In the final hour of the final day of his three-day visit to the moon, Duke took out the shrink-wrapped family snapshot and gingerly placed it on the lunar surface, near the crater Descartes. It was a gift, his message to whoever might one day stumble upon it. He then took a snapshot of a snapshot. Evidence. A memory.” (Who We Were by Michael Williams, Richard Cahan and Nicholas Osborn, Chicago Cityfiles Press, 2008, p. 238).
Actually, he took at least three snaphotd : AS16-117-18839, AS16-117-18840 and AS16-117-18841, though the last one is clearly the best shot.
Previously on Skandalon: Apollo, Nicholas Osborn.
9 0 0 0 photostream on Flickr: “Lacunar Vals”
