The essence of this project was inspired by a text that relates found objects to photographs, exploring the connections between physical things and information production/reproduction. Susan Sontag’s ‘On Photography’ is a string of brilliant musings on the nature of the reproduced image, and the topics in the text go far beyond a discussion of photography to touch on the whole modernist cultural project. It culminates with the proposition that we should practice an ‘ecology’ of images. The position that ecology is not only about physical limitations, but can also applied to the production of information is an idea that is both compelling and difficult to intuit. The fact is, in Western society we have only in the last 50 years or so commonly accepted the concept of environmental limits. Limits to the production & consumption of something more ephemeral such as ideas or thoughts, is not yet conceivable, or at least agreed upon.
Sontag relates the act of collecting quotes to the collection of images, in that they are disembodied pieces of information, that only gain meaning through being connected to a larger context. Hannah Arendt’s essay on Walter Benjamin describes Benjamin as a famous collector of quotes “nothing was more characteristic of him in the thirties than the little notebooks with black covers which he always carried with him and in which he tirelessly entered in the form of quotations what daily living and reading netted him in the way of ‘pearls’ and ‘coral’. In another passage, Sontag also describes the world as quickly becoming ‘one vast quarry’. This language turns thoughts & ideas into a resource, a physical thing to be mined. Our common understanding of physical resources is that they can be depleted or contaminated with use. Is it possible that our ideas and thoughts will become sparse one day? Are their infinite thoughts available? Is it possible that one day we will mourn the cavalier attitude we had with the spinning of ideas and then throwing them away? Is there a point when our brains will cease to deal with the onslaught of information we receive?
We have reached an age with information technology where the split between the virtual and the real has become blurred, as we witness potentially the third great technological revolution, the lines between physical production and idea generation have never been so thin. The number of steps between thinking of an object and making it real are diminishing. The way that Sontag writes about ideas as if they are physical things, is becoming less of a means of poetic description and more an actuality.
However, as we make things, we also make mistakes, we throw things away before they are produced, we make changes and then we scrap parts of ideas. It is possible that there are tiny fragments, physical ideas that we put intellectual energy into creating, that could be saved and clustered into something useful, or something brilliant, or beautiful. A photograph can capture the light off of something totally banal and give it a whole new meaning. framing, recategorizing, collaging, gives new value to things, both physical and intellectual.
Photographs are similar to found objects in that they are ‘clouds of fantasy and pellets of information’. Fabrication technology is now such that we can poach those pellets, and mash them directly into new objects.
Sontag relates the act of collecting quotes to the collection of images, in that they are disembodied pieces of information, that only gain meaning through being connected to a larger context. Hannah Arendt’s essay on Walter Benjamin describes Benjamin as a famous collector of quotes “nothing was more characteristic of him in the thirties than the little notebooks with black covers which he always carried with him and in which he tirelessly entered in the form of quotations what daily living and reading netted him in the way of ‘pearls’ and ‘coral’. In another passage, Sontag also describes the world as quickly becoming ‘one vast quarry’. This language turns thoughts & ideas into a resource, a physical thing to be mined. Our common understanding of physical resources is that they can be depleted or contaminated with use. Is it possible that our ideas and thoughts will become sparse one day? Are their infinite thoughts available? Is it possible that one day we will mourn the cavalier attitude we had with the spinning of ideas and then throwing them away? Is there a point when our brains will cease to deal with the onslaught of information we receive?
We have reached an age with information technology where the split between the virtual and the real has become blurred, as we witness potentially the third great technological revolution, the lines between physical production and idea generation have never been so thin. The number of steps between thinking of an object and making it real are diminishing. The way that Sontag writes about ideas as if they are physical things, is becoming less of a means of poetic description and more an actuality.
However, as we make things, we also make mistakes, we throw things away before they are produced, we make changes and then we scrap parts of ideas. It is possible that there are tiny fragments, physical ideas that we put intellectual energy into creating, that could be saved and clustered into something useful, or something brilliant, or beautiful. A photograph can capture the light off of something totally banal and give it a whole new meaning. framing, recategorizing, collaging, gives new value to things, both physical and intellectual.
Photographs are similar to found objects in that they are ‘clouds of fantasy and pellets of information’. Fabrication technology is now such that we can poach those pellets, and mash them directly into new objects.
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