Different places on earth have different vital effluence, different polarity with different stars : call it what you like, but the spirit of place is a great reality.
D.H.Lawrence
I wander, and I write about my experiences, and my impressions of what I see around me, as I move through time. In real space.
July 2024
PAINTING-VANISHING POINT-ANGELA McFALL
— Celeste Olalquiaga, Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities
‘Bodies are becoming like cities, their temporal coordinates transformed into spatial ones. In a poetic condensation, history has been replaced by geography, stories by maps, memories by scenarios.
We no longer perceive ourselves as continuity but as location, or rather dislocation in the urban/suburban cosmos. Past and future have been exchanged for icons: photos, postcards, and films cover their loss.
A surplus of information attempts to control this evanescence of time by reducing it to a compulsive chronology. Process and change are now explained by cybernetic transformation, making it more and more difficult to distinguish between our organic and our technological selves.
It is no longer possible to be rooted in history. Instead, we are connected to the topography of computer screens and video monitors, these give us the language and images that we require to reach others and see ourselves.
Almost a relic, the body is exercised and sanitized to glorification. It is the last refuge of identity. Like the vanishing city, the body remains as the only concrete proof of existence.
Yet, scattered and fragmented under the weight of technology, body and city can’t be recovered by means other than those that displace them: they must be recorded or registered anew.
Video replaces the personal diary.
Made up of images, urban culture is like a hall of mirrors, its reflections reproduced to infinity. Confronted with their own technological images, the city and the body become ruins.
Even technology is attacked by an obsolescence that renders it old instantly. We are faced with a transitory landscape, where new ruins continually pile up on each other. It is amid these ruins that we look for ourselves.^
Random thoughts
” The city no longer exists, except as a cultural ghost for tourists.” McLuhan
1- What’s on the other side of the vanishing point?
2 -“light is therefore colour” (J.M.W.Turner)
3 -Aether; the substance of light.
4 – from Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
“The universe,” he continued, “this universe that we know, began in almost absolute simplicity, and it has been getting more complex for about fifteen billion years. In another billion years it will be still more complex than it is now. In five billion, in ten billion — it is always getting more complex. It is moving toward…something. It is moving toward some kind of ultimate complexity. We might not get there. An atom of hydrogen might not get there, or a leaf, or a man, or a planet might not get there, to that ultimate complexity. But we are all moving towards it — everything in the universe is moving towards it. And that final complexity, that thing we are all moving to, is what I choose to call God. If you don’t like that word, God, call it the Ultimate Complexity. Whatever you call it, the whole universe is moving toward it.”
pp. 480-1
Angela McFall 