Statement
Here, image includes visual information we receive, but also imagination in our mind, imagery in memory, and all the senses—sound, scent, and touch—which bring specific visions to our mind. Some are abstract, some are vividly figurative. Research on images is research on ourselves as human beings. Our body is the image.
A certain part of this research is dedicated to body work. Body work brings awareness. It creates a dynamic circulation of maintenance—of your body, yourself, your mind, your senses, and recognition; your communication, your community, and society. Our intellectual endeavors always align with our physical practice.
The realization of a healthy society is based on the small unit of individuals facing their bodies and the dignity of the self. Caring for oneself and others is the very first step toward a larger movement.
Read bodily. Move your parts. Breathe to feel your relationship with the place and environment.
Be political on every scale. It is our real matter.
- Matterreal
001
Agency, Providence
and Time
From A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce, 1916.
In East Louisville, Kentucky, spectacle wearing, lifetime drifter, Avery Mann, accepts a ride from a pickup truck. He is told to climb in the trucks bed; he sits looking backwards. On his lap is a box of cheap antique watches (all with Roman numerals, most not ticking — none have the correct time). The truck is headed west around midnight on the first Sunday of November (Louisville straddles the “Central” and “East” US time zones if you don’t know). The box of watches was left curbside by some county workers who had cleaned out the house of recently deceased nonagenarian Maxim Qualunquecosa. Quite some miles away, a Foureye Butterflyfish (the ones with those faux-eye colorations close to their tail to deceive predators) is swimming against the Western Atlantic current, a direction in concert with a violent and large waterspout that is gyring counter clockwise on the surface above. On the nearest landfall, on a bluff in Providence, Rhode Island, the effect of said nor’easter is causing some stormy and icy conditions. An archaeologist named Aurora Qualunquecosa (estranged from father Maxim) has fallen unconscious after slipping on an ice patch on the edge of her dig. Yesterday Professor Aurora had discovered a mummified Cro-Magnon man preserved in peat for nearly 30,000 years. The professor, lying horizontal on a gurney, is being pulled vertically by a winch toward the National Guard helicopter. The stretcher, because of the spinning blades is slowly rotating clock wise. Outside the downwash of the rotors the wind is blowing hard from the north.