Bringing together documentation, memories, thoughts, and reflections about our Withlacoochee River kayak experience forced the seminar group to address some questions about the reality, authenticity, value, and kind of places and river systems we had entered in little plastic boats on a hot, blinding sunny Florida day. We began to reflect both on sensations and divisions: both on phenomenology--our bodies on the river, and ways of classifying our experiences through image, memory, conceptualization, and translation. Personally, I found myself floating somewhere between a total body immersion and a cognitive criticality of the various intersecting systems of the river and its surroundings.
I began to think about the difference between that day, in which I had spent several hours frying in the sun, feeling the motion of the waves, staring across a blinding and reflected sun--in essence allowing myself to be carried along, as a living body on a predetermined and highly controlled flow of water systems--and the very different experience of talking about it later. Discussions as a group revealed that such a response seemed fairly universal, though our ways of translating the paradoxical response were varied, almost at odds. We were staring at the sun--on this we could agree-and that our experiences on the river or reflected upon it later, while all valid, varied between and within ourselves in their degree of reality, authenticity, and the degree to which we could share them or what we could know about them. Jeremy looked to Plato to help us think about existence as a simultaneity of variously trustworthy, authentic, valid, or real objects, phenomena, and experiences. From here we could all adopt a gereralized approach to making an installation by thinking along lines of division, light, and the different layers of our experiences.
'Division,' in terms of this project functions on a literal level as the relationship between the river, its bank, and the land, or the river between two areas of land; it also functions as the line between light and shadow, the kayak between our bodies and our surroundings, the surface line between water and air, the horizon line...and metaphorically, the boundary lines between the bodies or minds of individuals, the line between us and our environment, between the native and non-native species and objects, between the folks of Yankeetown and us, as tourists...between what is natural and constructed, organic and controlled...and also, the line between thinking the experiences and the experiences themselves. As I started to think about these thigns, I also started to realize that, despite my feeling of immersion and the ease with which I gave myself to the affectation of the sensual experience, that within that unity there lies a series of fragmentations, limits, contradictions, and divisions. It seems as if the polarities unify the experience.
Abstractly, I think of the line as the divider; a murky, dynamic, dark, unknowable space between spaces. Lines isolate us, they leave a gap of untranslatability, a place where language can't go, through which we float, waiting to emerge from the dark into the light. While these thoughts are not totally in conflict with Plato, he uses the line as an illustrative device. Plato divides the line itself as a way of demonstrating what we can know, what is universal about that knowledge, how real or true different ways of knowing are.
So how do we combine the idea of the line as divider with the idea of line as the device that can bring all the parts of the division into union? How do we divide the divider to end up with something that holds together?
Installation: line is represented as a fragmented and mediated river, or that day that joined our experience of it, or the sun that penetrated us all; the moving line of reality which we can metaphorically look out from...we were six moving points--blinded eyes, working arms, burning skin, thirsty mouths, ears buzzing--on that line, six condensations of various kinds of knowledges...six divisions of an already complexly divided entity, and we process our six experiences of the same things in a single space through six aesthetics--in a layered and refracted environment we let it all overlap and interplay. Our combinations overwhelm, like the contradiction between experience and translation, phenomena and ideas, nature and technology, organic and synthetic, reality and representation--we unify through affect and reference, we divide through representation. We are forced to confront the mediation and overlap of commodity, nature, old and current technologies, representations, objects, light. We can enter the installation on different levels of reality and division, or we can identify the lines that tie the experience together. We find ourselves staring at the light, reflected, translated, captured, and divided in the unity of different layers of reality, experience, and memory.
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