Disconnection: A Neutral Gear A Semi-Solid

Disconnecti

A Neutral G A Semi-Soli

VISIONS OF JAGGED HORIZONS

Disconnection

Joe Letchford

Disconnection: A Neutral Gear A Semi-Solid Edited and designed by Joe Letchford Published by Joe Letchford, April 25th, 2017, Minneapolis.

Printed in an edition of 5.

Printed by Ideal Printers Inc. www.idealprint.com www.joeletchford.com

(pp. 49-64) Digital collage created throughout my graduate process. This image making process manifested itself out of a blend between accidental Photoshop layering and working in the same .PSD files. The layered elements in these images came directly from the web based works that I had been creating for my thesis projects.

What was just an image editing process, turned into an image production process. These images have become a center point in my practice and illustrate my relationship between the outdoors and out technology.

The GPS coordinates found sporadically throughout this publication give the reader a deeper insight into where my mind was at—geographically— when I was writing at that specific time. I have a tendency to wish for the mountains and consistently think about my favorite places to visit, especially while writing this thesis. I wish I could say that I have a present mind and live in the moment, but that would be a false statement. As you will learn from this writing, I long for my places to exist and achieve an in the moment experience. (pp. 4-9, 11, 25, 38, 54-55, 75, 78)

3–16

Disconnection: A Neutral Gear A Semi-Solid

17–32

The Daily Digital Life

33–40

The Atmosphere and Disconnection

36–37

Ólafur Elíasson

41–64

Techno Bodies

65–72

Attempts to Disconnect

66–67

Hamish Fulton

73–80

Thoughts Unknown

81–94

Physical Manifestation

84–85

Pierre Huyghe

95–96

Works Cited

I would like to thank the faculty at MCAD and my mentors, specifically: Ryan Gerald Nelson, Ben Moren, and Matt Olson. I would also like to extend thanks to my classmates for pushing me as hard as they did to produce the best work possible. And to my family and friends who supported this decision and kept me going.

Disconnection: A Neutral Gear A Semi-Solid

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WE CONTORT OUR SHOULDERS BACKWARD ALLOWING

35° 4' 11.586'' N

WHAT WAS STRAPPED ONTO OUR BACKS TO DROP TO THE DIRT

MOVING SLOWLY AS TO KEEP UP A NECESSARY

CALM

RELIGIOUS PREPARATION FOR THE TASK AHEAD

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85° 18' 11.196'' W

SIPPING WHILE SMALL LIGHTING A CARAFES OF CIGARETTE COFFEE WE MEDITATE OVER WHAT WILL SOON BE OUR THOUGHTS

FOR THE THE REMAINDER OF THE DAY

THE RITUAL CLOSES AS WE GRAB OUR PACKS

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RETRIEVE THEIR CONTENTS

AND BEGIN

ONE BY ONE ITEMS CAST ACROSS THE GROUND ROPE UNFURLED

35° 4' 11.586'' N

GEAR ON

WE BREAK OUR NECKS VISUALIZING

Disconnection

8

80 FEET INTO THE AIR

SILENT RHYTHMIC HAND GESTURES

ILLUSTRATE THE POTENTIAL MOVEMENTS AS WE DISCUSS 85° 18' 11.196'' W

CRYPTIC SEQUENCES THIS MOVEMENT MANIFESTS ITSELF INTO

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FULL BODY AS A SILENT GESTURES VERTICAL PERFORMED DANCE MY BODY RESPONDS MIMICKING THE PATTERN AND RESPONDING UNIQUELY

AS I EBB AND FLOW IN AND

Disconnection

10 35° 4' 11.586'' N

OUT OF ACTION AND AWARENESS PHYSICAL TIME NO LONGER

MOVES PARALLEL TO ME

SELF-CONSCIOUS DISAPPEARS WITH NO FORESEEABLE END I MOVE FORWARD

Disconnection

11 85° 18' 11.196'' W

A lot is being written about the current digital environment and what our societal actions within this realm are doing to our collective consciousness. Those focusing on digital connection are concerned with either the binary between a connected and disconnected existence, or how this new technology seems to be continually weaving within the fabric of our consciousness. Less but still relevant, is the focus on how the ubiquitous infrastructure of the web is navigated by those who already understand its “atmospheric presence”, a view that digital culture and technology are deeply ingrained within our industrialized and global culture. The cultural aspects of this technology and the current post-digital mentality can be defined through the lens of Cultural Anthropology which believes that “through enculturation and socialization, people living in different places often develop different cultures.”1 It is also important to note that through culture people living in different environments will often have different cultures. As Nanjunda suggests: Parallel to the idea of a local cultural development, A NEUTRAL GEAR

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1

2

D.C. Nanjunda, Contemporary Studies in Anthropology:A Reading (New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 2010), 3.

D.C. Nanjunda, Contemporary Studies in Anthropology:A Reading, 3.

cultural developments on a global scale are described as “universal human nature, or the web of connections between people in distinct places or circumstances.”2 0° 0' 0.0' N S E W

This is the atmospheric digital.

Although the Internet is argued as being not entirely global, its presence is all encompassing and I hold my position on the matter that it has a large enough presence to be placed into that definition of a global presence.

Continuing past these words, I aim to examine the challenge of a disconnection from our atmospheric digital world, and the subjective feelings of “presence” and “connectedness” that one encounters through the physicality of outdoor experiences. I aim to A SEMI-SOLID

Disconnection

13

A NEUTRAL GEAR

Disconnection

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2016 Self Explanatory Screen print

explore what it means to actively choose to disconnect from a digital presence and if the possibility of experiencing a sense of connection or transcendence is directly correlated with disconnecting from an Online presence.

Today, human connections are no longer bound to that of face-to-face encounters, mouth to ear, or the subtleties of our shifting limbs. Communication has now taken new forms in many different ways—ways that create interactions unlike those of our physical interactions. More and more, we exist in the digital world, which continues to expand our interactions every day. This communication is constant, ever-present, and threads itself through the most intimate moments we experience. As a culture, we use these digital frameworks of interaction for all the same purposes as physical interaction, because this realm is in fact real. It is no longer that of a second virtual existence;3 the web has been present long enough to be considered a cultural and existential normality. It is from this viewpoint that I begin to explore the notions of disconnection in A SEMI-SOLID

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3

Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 177.

relation to the current digital presence.

When we make the conscious decision to disconnect we are also working towards informing our future reconnection into our combined cultural and societal existence.

I am interested in how technology’s fluidity, complementary to our existence, helps to facilitate personal self-awareness—or presence—as well as how the notion of disconnecting oneself from these connective tools, can facilitate equal feelings of connection and presence in nature.

A NEUTRAL GEAR

Disconnection

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A SEMI-SOLID

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2016 What Happens When Screen print

A NEUTRAL GEAR

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The Daily Digital Life

DIGITAL

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19

As I sit and reflect on my existence as a digitally social being, it is difficult to ignore the shift that has defined the current generation.

This shift is defined by the development and implementation of our atmospheric digital environment.

The universality of this connectedness and “its deep infiltration of into our lives has created a fervor around the supposed corresponding loss of logged-off real life.”4 The very real cultural development surrounding this new (ish) connection still seems to evade a majority of our current population, and these fractured moments are assumed to take precedence over our current physical connections between each other.

Since the creation of the Internet5, the general thought is that the foundation of commonplaces has become less about fostering connections with each other and more about individual environments for us to inhabit.

This edict

The first image to pop up when I Google image searched, the internet.

4

Nathan Jurgenson. “The IRL Fetish.”

The New Inquiry. 2012. Accessed September 23, 2016. http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-irl-fetish/.

5

The Internet got its start in the 1960s with the creation of ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network).

THE DAILY

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Has long been portrayed as an elsewhere, a new and different cyberspace, with the habit of viewing the Online and off-line as largely distinct... The common (mis)understanding is experience is zero-sum: time spent Online means less spent off-line. We are either jacked into the Matrix or not; we are either looking at our devices or not…. We are not crossing in and out of separate digital and physical realities... Instead, we live in one reality, one that is augmented by atoms and bits. And our selves are not separated across these two spheres as some dualistic ‘first’ and ‘second’ self, but is instead an augmented self.6

Thoughts, ideas, locations, identities, friendships, memories, politics, and almost everything else are both our reality manifested physically and our digital life, they are one and of the same:

6

Nathan Jurgenson. “The IRL Fetish.”

The social aspect to our connected environment gives us a surfeit of options, to tell the truth about who we are and what we are doing, and an audience for it all, reshaping norms around mass exhibitionism and voyeurism...Social media is a part of ourselves; the source code becomes our own code.7

The shape of global interconnectivity and social connection exists metaphorically as an atmosphere.

This atmospheric presence—full of social architecture that ranges

7

Nathan Jurgenson. “Digital Dualism versus Augmented Reality.” Cyborgology. February 11, 2011. Accessed October 16, 2016. https://thesocietypages. org/cyborgology/2011/02/24/digital-dualism-versus-augmented-reality/.

DIGITAL

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from the early usage of e-mail, to today’s advances in social media and community based formats— is becoming the most successful venue for social interaction and development: “Inside this [venue], worlds exist in worlds, scenes in scenes, friends in friends, based on the reciprocal addition of more [pages] and more doorways to your friends and your friends’ friends [pages] as a mutually empowering social act.”8

This act of navigating throughout the digitally social spheres is what allows for the development of new cultural norms. The digital atmosphere is woven throughout the common places of our current daily lives. This new cultural sector grows every day, connecting us more and more, and spreading its digital roots further into our naturally social codes.

With this, we are entering a time where there is a new generation that cannot remember what it was like before the Internet’s deep infiltration into our cultural developments. It just so happens that my

8

Metahaven, “White Night Before A Manifesto,” Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2008. 1-21

Figure.1 illustration (pp. 40)

THE DAILY

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2016 All in One Screen print

age has placed me at the tail end of that generational understanding, I have only a very fuzzy memory of what it was once like to not have access to any piece of information at the touch of a screen or the click of a mouse. This aspect of “instant connection” shifted our “normal” cultural actions and positioned them into a new, more immediate blue-hued reality.

DIGITAL

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AS I OPEN

MY EYES

ROLL OVER

AND STRETCH

WITHOUT ANY

MY HANDS HAVE ALREADY CONSCIOUS DECISION MAKING

REACHED OUT TO BECOME CONNECTED

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TO THE WORLD.

I LET OUT

A YAWN

SWIPE MY THUMB

ILLUMINATE MY MUG AND AWAY I GO

LESS THAN ONE MINUTE BACK INTO

CONSCIOUSNESS

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I HAVE STARTED MY DAY OF DIGITAL CONSUMPTION I SPEND THE FIRST THIRTY MINUTES OF MY MORNING

HASTILY SKIMMING

THROUGH ALL MY MAJOR SOCIAL MEDIAS

TO FIND OUT WHAT IT IS THAT I MAY HAVE MISSED

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THIS IS FOLLOWED BY AN EMPTY-MINDED FLOW

37° 52' 54.3504'' N 81° 3' 43.2756'' W

THE ACTION FINALLY STOPS WHEN

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THE REALIZATION OF TIME REMINDS ME OF MY STILL LAYING IN BED I GET UP SWITCH TO LISTENING TO A PODCAST ABOUT

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[WHATEVER] AND TELL MYSELF THAT THIS

IS

OKAY

AT LEAST I’M ABOUT LEARNING USEFUL INFORMATION WHAT’S IMPORTANT TO ME BUT REALLY

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I JUST CANNOT SEEM TO BE ABLE TO START MY MORNING WITHOUT I

I

STIMULATION CONTINUE THIS DANCE UNTIL REACH MY

DESTINATION FOR THE MAJORITY OF THE DAY

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AFTER HOURS OF

PROFESSIONAL CONTENT CREATION

I SWITCH BACK CHECK BACK IN AND CONTINUE INTO MY BED PHONE RUBBING MY THUMBS AROUND ON MY THIS CONTINUES UNTIL I DECIDE SLEEP IS NECESSARY

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With this anecdote I am generalizing, but I do believe it is safe to say that this should sound pretty familiar to most adults these days, not just my generation. And obviously, there are going to be discrepancies between my routine and others. However, there are two specific periods of time in my day that I think would match accurately with many who may be reading this essay. The first of these actions being the moment you open your eyes and the first thing you grab is your phone.

Secondly, as you begin to doze off to sleep and the fluorescent screen of your cell phone casts a dull glow in your dark living quarters.

Having connection to the world and all that surrounds us digitally has evolved into a tertiary limb that we cannot live without: “79 percent of smartphone users check their device within 15 minutes of waking up every morning.�9 The compulsive tendencies of these users have now developed.

9

Nir Eyal. Hooked: How to Build Habit-forming Products (Westminster: Penguin, 2006), 1.

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2016 On Sight Film Still

If this compulsion develops over time and becomes habit, would that not make it a cultural development within those communities who are learning and interacting as digitally social individuals?

DIGITAL

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I think yes.

THE DAILY

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nn sco

Di

The Atmosphere and

Disconnection

on

i ect

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THE ATMOSPHERIC DIGITAL This atmospheric metaphor comes from a view that digital culture and technologies are currently ingrained within our society, in that its presence has been developed through cultural means over the last twenty years.

The cultural aspects of these technologies can be understood through the idea of enculturation and socialization. These terms explain that people living in different places than one another will often develop different cultures10 due to their local surroundings.

These immediate influences are explained as being non-genetic, which means that if you were taken from where you developed as a child and moved elsewhere, you would have a completely different cultural understanding of the world than you do now.

Parallel to the idea of a local development, cultural developments on a global scale are described as “universal human nature, or the web of connections between people in distinct places or circumstances.”11 This “web” can be easily applied to the current web that we understand—by which I mean the world wide web (WWW.). When thinking about the global development and the web (WWW.) As a foundation for the atmospheric digital the wide reach of technology and its presence has

in fact become global. The comparison of enculturation and the atmospheric digital is12best visually explained in figure.(1), a diagram explaining the levels of influence for enculturation as well as a metaphorical representation of the atmospheric digitals presence.

This global aspect of digital technologies casts itself on everyone, and as I will explain further, we can not disconnect from it completely.

So what does it mean that the Internet has reached an atmospheric level? One could imagine shutting off all Online access or user activity and the impact that would have on our society. I would argue that even at that moment, we would not necessarily be off-line; this idea of an atmosphere is best illustrated in the E-flux journal The Internet Does Not Exist:13 The internet does not exist.

Maybe it did exist only a short time ago, but now it only remains as a blur, a cloud, a friend, a deadline, a redirect, or a 404. If it ever existed, we couldn’t see it. Because it has no shape. It has no face, just this name that describes everything and nothing at the same time. Yet we are still trying to climb aboard...But we will never get inside something that isn’t

THE ATMOSPHERE

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there…we thought there were windows, but actually they are mirrors. And in the meantime we are being faced with more and more, not just information but the world itself. Older media as well as imaged people, imaged structures, and image objects are embedded into our 14 networked matter.

This for me is what I refer to as the ‘atmospheric digital’.

This picture of what the internet is, as an object, clears up a lot of objections that this place is both a very real environment, while existing as an equally intangible one.

10

D.C. Nanjunda, Contemporary Studies in Anthropology:A Reading (New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 2010), 3.

11

D.C. Nanjunda, Contemporary Studies in Anthropology:A Reading, 3.

12

pp. 40.

13

Aranda Wood, and Anton Vidokle, The Internet does not exist (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015), 5.

14

Aranda Wood, and Vidokle, The Internet does not exist, 5.

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More contemporary artists like Olafur Eliasson have taken the physicality of natural experience and the grandeur of the natural experience into a new realm of artistic production. Eliasson’s work deals specifically with the individual and their experience within his works. His sight specific installations and sculptures are created with the viewer at the forefront, and all of his work is created for a personal experience, mediated by the artists environment. This inclusion is where the work resonates with and is relevant to my own desires within a personal practice.

Eliasson's work represents my interests in feelings of presence in nature, and a viewer consideration.

Ă“lafur ElĂ­asson 1

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1,a,b,c: 2003 The Weather Project Mono-frequency lights, projection foil, haze machines, mirror foil, aluminum, and scaffolding. 2: 2001 The Mediated Motion Smoke, Wood. 3: 1994Moss Wall Moss, Wood, Wire. Image Source: Tate Modern (Gallery), Susan May, and Ă“lafur Eliasson. Olafur Eliasson: The Weather Project. London : New York: Tate, 2003.

3

2

a c

b

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DISCONNECTION Throughout this text I have been and will be italicizing the word disconnection in order to make visual my view on its meaning. A meaning explained through the idea that disconnecting from the digital realm as providing privileged access to what we believe is a deeper, more natural, more individual self that has been enveloped by a digital presence.

However, we have just exchanged one form of social conditioning for another, and the digital realm is now part of the world that informs and forms our selves as we interact with others both digitally and physically in the “real world” that is inextricable from the digital infrastructure we have created for ourselves in our post-digital global landscape (i.e. the Atmospheric Digital).

When we make the conscious decision to disconnect from our technologies, we are working towards informing our future re-connection into the cultural and societal existence we participate in.

If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you’ll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information,

are you really there?

—Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation15

When 48° we45' make the con17.7912'' N scious decision to disconnect 113° 48' 1.494'' W from our technologies, we are working towards informing our future re-connection into the cultural and societal existence we participate in.

With disconnection, I am arguing an idea that, yes, we have the ability to take a step back and to think about how we perceive our ubiquitous technologies. But that the conscious step towards a disconnect is futile because our technology exists everywhere. We all have our own ways of pressing the mental pause button. But the digital connections are always collecting information.

The immediacy of Online access today, I suggest, has built a framework in which many people now consider what it means to take an active role in disconnecting from their devices in order to re-center themselves; Your mind can always create the opportunity for disconnection.

Given the atmospheric digital environment that we all exist within and the disconnection from one’s devices, we have gone from pre-digital to post-digital,

THE ATMOSPHERE

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and are now exploring the nonexistent connection of the pre-digital, from a post-digital point of view. We understand and comprehend what it means to be connected at all times and always.

At this moment in time we are more dependent on the Internet and our connected environment than not, since our interconnected environment has transformed from a form that we could conceive of in the ‘real world,’ into an atmospheric one. The disconnection has become an accurate insight into today’s social implications that are more dependent on the Internet and our connected environment than not. Since our interconnected environment has transformed from a form that we could conceive of in the ‘real world,’ into an atmospheric one, the disconnection has become an accurate insight into today’s social implications.

15

Jennifer Kahn. “The Visionary.” The New Yorker. 2011. Accessed October 12, 2016. http://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2011/07/11/the-visionary.

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Figure 1.

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Techno Bodies

BODIES

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16

Sherry, Turkle. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Screen (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 177.

The term Techno Bodies was created by the author and sociologist, Sherry Turkle. She defines her idea by explaining that there are two separate environments, one that is the digital environment, and the other being our natural human environment.16 This dualistic logged-on/logged-off concept littered the digital discourse in early 1990s critical techno-theory. Since this connection was in its infancy, there was little known about what the Internet would become or how it would work in a social context.

Turkle was one of the most prominent theorists and critics writing on the subject. She has been prolific in the number of texts she has written regarding digital technology and its effects on culture throughout that time.

One of her ideas that I critique is the dualistic reality; one side being our logged on self, and our logged off self.

TECHNO

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17

18

Sherry Turkle. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 13.

Sherry Turkle. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 177.

“Technology makes it easy to communicate when we wish and to disengage at will.”17

Turkle believes in this duality of the Internet, writing extensively about how this has affected the idea of the self and our relationship to each other.

When we step through the screen into virtual communities, we reconstruct our identities on the other side of the looking glass. This reconstruction is our cultural work in progress… Many of the institutions that used to bring people together—a Main Street, a union hall, a town meeting—no longer work as before. Many people spend most of their day alone at the screen of a television or computer. Meanwhile, social beings that we are, we are trying to retribalize and the computer is playing a central role...We join interest groups whose participants include people from all over the world. Our rootedness has attenuated.18

Given the addition of social media platforms since the early nighties—like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit—this quote by Turkle has some valid backing in this time of the social platform.

However, the notion that we all leave the world to sit and stare at a computer screen, or that the only thing BODIES

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19

Digital content with the purpose of attracting viewer attention and continue that attention through mindless surfing.

we do when logged on is create a new identity— because the one we walk around with is not good enough—is antiquated and frankly untrue. This theory could not be farther from the experience of the users who utilize their technology daily.

Yes, much of the post-Internet conversation and “click-bait”19 articles today will try and lead you to the notion that your digital usage is something to be ashamed of. And the played-out anecdotal accounts of the public-place-turned-cell-phone-screen-zombies staring rooms, will soon become outworn.

As beings of cultural development, we have— and will always—utilize what makes life more efficient to allow for better communal engagement.

So for Turkel to say that the commonplaces of her thought (i.e. Main Street, Union Hall, town meeting, etc.) are no longer useful, is perhaps a narrow-minded view of social theory. I believe that these arenas have TECHNO

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20

Sherry, Turkle. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 177.

not lost their intended use, and in fact, they have only become more efficient.

I would then like focus more on Turkle’s idea of the need to “retribalize”20 in which she explains that we as social beings—and through the lens that our social environments have lost their intended uses—flock to the internet to regain the communal aspect that we have lost (in her opinion). I am especially interested in reworking the idea, relating this notion to the current status of social media platforms.

A majority of these social Online places are geared towards re-grouping large numbers of likeminded individuals within a common ideological meeting place, much like Turkle’s idea. And it is clear—by the success of these social platforms—that we as individuals are not only trying to reconnect with each other and share experience as a common group, but are searching for moments complementary to our BODIES

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21

Caroline Haythornthwaite, Social Networks and Internet Connectivity Effects. Information, Community & Society 8, no. 2 (2005): 125-147.

face-to-face interactions. These vast digital communities are supplementary environments to tell our stories, our gossip, and to find our news. These “tribal” connections we create Online absolutely reflect our need to connect daily with our common social kin (if you will). This idea is made stronger by the research of Caroline Haythornthwaite in her journal Social Networks and Internet Connectivity Effects21 and the studies they conducted with their students: Are Online ties as ‘real’ as offline ties? From LEEP (Library Education Experimental Program, at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign) it looks like they are: online-only ties are characterized by the same kinds of interactions, the literature tells us are found for offline ties.

Friends...Communicate more frequently, about more different things, and via more media...Interviewees report deeply held friendships, as well as working relationships, with other LEEP students even though the relationships are maintained Online...Other studies of LEEP also reveal that many of the attributes of offline communities adhere, including bonding to the group as a whole, and development of common history and folklore...Overall we find that, when asked, Online participants themselves report strongly held, close ties with others that are as important to them as any offline tie.”22

TECHNO

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22

23

Caroline Haythornthwaite, Social Networks and Internet Connectivity Effects. Information, Community & Society 8, no. 2 (2005): 125-147.

Emily Rassi, “Technology: The Un-Holy Grail of Love.� December 5, 2015,,accessed November 19, 2016, http://www.millennialinflux.com/technology-the-un-holy-grail-of-love/.

These findings from Haythornthwaite and similar findings elsewhere are often overlooked by those who only scan their environment, and then write an op-ed comment about our current digital state being that of self-centered individuals, who do not understand what it means to be human anymore. The current environment could not be more antithetical to this position. The digital atmosphere that I described earlier is my argument and theory describing what our digital culture actually is. We are living in an environment where we have grown with our technologies long enough that the understanding of our digital culture is now natural and of cultural importance. It is however still new enough that we continue to have the conversations about whether this technology will be the downfall of society, or that we will become so self-centered that we will forget what it means to connect with one another anymore.

BODIES

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TECHNO

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Attempts to Disconnect

TO DISCONNECT

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Artists like Hamish Fulton are looking towards utilizing moments of disconnection in order to inform their daily life, as well as an artistic output. It is the implementation of a physical moment that requires the person to take an active role in moving and exerting some form of energy other than mental.

Hamish Fulton is an artists whose medium is walking long distances. He states that his creative process is: “No walk, no art.�

Titles such as Song Path evoke his observations and emotions during these long, solitary walks. Fulton is very straight forward in his creative process, and subsequently his artistic output. This approach conveys the message , the magnitude of his journeys and ultimately leaves the non-journeyed viewer wanting for more information. The exact information which can only be discovered through the actual act of the art itself.

1

Hamish Fulton

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1: 2011 Mountain Skyline Painted weed with text. 2: 2004 This is not land art Wall painting with vinyl text. 3: 2012 The South Face Wall Text. Image Source: Fulton, Hamish, Andreas Baur, Tina Plokarz, and George Frederick. Takis. Hamish Fulton: Walking Transformation. Kรถln: Snoeck, 2014. Print.

2

3

4

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In the 1960’s a group of individuals—who went under the title of The Situationists— would conduct openended experiments aimed at scrambling mental expectations for themselves. For example; they would wander aimlessly through busy streets, or deliberately create obstacles for themselves by rearranging the furniture in their homes.

Their intention was to ignore labor saving devices in order to live with time as a restriction, it was a rejection of the relentless spectacle of consumption.24 This may not seem like a disconnection, but the Situationists were able to understand the benefits of being present, with the awareness that even the most mundane of moments had its unique qualities and benefits to their society and its constructed cultural implications.

This is a tool that we as a digitally literate and connected community have—for the most part—forgotten how to utilize. Silence has created situational stress for most, at one point silence was the time for a pause and thought, but it is now saturated with consumption and inter-connection.

More contemporary artists today, like Hamish Fulton,(pg. 66–67) are looking towards utilizing these moments of disconnection in order to inform their daily lives. It is the implementation of a physical moment that requires the person to take an active role in disconnecting.

“No walk, no art.”25

24

Véronique Vienne, “The Situationist Spectacle,” March 2000, accessed November 23, 2016, http://www. veroniquevienne.com/article/the-situationist-spectacle.

25

@tate. “Hamish Fulton: Walking Journey - Exhibition at Tate Britain | Tate.”

Tate. June 2002. Accessed November 08, 2016. http://www.tate.org.uk/whatson/tate-britain/exhibition/hamish-fulton-walking-journey.

ATTEMPTS

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This is Fulton’s significant and laconic manifesto. His work is concerned with the experience of wandering and the attempt to create a clear mind. In his walking transformation26 exhibition catalog he notes that his work cannot convey the experience of wandering, meaning he is only an artist that develops art out of experience. He goes into the world to allow himself to be influenced and changed by the occurrences rather than work in a fixed place. So his work can never truly represent his art: If in doubt. Keep walking’. Hamish Fulton added these words to his series of prints called Ten Toes towards the Rainbow. The title refers to ten seven-day walks he made in the Cairngorm mountains in Scotland...Titles such as Song Path evoke his observations and emotions during these long, solitary walks.27 Fulton is very straightforward in his creative process and subsequently his artistic output. This approach conveys the message, the magnitude of his journeys, and ultimately leaves the non-journeyed viewer wanting for more information: the exact information that can only be discovered through the actual act of the art itself.

This production method can be anything you manifest it into; running as art, talking as art, cycling as art, climbing as art, sitting as art, driving as art, etc. Whatever the journey may be to the artist, it is the action of uprooting one’s self (however one sees fit) in an attempt

26

Fulton, Baur, Plokarz, and Frederick, Hamish Fulton: Walking Transformation, 51.

27

“Hamish Fulton, 'Wind through the Pines' 1985, 1991.” Tate. August 2004.

Accessed November 08, 2016. http:// www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/fultonwind-through-the-pines-p77621.

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to seek some form of disconnection.

Relinquishing one’s mentality— in order to exhaust the mind—is one approach to disconnection that Fulton and I use frequently, it is through this exhaustive act that we know how to reach a place of disconnection and mental clarity. Contrary to Fulton, I am not attempting to create work that represents my ego—quite the opposite—I am attempting to establish what to me is the obvious, which cannot be described through words, only through experience. This is described well from a few quotes in his catalog Hamish Fulton: Walking Transformation:28 “Walking can be for the mind what the sauna is for the body.”29

28

29

Fulton, Baur, Plokarz, and Frederick, Hamish Fulton: Walking Transformation (Köln: Snoeck, 2014.

Print.), 57.` Ibid., 57.

30

Ibid., 57.

As well as this quote by American geologist Clarence Kin after climbing Mount Tyndall; “...After such a hugely demanding physical challenge, the mind has an almost supernormal clarity.”30

In comparison, the Situationists took this momentary disconnection and applied it to their personal surroundings.

They would achieve similar moments of disconnection/un-knowing—a term which will be explained shortly—and sensory misguidance that would inform their daily lives as well as an artistic practice.

This was achieved all within the confines

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of their surrounding environment, unlike Fulton’s extreme environmental changes.

Being influenced and changed by natural occurrences unknown, and influences presented to us at random is exactly where the conceptual disconnection presents an interesting idea.

This momentary—whether quick or prolonged—disconnection allows for us to achieve a secondary conscious state. This secondary state—the space between knowing and un-knowing—is a foray into my next topic of discussion and subsequently the catalyst for my thesis exhibition project’s content.

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Thoughts Unknown

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Unknowing is a place of thought that is intrinsically associated with spiritual practices that takes its starting point from a pivotal text in western theology that laid the foundation for this way of thinking, The Cloud of Unknowing.31 However, I have taken this idea from the anonymous English monk and redacted its usage of a God, replacing it with the natural environment. From this text, The Cloud of Unknowing, I utilize the short statements that open the beginning

of every chapter as metaphors to ground some of the feelings—which exist in the secondary state of consciousness—as they accurately depict the mental state of un-knowing in the natural realm. “What is nowhere to the bodily sense is everywhere spiritually.”32This statement from the text sparked some insight into how to think about the secondary conscious state during physical activities. This place of nowhere within the mind— but full bodily awareness—is the place that I seek each and every time I make the decision to disconnect, in

order to experience this un-knowing sensation in nature.

This state I seek has been theorized and examined by Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who defines this physical experience that of a “flow state”. Flow can best be explained as activities that stretch a person’s mental capacity, leading them to a sense of novelty and discovery post experience. It is within this moment that the individual experiences an almost “automatic, effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness”.33 In everyday life, we are always monitoring how we appear to other people; we are on the alert to defend ourselves from potential slights and anxious to make a favorable impression. Typically this awareness of self is a burden. In flow we are too involved in what we are doing to care about protecting the ego. Yet after an episode of flow is over, we generally emerge from it with a stronger self-concept; we know that we have succeeded in meeting a difficult challenge… the athlete moves at one with the team, the reader of a novel lives for a few hours in a different reality. Paradoxically, the self expands through acts of self-forgetfulness.34

Much of what I seek within moments of disconnection is this

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place of flow. The flow state is what allows the individual to enter into the realm of un-knowing through 38° 14' 30.012'' N a physical action.

Once within 80° 50' 43.6416'' W that state and assuming you have achieved a sense of non-existent social implications, you have achieved personal disconnection and are experiencing the realm of un-knowing. I consider the flow state that Csikszentmihalyi created, the parent of unknowing thought, or maybe the nest which un-knowing rests within. I think this due to my own experiences with these two states of consciousness and the fact that the only access is have to experiences in the realm of un-knowing is through achieving a flow state.

Less spiritually but equally important to the concept is the usage of un-knowing by designer Ken’ya Hara who spends each year working with students to visually represent the unknowing through a graphic design curriculum.

“Is communication possible which, rather than making the world known, makes people understand how little they know of the world?”35 Hara’s assignment is to think of a natural space and create an environment that is both familiar and unfamiliar within the same image.

This application of the un-knowing thought process is parallel to that of The Cloud of Unknowing when

thinking of this physical and spiritual sensation in terms of a visual manifestation. To seek and achieve a secondary consciousness is the same as attempting to create the visual representation of that emotion in a natural landscape—it is the recognition of what you are receiving but with a lack of knowledge to explain its manifestation.

Artists like Olafur Eliasson produce within the realm of un-knowing in a way not dissimilar from Hara, wedding its experience with what can be only be explained as having the essence of a natural environment. Eliasson’s work deals specifically with the individual and their experiences within his works.

His site specific installations and sculptures are created with the viewer at the forefront—a major reason why these works can be understood as representing natural experiences. These works are never created to mimic nature, only to represent a feeling that one may have experienced in a natural setting.

Eliasson is “interested in the possibility of making the mind of the spectator part of the work.”36 This in effect embodies un-knowing with the idea that the viewer understands every dimension of the art work, but is still left with a sense of not being able to explain what it was that happened to them during their experience.

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His work executes an installation in a way that does not mystify the construction process, as Marcella Beccaria explained in her 2013 text about the artist: “When the ideology of a display or exhibition is not acknowledged as a part of the exhibition itself, the socializing potential of that exhibition is sacrificed on behalf of formal values.”37 What you—the viewer—are within the installation, is the catalyst to its success.

One piece in particular by Eliasson has resonated with me in my search for constructed artworks that accurately create environments to experience un-knowing. The Weather Project 2003, commissioned for The Unilever Series in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London. Exhibited in London during the winter, this installation utilized fog, mirrors, 200 yellow mono-frequency lamps, and the control of temperature to mimic a season other than the one outside the confines of the museum.38 The installation mimics what could be a day at the beach. Upon entering the turbine hall visitors are presented with a sun like figure, floating in the center of the hall, and a noticeable atmospheric change.39 This viewpoint is your jumping off into informing how it is that you understand your stance in your environment. “For me it’s the relationship between the institution and society. Fundamentally the work is

about people, passing information back and forth, at every stage spreading into the next chain, so that a sort of human nuclear reaction is taking place.”40 What he is creating are moments of disconnection from society that will inevitably inform his viewer’s experiences upon reconnection into their daily lives. When this is effectively executed in whichever way you construct your experience, you will understand your disconnection and inevitably reconstruct your place in society as a more selfaware individual.

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In his speculative mathematics, Gödel arrived at a proof revealing that all axiomatic theories (topdown ‘explanations’) are necessarily incomplete and that truth will always have a hole in it…. It is fundamental to the nature of an explanation that it always contains an element that remains unexplained and not understood. Re-stated: all 41 explanations also don’t explain.

Gödel’s proof that explanations do not explain, granted me access to another set of tools allowing me to dive deeper into this thought of un-knowing. This was the proof—for what I was asking—that when enveloped within moments of un-knowing, the secondary consciousness, and physical awareness, it is appropriate to not have an explanation for what is unfolding before you. In an artistic practice, this also gives room for those like the students in Hara’s seminars to accept the fact that they might not have the answer for what it is that they have created, just that it made sense in their mind…“With their help, we can learn to enjoy the experience of not-knowing and the playfulness of being in the dark…”42 Historically the theories of un-knowing fell within theological texts, perhaps because these manifestations of human thought and feeling come without words

or explanation. Anything that came without words could only be explained through the supernatural and therefore was left to be explained though the presence of a higher being, an unexplainable set of anecdotal theories. These moments an individual experiences, with a fully present self which allows the individual to drop all other experience than the present, is my interpretation of Un-knowing thought and how it manifests itself within the desire to disconnect.

To reach the realm of un-knowing or presence within one’s act of disconnection one must relinquish all mental control over the actions in which they are participating. Individuals of all kinds from the professional athletes to artists to amateur outdoor adventurers constantly seek this mental realm, it is a space of awareness / unawareness unlike any other.

The body is present with your actions, creating full connection with you and your environment.

Your mind blurs, leaving you to your most present mental capacity.43 Our [western] society has taught us to understand that knowing is the only way to be viewed as

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having knowledge. Not knowing is viewed as having less knowledge and therefor less in the eyes of society.

More often we respond to these

productive confusion—that itself represents a powerful form of knowledge, a way of knowing...46

Take a 38° moment to think back 4' 9.9732'' N to a time when something that pos81° 4' 56.7408'' W sessed grandeur overwhelmed you.

Where were you?

What were you doing?

Can you remember the exact moment this feeling washed over you?

Or is there a gap of explanation, other than the fact that you know where and when it happened.

moments of non-knowledge with the phrase “I know”44 when in fact we aren’t actually informed on the subject at all.45 But what about those moments of un-knowing, those fleeting experiences where no words can describe your feelings? Diderot, explains it best relating this idea back into the practice of an artist: ...Art can operate outside the linear or binary axis of ignorance / knowledge and introduce another epistemological dimension—non knowledge or

My thesis work will focus on how we could harness the understanding of our environments, and through disconnection reach a subsequent state of un-knowing in our experience. Parallel to those desires is that the application of my theories is concerned with the viewer over my own notion of what an experience is.

My goal is to see the works live past what they may have been intended for, which hopefully imbues a sense that what is being presented is past a contemporary understanding of an artistic experience / institutional norm. Having an open, curious mind when presented with ideas one may not understand will hopefully allow

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the viewer to take an active role in their own participation within the work.47 While focusing on the viewer’s experience and understandings of un-knowing and a non-knowledge zone, through my own representations of how I have found these experiences, will open the work to more interpretation and questions of the work of art as a final product.

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FOOTNOTES 31 Emilie Griffin, The Cloud of Unknowing (New York: Harper One, 2004), 150.

32 Ibid., 150.

33 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention.

First Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition, (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2013), 110.

34 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention, 111.

35 Kenya Hara. Ex-formation, (Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2015), 8-9.

36 Olafur Eliasson, “The Experience Machine,” The Experience Machine The Artist Interviews Himself, 1995/2015, January 2015, , accessed November 25, 2016, http:// olafureliasson.net/archive/ read/MDA117964/the-experience-machine-the-artist-interviews-himself#slideshow.

37 Beccaria, Marcella. Olafur Eliasson. (London, Millbank: Tate, 2013), 71.

38 Beccaria Marcella. Olafur Eliasson. (London, Millbank: Tate, 2013), 70.

39 Beccaria Marcella. Olafur Eliasson. (London, Millbank: Tate, 2013), 71.

40 Beccaria Marcella. Olafur Eliasson. (London, Millbank: Tate, 2013), 70.

41 Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis., Anthony Huberman, Will Holder, and Culturgest (Gallery). For the Blind

Man in the Dark Room Looking for the Black Cat That Isn't There. (Saint Louis, MO : Lisbon: Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2009), 18-19.

42 Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis., Anthony Huberman, Will Holder, and Culturgest (Gallery). For the Blind Man in the Dark Room Looking for the Black Cat That Isn't There. (Saint Louis, MO : Lisbon: Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2009), vii.

43 Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).

65.

44 Kenya Hara, Ex-formation, (Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2015), 8-9.

45 Ibid., 8-9.

46 Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis., Anthony Huberman, Will Holder, and Culturgest (Gallery). For the Blind Man in the Dark Room Looking for the Black Cat That Isn't There. (Saint Louis, MO : Lisbon: Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2009), 28-42.

47 Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis., Anthony Huberman, Will Holder, and Culturgest (Gallery). For the Blind Man in the Dark Room Looking for the Black Cat That Isn't There. (Saint Louis, MO : Lisbon: Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2009),92.

IMAGES Scan: Quote from The Cloud of Unknowing 2 Scan: The Weather Project 3 Google image search for “I know”.

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Physical Manifestation

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48 49

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation.

(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994),3.

Relational Aesthetics is a practice and thought process created n the 90s by French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud. Bourriaud defined the approach as “a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.”

The artists is viewed in the relational artistic practice as the “catalyst” of a practice, rather than

being the central figure. (Bishop, Claire. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October (Fall 2004, No. 110): 51-79.)

50

This Relational Aesthetic artistic practice is the place where I learned that there are similarities within Graphic Design’s thought and systematic production and an artistic methodology.

Consider Baudrillard, who speculated that reality was disintegrating because of media and its presence48, disconnecting from the Internet, then, can be viewed as something that cannot be achieved. Even when we think we are not a part of the digital environment, there is a good chance that a piece of technology is gathering information about us and updating our digital existence. In the event that you manage to escape far, far away from your connection, this disconnection will inevitably inform your future reconnection. So, rather than thinking that your device is parasitic and fruitless, you should instead begin to embrace its cultural importance. We are a part of that culture: it exists all around us.

While we are thinking within this existence, the subsequent thesis exhibition then works to focus on both of the theories put forth (i.e. Atmospheric Digital and Disconnection, our natural environment, how it informs and provokes the desire to disconnect, and my desires for social and communal facilitation within the context of artistic production. This is achieved through working within the physical space, utilizing digital technologies and digital production methods to facilitate communication and realization.

To break those terms down further; communication, connection, and community within the work of art, is a process and methodology that I actively apply in the initial stages of the thought and research of every new work. I desire to create experiences that allow those who are viewing the piece of art to become active within the work. More specifically, I want for the viewer to feel as if they have left a mark, one that connects them to the final outcome, making my work theoretically incomplete until they approach and interact. These thoughts and applications of a piece of work can best be expressed through the artist Pierre Huyghe (pronounced hweeg).

Huyghe emerged in the 1990s as part of a wave of second-generation Conceptualists who came to be grouped together into the Relational Aesthetics

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51

52

Art 21, “Pierre Huyghe: “Celebration Park” | Art21,” , accessed November 19, 2016, http:// www.art21.org/texts/pierre-huyghe/interview-pierre-huyghe-celebration-park.

Art 21, “Pierre Huyghe: “Celebration Park” | Art21,” , accessed November 19, 2016, http:// www.art21.org/texts/pierre-huyghe/interview-pierre-huyghe-celebration-park.

53

Art 21, “Pierre Huyghe: “Celebration Park” | Art21,” , accessed November 19, 2016, http:// www.art21.org/texts/pierre-huyghe/interview-pierre-huyghe-celebration-park.

movement,49 50 an approach to art making that emphasizes participation, social interaction, and chance.

“I suspend time. I suspend the moment of the opening, forever. It’s an endless opening. Also, because of this giant door, you have the feeling of being small. It’s like Alice in Wonderland.”51 Huyghe has influenced me through his questioning of his role as the artist.

In his retrospective exhibition at LACMA he was not interested in creating work that was “domesticated.”52 He concerned himself with creating uncanny spaces and the idea of making an exhibition, which felt like a foreign body, lodged in a museum, by accident. He focuses on the viewer’s interaction with the space and creates moments of confusion, or what I wish to call moments of un-knowing. His exhibition Celebration Park at the Tate and ARC, created an experience that When you celebrate, you’re not so much observing outside the world, you’re participating in this world. Part of the title is really about this idea of not being critical, but being participatory...Celebration Park is a collection of exhibitions, a set of singular experiences. The format of exhibition is something to work on: it’s a form in itself. Usually an artist thinks of an exhibition as an end point, a resolution of something. He’s working in his studio, and there’s a process, and at the end of this process, he’s showing his work in what we call an exhibition. I’m not interested in that. I’m interested that the exhibition is not the end of the process but a starting point to go somewhere else. In a certain way, that’s what this is all about. 53

Huyghe’s work, is mostly concerned about the viewer over his own notions of what an experience is, even in his highly constructed experiences. He wants the viewer to experience for themselves, to come up with an idea different from the next. His interests in an incomplete work as an exhibited piece encapsulates my desires for an incomplete work which can only be completed through the viewer.

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Pierre Huyghe is an artist who works in the realm of un-knowing. Huyghe creates events and encounters that question the expectation of art as a discrete work exhibited for a specific time. Since the 1990s, he has ventured outside of institutional structures, to work beyond the restrictions of pre-existing mediums.

Huyghe, in his words, is seeking a “non-knowledge zone,” where he approaches an existing system, such as an institution, a situation, or an area of knowledge, and creates a speculative proposition, a “What could be.”

Huyghe has sought to extend the time and space of an exhibition so that it may continue indefinitely or exist in multiple sites at once.

Pierre Huyghe 1

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1: 2001 On/Off Light programme, installation view. 2: 2000-03 Atari Light Liquid crystal glass, opaque or transparent, according to a program. 3: 1996-97 Anna Sanders, l’histoire d’un Carpet, installation view. Image Source: Huyghe, Pierre, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and Italy Castellodi Rivoli (Museum : Rivoli. Pierre Huyghe. Milano: Skira), 2004.

2

3

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To consider a work of art as a thought in motion has captivated me as I have sought to understand and mold my methodological approach to my work.

Considering an artwork as thought put in motion has driven my exhibition work, by creating an experience and a work of art that can only function after there is an interaction with it. Technically speaking, this interaction is achieved through the uses of sound, code, projected image, and an environmental and physical disconnection within the full work. I have taken this user activation one step further, by implementing an environmental disconnection within the installation. This allows me to explain the realization component of the final outcome.

The realization moment in the work takes its starting point from un-knowing and disconnection, to legitimize its concept and application within the work.

To include a realization moment references the moments directly after exiting the realm of un-knowing. It is the idea that once you have experienced a state of flow and entered into the un-knowing, you have no access to the full story of what fully occurred prior. You can, however, piece together what happened physically through association and your environmental conscious, but mentally there remains a gap. I achieve this by disconnecting the outcome of the viewer’s interaction with the code based aspect of the piece, and the—not in view—moving image.

Within the space, this work is sited on two opposing surfaces; The code based work, which takes its form in a web interface is activated through mouse movements. On an opposing wall I project a film—the content of which consists of secondary slow pans of my favorite climbing destinations, utilizing a film style specific to the outdoor entertainment industry. The only access the viewer has to the video–which they are activating through their interactions with the web interface—is through two sequences: a sound element and a communal element.

Prior to an interaction the viewer is presented with the sound of a natural scape (i.e. the sea, birds chirping, the rainforest…) which is meant to reflect what is being projected on the opposing surface. During the interaction, the viewer’s movements on the interface create an oscillation between the natural sound and a digital sound (a digital sound created to sound… digital). These actions are effected vise versa on the side of the moving image, visually you are presented with a color distortion which parallels the oscillation.

Secondly, the access to understanding the interaction between the interface and the projected image can only be comprehended through a communal interaction. One may have an inkling about their influence on the piece, but to fully understand your contribution you need more than one individual in conversation with one another. On the side of the moving image and during an interaction of the web interface, the moving image changes from zero color saturation to full color saturation.

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This change in saturation, as I have stated earlier, is based solely on how the interface is being manipulated by one of the required viewer/participants. The code is collecting data from the mouse, its movements, and is outputting that data into the saturation levels of the moving image. This all culminates into a whole viewer experience that can only exist and function with viewer manipulation and interaction. Much of what is being presented visually takes its content from my own personal experiences with un-knowing and disconnection, since that is the only entry point I have into it. This installation hopes to evoke a sense of this experience, but ultimately it is up to the viewer to understand its connection to their own moments of un-knowing and disconnection and where those manifest for them.

In an attempt to conclude this intentionally non-conclusive exploration into the challenge of a disconnecting from our atmospheric digital world, I am fully aware that what I have set out to achieve in this thesis is a tool set which excites wholly my interests as an individual and the gamut of activities I partake in. What I have presented here, in this thesis and my exhibition, is a starting point. Much like Huyghe, I have created my suspension of time and its endless openings.

As I stated at the beginning of this process, my goal was to explore what it meant to actively choose to disconnect from a digital presence in relation to today’s post-digital environment, and if the possibility of experiencing a sense of connection or transcendence was directly correlated with disconnecting from an Online presence. What I have come to learn is that my personal opinion of this has shifted from wanting a definitive answer to this question, to accepting that there may not be one.

Exploring the state of flow and the level of un-knowing achieved during this state, has answered enough of my questions to believe that there is a level of personal disconnection which requires one’s mind to achieve a level of consciousness that can only exist if you have fully disconnected from any societal implications, thus making it a moment which doesn’t require any form of digital connection.

When we make the conscious decision to disconnect we are also working towards informing our future reconnection into our combined cultural and societal existence. My interests in how technology’s fluidity, complementary to our existence, helps to facilitate personal self-awareness and the notion of disconnecting oneself from these tools, will continue to expand past this program, changing as I continue to be informed by every disconnected moment I achieve.

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B-role cut from a film shot in the New River Gorge, WV. Robin Pyke, 2016.

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98

CONSUME THE SPACE THAT

EXISTS FOR THE CURRENT MOMENT

MENTAL TREKS GUIDE ME THROUGHOUT THE DAY I THINK OF HEAVY BREATH AND SUNBURNT KNEES HOUR

AFTER

FURTHER DISTANCING MY OWN REALITY

I THINK OF SPLIT SKIN AND UNCOMPLETED GOALS HOUR LOST IN ANOTHER DIMENSION AN ELSEWHERE PROCESS

PUSHES ME THROUGH MY STRESS

IT MAKES FOR NON EXISTENT INDIVIDUAL

NO HUMAN CONTACT THOUGHT AFTER THOUGHTS A VERTICAL BRUISE A SEMI-SOLID

Disconnection

DRESSES MY FOREHEAD

99

ion:

Gear id

3–16

Disconnection: A Neutral Gear A Semi-Solid

17–32

The Daily Digital Life

33–40

The Atmosphere and Disconnection

36–37

Ólafur Elíasson

41–64

Techno Bodies

65–72

Attempts to Disconnect

66–67 Hamish Fulton A NEUTRAL GEAR

Disconnection

73–80

Thoughts Unknown

81–94

Physical Manifestation

84–85

Pierre Huyghe

95–96

Works Cited

1.37°32’ 26.61’’ N

100 2.77° 26’ 9.7728’’ W