Texts > COMPLEX VARIABLES
One day in May of the year 1916, Andy
decided to visit the Alexander Hamilton High School in Arlington,
Virginia. He emerged from a lofty group of cumulous clouds
and flew across the school's spacious lawn, coming to rest
upon the sun-baked dome of the main building. This impressive,
four-levelled, neo-classical structure rested high upon a
hill, towering in the warm light as if it served a more important
function than simply being a public high school.
From this high vantage-point, overlooking a rolling slope
of oak trees and the northern ridge of Arlington Cemetery,
Andy could just see the apex of the Washington Monument shining
in the distance. A grumpy tugboat could be heard moaning from
the Potomac River, as it pulled its unknown heft towards Baltimore.
A swift blue jay landed on one of the brick chimneys before
darting off again. It was one of those days when Andy was
happy to be on the Earth, absorbing the day what was, all
around him.
Once having taken in the breezy view from atop the school's
roof, Andy began to sink down through the rafters into the
attic of the main building. A second later, he was sweeping
along an empty fourth floor corridor. It was 1:35 in the afternoon
and all the fifth period classes were in session. Without
there being any air-conditioning units, most of the windows
within the school were open, allowing sweet whiffs of dogwood,
cut grass and honeysuckle to permeate the shady halls.
Not quite sure what he was in the mood to do, Andy decided
to explore a classroom labelled 4-D. Inside this room he found
twenty-two students and one teacher in the middle of what
was apparently a very boring algebra lesson. The groggy students
yawned and daydreamed, while a man in a white shirt and brown
vest scratched out a long equation on the blackboard. Seeing
a cute-looking eighteen-year-old girl by one of the opened
windows, Andy levitated in her direction.
Using his Extra Sensory Perception, he
learned right away that her name was Lillian Wilson and that
her father had an important position with the U.S. State Department,
negotiating war aid to Great Britain. Andy rested his tiny,
transparent body upon the knuckles of Lillian's left hand,
as she used it to prop up her lovely head. She, as well as
some of the other students, was nearly nodding off to sleep.
Upon the wooden desk before her, Andy saw a much chewed pencil,
a small piece of scribbled paper and a text book opened to
page 242, which explained the various rules and characteristics
of logarithms.If he listened to Lillian‚s reticular
formation, Andy could pick up the lazy purr of theta waves
passing through her mind. By focusing on these brain waves
he saw a montage of visions, which included Lillian eating
strawberries in the park on the Smithsonian Museum, or anxiously
choosing a new summer outfit from the juniors‚ section
of the SEARS and ROBUCK catalogue.
Sliding down Lillian's smooth wrist, Andy hopped over onto
the desk and began drifting towards the open schoolbook. Examining
the pages more closely, he became aroused by the mass of numbers
before him. Andy was often attracted to complex equations
and their hidden variables. To him the intricate world of
negative and imaginary numbers was full of wonderfully poetic
symbols and representations. So, not having anything better
to do on that sultry afternoon, he decided to fly into the
textbook and ride along its vast, extended number systems.
Edging closer to the algebra book, Andy discovered that the
pages were covered with Lillian's small, lead-ridged fingerprints
and the delightful smell of her lavender perfume. The smaller
he grew, the larger these scents became, intoxicating his
disintegration into the world of quadratics and radicals...
Dirk Zoete
The first thing that Andy came across
within the Intermediate Algebra book was a set of Multiple-Valued
Functions on page 98. He had materialised into the left side
of the open book, which brought him into an existence among
one of the earlier chapters about Supplementary Problems.
The dull grids he found there were not especially interesting.
Moving on to other pages, Andy passed through various addends,
subtrahends, minuends and remainders. He flew across the pages
and was able to even go within some of the more complex fractions,
exploring unknown equations that stretched into plus and minus
infinities.
It was not too long though after Andy had entered Lillian
Wilson's algebra book, that he came across something which
he had not expected to find, a smudged pencil sketch she had
made upon one of the margins of page 37. The drawing depicted
a strange sort of house with many windows and one side door.
This structure rested a short distance away from a small canal,
which contained its very own miniature duck Lillian had been
so inventive to add. Pausing before this tiny drawing, Andy
contemplated the building and its abundance of little square
windows. He wondered what sort of things were inside? What
had Lillian been thinking when she was making the drawing?
What spirits of the subconscious had guided her hand in sketching
this obscure place? Was it someplace she had actually visited,
or had she made it up?
By making himself even smaller than he already was, Andy became
even in scale with the only door to the house. He was now
most curious to investigate the mysterious structure and its
many rooms. Yet in order to actually enter the universe, in
which the drawing existed, Andy would have to penetrate another
four-dimensional continuum; one that was even more abstract
than that of numerical exponents. Otherwise the picture would
remain nothing more than a flat, smeared, two-dimensional
image, as seen by the eyes and not the imagination.
Once the necessary changes in essence had occurred, Andy appeared
in front of the side door, levitating now in a bizarre, new
atmosphere. There was a sufficient amount of gravity and the
temperature was as pleasant as the May afternoon he had just
left behind. Andy could even hear the sound of Lillian's duck
barking from the nearby canal. Unfortunately though there
were no colours to be seen, only the dull graphite-grey of
the pencil lines. At this particular point, Andy existed within
an entire universal history, which only consisted of a single
house, a small canal and a quacking duck. It was not until
he began to materialise through the door of the house, that
Andy entered a rich, colourful environment, completely conceived
by the subconscious thoughts of an eighteen-year-old girl.
He entered an empty, white hallway. It was much cooler than
outside. There were no sounds and no other persons. At the
end of this hallway, was a single window, which looked out
onto a vast field of farmland, which had not appeared in Lillian's
original sketch. Sliding over to this window, Andy looked
out into the distance and saw a young man in the field. He
was steering a motorised tractor from behind the vehicle,
with a set of long rods. The absurdity of the scene made Andy
smile. The very idea that someone should lead his or her tractor
with a mule harness was wonderful.
The man passed back and forth against the rural backdrop,
ploughing his field as if the huge machine were a cumbersome
beast that required guiding. It became an ironic three-way
game of man, machine and element, as the awkward farmer sewed
the seeds of natural fertility through the assistance of such
ridiculous mechanical accessories. He was even a sort of circus
ringmaster, leading his four-wheeled animal in its preposterous
performance.
But who controlled whom? Was the man, the tractor or the land
the real master? The sequence made Andy reflect upon the relationship
between humans, machines and their element, recalling a plethora
of useless inventions and stupid appliances invented to better
control and manipulate the environment. What he saw out the
window was even a kind of satire on the often-idiotic sides
of human intelligence, going to elaborate, unnecessary ends
to achieve their various fancies. The man steering the tractor
as a satire of himself.
Rik De Boe & Peter Morrens
Throughout the first floor of the house were several closed
doors, which all came off of the main foyer. Andy drifted
over to the door closest by the rear window and passed through
it. He now hovered in a dim space with very little lighting.
The curtains were drawn and the air was musty. Upon a low
coffee table, in front of a row theatre seats, he made out
a huge photo album, lying opened within its centre.
Going over to this book, Andy saw that it hosted a collection
of vacation photographs, which had apparently been taken whilst
someone was on holiday in Japan. There were the typical shots
of oriental flower gardens, misty, mountainous landscapes,
modern buildings and other, trivial scenes captured by the
camera's lens. By flipping through the pages of the album,
Andy came across what seemed to be hundreds of random images.
He even started to hear sounds coming out of the photographs.
A picture of a public square sounded like a storm at sea.
A snapshot taken within a café contained the sound
of birds singing and a close-up picture of a rare flower gave
off the noise of an ambulance siren. Voices spoke out of place,
over top of one another, causing the varying images to overlap
and contradict with their appointed sounds. Amid all this
sight-sound confusion, Andy began to detect a sense of restlessness
and even a touch of disillusionment with what he saw. It slowly
became evident that a lovely holiday upon the island of Japan
might not be exactly what one imagines.
With unintentional gestures and the haphazard seizure of its
subjects, the camera presented a documentary of indefinite
reality. It captured the most casual of details, instead of
the most sensational ones.The album showed Andy that no matter
how far a human might physically venture in his or her quest
to discover the exotic, banality will remain present. In the
end, the exotic and the banal rest side by side, each interpreted
by the person looking at the pictures.
Stephanie Paulus
On the other side of the hallway Andy
came to a medium-sized room, with rhombic, uneven walls. It
was completely empty of any furniture, having only two opposing
sets of windows, which allowed light to filter in from different
sides. The space, although devoid of objects, was alive with
illumination. Andy went around the interior, examining the
subtle differentiation in tints given off by certain portions
of the wall.
Gradually he came to see a completely overt geometrical puzzle
being projected upon the flat surfaces. It was as if the yellow-coloured
light from one set of windows, converged with the white-coloured
light from the second set, to create an indirect series of
shades within the space. One quadrilateral area, low upon
a wall, became an aluminium curtain with rounded edges. This
silver sheet mediated the two transacting sources of light,
turning them into a neutral, metal cloud. Another similar
quadrilateral appeared on the other side of the room, absorbing
the light waves within a steady puddle of cobalt. This signalled
an imaginary depth within the space. It opened a metaphorical
window between the wall and floor, beaming the reflected and
refracted illumination into an oblique, rhomboidal prism.
Andy swept through the room again, finding an intangible quartet
of vertical and horizontal measurements. It was as if a certain
visual contemplation had been seized and arranged within the
atmosphere.
Greet De Gendt
Next to the illuminated room Andy passed
into another chamber. This space contained a typical, western,
domestic interior. A sofa, lamps, tables and armchairs were
arranged about a large carpet, each corresponding with the
styles of the early twentieth century. Andy wondered if this
wasn't the actual living room setting in Lillian's parents'
house? It was warm and inviting there, so he went over to
the sofa and sat down.
Just then he saw a large, black dog staring at him from in
between two armchairs. It sat a couple metres away, gazing
intensely at Andy; its long, pink tongue wagging back and
forth. It was impossible for Andy to tell whether or not the
dog was friendly. When he tried reading its mind, he couldn't.
"Hello," he said at last. "My name is Andy."
The dog's expression did not change. It continued staring
at Andy without reacting to his kind intonation.Then it did
unexpectedly reply, in a soft voice, its eyes never changing.
"What was it you were thinking just now, as you sat down
and saw me?" it asked.
Andy thought for a second and said, "I'm not sure...
I think that I was thinking about the fact that I couldn't
read your mind. You see, your eyes were saying something to
me, but I wasn't quite sure what."
"My eyes? What could they have been saying to you?"
"Like I said, I'm not sure. There is something very human
about your face though. It's as if your expression is somehow
knowledgeable, and yet you're only a dog..."
The black dog remained stiff. For a moment Andy thought that
it was stuffed. It wasn't normal that a dog sat still for
so long.
"What do you think it means to only be a dog?" it
asked. "Don't you suppose that there are certain thoughts
that go through my mind too?"
"Well, not really... I'm sure that you're capable of
certain capacities, like feeling affection and loyalty, but
I have no idea to what extent you may be intelligent. When
we look at each other though, it's weird... I mean, do you,
as a dog, ever consider who or what you are? Do you ever wonder?"
The black dog got up and moved around the armchairs. It wagged
its tail, yawned and paused to scratch behind its ear. It
came over very close to Andy, stopping directly in front of
him. The two looked very intensely at one another. Just then,
for a split second, Andy saw himself reflected in the moisture
of the animal's pupil.
Angelo Vermeulen
Emerging into yet another room, within
Lillian Wilson's sketched house, Andy found himself inside
a dank, darkened space. Again, there was no furniture in this
room, not even windows. Floating to the other end of this
rather humid interior, he came to the far wall. It was there,
through the dim lighting, that he noticed a putrid growth
of mildew clinging to the plaster from ceiling to floor. A
group of air bubbles distorted the flat surface of the wall,
some having already ruptured; sending bits of damp plaster
onto the floor.
Andy glided closely along the wall, observing a fascinating
constellation of tiny, parasitic fungi. They spread out across
the surface in woolly, furry clusters, granting this room
an oppressive sense of rot and decay. Zooming in closer, he
scanned various algae. They contorted and multiplied at an
amazing rate. The combination of the room's dampness and its
warm temperature made the ideal conditions for the algae's
growth.
At a certain moment Andy became intrigued by the aesthetic
quality of what he saw. The various thallophytes distributed
themselves in a way that transformed the wall into a living
canvas. The busted swells became layering and accents. The
near microscopic diatoms became active parasites of green
and black silica. It was an abstract sort of picture that
controlled itself, becoming what it would. This work of automatic
art was a composition of decomposition.
Regaining a distance from the rotting wall, Andy considered
the symbolic brevity of the process. There was no way of preventing
what was occurring. Time chewed away upon the soggy surface
with its corroding agents. This wall would be brief. The little
dance of diatoms upon its flank made sure it would not last
long. It was almost as if this display of biological virtuosity
had been set up upon a stage, as a deliberate experiment in
refined happenstance.
Boris van Nes
Sweeping upstairs, Andy came to a new
set of closed doors. He coasted along the hall, coming to
a door painted with florescent orange stripes. A ferociously
loud sound came from within, reminding Andy of a triggered
alarm system. Materialising through the door, he found a most
shocking sight. A thin, robotic figure whirled about in the
centre of the small room, emitting the terrible, screaming
sound, while swinging one of its long appendages violently
about the space. Andy had to duck out of the arm's way, as
it quickly spun around the room, blaring its noise over an
attached megaphone.
At the centre of this robotic figure, rested a large, flashing
orange light, which served as a head, spreading the entire
scene with an aggressive and slightly comic urgency. Andy
decided right away that this was for all intensive purposes
an electronic anxiety attack. The rotating figure shrieked
out to everything around it, lurching at the walls with its
heavy arm, filling the claustrophobic room with an irrational,
mechanical temper tantrum. Andy was delighted in coming across
another disturbed machine. In its own, obnoxious way, it perfectly
depicted the completely illogical, but fundamentally vital
dynamic of hysteria. The turning robot bellowed for the sake
of bellowing. It spread panic for the sake of spreading panic,
almost consuming itself in its own trepidation.
As Andy turned to exit the overpowering room, he recalled
that such moments of absolute hysteria really do exist. He
thought for a moment about being in a state of shock, about
the instant that someone has the air knocked out of his or
her lungs. He thought of the sensation of falling or trying
to run in a nightmare but your muscles don't respond... Andy
found the manic robot to be an overstated reminder that some
moments in life are made up of orange flashes and off-balance
contortions... the moments you never see coming.
Lucie Renneboog
Venturing into the next room, Andy came
across a little brown spider. It hung upside-down from a chandelier
by a long web, which it was in the process of connecting to
a distant bookcase. The spider had already covered most of
this room in a thick network of webs and nests. Its long legs
meticulously worked their way down the silky line, stretching
out a new strand of web from its rear body. Andy approached
the little spider and asked it why it was covering the entire
room in webs.
"Because I want to consume this space..."
"Consume the space?" replied Andy.
"Yes, I'm filling up all empty areas, connecting the
entire room."
"But why would you make your webs so all-encompassing?"
"So that this space will have one common surface and
one congruent texture."
"I see..."
Andy flew low over the meshed landscape, examining the growth-like
effect the cobwebs had made upon the room. Collectively they
took over the area and all which lie beneath their gossamer
coating. The room was occupied by the repressive distribution
of the webs. Returning to the little brown spider, Andy floated
in the air next to it.
"Tell me why you feel it necessary to give this room
one, common surface?"
The dangling arachnid let itself slide all the way down on
to the bookcase. After attaching the new line, it looked up
at Andy hovering near the chandelier.
"My webs are assertive...they have transformed this ordinary
room into another world! Look around you and tell me what
you see... Let your eyes find the ebb and flow contained between
these six surfaces. The floors, ceiling and walls are now
in unison, moving in the same direction, reaching for each
other, touching one another. My architecture, as brief as
it may be, is allowing this space to dream...it's turning
this interior, cubical area inside-out, applying dimensions,
fissures and cavities! Now there are hills and valleys extending
between the windows; now there are caverns and caves between
the walls..."
HAP
In the room next door, Andy found what
he first thought to be a typical nursery. There were numerous
toys and children's furniture, all brightly painted in primary
colours. Andy loved to visit rooms where children played.
It was always interesting to see what sort of objects attract
young persons and why.
But the kind of things Andy saw scattered about that nursery
were anything but typical. Lying on the carpet, next to a
small bed, he saw a miniature, metal crucible furnace. To
the left of this, he saw a tiny replica of a starching and
steam-drying apparatus. The more Andy focused on the toys,
the weirder they were. Instead of finding trains, horses,
or baby dolls, he saw thermometers, treadmills and even a
ship's navigation system. This strange assortment of articles
was puzzling. Andy had never seen such abnormal toys before.
When he floated over to the room's window, he noticed three
tiny elves, working diligently from underneath a desk. Each
of these elves performed their task in the building of a medieval
battering ram. One chipped away tree bark with a chisel, sharpening
the point. Another fastened together a sturdy chain, which
held the battering ram in place upon a wooden carriage. The
last elf occupied himself by carving the names of various
fictional sweethearts into the side of the heavy weapon. By
assimilating all the pieces to this odd puzzle, Andy got the
impression that the three little elves were working together
as a team, attempting to represent the not-so-evident features
of a cultural inheritance. Their battering ram questioned
the integrity of aesthetic design. Its miscellaneous purpose
became transcended in an almost humorous shift of context.
By using an unconventional language within their workshop,
the elves created singular objects, which stood out from their
oblique shadows to take centre-stage. Once the medieval battering
ram was finished, the three elves rolled it out into the middle
of the nursery and took a series of bows. The entire room
was suddenly animated with dozens of spectators, who cheered
the trio and their unique new presentation. Andy clapped along
as well, seeing the little team of inventors as heroes of
the obscure. They had given something random the honour of
being displayed and contemplated.
Chris Van der Burght
Making his way into one of the other
rooms, Andy saw a small whip of light passing to and from
within the empty space. It resembled a ray of sunlight, as
one might see shining from a mirrored reflection. This quick
flash shifted about like a bird, never remaining stationary
for more than a few seconds.
"What sort of light wave are you?" asked Andy curiously.
The blinking flicker giggled, "You silly ghost, I'm not
a light wave! I'm a surge of momentum."
"A surge of momentum?"
"Of course… don't you feel me just about to lunge?"
Andy concentrated on the little surge, not knowing where it
would go next.
"But don't you usually need to infiltrate matter in order
to aquire your potential? Seeing like this, you seem so light
and delicate."
"Not necessarily," answered the surge. "Sometimes
I can live within the most unexpected places…take a
photograph for instance. Should a photographer capture me
within one of the shutters, then I can remain there, frozen
in a particular moment."
"But do you continue to move inside a photograph?"
"I continue to pull upon the eyes of the viewer, granting
a sense of movement through the positions I animate. I am
the presence within the breeze, blowing over a field of wheat.
I am the little wind that ripples across the shirt of a runner
or even the potential for a subject to fall off balance, though
the photograph is permanent."
"Do you never tire, remaining fixed within a defined
instant?" asked Andy.
"There are ways to breathe and places to land…ways
to regenerate myself each time a viewer follows my currents…
There are even ways for me to transcend the foreground and
the background, enlacing the inertia between ground, muscle
and fabric…"
Colombe Marcasiano
Passing through the air, Andy went into a small bedroom, which
was full of large, multi-coloured images, arranged upon the
walls. Each of these images had been sewn together, consisting
of various dyed cloths. At first Andy wasn't sure what the
fabric pictures were supposed to be. He recognised certain
features within the series, but couldn't quite place from
where he recalled them. After looking very closely at a red
cloth with what seemed to be white, Arabic letters, Andy realised
that he was studying a warped Coca-Cola logo. Suddenly it
was clear. Who ever had sewn together this little flag, had
done so with the actual Coca-Cola logo in mind, yet they had
purposely twisted the letters into an indecipherable script.
The effect was strange. There was something child-like in
the renderings of the popular label logos.
Seeing them in this way, Andy even got the idea that the logos
were mutated, distortions of the commercial empires they abstractly
represented. When Andy considered the contrast between this
collection of logos and the perfect, polished idealism of
an advertisement one was used to seeing, they even subtly
suggested something deformed or impaired. The letter fonts
and styles of certain product labels, such as Coca-Cola, Fuji
Film or Apple Computers, are embedded within the collective
psyche. To view such familiar emblems in an odd, barely recognisable
way was surreal. Glancing over the group of incoherent names
and symbols, Andy wondered what a dyslectic Coca-Cola tasted
like?
Nicolas Moulin
At the end of the upstairs hall, Andy
came to another very dark room. Upon entering he immediately
heard the sounds of radio interference and satellite transmission
frequencies. It reminded him of a Mission Control centre from
a space expedition. Flying over to a large monitor in the
middle of the room, he watched a slow motion video feed. A
robot probe had undoubtedly captured these scenes, as it filmed
an unspecified alien terrain. The rigid, mechanical camera
tediously panned from right to left, with a portion of its
support arm always remaining within a corner of the frame.
The unknown landscapes Andy saw upon the monitor were barren,
rocky and apparently devoid of any life forms.Yet there was
also a soothing type of tranquillity in these desolate scenes.
As lonely and uncivilised as this place might be, Andy could
not help but to feel an urge to go there and walk about the
quiet rocks. The audio interference accompanying the images
was also sedative, portraying a far away place composed of
silence, poisonous gas and electrical airwaves. He could have
been seeing the surface of a distant planet.
He could have also been subject to perspective and scale,
actually watching a microscopic camera film the top of an
ordinary kitchen table or a minute portion of human skin.
There were worlds within worlds, each awaiting an electronic
scanner to define its reality. Andy smiled to himself, thinking
about how relative the senses are.
Joseph Jessen
Inside a closet, coming off the upstairs
hallway, Andy was instantly zapped away into a tearing vortex
of momentum. Somehow, the entire closet was falling through
the air. A fierce wind blew through his hair, pushing his
tiny transparent form with a mass of G-Forces.This turn of
events was completely unexpected. For a moment Andy wondered
if he was still within Lillian Wilson's sketched house. Maybe
he had fallen through a point of instability within his current
reality? Maybe the universal history inside the algebra book
had worm-holed with another dimension?
Once he finally gained control of himself, Andy tried to slow
down his velocity, but there was nothing he could do to lessen
the pressure around him. He began to worry that he might not
ever find his way back into Lillian's algebra book. He continued
to fall at a high rate of speed, having no idea where he was
going. Then Andy saw that he could still make out the wallpaper
of Lillian's closet. He pushed himself over to the side and
touched the flower-printed wallpaper. It slid under his fingertips,
going on forever without end. Why was it, he wondered, that
one could suddenly fall out of a cubic space? What must happen
before one is to break the barrier of stability? Was Andy's
free-fall through the closet psycho-semantic? Was the room
falling or was he falling?
Andy took a deep breath and everything came to rest. The closet
no longer fell. He hovered once again inside a small, claustrophobic
space, with a single, overhead light bulb. Still touching
the walls, Andy collected himself. He felt certain that somewhere
inside Lillian's psychology, as with most humans, there existed
a point where she longed to leap away from herself. Like she
subconsciously wished to dive off the edge of her classroom
chair and fall through the walls around her. Though Andy wondered,
should someone wish to spring away from themselves, how and
where would they safely land?
Frederic Geurts
At last Andy came to the attic of the sketched house. He entered
through a trap door in the top bedroom's ceiling, ascending
into a tall, rafted space. In the middle of this attic was
a large, round, wire structure, which slowly rotated between
the ceiling and the wooden floor. Flying into the middle of
this ring, Andy was able to see that it rested entirely from
free-suspension between the floorboards and rafters. It was
huge in size, echoing a model of centrifugal force. This ring
contained a graceful, yet mechanical sort of eloquence. It
seemed to float within the space being perfectly symmetrical,
subject to no mass or density.
Going over to a window, Andy looked outside. He saw sky, drifting
clouds and a very peculiar, bleached sunlight. It was, remembered
Andy, the sunlight within a mental projection. These types
of daylight had always fascinated him. The source of illumination
within a thought, memory or dream, was a very intriguing thing.
Andy floated around the rotating ring, basking in the artificial
glow of the attic. Looking back through the window, he could
make out a tiny, white-hot ball, burning in the distant sky.
Sighing, Andy addressed the blinding sphere.
"So here I am once again, looking at a trace of a sun
through the corner of a window sill.. But you're not really
there are you? You're just an imprint, inside the imagination
of a young girl in Virginia..."
The little spec replied in a dignified, far away voice, "Would
I not be one and the same?"
"I'm not sure."
"Do I not see all the icebergs of the Antarctic regions
as well as a sandstone cave in Sicily? Just because I am here
with you, inside this little attic, do you not think that
I am also other place as well, at this very moment...placing
one hand upon the Straits of Gibraltar and the other hand
upon the moons of Saturn?"
Andy tilted his head, watching the atmosphere.
"But I left the real sun behind in the algebra classroom.
How can you be out there and here at the same time?"
The angle of the imaginary sun slanted a fraction of a centimetre
lower, while the large round structure in the middle of the
attic continued to turn.
"Consider the vastness of the axis of the ecliptic...the
breadth of longitude and latitude...the perihelion distance
slinging the comets around the galaxy... Why must I stop at
the end of a retina? Why should I not be able to go deeper,
into the page of a book or the thoughts of a young girl?"
Andy thought for a moment about what the sun had said.
"I should think not, because ultimately a star is just
a burning mass of hydrogen gases... To me, finding you here,
inside a pencil sketch, you're nothing more than a projection..."
"My little sophomoric friend," replied the sun in
a way that made Andy feel suddenly foolish, "the parallelogram
of forces are much more placid than you assume. Look at the
floor very carefully, behind you, there, just underneath the
suspended ring and tell me what you see..."
Andy did as instructed. He saw, very slightly, upon the wooden
floorboards of the attic, an odd series of little burned arches.
Each had a thin, charred, black line, extending into the centre
of the ring structure.
"What are they?" he asked, returning to the window.
The sun spoke once again, in its perpetual far away voice.
"Those are my finger prints, pictures I have made with
shadows. They are little markers, showing where I've been,
reminding the floor how unique each moment is. There are very
few places, physical or virtual, where I have not gone."
Andy swept back around the attic, considering the shadows
he saw stretching across the floor and walls. It was true
that every second of every day made a different picture. Shadows
shifted and distended traversing lunar craters and even the
unknown attic corners, within the fleeting daydream of an
adolescent girl in May of 1916.
Alice Evermore 2002
De Zeeberg
Group exhibition Netwerk Galerij.
05/05/02 > 09/06/02