Surely eternity cannot be held within the limit of the horizon... Surely eternity cannot be held at all. It is that which eludes the definite mark and slips through incontrovertibly, how is it then our world could hold such an idea? Today is some eternity, for do believe we have one, suspended at the point of birth and creation. We are defined in opposition to the systematic collection of moments. It is a true sensation, outliving time itself, self-sustained by the new Narcissus (Adorf, 2004) in the age of total digital irrelevance.
But what of us? Are we cumulative or empty vessels to make mortal with our presidence? And what is the nature of this presidence? How is it that a freedom might arise from retention of the dead? Even though we now live somewhere else, this world is still written in action and consequence; those rules have not been dissolved or suspended, they’ve simply been forgotten. Because ultimately we do choke the physical world with our kingdom of time collected; this eternity sits atop its dead, and although we cannot answer the indefinite, we can observe its state of indefinance, as I have tried to do with Eternity Somewhere Else.
Eternity Somewhere Else is involved with the implications of an eternity in the physical world, and is yet hopeful of an escape. It is a reminder of the accumulation of things, and of time that passes with speed and direction, to counter and so create our paternal presence. It is an open dialogue of mortality and immortality, of matter to non-matter and of penpoint and line.
One eternity I mean to discuss is the scroll moment. The scroll moment is the proscenium through which we may experience a suspension of time, a frame of reference that sees time move through us rather than us move through time. This is our digital perpetuity; a waterfall with no cause or consequence, only perceived in flight.
The eternity we have found is attributed not to our impotent potential for recall, but to the cyclical reaffirmation of our presidency over the present. Put simply, with the birth of new information we ourselves are born again, what Sigrid Adorf (2004, p. 93) calls the ‘new Narcissus’ who ‘acknowledges no past, but also has no destination in view, but who instead newly creates himself again and again in a single moment of absolute presence.’
The duty of any proscenium is to sequester the eye; the illusion on stage is propped up by all that goes on off. For us, time is none but the ensemble cast, moving from stage-left to stage-right - but long as a clown’s handkerchief - the chorus line never ends.
Where do they go? Where is yesterday kept so we may oversee today? For the spectacle is surely empty consumption in respect to the progressive self; if we had accumulated yesterday we’d have less time for today. No, we are vectors, not hosts - so where do the scrolled go?
Eternity Somewhere Else is perhaps first and foremost, a website. The address bar and pointer are essential as the content itself, which is utilitarian in the extreme. One is likely to first visit Eternity and find what appears to be a short looping animation. But on closer inspection it is revealed to be an internet wormhole; a sequence of fast loading webpages, each serving as one frame and triggering the next, that fall through 10 times a second in perpetual motion. The circuit is created within the Internet medium itself - apropos of McLuhan’s maxim - and once initiated, cycles indefinitely.
The user should then visit Somewhere Else, where they will join a live video stream that sees a plastic bag collecting something over four hours. Is the bag collecting time? Energy? Memory? The dead? Is it collecting tears, or groceries? Spare change or white lies? Is it collecting the things that keep us collecting? Or is it collecting nothing? Will it burst? And if it does, where will it go then?
Sometimes we are given an outcome, and then we move slowly towards it. Sometimes we want to arrive, but sometimes we’d do anything not to. Because the last arrival is the final departure, and up until that point the bag is inflating. Eternity Somewhere Else is above all hopeful that the last bag will burst, and release those from pain and waiting into the true open air.
Various material has left its mark on this work. Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Alien Staff (1992-93) struck me as a wonderful bridge between estranged worlds, both in the sense of inciting an intervention between technology and physicality, but also in the linkage of the ancient ritual space, described by Stuart Brisley (Brisley & McMullen, 1984) as without divisions of spectator and performer, to today’s society of estrangement. Wodiczko (Novakov, 1997) talks about Xenology - the displaced other - and in Eternity Somewhere Else I wonder whether that might be the human figure in the canon and carcass of time.
The work of Eastern-bloc performance artists Zbigniew Warpechaowski and Jerzy Bereś was also of great influence, not simply because the works again evoke this ancient ritual space in their testing of the human limit, but for how one is forced experience that ritual today; no longer a participant, we see the dead spectacle. This recorded performance, such as that of Vito Acconci’s infamous Seedbed from 1971, relates the transient and the permanent, a relation that unlocks Eternity Somewhere Else
Also of note was the official Radiohead website of the late nineties (http://radiohead.com/Archive/Site2); a one-way garden of forking paths, never twice the same; a reimagining of the internet medium enriched with a compelling narrative modality. Finally in their most direct likeness, pieces such as Annette Messenger’s Casino (2005) and Nils Völker and Zimoun’s similar meditations on natural oscillations and repeated forms have sown the seed in the monolith, and found a great lyricism in automation.
Eternity Somewhere Else is both a profoundly personal work and a widely universal one. My hope is that it may reclaim the ancient ritual space by being so.
Sam Wickham, 2014
List of References:
Adorf, S. (2004). A Question of Gesture? The Act, the Image, its Language and their Movement in Body Art of the Seventies. In H. Schmutz (Ed.), Dass die Körper sprechen, auch das wissen wir seit langem = That bodies speak has been known for a long time (p. 93). Wien: Generali Foundation.
Brisley, S. (Director), & McMullen, K. (1984). Being and doing [Web]. Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/51508286
Novakov, A. (1997). Alien Staff: Krzysztof Wodiczko in conversation with Bruce Robins. Veiled Histories: The Body, Place, and Public Art. New York: San Francisco Art Institute.
When Jerzy Bereś made his first performance, the very term had not yet existd. [...] These were organised by hippies and Tadeusz Kantor – the guru of the local artistic world.
This was the time of transgression of painting to reveal the act of painting itself. More and more often the focus has been put on the creative process and direct action. Originally, a happening was close to theater, or more exactly, to its reform oriented aspirations; thus eliminating the gap between audience and performers.
Warpechowski lies face down in a trough of mud, before being strung up as a wooden marionette and dangled precariously above it. The video ends as his assistant begins to press burning cotton balls onto his back. Deeply political, Warpechowski's work deals with the Polish subject as a synecdoche for the nation's dark and tumultuous past.
In January 1971, Acconci performed Seedbed intermittently at New York's Sonnabend Gallery. On days he performed, visitors entered to find the gallery empty except for a low wooden ramp. Below the ramp, out of sight, Acconci masturbated, basing his sexual fantasies on the movement of visitors above him. He narrated these fantasies aloud, his voice projected through speakers into the gallery. This video documents the performance.
The Alien Staff is an instrument of social interaction, a means of reconciling frustrated dialogues and reinstating the 'ancient public space.' The Alien Staff as an intermediary between performer and spectator initiates an otherwise incomplete and unrealised exchange; a cultural bandage.
The factory is a force far greater than the sum of those who toil within; the factory remains always one step ahead; the rhythms of the factory are footfalls of a death march.
Unlike a tribalism, the factory chant is compartmental, and relies on the friction between individual units to sustain momentum. Despite this, the factory chant is not polyphonic nor polyrhythmic, it is performed in unison and quantised to the metre of production. So whilst the subjects form no cohesive union, no gestalt, they are nonetheless bound together without freedom of individuality. In this metronomic death march, they are neither dead nor alive: a state of limbo which once initiated, persists even when severed from the machine.
The industrial scale mining of Asbestos began in the mid-19th century.
The first documented death from Asbestos was recorded in 1906.
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