scribbler @jmharper - Tumblr Blog

Groys claims that if the techniques of mechanical reproduction gave us objects without aura, digital production generates aura without objects, transforming all its materials into vanishing markers of the transitory present.

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The idea of fine art and commercial art is a silly idea. And it's been set up in order to serve some people's purposes. Most of the stuff you see is not art, including the stuff you see in the galleries. For me, something can only be designated art when you feel yourself changed by the experience of looking at it. It only occurs when you are transformed. That is the role of art. if that doesn't happen, you're doing something else. You're being amused or you're being informed, but you're not necessarily experiencing art.

Milton Glaser

Year 36

Hands down, the most beautiful part was watching my daughter, Yma, grow. At any odd moment of the day, light might suddenly pass between us in a glance, and in those seconds I see the wondrous love that ties us together. Other than that, the world kept emerging. I spent several weeks filming in Cape Town, one morning spent climbing Table Mountain to overlook the South Atlantic. I lost my favorite hat on a recce in a lake, caught in the wind. Heard nightly stories at the bar with Yorick and Caro about Chivo or Jarmusch. Learned how to stay at hotels in Los Angeles with a baby and after twelve years of living in New York, felt like a New Yorker living at the Park apartment in Chinatown, which overlooks the LES. We bought an apartment in Brooklyn, on a street with an Irish name that we'd loved for years. Ness set to work turning it into a home. Then back to the west coast for our mothers' surgeries and more bearing witness to the miracle of life. Shortly after, a night at the Emmy's - losing to The Beatles. Didn't matter. Read a book on war that took ages to finish. At the end, spent a week in Berlin, trying to remember what it was like those years ago and maybe see the future. A good year.

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An Atlas of Deep Time

I am walking through a desert, on the bottom of the sea. A glint catches my eye. I stop and pick it up. White coral, a shard of a colony of creatures that lived here some 300 to 500 million years ago. I can’t comprehend how long ago that was. Yet by that time, 80 to 90 percent of earth’s history was already written in stone. This place where I’m standing now, wasn’t here at all. The earth beneath my feet was much closer to the equator, rotated 90 degrees on the north-south axis, and submerged under warm tropical waters. I am walking in deep time.

An Atlas of Deep Time is grounded in my desire, amid the turbulence of human affairs, to hear the older, deeper resonances of the earth. The piece is scored for a large orchestra, arrayed in six instrumental choirs surrounding the listeners, and layered in six simultaneous tempos.

Like the geologic layers of rocks beneath our feet, the densities and textures, the instrumental and harmonic colors are always changing, yet somehow the substance always seem to be the same.

The earth is 4 billion 570 million years old. An Atlas of Deep Time lasts roughly 46 minutes, which equates to about 100 million years per minute. At that tempo, the entire history of the human family is represented in the dying reverberations of the last 25 milliseconds of this music.

—John Luther Adams