In response to the assigned readings
First I want to start off by saying that Sean Cubbit’s aricle Projection: Vanishing and Becoming was one of the most well written articles, in regard to four dimensional art, I have had the opportunity to read. It gave that feeling of new beginning that all beings crave (a point that was addressed in the article) Oddly enough, Cubitt efficiently was able to ‘project’ his own passions about the growing technological world, onto the reader, spreading his enthusiasm.
Projections have evolved over time (which as Terry’s article will note, time is yet another illusion) as a means of communicating all that is within us that we are unable to speak of. Meaning, there is a truth within all rational beings that is unable to be communicated verbally. Projections, birthed from the illusion of self, have been a way to share human experience.
I always have a twinge within me when I think of a growing population of people who prefer the ‘computer world’ over the ‘real world’ or better put the ‘perceived world’. It seems almost that we are moving in the wrong direction as time goes on. Often, the only solution I can see is to revert back to a more primitive state, definitely not move further forward into a world that hasn’t offered us satisfaction.
Handheld devices and electronics haven’t seemed to offer many people valuable solutions to happiness or a fulfilled life. These are most likely widespread concerns and Cubitt doesn’t ignore these concerns. Cubitt acknowledges this loneliness and confusion that many people feel. He draws a line to separate the cause of those states, which would be the consumerist world, from the divine (for lack of better word). The consumerist world with its endless propaganda, advertisements, and disease is a world that we are capable of breaking free of at any time. Cubitt suggests that technology and the unfathomable advances it has brought about are to be separate from the consumerist world.
If we can learn to separate the two then anyone can see there is something incredibly irresistible about the digital world. A feeling that you just want to keep going to see if it will, actually, reveal the answers about the birth of suffering.
Sean Cubbit, who is wildly progressive, in my opinion, sheds light onto what he believes the 4d world can become. He believes the world can become, with the use of mathematical vanishing point and other tools, a place where our thoughts are not our own anymore. Instead, our thoughts will be a part of a collective pool of thought. Secrets will become past times as we move into a world where our sense of self crumbles. In this world, perhaps we can constantly be aware, instead of the cycle that strains us indefinitely. I particularly liked the inclusion of Jean Braudillard’s words on his 3 stages of the icon (in relation to the cycle), he says, which first “masks and denatures a profound reality,” then reveals the awful truth that “it masks and denatures a profound reality,” and finally crumbles under the discovery that “it has no relation to any reality whatsoever.”
There is something in all of us that wants to connect with the world around us, as if a missing link has been snatched away and we are working our whole lives to put the link back in place. Wars are fought for this reason and religions are birthed. Our wholes lives are a meager attempt to communicate the understanding we all once had. The understanding that came to us, and we became, as Cubitt said, a newcomer, possessing the capacity to start something anew again.
Terry Barrett, in her writing in Time and Motion, has a much more straight forward approach. She helps the viewer to understand the fundamentals of time and motion. What those words mean and she also alludes to the idea that those words are simply that, they are just words. Words applied to our experience of the world around us. For example a way of sequencing our experiences in an order in which we believe them to apparently occur (apparently being a key word), is a way of defining time.
Further into the article, she continues to offer definitions for different terms having to do with time and motion. She brings many examples of many artists to the table, showing that these elements are being dissected and played with day in and day out by artists in our contemporary culture.
