Elisabeth Molin
The purpose of a decoy is not always clear; sometimes it purports to attract its prey, drawing it closer to the hunter’s ground; whilst in military usage, it stands as a dummy military equipment, a decoy canon for example, which appears dangerous from afar. What all decoys do is to attract in order to divert someone or something’s attention or lure them off their course. A decoy stands in for what it represents, however its crude realism breaks down the closer you get. Certain types decoys attract their own set of avid collectors. Decoys are inherently self-aware objects, not dissimilar in ways to a work of art.
Crows (and ravens) are exceptionally intelligent animals. Of great importance in traditional myths and cultures, the crow is a trickster, a mediator between the dualities of life/light and death/darkness according to Claude Lévi-Strauss. A consequence of this close relationship to the Gods or Heavens, his plumage has been turned black. Interestingly, in philosophy, the raven paradox was put forward by Carl Gustav Hempel to bring to light the discrepancy between inductive logic and intuition in positing an argument.
Black was the first pigment used in art, in ancient cave painting. It’s the darkest colour; as such it is always a relative term. Whilst both black and white are achromatic colours, they are seen as universal opposites. Why is a black coffee or tea a purist’s beverage untainted by milk, but something that is blackened is stained? The sky always seems black as you step out at night, but as you get used to ambient lights and start discerning the Milky Way, your perception shifts as night vision opens up to you. A sartorial symbol for conservatives, intellectuals and radicals, are these melanophiles the ones who can help us look beyond the visible?
Just as black absorbs the light and removes it from our vision, it can also be seen to hide things. Something that is hidden has not disappeared, it is just momentarily removed from our vision. Yet, if you are not sure if something is hidden is doubly disconcerting. To know the world is to understand it, through vision and cognition. Is philosophy a process of revelations of the truths that are hidden? Artists are in a unique position, with their visual enquiries to assist, collaborate, facilitate, orchestrate, coordinate, and accelerate our understanding of the hidden world around us.
How do I know what I know? How do I know what I don’t know? How do I know that I don’t know? How do I know that I know what I know? How do I know that I know that?
Strobe light fragments our vision. It makes action seem as though it is taking place in slow motion, almost as if it were in a trance. By breaking up the speed of action into a regular rhythm, into a specific set of visual sequences, ready to repeat. The world appears to us almost like in a zoetrope; strobe action gives us an understanding of these actions within a cyclical or entropic order of things. It’s is a useful antidote to the frenetic pace of post-capitalist life, and always fun on the dance floor.
Vision and visions are two different things. A vision entails being able to see something clearly, that is, being able to perceive at the same time. Visions imply a higher state of perception and understanding. From being able to see something of exceptional nature, absolute beauty, or celestial clarity, this clairvoyance or excess of lucidity can easily be seen to tip over into mysticism, hallucination and delusion. It is not generally known for example that René Descartes developed the basis for his Cartesian or highly rationalised view of the world as a result of a series of visions. Whereas the plural of a vision offers a chance for second sight, foresight is only appreciated in moderation.
Travel can be a necessity or it can be a luxury; one would say the first is migration and the second is tourism. Those are two extremes, however it illustrates a point, that in a globalised world; whilst in theory we don’t need to travel much since everything is a click away, actually, in actual fact it fires an insatiable desire to experience more. Yet, we’re not the only ones to travel; animals, objects, nature, and all the molecules and atoms that make up the world are constantly interchanging as we speak.
Time unfolds endless ahead and behind us. How can I claim any portion of it as mine?
There exists somewhere something called reality. We are all looking for it in our waking, daily lives. It has nothing to do with how we are online, or asleep, or daydreaming, even simply thinking for that matter. It has nothing to do just with me, or you, or even the social structures around us. It is the opposite of fiction supposedly; it’s not just fact either. It is independent, it is not false, it is recurrent yet unpredictable and concerns everything around us. Most importantly it has always been that way. I sometime think I have come across it, through observation and perception, but as I keep reminding myself, it’s not about me, so for now I’m still looking for it.
When we look at a stick in water, it appears divided into two disconnected parts. Rationally we know this cannot be, yet our immediate perception tells us another story. It is this gap between what we sense and what we know where doubt can creep in: in many ways, the whole of Western thought is predicated on the worry that things are disconnected, displaced when they should be whole.
In 1641, Descartes wrote: All that up to the present time I have accepted as most true and certain I have learned either from the senses or through the senses; but it is sometimes proved to me that these senses are deceptive, and it is wiser not to trust entirely to anything by which we have once been deceived. Because we sometimes cannot trust the knowledge that the senses haveprovided, Descartes reasons that we cannot trust them at all. Our vision displaces objects that our reason cannot back together again. But what does it mean then when we live in a world where everything has been displaced? Where homelands are destroyed, lives are exiled, labour is exploited, identities shaken and the environment is definitively separated from any notion of balance.
It was a place where time passed fast, almost burned itself up before it had made an initial gesture towards it - lit the match, rubbed the hands, carefully assembled sticks and dried out mud
“this chair may look like wood but it’s actually made of mud”
the smell of rose and wet concrete
a virtual assistant who spoke one word into a microphone and heard another expressed in the speakers, so that SOAP became SOUP and TRY ME became DRY ME
there were arrows pointing in all directions in the space, they occasionally flocked together resembling almost-figures, just to break apart and disintegrate
thick drips of water
half a wet bag
cookie consent
their surfaces like the skin of silvery fish, millions of mirrors, silicium and a gluey gas called plasma
When you enter the room there is a click clack click clack sound passing by in uneven intervals. It sounds like the way in which shoes made of different materials respond to the metal flouring, maybe metal, maybe cobber you think, as you sink down on your knees and place palms flat, fingers first, finger tips searching, licking almost the smooth surface where dust particles glue onto your skin, erected and ejected by the tiny tunnels of some Auro Soma, passport identity touch screen, a quick click and the channelling of information from left to right, down onto, thousands of data systems, a storage unit in Houston, Texas.
You try to open your eyes in the space but it doesn’t make a difference or the difference is that of the wetness of your eyelids and the dryness of the room, an almost smoky air, piercing your retina, you try to ignore it, this taste of sulphur, as if the eyes could taste.
The soil further in the room feels wet, sticky almost, like a 1-degree level of quicksand and this childhood memory of water leaking into your waterproof wellies, an early recognition perhaps, of the cracks between word and world.
There is a waterfall of electricity on the back wall, cables, perhaps cars, and this buzzing sensation of electromagnetic waves, a cola ad on a black screen.
When the flooding began the water ran from the drain along the curbstone, under the legs of the street sellers, below the feet of cats those tiny footprints could be seen along bins, in alley ways and outside the old churches.
The water contained a microbe that infected the minds of dogs who started thinking of turquoise flowers, marine fish and the deep blue sea. Slowly an indigo banana would appear, a denim ant and a cyan piece of meat - a girl with nail polish would slowly turn arctic from her fingers to her elbows and neck, right to the edges of her long hair. Like ink dropped into water, it starting leaking into their dreams, overshadowing anything that was before.
The puddles that formed on the street had a hypnotic effect on passersby, it resembled the perfect ancient cobalt, made from vines and dead skin cells.
The water kept running down the streets and from above it looked like blue water on an map. Some conspired about the notion of balance - that of blue eating the beige and visa versa - some tried hovering and sweeping it away.
When the puddles reached the sea it flew on top because of its oily consistency. It absorbed itself into the soil and affected the crop which remained the same, but affected the people who ate it, who experienced an unusual increase in activity and blinks of amnesia.