21 June – 26 July 2013
Project Native Informant

One could wait. But decoration was considered a crime because it slowed down human evolution, wasting labour, economic and material resources. Iconographies are however inevitably registered on surfaces. As remainders and as reminders.

It is generally doubtful whether an archaic technique can ever be rendered truly contemporary. Attitudes of synthesis, attempts to juxtapose and reconcile, the work needed in order to bring things together. Such practices have of course already been envisioned.

A common challenge in diverse activities is to find the ideal way to pack various shapes into a given space. The goal is maximum density, with no overlapping. A comparable (perhaps somewhat reverse) application of compression concerns the process in which a surface shrinks so much that it ends up becoming a line. Thus a skeleton contains all the information that is needed to reconstruct the body, either geometrical or physical, to which the skeleton is supposed to belong to.

 

Nevertheless, it is difficult to tell when something is still under the process of shaping and when it is plainly destroyed. A still frame from a recorded demolition scene looks the same either when the movie was being played normally or in reverse before it was paused.

 

Meanwhile, the rules of the game are set: always make something with what is within reach. Maintain habits. Find the pace between solving and producing problems. Improvisation seems however to be a myth. It is as difficult to achieve as to become specialists in an exhaustive number of practices. Simply, we end up using tools for other purposes than the ones for which they were originally invented. Not efficient, but justified!

 

Through the study of the various types of amnesia it became possible to approximate the way that memory works for a healthy brain. This includes encoding information from the external world by chemical and physical stimulation. Then, the preservation of the coded information for various time periods. Finally, the location and retrieval of the stored information. We cannot remember the present as we are likewise not able to recall the future.

 

Commons are things shared and commons are things ordinary. Like translation and transformation, invention and discovery, the global economy, time and observation, scales and forces. Unlocked potential. Distributed brain. Messy progress.