Hey gang when you have a moment to check these out please email me some comments and suggestions.
Happy Holdays! Thanks for all of your help.
Barron
Timeclock
Maker:
Five hundred porcelain cups are thrown on a wheel. The time they spend being hand crafted is recorded with an impressed stamp on each cup. The sequence is also recorded from the first made through to the last. When the cups are placed on the shelving they are set out in the order they were made.
Participant:
Approach an exhibit style installation. Guide ropes force you to begin at the appropriate spot. Read a long list of rules. Clock in to the exhibit and go around the corner. Select the next cup from the shelf. Keeping track of your time you put on safety apparel. You look down and the trash can already contains the previous cups’ shards. You pick up the hammer and smash the cup. It is over very quickly. Go back around and clock out. Sign your time card and put it in the rack.
Cycle, birth through to death. What is your role in this? Have you negated the creation? Do you remember what it was like, when you were in the process?
Entropy? The fight against.
Presentness, how to live in the moment.
My goal for the viewer is that they are able to slow down during that time affixed to the cup. I want them to become aware of the present, and actually live in the moment. So many of us do not know how to slow down and revel in the whatever thing is actually happening. The process is a tool for the participant. It is a trick to make them think about this small amount of time they are allotted. The death cycle of the cup. Studies show that people that find out they are soon to die live life to the fullest. Everything tastes sweeter, children are more precious, and nature is seen with eyes a new.
Einstein Towers
Towers are beginning to appear around me. These towers are a way that I work with or deal with time. I find that when I have a goal or a set plan in motion of a specific work that I can lose myself in the labor of it. The towers make use of this principle in my life. The original plan for the towers works from a scientifically proven way to take me out of our current time sequence. Einstein proved that the further we are from the center of gravity of the earth the slower time moves. Yes this is infinitesimal. Without an ultra accurate atomic clock we wouldn’t be able to see the difference from the bottom of the tower to the top, but I do think I feel it psychologically. Not only does the work of the towers become meditative and escapist, the tower itself is out of the time sequence and is an island unto itself. There is also a microenvironment when you are at the top, all perception changes. Sound is muted and heightened, sight is expanded and receded.
I have discovered that the towers along with other projects have become a way for me to get centered. When I am doing the work it similar to meditation. It is a way that I separate myself from the outside world, almost as if stealing time. This time becomes wholly my own. I do not think about the list of things that I haven’t gotten done, I don’t worry about what happened yesterday; I am only there in the moment, breathing and being. I entrain myself with the rhythm. During these times I like to do things that require no abstract or analytical thinking. Whether I am hitting a board for an hour, walking north, or building a tower.
Presentness
Presentness is a state of being in which I am trying to be as often as possible. Throughout my work at UT I have experimented with the ways people move through their lives. With my picnic table piece I weekly raised the levels of the tables in which people daily sat. I was wondering if mentally they could slow down enough to notice that there physical nature between themselves and the seat was different than it had been before. Of course they did not. We have been trained to live in a super fast paced world. In this fast pace we do not have the ability or the time to slow down and notice. In my display box piece I was hoping to set up a type of viewership similar to a television show. Everyday at the appointed time for one hour I was in the case working. Each day the piece inside grew and the same people came by and watched the progress. In a way I was tricking them by using their own habits against them. They have been trained to sit on the couch and watch a half hour or hour television show, and with that escape their surroundings and see something. I simply replaced a sitcom with an installation.
