The Horniman houses these creatures. The lack of flash on my camera means that you can't see the neon colouring they exhibit in UV light, but maybe you can imagine what an incredible sight it was.
Looking at animals is always a challenge to imagine life without ego-based consciousness and a more profound challenge to live an ethics of equality that takes life without ego-based consciousness into account. Reading a lot of Freud at the moment. I can't imagine that he ever imagined the different - without being less equal - consciousnesses that might inhabit creatures. But, I guess his work paves the way for us to.
Horniman Aquarium from Horniman Museum on Vimeo.
Just found this video when searching for the link to the Horniman Museum. It shows the jellyfish in all their glory.
Also discovered that there is an exhibition of Venkat Raman Singh Shyam and Rajendra Shyam on currently. I first discovered Gond art via BibliOdyssey: The Night Life of Trees It's wonderful.
You mentioned the lack of flash and how its addition would have provided the real object.
ReplyDeleteBut in all your photographs these abstractions happen. Somethings are taken away. The stillness abstracted by the blur of motion, the colour removed by the abstraction of light, form abstracted by the excess of light from the other side. So abstraction, as in abstra-here, performs a dilation of the image. It makes sense if we think the image as the eye. Then your images are abstract images themselves. I find that incredible.
(The Eye - Now I know why they like me back!)
Hope you will soon put your writings and images together in a unique way--your own way which you have most likely found already--and make a book, including what you wrote on Kant.
Hello Anonymous, I want to thank you for your comment. I've been stewing over it for a week, turning it round trying to think abstraction and taking something away in my work. It's both encouraging and disconcerting to be given interpretation of your images other than your own thoughts. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteI am not sure about Kant though. I had a look through previous posts - do you mean the stuff on transcendentalism?
Thanks again.
So you are the thinker (a better thing to be) and not the artist, which obviously was always evident. But the images that you make are also thoughtful, even in the sense of a thinking behind them, otherwise you wouldn't have put them up. Then, image is thought itself or thinking is image making. That much is Kantian. You mentioned Kant in your tweets (you have stopped tweeting), working on the third critique. And then transcendentalism following from that. That is how it appears, the transcendental image which is not visible, but which makes the appearing of the visible. This sense of the image, the transcendental, can be glimpsed in the images uploaded over here.
ReplyDeleteAre you Greek Luna or London Luna now?
You have a good memory!
ReplyDeleteYes I think, but I don't believe there is much of a distinction between thinking and making images. There may be different cognitive processes involved, but the image is mostly some kind of externalisation that then brings its own qualities to the process, my thinking. I think they are both mediated by feelings too.
I do occasionally tweet, though not as much. There is a particular set of conditions that make me want to and I'm not in 'that place' so much at the moment. Maybe that's the Greek Luna wearing off. Or at least not being so much in the foreground.