Cornwall 2012

 

Madron 28.11.12

It's been a while...

language is annoying me. instead, ambivalence and complexity.... de-connecting the standard meanings of things...

these are from september

Small Interventions

We are having a very wet summer.

I am thinking about nature again, and about small things, and about Richard Long's work, and about attention to that which is at hand and the non-exceptional. I am also learning about light levels with my macro lens.

Oracle/Soap Dish*

*Perhaps each one of these should have a title that refers to something 'culturally produced', like, Oracle, or, Soap Dish. I'm thinking about the language of titles and what that makes of an image, or brings to the image. The relationship of nouns to phenomena. What comes first, the noun or the thing?

Nebulae/Paperback

Closet/Electrical Device

Participant/Car Seat

Rushes/Flight Attendant

Howler/Sweeties

Wharf/Beach Ball

Mammal/Safety Cover

Island/Petal

Vestibule/Coat

Packet/Surface

In the garden.

Tunisia (2)

Tunisia (1)

No thoughts yet, just some photos. Wish I'd taken more.

Another two from Paris

My thinking on images is continually buffeted around by new ideas. I'm reading Cassirer's Philosophy Of Symbolic Forms (vol 1, Language) and am enjoying it. So far it affirms my own epistemological beliefs, that knowledge of the world is mediated, meaning is not fixed,  and that we deal mostly (entirely?) with fictions. I'm not sure yet if Cassirer is as sceptical as me, I hope to find out. It's interesting though how Cassirer posits language as one of several independent modes of symbolic formation - language, art, myth, science/reason and religion each function through their own cultural forms and the meanings attributed to them, unlike the Saussurians who would place language as the most basic means by which all the different cultural forms function. As I am reading Cassirer it is easy to imagine that photography possesses the dignity of a fully qualified category of epistemology, because the aesthetic imagination is treated as essential to our basic experiencing of the world. Although Cassirer was against Heidegger ('being' as the basic ground of philosophy is constantly rejected), I am reminded of when I read 'The Origin of the Work of Art' because of the same sense of the fundamental importance of representation, of an image inserting itself between us and the world. However, Cassirer rejects the concept of representation too, because for him there is no guaranteed already-existing external world for us to make copies of. It is us that forms the criteria, categories, of perception in an ever constant process of relations between that which we have already formed as symbols and the world that comes to us through them.

Paris

My four favourite images (so far):

Thought Jan 2012

Just going to quickly jot some thoughts down.
Thinking about the role of symbols in our thought. How images that we carry in our minds mold our subsequent cognition, how it is as if the form of the images/representations that we take of the world come to delimit what we are then able to see/think, or at least, to influence it, maybe to facilitate it. Our representations as symbols, because they facilitate a transition somehow, the transition of the thought process itself. The transition of inner mental experience mediated/mediating our experience of the outer world.
Saw this today:
http://www.ravenrow.org/current/asier_mendizabal/
And there was talk of collective symbolisation in objects and in political representation.
I am thinking too about constructing house like structures within our imagination in order to 'house' our thought - that place that makes the ingestion of our experiences possible. What would your house be made from?
The faculties, as in Kant's, need a certain imagination space in order to fantasize. The fantasy, our visions, are secreted by the experience of living life, both physically and cognitively. Those visions are related to the thinking and experiencing, and are necessary for true comprehension to occur.
In which case we need space to be imaginative.