Liz Ivkovich, on SCALE /  by Nathan Webster

My Grandma once broke up with a boyfriend because he brought a book to breakfast. 

She’d met him online during the eHarmony boom. After a few dates, he was invited to spend the weekend at her Mid Michigan bungalow. On Saturday morning she made eggs and coffee to share. And this is where I guess it fell apart -- he sat across the table with a book in his hand. 

It’s never the sex, is it? It’s the weight of a thousand tiny moments of drifting attention. 

In 1993, a core of bedrock was drilled from beneath the thickest part of the Greenland ice sheet. These are the only rocks ever taken from that place. Joerg Schaeffer’s equipment wasn’t sensitive enough to gather the climate data he knew the minerals contained. He waited. (I wonder, did his attention drift?) Decades later, he finally knows what the rocks know; that a million years ago, when the Earth was as warm as it soon will be, these rocks met the sun. 

This tiny rock under that magnificent sheet of ice means a few degrees Fahrenheit means a melted ice sheet means 23 feet of sea level rise. No climate predictions have accounted for this. (I apologize for sounding apocalyptic.) 

Small things at orders of magnitude become unimaginably heavy. Our thousand drifting attentions carry us from breakfast to breakfast on this planet that exists in millennia. The pace at which we live is a matter of incompatible scale. 

But I can’t comprehend millennia, I live in urgencies and soundbites and five-minute intervals.

Constantly in search of something to anchor me in a scale of time that is not my own. Today there is the way the light hits your nose across the table, the gravel of your voice, the weight of your head in my hand.

The above text is by Liz Ivkovich as part of a series on communication, related to NOW-ID performance A Tonal Caress.

Fruit and Not Fruit:  /  by Nathan Webster

Imagine the most fruit-like fruit you can imagine. We all have these archetypal fruits, like pictures on wooden toys for toddlers that make up the blocks with which we organize the world. Which of these things are alike? Which of these things do not belong? 

Once I saw a picture of a window full of cakes in a bakery in Korea. There was a chocolate cake in the display case covered in strawberries, raspberries, and cherry tomatoes. I can not tell you why, but I can tell you this-- vehemently-- my whole body will tell you this: tomatoes do not belong on chocolate cakes. 

Weirdly, someone studied this. They found that our internal ideal fruit becomes the fruit against which all others are measured. The further you get from the picture in your mind of the archetypal fruit around which all other fruits revolve, the less fruitlike the fruit seems to you. This is a kind of measurement-- in our gut we each know the distance between a banana and a kumquat. In the Red Delicious solar system, the cherry tomato has to fight for even Pluto status. 

It seems benign, this produce tribalism, until you are not talking about fruit anymore. 

The above text is by Amie Tullius, as part of a series on communication, related to NOW-ID performance A Tonal Caress.

 

Panoramic Research. /  by Nathan Webster

Charlotte and Nathan are exploring procession/movement for a museum piece we are aching to announce. Here, a few shots to share one such experience, with focus on Olafur Eliasson’s permanent installation: Your Rainbow Panorama.