Project 3 Reflection & Documentation

Blue Hole IV was born from a phrase in Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman, where he states “The fundamental fact of life is that nothing lasts—yet.. we need something to orient us, to lift us above the confusions of the moment.” I began thinking of the way in which we orient ourselves to the world. The spatial level that orients my experience is, for instance, a certain way that my body takes up the world, a “gearing of the subject into his world,” as Merlau-Ponty puts it. He argues that depth is the only dimension that belongs clearly to our perspective and not to things. Depth is the dimension of space (more than height and breadth) that requires us to suspend our assumptions. We experience depth at the ‘crossing’ or ‘collision’ of body and world. Accordingly, we do not construct space without an instrument for measuring it, and the instrument to which we refer everything, which we use instinctively, is our own body. In all the different ways of perceiving space, I am able to gain knowledge of others and myself in the world. The significance of everything that determines space (up, down, now, far) is based on here. Think of giving directions: you are here… you must move this way to reach “there,” or a new here. In order to orient yourself to a point, you must first have a point of orientation. In order to experience disorientation, you must have a loss or a slip of an existing point to be oriented from. The body consistently searches for an optimal way to gear itself, to orient itself within the world. In my blue hole series, I began searching for a way to create this slip, or search for orientation in the viewer. The blue hole in the floor acts as a precipice: an object which one must orient itself to, but also one that presents the danger of disorientation. The strobe lights and the fluorescent, glowing resin create a distance between immediately perceivable space and the dimension of depth within space that entirely disorients the viewer. Keeping a gearing of the body to space at bay, it disallows orientation and makes the experience one related keenly to the body.