A retrospective on Retro•Future•Spective
I just want pictures. Here are pictures.
Otherwise…..
15 years.
Half a generation.
A bit over the half-life of Plutonium-241.
Just long enough that someone, with the right kind of machine and steady aim, could have sent a signal from that opening meeting of CRASH Space at the end of 2009 and hit the Gliese 687 system. This probably doesn’t matter, but there’s evidence of a planet in its habitable zone. So that’s a plus.
You’ve made it this far. Please read the following paragraph in the voice of Werner Herzog.
We, CRASH Space, recently hosted an art show to celebrate our fifteenth year. We’re a community which makes things, which includes art, which in turn includes paintings. Painting being an art form which human beings have been compelled to engage with for tens of thousands of years.
“Looking at the paintings, what will they make of them? Nothing is real. Nothing is certain. It is hard to determine whether these creatures are dividing into their own doppelgangers and do they really meet or is it just their own imagining mirror reflection?” – Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Of course, while everything is not illuminated, the future is now. Please read the following paragraph in the voice of Nina Hagen.
A number of the pieces, kinetic or otherwise, were infused with LEDs. All the pieces, dynamic, glowing from within like some ersatz Thomas Kinkade painting. Pastel, pulsing, pixels scanning through an aesthetically pleasing color palette. The endpoint of millenia of refinement from the original campfire.
If computers came from the logic of industrial looms, then who were the Victorian equivalents of Tumblr users? This next paragraph is to be mentally narrated in the voice of Björk.
You assume you have to make a knot somewhere. Once you’ve finished weaving, embroidering, you can hang it up anywhere. It doesn’t really matter where. It’s with starting the piece though that you have to just make that first knot and tie everything back to it. Also, there’s that Cool S again.
I will refuse to elaborate, but after checking the weather you may want to read the following in the voice of David Lynch.
I saw a woman in the radiator. I’m saying so in the past tense because it already happened, and I don’t see her there any more. She has now reappeared, floating in space, changing form. The most modern of ghosts for a generation of ghosters.
Get off your phone.
We now come to the unblinking terror that is performance art. Though often silent, the following can be assumed to be read in the voice of Marina Ambramović.
If you already knew tomorrow would today have a point? Unpredictability, chaos, terms we associate with the absence of meaning. But can it also be the empty vessel to fill with our attempts?
I suspect the universe only provides so much meaning, and we just get to move it around. If we could really know, with absolute certainty, anything about our future days, are we really just making today more meaningful at the cost of tomorrow’s poignancy? Here, hold out your palm. You will find out soon enough.
Yes, all of this and more was the CRASH Space art show. You of course can resume reading in whatever voice you tend to default to, but you’ve come to the realization that it’s Vin Diesel.