Terminus-Nodus

opportunistic departures to the virtual bridge

You enter this work as one in a consumer space. Next door you can get a floral dress or a feather headband. A little further on, margaritas come in vast salt-crusted bowls. Across the way, movies, falafels, and tiaras mingle with the sounds of swing or punk or retro-surfer music from the band of the day. In this space though, expectations explode. Some things seem broken but emit light; other elements are clearly non-functional yet a freeway rushes and a heart beats. Images remind you of your mother, the dreaded dictator of a bygone generation, yourself. Projections are hazy but then you remember that you saw that image last night in your dream.

Spanish architect Ignacio Solà-Morales used the French phrase terrain-vague (roughly translated “wasteland”) in the mid-90s to describe a place outside the normal, unified space of the city; it is a physical space but also a psychological space, a place of potential. It is wild and crumbling and therefore vital and wondrous. In his bridge trilogy novels, cyber-punk guru William Gibson situates the landscape of his marginalized heroes on the useless no-persons’ land of the defunct Bay Bridge. Nano technology has made the steel and concrete of the old bridge obsolete and nomads from all walks of life have come to occupy a new wasteland and make a community of sketch-artists, tale-tellers, and people who are free from the homogeneity of the normal. These people can actually assert some agency in a system that dominates every aspect of life, from vision to action. These people seem down and out but they are really the only ones who can change the world.

The space of Terminus Nodus is about investigating the terrain-vague without fixing it in time, nation, or language. It is an ebb and flow of memory: disastrous and beautiful, archaic and electrified, frightening and potent. Partly remembered stories mix with appropriated mathematical formulae and overlay broken and refigured objects, erasing former signification and evoking something new without making that new thing concrete.

Frames point to nodes that slip away again when a projection turns or a light flickers. A rush of muddled sound flickers past a note about that girl you once knew, that man who haunted your dreams, that boy with the curling hair.

If all that was known had been destroyed would we make art? Would we find a way on Cormac McCarthy’s road to express and create? What would aesthetics mean to us and how would we engage with them? If all the books were gone, what would the new ones look like? Would Eli be able to memorize them in a trip across America?

A fetish for memory occurs in another Gibson novel, Pattern Recognition. We wonder what would Casey do if she met Ivan the Terrible in a montage of sound from under the freeway in someplace really different from Tokyo. This is an experiment in colliding visions, teasing out a new expression, erasing the subject and re-inscribing it on the surface of collaborative and collective memory. It is a nomad’s journey. Thank you for taking it with us.


Multipoint is WHAT?
du quoi? huh?
doorway out of the rabbit hole
iteration 1: Riverside Arts Project: Riverside Plaza, Riverside CA . July to August 2010
iteration 2: Kellogg Gallery at Cal Poly Pomona . November 13 to December 12 2010 . Opening reception Saturday, November 13 5-9 pm . as part of "crisscrossing" an exhibition curated by John O'Brien
a store front with nothing to sell, a portal to the story you forgot you knew, data realigned with light, have a seat and watch a meshed dream
maya and man meet on a dirt road. she says maybe, he laughs. jake the dog runs. birds just keep on flying and singing despite the barbed wire. watch the dream but come back to the nodus.
small nodes of information tell nothing unless the false map is turned in the right direction.
look down and there, resting on a stack of memory timed-out at the dog pound, a guide with the routes defined: shanghai, tokyo, san francisco, LA, riverside. dirt highways and a tour guide who looks like a hunk of ginger.

oh listen, there he goes again...

play it again antoine

a tongue of paper laps across the room hungry runway landing strip for ribbons of luxurious invaders to serve their heads on plated ruffs and watch while couples trade sidelong glances meaningful in only certain circumstances
a portal, rough but present, showing up with spurred edges to insist on a moment of expression a gateway for new thingness, brutal but generous, contained only just as the echoes of Jupiter and someone's heart tinkle and thromb as the network extends, expands, unfurls its dis-structured grid
ruffed and elegant the papertowel-printer-stacked-sentinal holds the story, the progression through time and space in the effort to rem-ember what was once valued but that flew on the wind, was buried in snow, was tossed in front of a bus like so many drifting leaves
the disco version supports the tesla experience and reminds you to re-

member

visual data nodes define portals before final inception