Quietest Place?

What are your places of rest and solitude? Where do you find quiet? Where is quiet located?

The Art Assignment is a really rad weekly video series produced by PBS Digital Studios.  It's a sophisticated, playful, fun program hosted by curator Sarah Urist Green and author/vlogger John Green. The Art Assignment takes you around the U.S. to meet artists and solicit assignments from them that anyone can complete and then post on their website:  theartassignment.com

It's a genius series (and curiously happens to mirror the model of assignment making that I have in my own studio practice *grin*).  The newest episode really sings to me.


Jace Clayton, aka DJ /Rupture, challenges you to take a walk from where you live and find the quietest place. Once you're there, take it in for a moment and then make a short video or take some photos there.

(The Art) Assignment:  Quietest Place
EPISODE 5 INSTRUCTIONS

1. Go outside and talk a walk from where you live or are staying at the moment. 
2. Continue until you’ve found the quietest place possible.
3. Take a moment to absorb it. Then document the place through photography or video. Upload it to your social media platform of choice using #theartassignment.
4. Fame and glory. (Your work might be featured in an upcoming video.)

Artworks mentioned include John Cage’s 4’33” (1952/53) and Charles Baudelaire’s essay The Painter of Modern Life (1863). 

 

MORE: RESEARCH (from THE LAB)
or find posts from all categories of THE LAB below.

Horizon: Intimate distance

Between my body and the horizon stretches an indeterminate distance and infinite time. Simultaneously, I embody it.  My feet rest on earth.  My head, the sky.  I am within the horizon, yet it is unreachable.

“The horizon (or skyline) is the apparent line that separates earth from sky, the line that divides all visible directions into two categories: those that intersect the Earth’s surface, and those that do not. At many locations, the true horizon is obscured by trees, buildings, mountains, etc., and the resulting intersection of earth and sky is called the visible horizon. When looking at a sea from a shore, the part of the sea closest to the horizon is called the offing.[1] The word horizon derives from the Greek “ὁρίζων κύκλος” horizōn kyklos, “separating circle”,[2] from the verb ὁρίζω horizō, “to divide”, “to separate”,[3] and that from “ὅρος” (oros), “boundary, landmark”.[4]”
— Wikipedia

Three types of horizon (from Wikipedia).

Poet Ann Lauterbach continues in her article "The Thing Seen":

“Indeed, as the Internet continues to flatten time and space into a scan that erases the “horizon” (the classical metaphor of both spatial depth and temporal aspiration), young artists are faced with a deracinated landscape. How to steady this mobile map, in which one’s own presence-one’s personhood-is without discernible evidence or local? ....[Artists] need to find ways to claim a physical, embodied presence within the increasingly dematerialized modality of connection.”
— Ann Lauterbach. Art School: Propositions for the 21st Century

MORE: RESEARCH (from THE LAB)
or find posts from all categories of THE LAB below.