object

Christine Corday. UNE, 2008. 508 West 25th St. New York, New York.

a somatosensory experience ultimately allows the senses to inform identity or self with an unknown or an abstract. Forms of the PROTOIST series are prompts of this experience; not to be collapsed into or as "object" but rather as a relative, interconnected yet open marker of experience itself. object has been indoctrinated as an encounter of the term and meaning of "other", the Forms of the PROTOIST series explore dismantling this habitual, often sight-dominated, separateness-–to experiment informing one's self in the perpetual encounter of object without reinforcing other-ness but rather expanding the definition or object of "self." 
object, other, and self in quotations serve as abstractions from their known terms-–blurring their edges of distinction.

UNE Imagined Places, Lithium Salt Flats. 
Original Image: Friedman Rudovsky, New York Times

... i think to the colosseum, ziggurats, ancient arches, the pyramids and temples of every continent––when their edifice form lost its function, its ruin reveals its art. what remains is not seen but is a sensation, similar to how nerves that once serviced a missing part of the body still remain alive and well but without a function. the sensation from these ancient forms triggers a function of what it is to be human––and humanity's continual efforts to build or create something to replace or fill what is missing.

Art is not in the creating of a functionless form––rather, when all other structure and definition has failed, it is what persists.

when this persistence can be expressed in Form, only its sensation will demonstrate whether it serves to function humankind.

nearer still, prandtl-glauert singularity

photo credit: realbigtaco, file:FA-18 going transonic.jpg 2008

sometimes we needn't stir the senses through metaphor to inspire a reality beyond what we readily see; sometimes the physics or chemistry of what already is sheds another veil from what we see revealing an ever truer medium.

the moment with a work of Art should touch this mark; this is my science---an gedankenexperiment into Form through experiencing the question and answer of where we place our physical senses as reality.

the Abstract is an insistent realism pulling through the millennia layers of man's fiction; it's story is made known when a line of our fiction opens to the unknown. the Abstract is not an intangible, it is conceived as such only because we cast it outside the written wall of our experiential world. Art either punctuates the fiction or bares an experience of realized abstraction.

“...but what does it mean?” Object vs Information

At the emergence of quantum investigation, Art followed, consciously or not, with Science’s shift from centuries-old object-based system of physical laws into the strong evidence of a more information-based or potentiality-based reality. The interacting billiard ball view of an outside world was being undone from a perspective on the very smallest yet foundational scale.

The question "...what does this mean? when confronted with an Abstract work of Art is illustrative of the point of where Art can lead the viewer/experiencer beyond the old Newtonian object-derivative surface reality towards a system a century of new Science has evidenced as inseparable information of all-potentiality. As viewer becomes experiencer, witness becomes participant, Abstract Form is no longer relegated to someplace outside one’s reality as confronting object or static learning but as inseparable information.

Art presents an experience of this Science. The Abstract is not fixed to an area outside reality, its roots can be evidenced through great invention and new thought breaking the pattern of the habitual.

The physical experience of the Abstract in Modern North American Art (Heizer, De Maria, Turrell) began at the outer edges of shared experience, the uninhabited American Desert, and is now evolving inward, centered within the collective self or populated thought we name City. HELDAN inhabits this landscape. The isolated site for Art becomes almost an isolated occasion if relegated to a separated time or a separated place.

The scientific investigations of the physical laws that govern reality has moved from object centered to content/information centered. The Abstract Forms of Land Art signaled the frontier of this thought, at the horizon of this new landscape. The Abstract is not fixed to an area outside our reality, it is our reality. For over a century, the shift from the old yet still pervasive Newtonian reality as separate object-based content to the quantum suggested reality as inseparable information/potentiality-based content is shown through investigative parallel in Art. HELDAN’s permanent installation within the collective self or City evidences the dissolving or disassociation of objects as outwardly separate interactions in one’s reality to that of inseparable information.

I use Art as a gendenkenexperiment to that experience.

Art as Infrastructure, Unknown Body of Reality and the Scale of Potential

The Information Age has progressed man beyond the need of his own physicality and yet man must still contend with the reality of his body. Through the feats of our Industrial past, man achieved the scale required of living with more than himself. The structure of his bridges, diameters of his water works, tunnels and frontiers of his road and railways are symbols of the iron infrastructure of his collective body named City.

The industrialized materials of a City’s infrastructure holds the familiarity of a public skin. The Forms of the PROTOIST Series render this collective skin for intimate encounter. PROTOIST Forms engender the physical touch of material potentiality for the collective as individual and the individual as collective. At it’s intersection, this Art as infrastructure, the body of the city and individual man are poised at an unknown – a body of reality of ceaseless potential

or the obsolete.

New Realism: Touching the Abstract

The Abstract is more than plastic Works in a museum, indeed, true abstraction is the very world outside. Neurological and somatosensory studies suggest the “outside” world as a percept-dependant sensory construct, what this series of works engenders as abstract realism. Sense perception is not objective and yet centuries-old science pervades the contemporary belief in an independent world of objects patterning self and “outside” reality. Indeed, “objects” have no complete separation in the less perceptible phenomenal worlds that form the life we perceive. Sculpture (Form) conceived for touch dissolves the percept’s veil of separation from “object only” to “experience” as/of self. When these Forms are Abstract, the profound permission of viewer into experiencer brings a third dimension of Abstraction as Self. PROTOIST Forms are Abstract Form; their experience of touch and the context of touch as the sole perception of self and the “outside” world allows for expanded experience in the realism of the Abstract. It is from this foundation Abstraction is the grand medium of direct encounter with the greater reality.

Art’s Public Skin and the Hand of Man

The metaphor of touch may aid the eye’s encounter with sculpture (Form) however touch allowed by the hand, beyond the paralleling attempts of metaphor, allows the body a transformative moment with Form as an experience of one’s self. Touch requires our presence; it is the sense of our very skin, our esemplastic perception of body and self.

Neurological investigations of our sensory system strongly suggest reality as percept-dependant, a subjective combination of memory, attention, and patterned expectation dictating the perception of the percept’s known world. This pattern of the known, persisted by sight-dominated encounters, conducts expectation of the percept’s experience without an experience of it. Thus an encounter with little available association or memory, touch enables the percept’s perception of self through the experience of a powerful Unknown, patterning what is known from the Unknown as self.

This synaptic experience and its essential connection with touch are foundations of the PROTOIST SERIES: The Forms before the Known. These human-scaled works are created with steel, iron, concrete to be touched, walked upon as consumptive sensory experiences. Through touch, man’s hand affects the surface areas with temperature change, chemical effects and accumulated pressures as the Form and percept together evolve into their never–ending Other. PROTOIST Forms poise a permissive moment with the experiencer to touch this public skin engendering a new intimate Known and collective Self from the Abstract.

Singular Experience And Permission of the Physical Moment

Friday, May 7 1824. Kärntnertortheater,Vienna

It had been ten years since Beethoven stepped onto a stage, paper advertisements around the city announced the performance of his Ninth Symphony. Ludwig prepared an unparalleled physical scale and sound to his performance. He doubled the size of the orchestra, tripled the size of his chorus with perhaps as many as ten voices per written part. The evening was absolutely mighty. A sensation so eruptive the audience stood to their feet five times, a number of ovations considered so obscene the authorities were called to calm the crowd. And the memory of this historic performance was not saved in a recording but in the bodies of those who experienced it.

The Abstract exists just outside associative time. An Abstract Form can bring an unknown, an "unfelt", powerfully into intimate relevance by direct physical experience. They require our presence. These Forms are to be touched, entered, walked upon. They are conceived and constructed to be permanently encountered. Their Work is your permission to physically engage, to allow the rare opportunity for the body to lead the mind beyond its known pattern of reality into the monumental collectively and individually.

These Forms are not a “minimalism” but a singularity. The singular moment when thought is silenced by abstract presence and something unknown/formless collapses into what was previously known, felt, experienced. This moment is free from association and has nothing neurally to connect back to but the sensation within the body. And when that experience is profound, it is profundity then that grows our physical connection with the outside world. Thus allowing, even for one moment, a truly physical experience to return us transformed. As humanity evolves an immediacy without actual physical presence, these Forms give opportunity to awaken sedentary senses and exult their skill, liken to the awareness of those in the audience at Beethoven’s premiere–what would be their only time with his Ninth––the experience to feel human.

UNE begins this series of Form: The PROTOIST Series, the Form before the Known.