First Light

christine corday. NOUMERAL 100 Series

as our universe grows increasingly cold and dark, our telescopes/satellites follow the first light, the first heat, tracing us to the moment all matter arises.

this work also follows heat, a focus on the sensory satellites sending knowledge from the untested edges of our perceptual system, bringing the experience of light, its information and knowing to a dark and silent brain.

as sculptor, it is not simply the material that interests me---

it is the experience within it.

temperature opens this exploration.

tremendous cooling allows ordinary matter to form

and tremendous heat gave its existence

both at unimaginable scales---

and yet the elements within our body carry its scale--

the experience of the supernova, [even twice or more]

the experience of gravity on a scale 100-1000x that of earth

the experience of billions of years that define becoming

the elements within the generation and evolution of our sensory organs have an experience beyond our own body---a particular trait or knowing in common---a shared medium beyond the first light.

playing a composer's piano.
the schoolboy's lunch wrapped in bach manuscripts.
invention of the hammerklavier.

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.

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.