Releasing Center

copernicus, galileo, grothendieck

the center of our sensory/intellectual bias has found different positions in the last thousand years. eppur si muove. the practice of re-locating the center of our thought, world, and greater phenomena, enough times eventually releases the comfort of needing center altogether. 

a relative point of view provides a point of thinking. 
but not a place, position, or object more privileged than any other.

this work is interested in the conversation of its measurements

Christine Corday. HELDAN. Elemental Metal. Photo ©2017 Corday

the work. at the pace of evolution.
a 600 million year sensory architecture in contact with the next
13.8 billion
like hadaen earth some 4 billion years ago with a surface reprocessed by the impacts creating, burying and mixing of material by material, generating great melt.
so continues the iron, carbon, maganese, silicon, copper and trace elements of these Forms to exist for a time in our hands as the buildings we put up and take down, culture sustains what lasts as our shared terrestrial Form.
the work is the relic as well as fragment futures of mankind's best thinking not the laws of nature itself.

the work. the tool of the object.

the work. time is not a concern in the linear or current experiential sense with interests in past as backward, future as forward etc but rather time as concerned with a duration or position of perception, a particular focus of state/states of a material, of an element. 

Christine Corday. HELDAN. Elemental Metal. Photo ©2017 Corday

the instrument of medium/ thawing of frozen timber

1970 recording of Jorg Demus performing Beethoven's last Piano Sonata (no. 32 in C minor, op 111) on Beethoven's 1825 Viennese Graf. [Bonn Germany]


Train, one of the 1997 recordings from the U.S. Navy Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) network and autonomous underwater hydrophones. Possible origins of this sound are an iceberg's keel dragging along the sea floor to other vibrations generated from moving fluids, like air blowing through a clarinet, of the ocean water and the right conditions around some seamount.

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.

Der Blaue Reiter

“the art to come will give form to our scientific convictions. this art is our religion, our center of gravity, our truth. it will be profound enough and substantial enough to generate the greatest form, the greatest transformation the world has ever seen.” franz marc 1914

while living in my attic studio in sevilla spain, i came across a biography on wassily kandinsky. its author purported the story behind wassily's genesis of what the western world terms the beginning of modern art. after a day of landscape painting, he returned to his studio laying his canvases against the walls to dry. upon entering the studio the next morning, he struggled to recognize one of his canvases because it was oriented sideways (maybe even upside down). it was the nature of the abstract's immediacy, the inner necessity of this moment that began an intuitive, spiritually and scientifically symbolic series of works which thoughtfully developed into what later credits him as the father of western modern abstraction.

if the picture of reality shifted perpendicular to your line of sight, if all the forms you know as reality shifted even a little, all forms then become a choice again in how you assign them meaning. it is this momentary lapse of the conditioned into the permission of the conscious choice that brings the true art of creation as a filter ever-present within our collective/individuated thought processes and conception of what is.

The Tight Bud of Openness, (a subtle shift in a closed system)

"There are times in science when progress can only be made by revolutionary ideas" Nobelprize.org

If matter is never truly created or destroyed, just as its equivalent, energy, but merely changes or re-arranges form from one state to another––any state of matter then is transformation, a transfer of information or potentia (as Aristotle termed it) and with this, what part does our sight and touch play as we are not simply witnesses to but inextricably "of" this––and yet the unaided human eye takes a seat at such a surface level of matter's seeming creation and destruction. Is this deeply ingrained Cartesian philosophical split of mind and matter? What do we "see" with our sense of sight? How is what we see the role of observer and participant in the state of matter? If sight is the resulting perception of visible light that reaches our eye but perhaps even more so the unconscious inference that requires well-known assumptions and patterns based on prior visual experience of the world––the conscious awareness of this and experiences with abstract unknowns can experiment with the resulting perceptions of sight and touch. Perhaps the human brain over the next millenia evolves our somatosensory and other neurological systems––in the meantime, our sense of "knowing" may be a tool into investigating the senses more fully––developing physical senses to the larger base reality of mass and energy––developing another awareness; this is the great opportunity of Art.

In the early spring of 2001, my use of paper, board or canvas as a choice in the immediate dispersal of an idea waned––the preparation of its substrate, a former ritual to the developing blueprint, grew to an almost full disregard of the "vehicleness" of the 2-dimensional plane. Accidental rips, stains, or eventual dissolvement/age of the 2D vehicle brought more intensity to the insistence of the idea at its 2D surface---further dimension(s) were needed. This was reinforced by a complete fascination with the paint itself and how it transformed into another image––every tool, every substrate felt all the more transitory.

The transition into Form, Sculpture was driven by the "existence" of the idea––what if anything is indestructible within any idea. If drawing a Form on paper, the stroke of the charcoal focuses on this––the destructible and the indestructible nature of Form. The stroke of this charcoal line then is similar to a momentary stroke of light in a darkened room.

One of the many reasons science enters my studio is its demand of a simple fundamental persistent openness, a budding thought and this is to remain open to the fact that measurements on the smallest elementary particle level do not bring completely objective results. This point can be as well argued as sustained however regardless of the ouroboros intellectualizing as to what is ever truly objective––this provocational thought reduced to its simplest seed renders one with a tiny mysterious openness and unknown which should be an extension to each of our physical human senses. This again is the great opportunity of Art.

A small openness that desires no answer other than remaining open to what determines what is––this pause in perception in the larger arenas of mass, like with Art, frees the addiction of collapsing all perception immediately into definition, into complete objectivity; again, this demands another awareness––a development of one's sense of the unknown.

Werner Heisenberg, Selections from Physics and Philosophy 1963

"Natural science, does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves." –– "What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning."

– werner heisenberg

“...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.

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.