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Doug Aitken seems to be anticipating some sort of technology not yet invented. He looks ahead to a radical rethinking of what “technology” means and what its relationship to nature could be.
In the spring of 1955 the UNESCO Committee of Art Advisers invited a number of celebrated artists to contribute an artwork for their headquarters building, which was then under construction. Moore was among them, and he devoted an unusual amount of time to the commission. He visited the site several times, firstly later that same year, and next in July 1956.
Since the early days of modernism, progressive architects and critics have lamented the backwardness of their discipline, particularly in relation to the design of industrially produced objects. Within the rhetoric of positivism a certain obsession with the new would be understandable. However, even at the height of revolutionary modernist zeal in the 1920s and 1930s, architects were confronted by the cultural foundation of their endeavour.
A catalogue of everything in the world that resists photography – this is in some sense what photographers have always hoped to make. At one point in the process of becoming the artist whose mature work we see in Tales of Estrangement, Effie Paleologou tried to do what Antonino does in Calvino’s tale: to photograph every minute of her day, starting with the instant she woke up by pointing a camera at the ceiling.
I remember understanding that everyone in that book was long gone, and then apprehensively asking my Mom if I too was going to die. It was the first time my nine-year-old mind understood that many more people had come before me, and I never would have been able to look in their eyes if not for those photographs.
Like a good analyst, Claudia Rankine enables people to hear themselves differently. But more than that, she allows their responses to open up further questions for herself. Rather than remaining stuck in one position, or simply correcting other people’s errors, she suggests it may be perfectly possible for people to affect each other, to hear and alter each other, without it being a catastrophe.