in constant flow all things are thinned (2023)
The title of this installation is derived from Lucretius—“So death rightly comes, when by constant flow all things are thinned, and all things, struck from without by an increasing hail of blows, succumb.”
This work comes as a result of my ongoing research into melancholic decay as conceived in machine ontology, the disintegration in the shifting limits of capitalism, and the equal corporeality of both things and images. The aim of this installation is to produce constellations of melancholic traits in the nonhuman, uncovering surface qualities that appear as traces of absence, while forming interconnected assemblages of diffracted fragments.
The supports, things, and images in this installation are meant to be considered equally real. Each object produces and follows different temporalities, which are all subjected to the enclosures and limits of capitalism. Every object is a displaced or lost fragment of some aspect of fabricated production.
With this installation I am manipulating the melancholic attributes of objects—processes of fragmented disintegration, symbolic incoherence, and temporal displacement. This work began with accumulations of remnants, such as found video and filthy curbside finds. Mediated and remediated fragments are formed into new machinic assemblages in the process, partially retaining some melancholic qualities through translation while also acquiring new melancholic traits such as loss, displacement, incongruity, and anachronism. In mediating found materials, there are residues of qualities that become temporally misplaced remnants, or ghosts, traversing flows of fragmentation as partial objects.
The arrangements and choices of elements in part recall memento mori still life tropes while also activating the space with temporal rhythms of the moving image. As assemblages, there are spaces of density, sparseness, incongruity, separation, overlap, and gravity. The installation also includes large format prints of stills from video experiments.
The videos in this installation follow a similar line of inquiry and source materials as veils into dark places. The videos came as a result of experimentation with appropriation, montage, glitch, and AI, geared toward an exploration of the computational gaze. From a video of AI-generated found objects trained on a dataset of my collected finds, to datamoshed montages of abandoned homes, to 3D scans of the installation in progress, to a combination of datamoshing and AI-generated video, to an amalgamation of different version of AI-generated imagery—all these experiments question the diffracted motifs of melancholy and memento mori in visual culture while situating those motifs in the fabric of digital materiality, susceptible to decay just like the found objects in the overall assemblage.
Photo credit: Frank Piccolo