until they fade away completely...
"it seems like a rhythmical process, like inhalation and exhalation; waves of disturbance run through the sun sphere, stream out and stream back again, gradually lessen in strength until they fade away completely."
the text is from l. kolisko's gold and the sun, an account of experiments conducted in connection with the total eclipse of the sun of 20th may, 1947. kolisko's experiments dealt with "the influence of various heavenly bodies on earthly substances" by exposing "filter paper" coated with various solutions of gold and silver nitrate to the sun during a solar eclipse.
the abstract images presented in the folio are indeed quite beautiful and certainly demonstrate the amazing abilities for light and chemicals to react to each other towards creation, but instead of kolisko's evidence, i present one of my own: an albumen photograph of a banjo player (or in actuality a banjo-uke player) circa 1880. as you can see, the sunlight has done a beautiful thing with this image, creating something along the alchemical lines of some of strindberg's camera-less photographic experiments, and expressing the kind of inner electricity of some of strindberg's texts (i.e. inferno).
since kolisko's experiments had more to do with anthroposophy than science, it seemed only fitting to use an image of a man who seems to be in the midst of being consumed by his own energy and aura. the image seems as much of a psychic or emotional state as much as the physical portrait it once was... thought forms never looked so good!
Labels: albumen print, anthroposophy, banjo-uke, eclipses, faded, kolisko, sunlight
2 Comments:
That strain again! It had a dying fall.
To Catherine’s final point, at the conference I could not resist running my mouth during the Q&A on the whipping-boy of “subjectivity” that kept returning in each and every one of the presentations. Bishop admitted that in “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,”–her fine critical essay which appeared in October 110 and from which she made it clear she is desperately trying to escape (imagine how Michael Fried feels)–she had turned to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s writing on the “democratic subject” specificially because it was informed by an (Lacanian) understanding of that subject as incomplete (split) and in-formation, and, importantly, because at the time she was steeped in Lacan for her own doctoral research
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