
rec(o)urse is a three-part installation made in collaboration with Evelyn Tsisin. Drawing on poetry, family photographs, and found footage, the exhibit considers the immateriality and dematerialization of memory as it is encountered through ‘double’ or stereoscopic forms of looking.
Poetry by Evelyn Tsisin.


ONE:
three sequential viewmaster reels






















TWO:
two-channel video projection, 7m 40s.
THREE:
augmented reality iOS application made for Holokit cardboard viewer.

(excerpt)
A formula that located a set of vertices yet without volume, a network of nodes in need of edges.
Memories resurface and recede with each passing glance over a line, always dancing around an image or series of images. One recognizes a longing for the tenuous materiality of memory, and for which the speaker’s only recourse is to rearrange and reinscribe these fleeting thoughts within the deceivingly complete structure of the sestina - six words, six stanzas, six lines each. Three dimensions to yield the mathematically perfect three-dimensional cube. Not only is the poem a fraught recourse for the anxiety of remembering, but a recursive framework, a strategy of rigid repetition in hopes of conjuring that which can never again exist as it once was, suffocated by the intensified “heat” (6) of its own hyper self-reflection:
What happens when images end? Will the end of history be the end of images, too? What if we were to no longer rely on images and visuality for memory, but to create space for other, differently experienced, recorded, and recalled forms of knowledge?
It is unclear whether this new reality has been forced upon the speaker, or has, in fact, been a deliberate choice, as if to end the very world she has created within the sestina. Perhaps the poem’s nostalgia has turned fatal, and the speaker has lost her ability to comfortably structure her memory around the images now overwrought and overdetermined by the recursive framework of the sestina. And so she asks:
We could take this as a final invitation - the total obliteration of the borders of the image, which condenses all backgrounds into one, which becomes the afterthought, the privatized space onto which the poetry is mapped, always ready to give the viewer the illusion of being at the center of the universe, no longer watching the spectacle only from the bleachers. She has lost herself within time and space not because the images stopped, but because she cannot see beyond or without the image at all - and it is there where “no one dreams of bleachers” (Tsisin 39).
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A formula that located a set of vertices yet without volume, a network of nodes in need of edges.
Memories resurface and recede with each passing glance over a line, always dancing around an image or series of images. One recognizes a longing for the tenuous materiality of memory, and for which the speaker’s only recourse is to rearrange and reinscribe these fleeting thoughts within the deceivingly complete structure of the sestina - six words, six stanzas, six lines each. Three dimensions to yield the mathematically perfect three-dimensional cube. Not only is the poem a fraught recourse for the anxiety of remembering, but a recursive framework, a strategy of rigid repetition in hopes of conjuring that which can never again exist as it once was, suffocated by the intensified “heat” (6) of its own hyper self-reflection:
meet me underneath the bleachers
during the endurance
test their bodies stiff the land
arm’s length away sway nerves betrayed
they’re at prom with the sidewalk
but we take her home
skin cement skin heat trapped within aluminum reflection
meet me on the other side of our reflection
watch us in our stillness smile without admission from the bleachers
inside the glass no one can reach us convince us to come home
surrender only coaxed by threat of shatter frail endurance
if we are trapped in scattered sidewalk
shards in dazzling pattern may we land
....Yet my argument dissolves itself, too, “like liquid bleachers” (Tsisin 16), as we witness both analog and digital continue in their inevitable process of decay....It is not the failure of the stereoscopic image to manifest or convincingly materialize a past world, but rather, a giving over of the self to a space where that spatio-temporal certainty is no longer the basis for thinking, feeling, seeing, or remembering. This is the speaker’s double gaze that constructs a vision of the future through the space in between two images - a gaze that can look through and beyond foreground and background, and that ultimately invites the viewer to do the same (“meet me”, she repeats each time).meet me in the place where land
ends in reflection
where the pavement of the sidewalk
resorts to powder sloping to sea like liquid bleachers
knowing nothing of endurance
as prone to weathering as home
meet me at home
where promises do not take root in land
pipe dreams rust like magazines we keep ironically and endurance
is just a game we play with our reflection
sighing to ourselves three times trying to find what we lost beneath the bleachers
what we inscribed on one another bathed away like sidewalk chalk
meet me when it rains on the north side walk
the long way home
be stupid show off for me alone and clamber up the bleachers
stand at the peak ladder at your back fog beneath your feet and land
in a pool of your reflection
drunk on the deception of youth’s fugitive endurance
meet me where endurance
broke up with the sidewalk
left the scars as a reflection
of uprooted home
let the eager hands of land
surround her slowly defeat is holy only from the bleachers
(Tsisin 30-36)
What happens when images end? Will the end of history be the end of images, too? What if we were to no longer rely on images and visuality for memory, but to create space for other, differently experienced, recorded, and recalled forms of knowledge?
It is unclear whether this new reality has been forced upon the speaker, or has, in fact, been a deliberate choice, as if to end the very world she has created within the sestina. Perhaps the poem’s nostalgia has turned fatal, and the speaker has lost her ability to comfortably structure her memory around the images now overwrought and overdetermined by the recursive framework of the sestina. And so she asks:
meet me where reflection has no home
where memory yields its endurance where the sidewalk
melts with land and there is nothing more to see there no one dreams of bleachers
We could take this as a final invitation - the total obliteration of the borders of the image, which condenses all backgrounds into one, which becomes the afterthought, the privatized space onto which the poetry is mapped, always ready to give the viewer the illusion of being at the center of the universe, no longer watching the spectacle only from the bleachers. She has lost herself within time and space not because the images stopped, but because she cannot see beyond or without the image at all - and it is there where “no one dreams of bleachers” (Tsisin 39).
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