Welcome to This

A few from this summer's excursions

So, what’s this all about?  Well, that remains to be seen.  For now, I’ve decided I need a place to compile things – notes, pictures, video clips, quotations, excerpts, ephemera – so I can go back through everything and make a more concerted effort to bring it all together.  As this summer came to a close, I felt that familiar feeling of my artwork and the research/thinking around it starting to slide off into the background as I geared up for the school year.  Inspired by my friend Jessica Auer’s research/photo blog, The Viking Explorer, I decided to try something a bit similar.  I’m going to use the forum of a blog as an on-line (and public) journal, where I’ll hopefully be able to accomplish a few things, 1) keep the work going by imposing a requirement/promise for one post of original content per week, 2) get the writing out on the page/screen, without worrying about formality, creating an archive of already typed out notes, 3) possibly, maybe, engage in conversation about some of my thoughts/ideas/imagery with those who come across my posts.

Now, I don’t necessarily expect much of an audience for this clearly self-indulgent venture.  Like I said, it’s really more of a place for me to plunk the stuff, keep it out there, get it going, etc.  But, I really would like to chat about ideas and images and will gladly welcome any comments/conversation.  And, if you’re in my part of the country/world (Winter Park, Florida and Asheville, North Carolina) getting together in good old-fashioned real time would be fantastic.  (I’ve got some absurdly grand plans to host a residency based around visual art and philosophy during the summer months in the next year or two – if that sounds like your idea of a good time, let’s chat!)

And, about the blog title – Between the Already and the Still More – that’s paraphrased from a (translated) Alain Badiou line in Being and Event (thank you, Leigh-Ann Pahapill for suggesting this text).  It actually reads, “Infinity is the Other on the basis of which there is – between the fixity of the already and the repetition of the still-more – a rule according to which the others are the same.”  Yep.  Admittedly, one of my main goals is to sift through the dense texts I struggle with, but that excite me to no end in terms of how I think about applying these critical and philosophical ideas to my work in photography, film and video.  Ever since I was introduced to Henri Bergson in graduate school (thank you, ShonaMacDonald), I’ve found that I can think more clearly about my own work, and can discover what my true interests are, what I’m really trying to get at, via the thoughts of minds much more complex than my own. 

Here’s a caveat, of sorts.  I often find myself torn between two poles.  I’m not a trained philosopher by any stretch, and I’m barely an intellectual.  Maybe ¼ intellectual, ¾ dirt road.  I engage with this stuff because it’s what I enjoy and what seems authentic to me.  I’m not going to make any apologies for being too theory-based, or for not being theory-based enough.  And believe me, I feel pressure from both “sides” often enough.  But, that’s not what all this is for.  So, keep that in mind (note to self).

What’s up for me in the coming weeks?  Next week I’ll post some work-in-progress photographs from some stops-and-starts from 2012.  I’ll include a particular image that I think is going to prompt the direction of my thinking for a bit.  In the following weeks I plan to include short video clips of in-progress sequences, notes and sections of text and my response to certain passages, etc.  So, basically, the idea is to get up new visual work and some writing that relates to it each week.  I’m planning to do lots of work in the studio with the 4 x 5 camera using b/w film, but will continue to shoot color digital and video – might combine things. 

Tomorrow, I start on next week!

See you/me, then…..

xodroe