Old Scratch is in Your Garden/Pod

This piece is a concatenation of two ideas—one, a narrative sculpture, a brief story in steel, and two, a conduit from the earth to the sky. I think the big idea that we miss as humans is that we think the object stops at its bounds. As a systems guy, I look at the space between (what we think of as objects) and consider that invisible/silence/emptiness as the more important thing. In filmmaking this is the edit and according to the theorists, it is where meaning is made. In society it is the change that occurs over time and space. In culture it is the stacked-up push-pull between people.

Concatenation is an interesting idea. In time based media it’s an easy process to implement, cut-up film, electronic mash-ups, found voices in a remix. In 3D physical media the remix is the object, so tougher to implement. Every idea and sketch precedes the object, but the joints and welds, the fasteners, screws, nuts, and bolts are what makes the thing. The viral, infrared, and subsonic are all essentially non-existent to our senses, but give them a chance and they cause a pandemic, skin cancer, a tsunami. These connectors don’t require belief to exist and so join people in a network of illness, turns lightwaves into unbridled cellular growth, and join continents in tragedy.

Steel is a recording medium. Not only does it form the object, it is a record of every person who has handled it—Sarah (who takes the order at Triplet and Coffey), the delivery guy from Winston-Salem, the captain of the ship who sailed it from China, the crane operator lifting a thousand containers of a thousand sheets, the team at the foundry who poured and rolled it, the miners and diggers and their families. And looking further back, every Iron Age founder who added carbon to iron and hammered it flat. 

Moss and sticks are organic. Like steel, they are a record, holding a list of assembly instructions and historical data. How do these plants end up on my property, in my hands? At some point in the recent past a corporation and the complicit/exploited workers cleared this land of trees. Who came to replace those disappeared trees? These sticks, this moss. Uninvited. 

Ingredients: steel, moss, sticks