Inspirations and studio log
New favorite thing.
William Basinski
Disintegration loops
I really want to do a collaboration with him.
To explain his creative philosophy, Every has adopted the term “imagineering,” which describes his process of taking objects from the machine world that have outlived their usefulness and giving them a new imaginative function.
In discussing Tom Every
Sci-Fi Machines and Bottle-Cap Kings: The recycling strategies of Self-Taught Artists and the Imaginary Practice of Contemporary Consumption (Continued)
According to (folklorist Susan Stewart), nonsense is that activity “by which the world is disorganized and reorganized.” Standing in contrast to the reasonable, coherent, stable, and hierarchical world of sense, nonsense is random, arbitrary, changing, and fragmented. As a postmodern expressive strategy, recycling can be seen as a nonsense activity. A product of the intertextual relationship between the reasonable world from which it draws its materials the nonsensical world created by their unexpected reconstruction and recombination, the mediated recycled object, like the nonsense phrase, decontextualizes and recontextualizes and thus remakes meaing.
By altering the organization of the everyday world, the recycler transgresses the assumptions of common sense and logic, an act which Stewart also associates with artistic activity. In this way the recycler can be seen to operate in an aesthetic domain in which the commonplace is reconceived and transformed into a new reality. In this nonsensical place, the recycler, like the artist, creates “a model for interpretation, for arranging perception, which at its profoundest point does not so much make its members see into the life of things as it enables them to remake the life of things.
Having been the last to witness so many objects as they became the latest casualties of rapid technological change, Every has felt a special urgency about his responsibility to save vestiges of the old industrial world that he so values and admires. Caught up in the larger cultural drama of regret and anxiety about modernism’s possible demise, Every’s relentless appropriation of machine culture refuses to accept the transitory nature of the modern world and its inevitable passing. Recognizing his dual role as both disposer and salvager, he confides, “I was part of the generation that destroyed the industrial age, but saw magic and beauty in this stuff.”
~About Tom Every~
From Sci-Fi Machines and Bottle-Cap Kings: The recycling strategies of Self-Taught Artists and the Imaginary Practice of Contemporary Consumption
Sci-Fi Machines and Bottle-Cap Kings: The recycling strategies of Self-Taught Artists and the Imaginary Practice of Contemporary Consumption
In many ways, recycling or the process of borrowing, quoting, and recontextualizing objects, images, and ideas is the best metaphor for thw ay in which meaning is constructed and understood in our contemporary world. This view of culture as the product of fluid and interchangeable parts, constantly recycled and recombined, is commonly held by many postmodern theorists. In contrast to a modern vision of stable social ideologies and hierarchies, Bauman argues that our society exhibits no universally binding authority and thus no intrinsic or indisputable source of connection, meaning, or truth. “Instead the world is composed of a indefinite number of meaning-generating agencies, all relatively self-sustained and autonomous, all subject to their own respective logics.” In such a world of multiple points of departure and destination, we have lost our faith in progress and with it the belief that what we created is truly original. There is nothing more to invent. More particularly, as our natural resources are depleted and replaced by an environment of manufactured objects, these industrial artifacts become the new raw materials from which we must produce more.
From Cubbs/Metcalf: Recycled ReSeen
