But Not Nothing, Either : Michael Day

BUT NOT NOTHING, EITHER

“A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either.” – Julia Kristeva (“Approaching Abjection”)

Modern transportation enables a larger segment of the population to experience a far greater portion of the world. Airlines advertise weekend getaways to exotic locales. We commute for hours by car or train (sometimes even by plane) to our jobs. We cover a lot of territory.

A quick survey of travel literature, though, reveals some fundamental differences in the types of travel we value culturally. Cook’s journals, The Canterbury Tales, Seamus Heaney on Station Island, Emerson in The Maine Woods, Mary Kingston’s Travels in West Africa – each of these texts in its way describes the phenomenon of the heightened sense of experience one can have during travel. I don’t want to suggest that there wasn’t significant tedium involved in, for instance, Lewis and Clark’s journey into the North American wilderness – just that the need to boil down and represent some essence of what it was to be in those places suggests that we value strangeness in our travels even as we participate in routinized, repetitive travel each day.

Commutes all too often are comprised of blank-time and blank-space. This is, of course, not due to the moments and spaces themselves, but to our responses to them. Just think of how often we do our daily commute without realizing we’ve done it.

I was discussing non-narrative reading with a friend recently. He told me of a man he met who reads, almost exclusively, train schedules. It seemed to me at first to be an abominably boring task. But there can be a certain beauty in the attempt to track and represent the passage of time and the accrual of distance. In all its decided structure, a train schedule really ends up being a tool through which we can make time malleable, speeding between stops and pausing to picture something we’ve done when we once got off at a certain station.

In drawing a comparison between pre-modern and contemporary modes of transportation, I don’t wish to romanticize the task of riding a sweaty horse for fifty miles or laboring on a ship as it makes a trans-Atlantic voyage. I want to be clear that I am not holding one mode up to the other as a kind of standard by which we can measure our own deterioration. Instead, I’d like to suggest that in considering these shifts, these changes in practice, these different valuations, we can begin to make observations about our existence in terms of activity and awareness.

We’ve become expansive but passive travelers. The convenience that these mechanical and technological advances allow also gives rise to a generalized kind of passivity. As technology touches increasing aspects of our lives, our modes of contemplation have begun to shift. People are spending more time each day reading than they had before the internet was so broadly available, but the kind of deep, sustained, and contemplative reading that a long novel allows us is not something in which we engage whilst reading on the Web. Web reading, rather, is characterized by broad information decoding.

Michael Day’s Filter images allow for an interpretive activity that mirrors, parrots, and plays off of some of the changes to cognition that Web reading has engendered. The images at once tug between a kind of strict dedication to and literal focus on surface, while simultaneously drawing attention to the blurry landscape beyond. The short depth of field creates the impression that we may just be able to identify and decode things that are only barely beyond our reach (the out-of-focus horizon line or trees, a house, the edge of a field, the smallest corner of sky, a billboard). This double obscuring – that of the muddy window coupled with the short depth of field – makes viewers struggle to read the images and renders a routinized landscape (it is one through which a train line passes, after all) strange.

These images are difficult. Their relative legibility or illegibility engenders a kind of slow contemplation required to uncode them. What is on that window (shit, rust, mud)? What are the landscapes (are they landscapes?) passing beyond and out-of-focus? Where are we in relation to what we’re seeing? What separates I from that?

The Filter images provide opportunities in which we can confront unidentifiable spaces. There is tension between that which is withheld from view and that which is revealed. The images, in an almost banal way, force the landscape they depict out of the symbolic order. This just barely unidentifiable landscape, obscured from sight, is revealed again and again, making its very unknowability familiar. The repetition of this confrontation gives rise to small, discreet traumas.

But what purpose might these little traumas serve? It seems to me that they pull into focus the passivity with which our relationship to modernity is so often characterized. That these images replace ad content (which takes up what is, perhaps, the quintessential site of the passive information decoding that comprises Web reading) creates an equally jarring response to the way we consume information through technology as, for instance, we experience when a stopping train pitches us from our daydreaming.

It is important, I think, when considering these shifts in cognition and experience not to damn one side of the shift or the other. It is equally important to take up an active role in shaping our responses to these adjustments. In imbuing this relatively new reading technology with strangeness, problematic legibility, and, indeed, little repeated traumas, Day’s Filter images provide us with just such an opportunity at active engagement.

Curator Meghan Maguire Dahn

Meghan Maguire Dahn is a writer from the Quiet Corner of Connecticut. Her work engages issues of representation and identity, often through the lens of technology and science. She is interested in projects that blur the boundaries between things (genres, eras, disciplines). She works at Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut.