Here I was, downtown Minneapolis, the city of my childhood. All my life I looked up at the skyscrapers with the dream that one day I would be looking down instead of up. For a glorious year, 2019, I enjoyed some fruits of my labor. I made it to the top floor, over 400 feet up in the air. As I rode the bus, paying endless attention to the goings on, there was an expectation of collapse, of disaster. It would come, I told myself on those absolutely gorgeous sunrise bus rides down Hennepin Avenue, the end was nigh to this endless repetition, the commute to work, the endless extraction of resources. It may not happen tomorrow, I thought to myself as I rode the elevator up to the 33rd floor. Then came the day that I would experiment with working from home, and the preceding day when I packed up my laptop and did not bother to empty my desk, not realizing fully that my ride down that escalator would be my last for over 7 months and counting.
This picture was taken that final week. I felt obliged to record a rare peek inside a device I used Monday through Friday from 8 in the morning to 6 at night for almost a full year. A device, like an elevator, or a body, or even all of society, needs to be maintained if it is to function in perpetuity. How does this maintenance happen? How are fundamental human values reinforced and maintained? A moment for reflection here and there. Reminders as always in the glitch. Every color ripped apart, reconstituted and shredded, negatives and edges. Art is a device too, it needs to be maintained or it will fall apart, lose coherence, dissolve into abstraction, beyond reason and comprehension. This is what I am doing, isn’t it? I am making art, right? The glitch will guide me. The moon as my witness, I am bound to follow until the end.
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After a spell of piercingly cold weather, I felt emboldened to visit the Como Conservatory. On the vast frozen plains of the twin cities in the dead of winter (and lacking a greenhouse of my own) it is the closest place I could think to find warm vaporous air to breath, at least the only place where it is filled with the smell of green and sunlight, however dim. The sun sets later every night now, but remains dim and low in the sky. Only here in this supposed temple to life is its power and greatness received, unharmed by the wind. February 15. Palm trees in the sunlight. Leaves cast dappled shadows as they flutter. Glitch, reorient, disorient. History, the past, before, back when, documentation, preservation, the rings on a stump. The present, glowing red, like blood flowing like sap. The image. Joint Photographic Experts Group. Portable Network Graphics. Every image, another image. A time and place, and every captured moment spit into the cloud. A special event, an occasion of meeting, two people or more in the room together. Breathing the exact same air. Nothing sentimental really.
The mood, faces filled with light and laughter and conversations about the future, what future? What will happen? Imagine it.
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