Aspen Art Museum Summer Magazine 2023

Smoothing . . .

The Enlightenment put light (lux, sol), a radiation that makes vision possible to the human eye, in a binary with darkness. Light denoted knowledge and the Enlightenment shed light on the unknown, the dark. At ACC, lightness is familial to darkness. It denotes a lightening up, a buoyancy. Its dust and dirt are some of the finest, the faintest ever recorded. At ACC, enlightenment denotes a process of adding layers of micro-pearl dust onto Altamira Cave residents’ already pristine structures. In 2057 LT, Altamira was the first site equipped with a dimensional translator, the device allowing it to speak. It was also the first to volunteer as a recovery site through its own speech channel. Is ACC dust and dirt synthetic? At ACC, both occur naturally. In 2054 LT when Cultural Property Protections were suspended and invalidated, the preservation of the Altamira Caves as a World Heritage Site ceased. Sedimented dust and dirt showed as micro-pearls with no measurable physical weight. Further tests implied that, if charged with the Xi magnet (Xi-mag), the dust would remain aloft, floating and growing denser over time. In 2058 LT, ACC placed Xi-mag chargers at 20-meter intervals, thus creating a micro-pearl dust atmosphere in perpetual suspension. As the residents arrived, the first step in their recovery was being Fi-charged and pinned against the dim cave walls. Fi-charge attracted the Xi-charged dust, which covered the residents fully upon entry. The ACC provides continuous dust and dirt sedi- mentation to those who were prohibited from aging and feeling the passage of time. As a first step in feeling time, the residents feel the falling of dust.

Who can visit Altamira Cave Complex? Only those authorized for dream state visits can enter ACC. To qualify for entry, kindly proceed with the following ACC Dream State Entry Permit. Who is currently housed at ACC? Majority of “Western Masterpiece Painting” from 1403 LT until 1968 LT, formerly protected by UNESCO Cultural Property Laws, are housed at ACC. In 2054 LT, when Cultural Property Protections were suspended and invalidated, these former assets were given as Re-Animate Objects and released from their collections. They arrived at ACC for repair procedures in 2077 LT, when systemwide ownership codes were replaced with charters of use. Following reclassification, these Re-Animate Objects no longer required strict preservation conditions mandated by previously encyclopedic museum collections, insurance companies and philanthropic holdings of the 20th and early 21st centuries LT. At the current time marker, conservation and preservation are isolation-grade crimes: forceful imprisonment and embalming. Depending on their generation, our residents have each endured somewhere between one and three centuries (LT) of conservation. To recover, they are placed in ACC for a hekayear CT quarantine. Why were they placed under a hekayear CT quarantine? Art Recovery Initiative of 2077 LT has selected these Re-Animate Objects carefully over a period of a dekayear CT. Their inestimable financial valuation, museological display and storage requirements were marked detrimental to the founding of a New Image Ecology. This initiative, art field-wide, was tasked with restoring sensual degradation and optical drives responsible for 21st century LT Climate Cataclysm on Earth. In their original exhibition context, the residents of ACC were tagged as broken, distressed and unsafe for the New Image Ecology. Their recovery starts by allowing them to feel time again, to heal from the stigma of eternity—a condition prized by their former hosts, who treated things as property. As Re-Animate Objects, the ACC regards them as reanimate beings requiring rehabilitation, nourishment and, ultimately, living. Is it safe to enter AAC? It is not safe to enter Altamira Cave Complex lacking the mandatory Dream State Permit. Seizures and permanent trauma may likely occur and lead to biotic Sense-degradation and dream paralysis. Dream State Permit allows visitors to understand the historical context and use of residents at the time of their creation, their exhibition and their role in building the Western Aesthetic Canon, responsible for the array of deadly drives that culminated in the Climate Asset Wars in the first half of the 21st century LT. The permit also allows the images inside to imprint safely onto your unconscious vent. It is equally important that your visit does not trigger the kind of gaze the residents are recovering from. Why was Altamira Cave Complex chosen as a host? Altamira Cave Complex was chosen in 2077 LT because of its archaic use properties. The last century brought an aesthetic reckoning. In the early 20th century LT, a group of artists noticed that the cave paintings, previously thought rudimentary, exhibited qualities vastly more sophisticated than the new art of the artist-group’s own time. The “contemporary”, relating to the art of the present, was abandoned together with the linear time acceleration. The cave paintings encompassed all media simultaneously: scoring, drawing, print- ing, stamping, painting, sculpture, performance, music and—with the addition of fire’s stroboscopic effect—animation and narrative cinema. They were not owned, but living architectures. The artists wondered at length. They struggled to understand how the first recorded artworks had already been what “contemporary art” now claimed to be for the first time. Had a 38,000 year-long intermission (LT) transpired unnoticed? They narrowed the point of art’s sharpest decline to what was called Enlightenment in the West and its descendants.

The dust cover acts in three ways:

embracing the residents by making them lighter; physically releasing the hold of conservation; and, nullifying residents’ derivative value as speculative property. The ACC gifts the dust and dirt to the residents and through it, its codes of use and life. Under this influence, many of the residents develop their own relationships to the dust and allow parts of it to be in- corporated to create new forms. Some residents grow thicker and others thinner, some change color, some move. These forms cannot be predicted. The process of recovery is different for each resident. Can the visitors of ACC witness this form shift? Certainly, as this is one of the primary motives to enter. The Dream State Permit charges your Biotic Tag with a slight Z-magnet (Z-mag), so that as you enter the ACC the micro-pearl dust in your path swims away from you. Since the caves are not lit, except by the naturally occurring oculi, shift to somatic senses to supplement vision as needed. Note that as you near the artworks leaning at the base of the cave walls, your approach may or may not shift the dust around them. Each resident has a Z-mag block in case they do not want to be disturbed. If they allow the dust to shift, the dust particles they have already incorporated will remain in place. Regardless, you may move as you please through the cave and remain as long as you like. In Dream State Visits the ACC can be comfortably occupied by 280 biotics, but every one of your co-visitors manifests, to you, as an elongated vector shifting the micro-pearl dirt.

Are all the residents of ACC arranged in the same way? No. Two kinds of exceptions are present:

1. ACC has felt some physical movement of its residents beyond dust incorporation. Those remain unrecorded to provide privacy. The residents are not subjects of study. They can be visited only if they seek company. ACC provides them with the option. 2. Certain residents arrived with occupancy instructions prescribed by the Art Recovery Initiative, for the initial period of their stay. For example, in the ACC entrance hall, two residents received such prescriptions. With their permission we will use their prescriber’s argument notes as examples A and B below.

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