Erratics Net (right) is a complex interlinked wire fabric mounted on a glacier-scoured terrain in Nova Scotia. Layers of new strata floating just above the surface of the land are developed within the foam-like filigree of this textile installation.
Erratics Net est un tissu fabriqué de réseaux complexes de fils interreliés de façon complexe, monté sur un terrain brossé par les glaciers en Nouvelle-Écosse. Les couches de nouvelles strates qui flottent juste au-dessus de la surface du sol sont développées au milieu du filigrane mousseux de cette installation de textile.
of dissociated identity-specificially, the assimilation of insects into space through mimicry:
industrial practice of reinforcing landscapes using geotextiles. At the same time, the projects tend to question boundaries of psyche.Their large-scale field structures offer immersion, an expansion rendering our physical bodies porous and offering wide-flung dispersal of identity.This might remind us of a long mystic tradition. A recent example from modern European culture could be the mid-century writing of Georges Bataille, pursuing ecstatic alterity: This work shares common interests with early strains of psychoanalysis. In a passage presented to a surrealist circle in 1937, Bataille’s associate Roger Caillois studied insect behaviour as an analogy for a psychopathy
Then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his sense. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space […] And he invents spaces of which he is ‘the convul- sive possession’[…] Caillois explores a vertigo, an attraction by space,… by the effect of which life seems to lose ground, blur- ring in its retreat the frontier between the organism and the milieu… 4
The anima which is treated in these works as a sacred quality is a product of geometry and material synthesis. Making a new nature.
…I stood up, and I was completely taken… Only my legs— which kept me standing upright, connected what I had become to the floor— kept a link to what I had been: the rest was an inflamed gushing forth, overpowering, even free of its own con - vulsion. A character of dance and of decomposing agility… 3
1 Genesis 37:24, NRSV 2 D. W. Winnicott, Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena , 1951. 3 Georges Bataille, Ecstasy, Inner Experience . [1943] Leslie Anne Boldt, trans. New York, 1988. 4 Roger Caillois,‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychas- thenia’ [1937]. John Shepley, trans. in October: the First Decade , Cambridge, 1987 Erratics Net, Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia, 1998, with DalTech Faculty of Architec- ture students: Kelly Chow, Chris Ferguson, Nicola Grigg, Sandra Lee, Beth Lewis, Sunil Sarwal,Vicco Yip,Thomas Wright.
Haystack Veil, Haystack Institute for Crafts, Maine 1997, collaboration with Warren Seelig and students: Judith Botzan, Sophie Hammond-Hagman, Emily Haris, Mi-kyoung Lee, Dale McDowell, Kelli Phariss, Stephanie Ross, Michele Rubin, Kristine Woods.
Philip Beesley is an architect in Toronto, Ontario. He teaches at Waterloo and lived in Rome in 1997 having received the Canada Council’s Rome Prize. This text was originally presented at the Subtle Technologies Conference,Toronto, May 19, 2001.
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