“Coming closer to things only shows us how far away they still are from us” – George Simmel

Individual witnesses to an event will describe the same actions differently. Not only in terminology and accent points, but in the mundane, seemingly incontrovertible details. The property may be described as next to conservation land, or a vacant lot, or a patch of wildflowers. Semantics are part of this, as surely the meanings of the small group of words describing the same thing are different, though that would not accurately describe the breadth of possible impressionistic perceptions created, whether intentionally or not.  

This witnessed event that is being retold, is given both meaning and a static interpretation through word choice and through the structure of the narrative. In doing so, the witnesses create a new thing, not a story about an event, but an event that is the story about the event, to be processed individually by the receiver. And by event, this could mean a space, a physicality that we perceive as a site of either temporarily invested interest, or something that is privatized through our gaze and foolishness. 

Our spaces are not shared as much as they are tangled and contested. As an individual we conceptualize our spatialized self, beyond the thought motor sitting between our eyes about an inch backward into our skull from the bridge of our nose. As we release this tension of a false inner voice, and move it to other parts within and outside of our self, we allow not only for greater intimacy with ourselves, but also with others and the world around, before, and beyond.

Unfortunately much of this has been repurposed as consumer coercion, allowing for the occupation and eventual obliteration of this spatialized self. We do not consume, we are consumed.

Facial recognition and individually targeted advertising, algorithmic adaptive playlisting designed for optimal impressionability, and nostalgia for something you haven’t experienced yet, manufactured as a crowdscaped assemblage of past knowledge heated to the correct temperature. Even the architecture and its ornamental aesthetics are used to produce space. This force induces our individual and collective malleability to ideas of civic patriotism and market allegiance molding our response and navigation of those spaces and identities. These systems, tactics, and mechanisms of visual and performative culture interact to form the boundaries of public and private, nature and non-nature, sacred and profane. Collectively this interplay and layering of context binds us to this current condition, one that is no more than a manifestation of definitions and form. Oppositional methodologies and resistant aesthetics can be a means to counter economic, political, and cultural systems of oppression, exclusion, homogenization, and ecological degradation. 

The unplaceable cricket, recording time in their own way, lays some eggs, a version of themselves adapted to that place, their sound taking temperature within the fray.