Imagining, Constructing, and Capturing the Aura:

A Retrospective Look at Ephemeral Art Forms Using Google Cardboard

by Heather Marcelle Crickenberger 

Sunday, May 1, 2016

Charlotte, North Carolina

         The exhibition has come and gone.  I had one human visitor and several animals and insects.  I did not serve wine or cheese nor did anyone buy anything.  The paintings are now stacked in the studio, to be archived, framed or tucked away.  The journal sits nearly full--the last few pages saved for a final thought of some kind. The other day, I organized all the digital images and short writing assignments I had created this semester so that they may be somewhat accessible.  The line has been taken down, the clips piled in a handful inside.  

         I have since produced three more paintings and rehung a the exhibition in a different configuration using cotton line instead of nylon; I used wooden clothespins instead of colored paperclips.  I only included the images I liked best and I moved them around so that they could share the light.  I did not take any Cardboard images of the second hanging--and I'm not sure why.  It would have been easy to do, but I didn't think about it until after I ripped it all down in a hurry for fear of rain--but there are several stills of that layout included in the gallery of stills.

         Last night, a friend "visited" the exhibition using the Google Cardboard device.  A frozen series of moments snatched in shifting patterns of light then stitched together to produce a narrow swath of 3-D details. The above and below are disappointingly blurred. I have PANO images I have taken but not yet worked with. They capture the ceiling and the floor, but not the depth. In both casees, it's not really like being there, but it's closer than I've ever been able to take somebody to an event they had not attended.  Or is it?  

           In "Lapse", the short story I wrote before I had decided what form my virtual gallery would take, I was able to include haptic sensations and thought.  Language gave me the ability to conjure images based on consensus.  I wonder if visitors who read the story would recongnise the exhibition they read about in the images.  I don't believe I describe a single painting in the story...perhaps that would be something to add. What I walked away realizing is that there's still a lot that language can do that the image can't, whether you are immersed in it or just looking at it hanging in a tree.

           In terms of the paintings themselves, they will aways be connected by this narrative, their subjects all connected to my own personal experiences.  I can throw these images out into the world as 2-D stills or in 3-D virtual spaces.  Transmissions are never lossless, however.  You may be able to read excerpts from the journal I was writing in when I was making the paintings, but those entries are also just approximations, overlaid with narratives--grand and peculiar--inextractable from their thisness...censored thought--code--all bound by their unique situatedness in many particular moments.

              We advance through inquiry by such approximations--by leaps and shuffles. Like thought, the questions move us forward and back.  We have moments of illumination and moments of reflection--moments of disillusionment and of distraction and inspiration. It is all part of the work of inquiry--all part of the aura that hangs about it. This project aims to make some small part of that visible to others.