psemme

A Notarist is an artist whose medium is measurement. They are observers, witnesses and documenters of space-time as we perceive it.

Space-time is a river. The Notarist witnesses and records its flow in order to tell others of its existence, like a storyteller.

A Notarist’s work is observation captured at a precise time and location. In so doing, they memorialize a unique and irreproducible slice of reality. Each art work is an explicit acknowledgement of our “participatory universe”** – that only through perception and examination is the world created.

Notarists measure, notarize, human existence. They aim to quantify, and record, virtually anything – whatever datapoints available – at, and during, a particular space-time.

The aesthetics are unlimited. How measurements are taken, stored, revealed, displayed, etc. is purely up to the Notarist.

A Notarist celebrates the now, the ephemeral, the flow of life as we experience it, in as many dimensions as possible.

Creative Witness

“I describe not the essence but the passage.”  – “On Repenting” – Montaigne

Notarists can notarize acts of human creation. 

Every creative act produces two inextricably linked outputs. The first is the process itself, happening over time – the writing of a poem, the drawing of a picture, composing music. It is the verb in the sentence. The second is what we consider the finished artwork, the object. We memorialize the piece by giving it a name, hanging it on a wall, etc.  The creation process itself is generally neglected, seen as incidental. 

The human creative process, in space-time, is authentic and irreproducible.  The doing is more precious than the done.  The Notarist’s art is in measuring and documenting this doing.  I call these types of notarizations “transients”.

We have all experienced this energy, creative electricity.  It has many names – the Greeks named nine Muses – and we tap into it from birth. We enjoy watching and listening to others experience it as well. Transients are works of witness that honor the creative process itself, while simultaneously participating in it.  Like the door between rooms, an essential physical interface that is easily overlooked, a transient represents the boundary layer, the journey, between a creative thought and deed.

My very first post was called Transients and my thinking has evolved since then. My post on existential proofs last year was another stepping stone. I will try to post some concrete examples that will hopefully help bring some reality to this admittedly very conceptual idea.

There are also serious practical implications to this approach as well that I will further explore in a future post.

Photo credit – ©1987 Wim Wenders, “Wings of Desire”

** John Wheeler