psemme

The aesthetic quality of location

Last weekend, I built a simple 2×4 + plywood work bench for my workshop. I had just finished wrestling with a heavy vise, mounting it to the pine frame, and was standing back to admire my handiwork. I was pleased with the outcome and happy with the aesthetic of the materials, mainly all the pine wood’s characteristics. The cast iron vise added an aspect of seriousness that also made me feel, well, serious 😉

While reflecting on these basic physical attributes I was inspired to surface a hidden quality – its location. The resulting effort, and the outcome pictured above, opened a door in my brain that admitted a host of additional thoughts and insights that became the inspiration for this post.

My most striking realization was that the table’s location was not an intrinsic quality. Unlike its color, dimensions, weight, texture – attributes that would travel with the table wherever it was placed, its location was really just inhabited. That is, if I moved it ten feet northwest, it would look the same, but I would need to update the lat/lon data taped on its surface. If I then placed another object in the location previously occupied by the table, it would instantly inhabit the table’s prior coordinates.

Like time, objects don and discard location attributes effortlessly throughout their existence. You could even argue, in a very quantum sense, that an object only reveals its location when it’s observed or measured, but that’s a different, larger discussion.

If I’m being a geek, location could be considered part of the table’s metadata – datapoints that gain meaning only when we interpret them.

Location measurements “exist” conceptually. The lat/lon numbers on the tabletop are relative to its presence and nothing more. There is no intrinsic connection between the two worlds – we humans create the meaning. That realization is what piqued my interest (as an artist).

The fact that I can create a physical object and access/incorporate related, conceptual, dynamic qualities really inspired me (and down the rabbit hole I went). I could create objects that look or behave like X in Paris but Y in NYC. Or make this sound at Noon in Berlin but a different sound at midnight in Tokyo, but only if the year is divisible by four, etc ad infinitum.

Imagine the innumerable, intrinsic, physical qualities an object embodies and how they could creatively intersect with the dynamic qualities space and time introduce.

I will explore and report back.