Rewriting an academic text on interaction as a pre-requisite for our contemporary understanding of "liveness"(and what that means for our relationship to animate beings in the environment that cannot provide an immediate experience of interaction, like trees, for example) has occupied me for most of the day. And in the evening I received a message from my colleague, who cursed some fallen trees that blocked the road and destroyed the electricity lines at the cottage. Trees can have agency, too, no doubt about that. I realized how protected and easy my life here at the station is, with three meals a day if needed, warm water, internet connection and all the electricity for the appliances that I depend on, from camera and computer to telephone and toothbrush. Without electricity most of our society would probably collapse within days.
I did a little bit of video this afternoon, well, this evening, although it looks like afternoon, I guess. Sitting on a rock at the shore for fifteen minutes, almost as a still image, to be combined in a long crossfade with the "empty" view, to let the human figure slowly dissolve into the landscape. (The editing I cannot do here, but that is the plan). The sun was burning hot, despite the chilly presence of the ice on the lake. I took two snapshots with my phone, one picture of the view, which the camera saw (albeit vertical, while the video image is horizontal) though without me sitting in the image, and another from where I sat on the rock, of the view that I saw. For once they were not that dissimilar. Sometimes the difference between what I see while performing and what the camera sees while watching or recording me is hilarious. Here the landscape is continuous; there is very little that you would want to crop out of sight. The sounds of the cars passing on the road I would gladly do without, though. I hoped the glimmer of the empty beer can floating by the shore next to the rock would be visible in the latter image, but maybe not. The illusion of a pristine beauty is preserved, for now.
