Reality is so insubstantial, sometimes, you don’t even know if it’s really there. Can’t quite trust your senses. Really, you can’t trust your senses at all, and yet, your senses are all you have. I’ve never been able to accept this. It’s a daily pressure on my mind.
Life comes, as Casey read, as a “rude and indigested mass.” And we order it. If you’re a painter, maybe you recognize the patterns of colors or the different hues and tones in the sky. You structure your life around these things. If you’re a writer, every picture inspires a barrage of words. You attempt to organize your surroundings into perfect sentences. You live your life on the line, through lines. However life comes, depending on who you are and what you love, you order it differently. Reality initially seems such a stable thing. But between the painter and the writer, between you and me, everything is different. Our very eyes, though they look the same and work the same, are in completely different worlds. It’s quite lonely sometimes.
I think Casey’s talk was an acknowledgment of the history and heritage that made him. I was only able to have these realizations about reality because of when I was born. Did people in the 1700s have thoughts like these? Or did they never question the stability of the reality around them? They were living in a completely different reality than I am now. One whose face was never questioned, no double glance in the mirror.
As a photographer, I was struck by how similar some of Casey’s geometrical designs were to photograms. Making photograms is the first exercise a film student does in the dark room. You throw random objects on some light sensitive paper and expose it. You end up with the outlines of simple, vague, white shapes on a black piece of paper. Casey said the simplicity of his geometrical designs encouraged you to look closer. If you changed one aspect of the code, the visuals looked completely different. In photograms, because you only see dark and white outlines, you have no idea what the objects that formed them really are. I couldn’t shake the newfound feeling that I was living in a world where all objects are in disguise. Even with the simplest of designs, you must look closer. Perhaps you could find the nature of the whole world there.
Casey visualized human experience in his art. We all begin by living in a world that is stable. And it determinedly morphs into a reality that we feel like strangers in because we realize our lack of control. The grid turns into a maze. Hence Casey’s transition into art where he was not in total control over his images. Much of the art he referenced evoked the “supremacy of pure feeling.” Our feelings mean nothing. They change on whims. They make us feel like Superman or like the world is falling apart from one moment to the next. And yet, our feelings are all we have. Casey quoted Richter, who admitted “how much better chance is than I am.”
And maybe I can start to come to terms with my existence by acknowledging that it is the push and pull between the chaos of the universe and my attempts to order it that make it so interesting, so beautiful, so wonderful. Maybe I wouldn’t have changed a thing. Living in your own reality gets lonely. But watching Casey flick from one piece of art to the next, I got the sense that we make all these things to temper that. This is what Interactive Media is. Sharing this. Tempering that.