Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Pages and time

This motive has been bubbling around in my mind for a few decades, though I just made this sketch. I'm thinking it would be good for a cover, as it's showing many covers.
I just had the impulse to sketch it when I was reading Erik Von Daeniken's Chariots of the Gods, a book in the air of around 1970, but now being pushed to the background a bit. I mention the air because the smell of it is quite important, having the spirit of energy of a Wyoming basement, where I rescued it last summer. (the smell of a book is the first thing I notice, before I settle my eyes into it.) These particles of smell are the same as the rocks and nature of the times in which Chariots was discussed much, the era of speculation and imagination about ancient astronauts. Von Daeniken discusses the time capsule placed in NY, 1965 (I imagine at the World's Fair.) This world's fair is the inspiration for Mansonia, the last Blog post, and a future painting.)
Sheets and covers are about time, artifacts in the air at one time, since covered up. Sometimes they fall away entirely, lost in the wind, though other times they can be pried from underneath layers pasted over them.
This notion of the time capsule is intriguing and troubling; in a scant 45 years since the capsule was layed down, the world has changed troublingly much, to the extent that we put our artifacts into mainly digital forms. This digital info is highly fugitive and transitory. As I write, I am aware that the form of a blog is becoming archaic. Unlike a book, a blog will vanish entirely, and it has no smell particles that can be rescued. Are we thinking of putting digital info in time capsules? Will we be able to decipher it 5,000 years from now? Or 50?
I have contrarian concerns to most people, concerning the web. Most worry about things like Facebook's lack of privacy, that a person's mistake will be preserved forever, etc. I doubt this: in just over a decade, a huge amount has vanished, never to be seen again. My gallery at paintingsdirect.com, for instance, one of the premier web galleries of the world, folded a year or two ago, most of its pages wiped away, only a few remaining in archives. This was a very high profile site; small blogs and most pages stand an even worse chance of lasting for a long time. Keep it in perspective!

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