Tidal Locking — SPILL 180

BEANS

CHARLOTTE YOUKILIS
TIDAL LOCKING
Language, perception, and the forces that hold us in orbit

In 1969, an extraordinary book entered the atmosphere: Madeline Gins’s Word Rain (or A Discursive Introduction to the Philosophical Investigation of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says). Sometimes referred to as an avant-garde novel, artist’s book, book-sculpture, or metafictional experiment, Word Rain continues to elude classification and reject disciplinary boundaries. Every page is a material, spatial, and conceptual exploration. Some pages are filled with dashes and strikethroughs, others with what appear to be mathematical equations, where numbers are replaced by letters—a calculated and willful absurdity. Words literally rain, spilling forth, becoming a deliberate confusion.

That same year, humans set foot on the Moon for the first time. The Apollo 11 mission returned with twenty-two kilograms of moon rocks and powdery lunar dust, which they thought would help reveal the mysteries of the universe. They discovered that the moon’s rocks were lifeless and wet, similar to Earth’s. The Moon rotates on its axis once every 27.3 days, which is the same amount of time it takes to complete a singular orbit of the Earth, a synchronicity known as tidal locking. NASA destabilized human orientation to the world outwardly, into the vacuum of space, as Gins tunneled inward, towards the cognitive warpings of language and perception.

Evidently, consciousness was not limited to the terrestrial. In Word Rain, Gins writes about the human body: “The changes of the waft are not at all without a defining axis, a relative center. The axis, assured, might even be coordinated with a vital internal homologue, the spindle, that shaft about which my thought is spun and spinning. And this is the axis about which whirling fields (platforms) rotate past billions of fibers in the body of the imagination.” It may be true that the mind, like the Moon, spins on an axis, perhaps faster than any axis can hold.

That spectacular cognitive and physical disorientation continues to materialize, nearly fifty years later, in Dana Karwas’s exhibition, Thirty Six Point Eight Hours. The exhibition considers the “collective cosmic psyche” that develops out of human responses to monumental scientific and technological events and discoveries. A camera-pendulum built by Karwas swings at the center of the gallery space above printed renderings of the cosmos, memeified reproductions that Karwas sourced from the James Webb Telescope. With each swing, the hand-constructed camera re-captures photographs of massive and distant galaxies.

It may be true that the mind, like the Moon, spins on an axis, perhaps faster than any axis can hold.

The work Come Towards Me, a cerulean pigment print with a vignette of lighter shade, gives an illusion of spherical depth, as though millions of particles have coalesced under the forge of gravity, verging on implosion. The print is a composite of 5,000 images taken from the pendulum. Here, Karwas abstracts the cosmological concept of blueshift and redshift, the light emitted from stars or galaxies that are approaching or receding. As stars move away, the corresponding wavelengths stretch further apart, generating red light. As they get closer, the wavelengths compress, and blue light emerges.

The last page of Word Rain is a dense composite of superimposed words. Below the unintelligible block of language, Gins writes: “The body is composed of 98% water. This page contains every word in the book.” A radical collapse of scale, her confusion of words is suddenly compressed into a single visual and linguistic plane, warping both temporal and spatial dimensions of reading. Time collapses, space implodes, words occupy the same surfaces. Language is no longer merely a system of representation, but a physiological and spatial field, configured with other body-wide systems.

Karwas, too, builds portals, across time and space, where the billions of fibers that Gins references are ever-present, at all scales. These encounters function internally and externally. Her Cosmological Funhouse Mirror, a sculpture made from warped plexiglass, bends light, space, and reflection, inviting viewers into disorientation. Physical reality contorts, and perception becomes puzzled. The work is loosely inspired by the Reversible Destiny Healing Funhouse that Arakawa+Gins planned to build in Greece. Karwas references an archival drawing from the Arakawa+Gins project that depicts two people, separated by a translucent wall, waving at each other, with the label SPACETIMEMASSENERGYWAVEHELLO. Again, Gins plays with the density and composition of the sentence, making language turbulent and dimensional. But there’s something else occurring: a kind of co-origination of the organism and bodily forms. These reorientations of scale happen when looking through the mirror that Karwas built, similarly to how they happen when reading the meteorological, slippery language that Gins employs. What appears to be distortion is actually a recalibration of self.

What would happen if we operated at all scales of action, from the molecular to the cosmos? What if the constellations were not only groups of stars, but systems of thought, arrangements of knowledge?

If humans traditionally operate at the scale (or, the organizational level) of awareness, of a predetermined reality, what occurs at every other scale? What would happen if we operated at all scales of action, from the molecular to the cosmos? What if the constellations were not only groups of stars, but systems of thought, arrangements of knowledge? Karwas proposes yet another entryway to scale-juggling, one that takes into account the expanses of our homogenous, isotropic, and protean universe.

It may be that scale itself—bodily, cosmological, textual, epistemological—is unstable, operating across multiple registers. All exceed measurement or comprehension when viewed in totality. The modes of saturation that Karwas brings forth are offerings, ones that inhabit new forms of sensing, perception, and somatic capacities for observing and learning altogether. They know no temporal or spatial boundaries. What begins as play or experiment becomes a profound reordering of how bodies come to know the ever-expanding-and-contracting universe that surrounds them.