2.
At this point I believe it would be wise to elaborate on the nature of our situation
. In a manner which escapes not only my own reasoning, but also throws the accepted laws of causality to the wind, I have discovered a very interesting aspect of the phenomenon we call ruin.
According to our human understanding of a ruin, a structure decays as it moves through time. Erosion, use, war; all of these things and more contribute to the entropic dissolution of our man-made world. As structures dissolve, so does their authoritative meaning, rendering them a palimpsest. They are empty, save for the faint ghost of their former purpose, allowing them to be filled with new allegorical meaning. This is a phenomenon that we can perceive and record.
But what of the ruins that have no past?
These are the ruins that are built for no actual function other than their referential aesthetics. Ruins that are constituted not from history, but from hubris. As assumption of a false lineage. A truly empty facade. Readymade detritus.
What if, due to circumstances that we would never imagine through our lived experience of the universe, a ruin made in this way could not just continue into the future, but cast itself anachronistically into the past.
As a spectator views a ruin and imagines what it once was, the structure’s original form is made manifest in the metaphysical and atemporal space of the mind. We cannot look into the past and see it, but by nature of our consciousness it nevertheless appears, fully formed, pristine, mysterious.
Through quite esoteric means, I have done the impossible and transported myself to a previous ice age. My goal, to find a pristine representation of the ruin, thrown into the past, and document what I see. My only wish is that I can somehow cast my observations into the future.
And so, I approached the duck pond
At this point I believe it would be wise to elaborate on the nature of our situation
. In a manner which escapes not only my own reasoning, but also throws the accepted laws of causality to the wind, I have discovered a very interesting aspect of the phenomenon we call ruin.
According to our human understanding of a ruin, a structure decays as it moves through time. Erosion, use, war; all of these things and more contribute to the entropic dissolution of our man-made world. As structures dissolve, so does their authoritative meaning, rendering them a palimpsest. They are empty, save for the faint ghost of their former purpose, allowing them to be filled with new allegorical meaning. This is a phenomenon that we can perceive and record.
But what of the ruins that have no past?
These are the ruins that are built for no actual function other than their referential aesthetics. Ruins that are constituted not from history, but from hubris. As assumption of a false lineage. A truly empty facade. Readymade detritus.
What if, due to circumstances that we would never imagine through our lived experience of the universe, a ruin made in this way could not just continue into the future, but cast itself anachronistically into the past.
As a spectator views a ruin and imagines what it once was, the structure’s original form is made manifest in the metaphysical and atemporal space of the mind. We cannot look into the past and see it, but by nature of our consciousness it nevertheless appears, fully formed, pristine, mysterious.
Through quite esoteric means, I have done the impossible and transported myself to a previous ice age. My goal, to find a pristine representation of the ruin, thrown into the past, and document what I see. My only wish is that I can somehow cast my observations into the future.
And so, I approached the duck pond