morningtomorning.net 

MARCH 

       This website is a laboratory where we do experiments about, in, and around the concept of aesthetic drive. We do it quite invisibly and we barely talk about it, but aesthetic drive is the seed of this website as a platform and everything we do nurtures our understanding on this topic. For this cycle (January-August 2014) each one of us has been working in a long term project and will continue doing so throughout the eight issues. This prompt has opened a whole new dynamic for us and offers beautiful insight into our questions about aesthetic drive in a Platonic way; answering our questions with more questions.

       Presently I’m ambivalent whether the aesthetic drive is: something static, constant, some kind of elemental rhythm or pattern that is particular to each one of us, almost as if it were a non-material rhythmic DNA, and by defining our relationship with time exists in how we perceive, understand and act upon the world; OR if it is something more delicate, volatile and is nourished, exchanged, is active, inactive and susceptible to significant change.

       I found this same uncertainty when thinking about another strange and more existential substance: the self, and thought it could be helpful to use one to shed light on the other. Many times I rise from sleep forgetting the information I so wanted to retrieve from the depths of dreams.Often I read notes I’ve left for myself, written in journals, post-its, notebooks, loose pieces of paper, scribbled on walls or typed on the internet, and feel like they were written by someone else, and even though I often can recall writing them and I can definitely recognize my handwriting, these messages and their meanings are completely inaccessible to my-self in the present moment and lead me to the conclusion that it is possible that the self is a stranger, bigger and less defined entity that it seems.

      Can it be that I've stretched my self so, that from one end of the island it is impossible to see the other end, and that the journey is so long it is hard to remember with enough detail and definition what it feels like to be elsewhere?

      Yet there are these objects, these notes, these pieces of material evidence which, like cave paintings, or flags erect on the moon say, "you've been here, and this token is proof", and it becomes as confusing as it is for those characters in fairy tales who wake up from a dream holding a ring in their hands which they retrieved in that same dream they just woke up from. Two questions arise, there is the question which contorts our character's face and character as his eyes look suspiciously at what is around him, a question from the inside out: "what is reality?", however the other question remains floating silently in the air almost like a distorted echo from the first question which slowly bounces back from the space around him and asks softly, “who the hell are you anyways?”.

      Childish and inexperienced as I am, the trials to grasp myself have become arduous and tiring, like trying to fish with bare hands, feeling its skin rub the back of my hands and after splashing and holding it for a few seconds feeling it slip from my fingers and disappear in the water. or something like that. I don’t know if I’ve ever had an encounter with my true self or if I have I can't really remember myself. I can remember the place where it happened or the time of day or small little details that can possibly give me clues to come close to guessing the answer to the question “who the hell are you anyways?”. I remain a stranger to myself. Except for mirror images, distorted things we identify ourselves with, and things that serve as mirror images, such as pictures, pieces of writing, paintings, or even the way other people treat us, look at us, react to us or act in our presence, I have little clues as to who I am and often these mirror images are so divergent they become more of a hindrance or they tend to hint that our selves change at high speeds in spite of ourselves. The better reason to make maps.

      (Why bother? too late to ask that question. Why bother? because it’s related to the aim of this website. why bother? because that is the question that people are after without knowing, because asking these questions is what can wake us up from this lull that entertainment, food and labour traps us in, by answering these questions we can know where we stand, what we believe, how we want to act in our day to day lives, what game we want to play and play it.)

       What we have here on this website is a collection of tokens, pieces of evidence, not necessarily of the self but more specifically of aesthetic drive seen here in different projects that are slowly coming together. Because people change at different and inconstant paces and speeds it is good to start by making different maps. What I offer below are inaccurate maps that somehow depict the territory each one of us has been treading on as well as the journey each of us has treaded up till now. Because this “territory” and this “journey” mapped here is not a map of land, or streets, it is a conceptual map of space-in-between. However, it is true one point makes a point (and infinite rays from the point to infinity), two points make (two points, two sets of infinite rays to infinity, infinite curved lines between them and) one straight line connecting both points. three points make (three points, three sets of infinite rays to infinity, three infinite sets of curved lines in between the points, three straight lines, infinite curved planes where all three points lay and finally) one flat plane represented by the triangle. Triangles stand on their own. I invite you to see this work this month as the third dot that gives definition to the shape of the project as well as the plane where each of these exist.