Like A Labyrinth (part 1)
Edge work & reflecting on a creative process
Every hole has an edge.
What does the edge mean to its hole?
If we follow the edge, where might we find ourselves?
The idea of the edge has captured me ever since I read Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet where she write about the edges apparent in the acts of reading, writing, and loving. For Carson, each act is of desire. These acts trace the edges between idea / sound, sound / word, word / love, love / lover, lover / beloved. The closer any pair gets, the sharp of the edge grows more clear. Often painful as it is pleasurable. The experience of edge points back toward its hole — what’s missing, or never was.
This interplay between edge and hole reminds of making a poem. When I write a poem, I endeavour to put into words an idea and a feeling that I will always fail to describe. As I get closer and closer to the idea or feeling, the more pleasure I am in reaching toward the impossible, yet the more it hurts to know that I will never reach it in the end. I never will. The impossibility of poetry is my experience of the edge and its hole.
Is this not like love?
At the 2024 New York Art Book Fair, I came across the Spector Books table where the cover of this book, Labyrinth, caught my eye. Translated from German into English by Sadie Plant, the book is a collection of four lectures (in text and image) on the idea of the Labyrinth. Taking the original Minoan myth of the labyrinth that King Minos had Daedulus build to imprison the minotaur, Asterion, and into which the Athenian ‘hero’ Thesseus ventured to slay the misunderstood beast, these lectures ranged from Urban Studies (Alexander Hempel, Anne König) to Architectural Criticism (Francis Hunger) and Game Theory (Johannes Kirsten).
After the book fair, with a copy of Labyrinth and a few other new editions to my collection in hand, I ventured to Wakefield, Québec to participate in a residency called Intelligent Terrain. Organized by UKAI Projects around the themes of artificial and ecological intelligiences, a group of five artist-researchers and myself stayed for a week on the regenerative farm, Ferme Lanthorn — learning the farm’s systems, wandering the grounds, understanding its place in the local ecology, making a willow fedge, and engaging in semi-structured workshops at a cermaics studio, wet felting lab, and the Museum of Nature’s storage facility (where we met the Crawford Lake core sample in the cryogenics chmaber and single-cellular algae called diatoms under an electron microscope).
Amidst all the group activity in Wakefield, I was reading the lectures in Labyrinth, as well as revisiting Eros the Bittersweet, in the quiet hours after waking, between workshops, and before sleep. I went into the residency wanting to do edge work while exploring the idea of ecological intelligence in the specific place of Ferme Lanthorn. I knew I wanted to integrate poetry and moving image into these explorations. One of my fellows residents, Simón Rojas, brought his GoPro, 360° camera, and field recorder for me to borrow as I went about doing my edge work.
However, I didn’t know exactly what the result of these explorations would become by the end of the week, nor did I feel totally optimistic that I would be able to give these ideas form in a few short days. And we were tasked with presenting some kind of work-in-progress to the community at Place des Artistes de Fallerton on the final day of the residency.
In the final days leading up to the presentation, I wandered the woods around Ferme Lanthorne, cameras ready, recorder fixed, and notes app open to record any thoughts that might turn to poetry. On Friday, the day before the presentation, I engineered a simple helmet-mounted appendage to hold the 360° camera as to both show my face while moving through the landscape of forest, field, trail, and stream.
Walking around with this helmet was clunky, as the clip holding the adjustable appendage to the helmet would often loosen and fall. To counteract the loosening, I had to tighten the helmet so much that I ended up with a throbbing headache after a couple of hours of shooting. I also couldn’t see what was recording, and never having used a 360° camera before, I didn’t quite know what to expect. Though, having watched Eduardo William’s Human Surge 3 at last year’s TIFF, I had a good feeling of how this might turn out.