Mapping the Mapping: About Limited Fork Time Mapping (the Burial Component)

Limited Fork Time Mapping explores interactions with time, environment, moment as collaborators and co-authors. It is a tine of the Limited Fork Theory principle that recognizes a collaborative nature of all things and tries to be more aware of site-responsive making and the creative potential of environments.

A project of this course experiment is an experiment in the School of Art and design's woods, the burial of art objects and personal artifacts to allow subterranean environmental constituents an opportunity to mark the object and artifacts in ways specific to the configuration of dynamic patterns in the environment. Other art objects and personal artifacts have been hung on clotheslines placed in trees as additional branches or branch extensions, again to allow shaping and configuration of the objects and artifacts by more exposed environmental factors. The suspended artifacts are periodically observed and documented with text comments, field recordings of sounds at the hanging burial installation at the time of observation, and still and moving image sequences.

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Sounds of the hanging burial installation on 19 February 2010 at 5:39 pm EST.

Objects and artifacts were photographed prior to hanging and/or burial, but I'm sorry to have to report that sounds made by the objects and artifacts were not captured, so progress or change in sound production though mapped after excavation cannot be measured against sound prior to suspension and/or burial, still it will be good to listen to sound that can be coaxed from the objects and artifacts after their experience.

We are of course shaped by the environment that we also shape, and frequently, we take inspiration from our surroundings. This transaction can occur in multiple directions, the environment responding to our presence, perhaps not emotionally attached as we may from time to time perceive ourselves attached to elements on the environment, but there are dependencies and consequences that emerge in environments. The site-sensitivity of object and artifact placement attempts to acknowledge a relationship with the environment in which the environment's methods of marking is considered valid. The environment has something to say. Each location in the environment has something to say. The objects and artifacts are in conversation with the specific location in the environment that the object occupies.

This experiment is also a reminder that the human artist does not, in completing a piece, determine the work's final form. Environmental forces will continue to shape the piece, will eventually degrade it gradually, elegantly or abruptly and cataclysmically. From an extensive environmental palette, a piece can be augmented or transformed in subtle and/or profound ways. We give the objects to the environment, not as trash, but as something we will want to try to revisit, displaying the reclaimed objects as works authored by the locations on the grounds of the location of the installation. Some objects removed for temporary reclaiming at the end of this semester will be returned to their subterranean and suspended locations to allow the environment more time to work on the objects.

Many forms of maps will be made, forms that cannot be anticipated well before forms of the environmental authoring are better known.

Two of my favorite nature collaborators are Stephen Gill, whose work (an image from his series Buried) appears on the left, and Andy Goldsworthy whose pieces are often incredibly temporary, that belong to the moment and may be witnessed primarily, if not sometimes exclusively, by the moment, a still photograph of the collaborative event not the work, but only an echo or shadow of the work. Goldsworthy is but one in a chain of makers that will shape a piece. He initiates the chain, but the idea for the chain comes from the environment that participates in the chain of making. It is a beautifully entangled system that still grows, branches as makers extend the range of the piece.
A collage of works by Andy Goldsworthy from the Rickshaw Diaries:



This work (except work by Stephen Gill and Andy Goldsworthy) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.