Tribe 03 | Space

Milton Bell, Waimarama Beach, New Zealand, Sept. 2003

THESE ROCKS ARE DULL. Here lies the rubble of erosion, space whittled out of country. These rocks are clouds moving at an imperceptible pace; their patterns emoting, bursting from the frame of imposed rockness, escaping the infallible essential form. Borges’ Funes the Memorious is invoked. A coastline; he would be able to recall every rock, every stone, every grain of sand, every object of “attention” (here's the rub) – could his consciousness bear the weight of its gradual transformation. The friction of sea and shore, season and storm; with sea-walls and revetments – the hardened beaches are being depleted of sand... The race to live by the beach makes us vulnerable to its extremes, and potentially complicit in its destruction. For an uninterrupted view we can become material for erosion.

Digital storage replaces the incredible mind of Funes and makes us all memorious if we care to look. This digital augmentation provides false eidetic memory – externalizing memory encourages us to forget... we click, we capture, we file away... our memories, like sand, are accreting on other quieter shores. I am the space where memories used to be... digital accretion, memory erosion. I can hear Marshall McLuhan intoning a jeremiad.

These rocks remind me of the Buddhist who sees a landscape in a bean. Are these rocks dull because I lack specialist knowledge. I am no rock hound – without this understanding I resort to superstition, making meaning where there is none. Do these rocks fail to surprise, are they worthy of our attention? I am looking at them now and wondering what the fuss was about, when I wandered, hopped, raced by, with my cheap digital camera, and cheap imagination... the skeptical glare has left me suspicious of wonder... spectacle is to be found elsewhere... these rocks are dull.