scale 2

• How does scale affect the experience of the work?
• I begin to recoil against the idea of the ‘immersive’, projecting images at huge scale does not immerse me, I am with Brecht on immersion and wish to break the spell so we can grasp larger power structures and systems. Perhaps Metzger wishes this too
• Is the installation functioning more like an environment than an image?
• It makes me wonder what we can mean by an environment? It creates something from scale but to say something is ‘immersive’ or an environment no longer carries much meaning for me.
• How does light behave as a material here? It serves in a similar way to the staining of slides for microscopy, an editorial filter, enabling and disabling certain forms of vision
• What emotions or physical sensations emerge while viewing it? Oh I am so awkward and no longer believe in the construct of emotion? what is such a thing? It seems like a by product of late capitalist crisis (see also Ruth Leys, the Rise of Affect, Genealogy and Critique, 2020), I do not know what it feels like to be confronted by these images at scale. I have spent so long in hospitals surrounded by ‘scientific’ images presented a bit like this they do not impact me other than as a form of signalling, again, perhaps Metzger is also exploring that form of interior design?
• Does the instability of the projections reflect wider social or political instability? The political economy of the body is unstable, I know and sense that in my own bones and marrow, I think it is the knowledge economy which subsides as we speak.
• How might this work relate to ideas of systems breaking down or mutating?
• Materials will always decay, even Nuclear materials. Our bodies mutate, especially under conditions of industrial toxicity. My cells have divided themselves against me and in a wider sense a corporate coloniality seeks to break down all systems and reconstitute them to their own ends.
• What happens when illustration or image-making becomes immersive and spatial rather than fixed on a page? We get wall-to-wall Van Gogh if very unlucky or Richard Long and James Turrell if well financed, or something I do not know about which is less entangled with wealth, song lines or mass trespass maybe?

I will continue to research some of these:

• Metzger’s concept of “Auto-Destructive Art”
• the relationship between art, protest, and anti-capitalist politics in the 1960s
• psychedelia and altered perception in visual culture
• environmental collapse and entropy in contemporary art
• installation art as a form of world-building or performative image-making.

Note to self: scale of action and impact occurs to me, what if the work was an attempt at climate impact ?