Deborah Fisher

Teleportation

I've been listening to a lot of podcasts lately. So I've gotten two separate chances to hear Michio Kaku argue that we will be teleporting humans before the 23rd century.

In case you are not up to speed on this, scientists can now teleport (or "beam") a particle as far as 600 meters. Kind of. You don't get the actual particle on the other side. The original, as far as I can tell, is annihilated. You get an exact replica. Travel is to teleportation, then, as snail mail is to fax.

The physicists working on this (in Switzerland?) say that they are finally conquering this problem of matter, and that is where my ears perk up. I have a deep gut sympathy for the words problem of matter, but I have organized my whole life around the idea that it's the one thing that I can't really conquer. It's the one truth that's larger than I am, that I can't make up, slide around or vault over. Matter sits outside of me, telling me exactly what I want from it by obstinately refusing to assume my desires on its own. And when I work with matter, my desires necessarily fall away and become compromises. Anyone can collaborate with matter to astounding effect, but there are limits.

You can't uncut a piece of wood.

The problematic nature of matter is a powerful check on human ego. It certainly keeps me much more modest than I am naturally disposed to being, and not just because loving matter means wearing rather dumpy work pants most of the time. I had a bad studio day yesterday. I spent fourteen hours making a very heavy turd, and it was because I fell into the trap of thinking that I have more than a vote. I was working from the inside of my head and trying to get what's inside out--trying to stick with the plan instead of listening to what's actually happening.

That's why I am so curious about what's going to happen with this teleportation thing. The idea came to the producers of Star Trek for very practical, problem-of-matter reasons. They didn't want to incur the extra set-building costs that shots of the Enterprise landing on all these planets entailed. It made financial sense to make the teleportation set and be done with it.

(That's the matter I know and love, creating obstacles that become brilliant ideas you never could have thought up on your own!)

And perhaps I am taking Kaku too literally when I conflate the Star Trek idea and what these Swiss scientists are imagining. I'm imagining them taking this patently silly TV show idea that is all about overcoming an infinite number of sets, and holding on to the idea inside the mind and working to make it real. I'm imagining this because that would be so human--because that's the direction we like to imagine our ideas flowing. Not from TV show to particle accelerator necessarily, but from the inside of the mind to the real world.

But bad shit tends to happen when we think that way. This is the vector (idea to reality) that creates craziness like The Final Solution. Our insane Middle East strategy. Bound feet and corsets. Donald Judd. I am no luddite and I am not anti-intellectual. But I do believe in matter, and I believe in emergence, and I believe strongly that we are not as smart as we think we are. All this leads me to believe that the best intellectual vector points in the opposite direction: from reality to idea.

So I feel pre-emptively sorry for the first teleported human, who will ignore the cautionary tale of Mike Teevee and put his matter in the hands of a machine that will annihilate him and attempt to reassemble him somewhere else. Based on my own, unscientific studies of matter, I have a hunch that he won't ever be quite right afterwards. That at least part of his consciousness is in his matter, and that it sits there in a way that is irreducible to information.

What I Do Here

If you're not a regular reader, you maybe don't know that I am on a residency in the middle of New York state... in a post-industrial wasteland that is two parts despair, one part squirrels, and three parts colorful characters that really like sculpture. Mostly, I've been doing this:

But I've also been getting out more, harvesting tires, doing chores. Recreating. You can't do nothing but work, and doing nothing feels really wrong here. So yesterday tried a breakdancing class.

My arms are really sore this morning and I mostly watched. I am no bgirl. But there is probably actual humility in being humiliated by a pack of truly graceful teenagers for a couple of hours... gamely counting to six steps while they spin around on their heads. Making me feel old.

Maybe I'll keep at it. I'll let you know if I can ever six-step anything faster than Enya.

Effort

I became a sculptor, in part, because I grew up in a town where there was little else to do and I am not a very good drunk. So I fell in with a group of people who worked to stave off boredom.

These most precious friends and mentors were artists, but in retrospect it was more important to me that they were industrious. These people did not go to the mall or the movies or out dancing. Instead of calling one another and making plans, we would show up at the project. We made buildings and sculptures and poems and photographs and paintings and restaurants and museums, all the while drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and laughing.

Since I am on a residency in a place that really reminds me of my hometown, I've been thinking a lot about these times and these friends and how formative they were, and how much I had to unlearn when I moved to New York--a place that is effortful even without extracurriculars, and in which everyone is....

...well, that's the thing. I was going to write "in which everyone is this industrious." But that's not true. You can't live in New York with this level of industriousness because you would pop a rod, and by "this level of industriousness" I mean all the bad habits of work ethic that grow unchecked in a place like Tucson or Utica.

In Tucson or Utica you start off working to prove that you can entertain yourself--that you have inner resources. And you know how it is when you start off trying to prove anything to anyone. It's just not a firm foundation. You can get off on the wrong track. Not bad art tracks--that's always forgivable. I'm talking about bullshit ego-based work like caring too much about the tools or worshipping equipment you don't have, or pouring effort into the studio at the expense of the work that's in it.

There is a deliciousness to effort that you produce in a place like this, because it's an environment without any external pressure. Being the only resistance is unbelievably affirming. I spent my twenties totally seduced by that sensation. It's hard not to use your effort to measure yourself, and in a boundless landscape that can accommodate an endless quantity of work it is easy to forget what contemplation even is.

It can get to be like slavery.

Moving to New York was the best thing that ever happened to me because it taught me how not to work, and how to separate my ego from my effort. Let me put it this way: everyone in New York is working really, really hard. There is nothing special about work in the city. In fact, anyone who's smart spends most of their time trying to avoid it so that they can focus on what they really want to do.

I still work hard, but for different reasons and to create different sensations. It's been years and years since I have fallen for that sensation of working to prove that I am someone, or that I am interesting, and I have never felt more free. But I've got to tell you. Returning to a bleak setting where boundless, ego-based effort feels really good is not unlike going into Yoda's cave.

And Now For Something Completely Different

It's too hot to be serious about anything... except maybe Oprah's demise. This essay about Oprah Winfrey is priceless. Danielle C. Belton, how can you be so critical and so loving at the same time? Brava!

Sculpture Space

I'm in Utica, New York, at a residency for the next two months. I haven't written for awhile. Getting out of town for two months involves a lot of chores, you know, and for me it also seemed to require (or just produced) this detatchy head space that I am just getting out of now.

Utica is depressing, frankly, but it's depressing in a way that I find relevant. This morning I was walking to the studio building from the house I am staying at, and I kept wanting to say that Utica is like an industrial-era Angkor Wat, but that's hyperbole.

It's a little desolate, but it's hardly a ruin and it's no tourist attraction. There are people living here and having interesting lives. They all say that the population is shrinking, and that it's very "affordable" to live in Utica.

(coming from the "affordable" Southwest, I am familiar with this euphemism for "no jobs")

The desolation has some practical side effects. I can't seem to find a loaf of bread that isn't fluffy. And the first thing people seem to mention is crime. They don't need to. I feel much more nervous walking around than I do in my "bad neighborhood" in the city. It's so obvious that there is nothing to lose here, and nothing to do. I have never felt more alone. This is an amazing set of sensations for an artist, and when left to my own devices I don't stay up too late past sundown. I think I will be pretty safe and productive here. Productivity can happen anywhere, though. I am inspired by the fact that this is an industrial mecca that is struggling to be relevant.

This place has nothing to do with nature. It's big freeways and little roads and a lot of warehouses. But it's not that there is no nature here. The houses are downright animated by their decay. Old houses covered in tarpaper shingles that are peeling and re-screwed down. Porches are practically falling off the sides of houses. There's a lot of really gestural Camille-ing chain link fence. A lot of windows covered with a sheet of OSB, a lot of overgrown hedges and tall weeds spilling into sidewalks. Squirrels and bunny rabbits hop in the streets with impunity.

Utica seems to be about building on an old-school industrial level, in a way that reveals that we all know this kind of building is an old modernist joke that's been replaced by an injected-molded plastic reality. I mean, look at what I am doing right now. I am sitting in a totally old-school sculpture studio, complete with two huge bandsaws and all the different kinds of welders and old coffee cans with little parts rattling around in them and grease everywhere, typing up this treatise on a little white laptop.

I was drawn to sculpture because of the tenderness and fragility we express when we think we can build so far beyond ourselves. And if any place broadcasts that exact tenderness and fragility, it's Utica.

I am still getting my bearings here, but stay tuned for updates and pictures.