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Writer's pictureGreg Lock

Knot session:

A fiercely intensive period at work meant I could only attend a short portion of the NYC intensive, but I felt like I lucked out. Susie Quillinan opened the presentation with a thought provoking essay. I was particularly fascinated with the idea of the Khipu and the devastating news of how the practice was all but eradicated. Fuckers.

After this presentation we were introduced to more speakers:

Jesse Harrod fibre artist.

Zachary Fabri dance/movement

Mirene Arsanios, author

Nicolas Baird, performance artist

Coleman Collins, visual artist

Zeerak Ahmed, audio artist

Moderator Dr. Allison Geremia , would make a good comedian - we spoke after walking to the subway; she admitted she has a desire to perform.

I learned about the Khipu, Jospeh Yokum who started drawing ages 76, enjoyed the art I saw and heard. My personal interest was piqued by Coleman Collins. His work involved 3D scanning and video and 3D prints. Like me, his work concerned memory; I loved his video work "Dispersion: 2022" which when looped distorted due to compression artefacts, it reminded me of the classic youtube video of 1000 uploads "I am sitting in a Video Room" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icruGcSsPp0&t=2s&ab_channel=ontologist

More artful, the boat ride to the coast of Nigeria, tracing a slave trade route, seemed personal and became very beautiful as the loop[s became increasingly abstracted through the compression. A super piece: Here is a description from Artnews: (accessed 12/4/22)

In another corner of the gallery, two stacked monitors display alternating video works. In Dispersion, the bottom monitor plays a short home movie of a boat trip Collins took in Nigeria in 2017: beginning outside the coastal town of Badagry, near the border with Benin, he traces a former slave route that leads to the “Door of No Return,” a port where many enslaved people last set foot in Africa. In the top monitor, the same video slowly degrades with each repetition, breaking down into pixels and primary colors, growing more abstract each time. Its disintegration (which Collins achieved by exporting the video again and again) both parallels the artist’s deteriorating memory of the trip and invokes the violent erasure of Black people’s origins through the transatlantic slave trade. While DNA testing might pinpoint information about one’s ancestry, this work, like Tetrad, insists that a return to one’s origins is always incomplete, and alludes to the diffuse effects of generational trauma.

Notes I made:

Not lesser but different

Dispersion seemed inevitable

Material differences

IRL enjoyment

I drew this again after the session. Will I ever make it?






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