DISPERSION

Artist Seth Price's recommended essay on Dispersion got me thinking about the modes in which types of information - art, writing, thoughts, interests, speculations, questions - are disseminated today. I made some notes previously on duplication of imagery - of xeroxing. Dispersion can apply to biology, in the way a species propagates, or can apply to optics, in which a beam of white light is separated into its spectral components by a prism. The result is a rainbow.

My training is as a painter, but painting is something best appreciated in the physical moment. Site specific or stationary art is warranted and remains a valuable resource in a world increasingly dislocated by nebulous electronic communication. Much culture is now consumed privately. "Distributed media can be defined as social information circulating in theoretically unlimited quantities in the common market, stored or accessed via portable devices such as books and magazines, records and compact discs, videotapes and DVDs, personal computers and data diskettes." I find myself increasingly in favor of liberating ideas via production and subsequent reproduction and dispersion. "New animals" are created by the reproduction of information. They're let loose by vehicles of dispersion and separated by the four winds.

Where will this article land? Check the newly added Clustermap at the bottom of this page to find out.

Rosarium philosophorum - "Where we have spoken openly we have actually said nothing. But where we have written something in code and in pictures, we have concealed the truth..."


Photos: Above: Jeff Wall. A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai). 1993. Below: Katsushika Hokusai. Ejiri in Suruga Province (Sunshû Ejiri). 1830-33.