Writing with Stone
This is Roger in the dioramatron for another turn with the cyclorama.
No word from AAMSO Benefactors during my break.
I suspect I’m worrying for nothing.
Input: quietude.
Input: stillness.
Open neural pathways.
T2T Calibration complete.
Activate Speculative Protocol 05
Explore material base, properties and root systems
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First up. Text: the most visible artist in the Victorian Goldfields. The figure we know as Samuel Gill is crouching before a figure we know only as The Invalid Digger. Samuel has a crayon in his hand. He looks up from a limestone plate to the unnamed Digger. And back to the limestone. The cyclorama zooms-into the limestone. In my eye-mind it’s raining shells and skeletons of marine creatures. There’s calcium carbonate everywhere, and layer upon layer of biological and chemical sediment, compressing, transforming into sedimentary limestone rock.
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In spoken word: knowledge originates in matter raiding our sensorial aspects like biological chemical geological space-cadets infiltrating commercial and cultural cycles through art practices and assemblages distributing themselves in the veins of extracted copper silicon receptors circuitries and processes of digital image-making
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Close-up on Samuel. He is applying gum Arabic and nitric acid to his stone drawing. He moistens the limestone surface with water. There’s ink and a roller. They pass over the crayon image of ‘the Digger’. There’s a sheet of paper. It is pressed to the ink. Samuel lifts the paper from the stone. The form of the unnamed Digger has moved: from flesh to stone to paper. The artist uses a mirror to inscribes his own name on the image. His signature in mirror image.
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More data from our 21s century connection appears on the screen:
“The tears of two species of acacia have been called gum Arabic since the middle ages, even in the Arab world, where samgh arabi was used as an ingredient in ink and hair pomade, among other things. The acacias that exude gum Arabic do not grow on Arabian soil.” – Van Dellan Dorrit, 2019, The Golden Tears of the Acacia
“Gum is largely collected in Central Africa and sent to the coasts of the Mediterranean and the oceans.”
The Maitland and Hunter Valley General Advertiser, Saturday October 1856:
Transcription #3: Tumbling Figures
Unquiet Voices 