A Convergence
of Convergences:
A Contest.
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For more information
about this contest,
click here.
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Cameras, Action!
From Disney World
to St. Peter's Square,
the Mediative Flight From the Immediate.
By Lawrence Weschler
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So, this photo leapt out at me from the pages of the New York Times the other day, an air-show flyover at Disney World, the crowd ranged in rapt ecstasy, not unlike the massed swarm at some Aztec sun-worship festival,
which in turn got me to recalling the crowds ranged in St. Peter's Square, back in April 2005, at the time of the funeral of Pope John Paul II.
Although, come to think of it, there was something else about the slew of images that emerged from that latter event that may more fully account for this specific trill of associations. Not so much the rapt massiveness of the crowd but rather the behavior of so many of the individuals in these (Disney World flyover; Vatican funeral) and so many other such contemporary crowds—how a lot of people nowadays just seem incapable of experiencing things directly, how everybody has immediate recourse to the mediation of digital photography, a tendency, granted, rendered all the more peculiar in the context of that Vatican processional,
with its throngs of worshippers craning desperately forward, literally inches away from the body of this representative of Christ on earth, in what was surely, for many of them, one of the defining moments of their spiritual lives, and almost every single one of them gazing not at the holy spectacle unfolding right there before them but rather into the miniature simulacrum of that epiphany in the viewfinders poised above their heads ...
Which in turn puts me in mind of the last paragraphs from my own forthcoming book of conversations with the artist Robert Irwin (an expanded and updated edition of my 1982 book, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees). How at one point recently the now 80-year-old artist was talking about the fact that he didn't expect to live
to see the realization of the sort of world his own art has been aspiring toward, that such a realization may indeed well still be several generations off. What, I now asked him, did he have in mind? Was it (I was suddenly in a tweaking mood, wanting to lance the mood of somber sobriety that had strangely overtaken us) a question, for instance, of not yet having sufficient computer power, such that artists in the future, properly endowed with the requisite terabytes, might be able to infuse visors with ecstasies of virtuality barely even dreamed of ...?
"Of course not!" Bob erupted. (I'd managed to provoke exactly the rise I was hoping for.) "The point is to get people to peel those visors off their faces, to remove the goggles, to abandon the screens. Those screens whose very purpose is to screen the actual world out. Who cares about virtuality when there's all this reality—this incredible, inexhaustible, insatiable, astonishing reality—present all around!"
Now, I am not unaware of the paradoxes involved in citing this of all passages, with its utopian aspirations toward a world of unmediated presence, in the middle of a contest veritably steeped in the worshipful celebration of images upon images ranged across screens upon screens. Nor am I oblivious to the way in which Irwin's entire life project, captured in that 1982 book's title—this imperative that we stop free-associating like crazy and instead attend (tongue-tied and gobsmacked) to the singular wonder of the object immediately before us—likewise runs entirely counter to the ethos of this contest (and the more recent book that inspired it). Still ...
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OTHER WINNERS.
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1. Evolving, Evolved by Charlie Hopper
2. Primal Forces, Basic Colors by Andy Hunter
3. The End of the Beginning by Holly Dunsworth
Intermezzo by Lawrence Weschler
4. This Is Not an Ad by Jimmy Chen
5. Catskills Vagina by Dan Clem
6. The Antipodes by Chris Zic
7. Self-Made Constriction by Sam Gaskin
8. We Are the Son by Danny Erker
9. Painfully Unaware by Dan Park
10. Gutshot by Jason Torchinsky
Weschler's Second Interlude
11. Love and War by Kim Wood
12. Inside and Out There by Lena Webb
13. The March by Emily Marvosh
14. Feminine Divine Triptych by Margit Christenson
15. Time's Deliberate Convergence by Steve Denyszyn
16. A Rousseau/Hirshfield Convergence by Adam Webb
Beirut/Warsaw by Lawrence Weschler
17. Clothesline Raising Over Carlisle, Indiana by Charlie Hopper
Carnival of Convergences
Weschler's Fourth Interlude
Aftersquib to the Foregoing
18. Pelvises All the Way Down by John Peter Rickgauer
19. Ovary Night? by Maya Muñoz
20. Christ in Space by Jonathan Shipley
A Pair of Convergences Off of Tina Barney
Another Carnival of Convergences
21. Moral Confusion: Iraq, Munich, and Vietnam by Donald Rumsfeld
22. Seeing the Tree for the Forest by Walter Murch
An Addendum to the Foregoing, and a Visitor Challenge
23, 24, and 25. Far Out by Michael Benson, Brian Christian, and Walter Murch
26. Jewish Bunk Beds by Monica S. Bland
Those Damn Swedish Trees, Take 3: Convergence of the Blogs
27. Degenerate Boogie-Woogie by Lisa Lee
Carnival of Convergences No. 3
28. Sand and Moon by Alison Cornyn
Actaeon: An Ovidian Impromptu by Lawrence Weschler
29 and 30. Hoods and Veils by Vero Testa and Lauren Redniss
The Onion/Bickle Convergence by Lawrence Weschler
31. The Lone Figure Against the Armored Swarm by Michele Siegel
32. Muscle and Flow by Benjamin R. Cohen
An Addendum to the Foregoing: Cities, Brains, Orchestras by Lawrence Weschler
Saint and Princess by Lawrence Weschler
Beauty Queen and Baghdad Hummer by Lawrence Weschler
Carnival of Convergences No. 4
Laughing, Clapping, Constantly Forgetting: A Trill of Readerly Associations by Lawrence Weschler
33. Lithographica by R.A. Villanueva
34. Papal Fire (Papa Lux) by Nick Feia
Addendum to "Laughing, Clapping ..." and, More Specifically, to the Stalinist-Applause Anecdote by Lawrence Weschler
35. Disseminations: Internet, Dandelions, Flight Paths by Sarah Daegling
36. Black and White and in Color by Walter Murch
Carnival of Convergences No. 5
Lee Friedlander's Visionary Trees: An Addendum to the Last Chapters of Everything That Rises by Lawrence Weschler
37. Shipwrecked Desperation by Charles Mudede via Matt Haber
38. Life Forms by Ariel Winter
Cameras, Action! From Disney World to St. Peter's Square, the Mediative Flight From the Immediate by Lawrence Weschler
Carnival of Convergences No. 6
Convergent Postscripts by Lawrence Weschler
From Da Vinci to Duchamp, by Way of Russia by Lawrence Weschler
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