Quite often, the Contest receives entries that aren’t so much convergences themselves as addenda to or further elaborations upon earlier contest entries. So we thought we might group a few of those together for this Contest installment.
For example, remember Lee Friedlander’s tree shadow from a few entries back, the way it ramified in all sorts of directions (root systems, camera obscuras, etc.), including toward the vascular structure of the eye itself?
Well, Matt Kirkham has another association, to the candling of chicken eggs …
Candled egg
Or, in another instance, remember the “Aftersquib to the Foregoing” (just before Contest Winner No. 18), how the rhyme between the image of a cross-channel swimmer being pulled onto the beach and a painting of Christ being lifted down from the Cross in turn provoked a whole slew of observations about paparazzi and the Passion
(not unlike those provoked by the Iwo Jima / Stations of the Cross and Beirut / El Greco analogies that immediately preceded that aftersquib)? Well, take a look at what correspondent Matt Mikalatos came up with in terms of the Passion of Peter Parker:
John Sands sent us a weird series of trills off of Ariel Winter’s Entry No. 38. (Remember the heart and the gas masks and the whole series of cascading associations peeling off of them?)
Somehow Ms. Winter’s associations wended their way through Mr. Sands’s subconscious to produce connections with, as he explained:
Q*bert, one of the first video games I can remember. Creatures from the Tulgey Wood in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. The Kunsthaus Graz, by architects Peter Cook and Colin Fournier, in Graz, Austria (a brass model for blind passersby and the view from Schlossberg).
Now, remember the clear-cut Swedish forest seen from above, first presented to us by Walter Murch back in Entry No. 22?
Well, a few months back, when the Veolia Corporation began mounting a series of Photoshopped aerial views of hope-filled vistas,
we’d like to say we saw it coming, but we were still pretty astonished when up cropped this one:
Then there was Benjamin Cohen’s “Muscle and Flow” (No. 32),
which made us think of something we’d read in Richard Sennett’s Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization—namely, that Adam Smith based his analysis of the circulation of wealth on William Harvey’s analysis of the circulation of blood through the heart and body—which in turn got us thinking about the circulation of taxicabs through San Francisco on that amazing cab-spotting website:
(Click to watch)
Well, take a look at this astonishing detail of a cut-dollar-bill collage (Twin Temples of the Heart) by the artist Mark Wagner, which we came upon just the other day in the second issue of The Sienese Shredder (http://sienese-shredder.com/2/wagner.html):
For that matter, take a look at this recent New Yorker cover by Roz Chast:
And to the following pair of images from Entry No. 8
we can add this one:
Fans of the original book will perhaps recall its endpapers, documenting the aftermath of the sudden explosive discharge of a supersaturated field of stray electrons previously trapped in a block of Lucite …
Well, take a look at this video currently ricocheting all about the Internet:
Essentially, the hyper-slow-motion cinematic capture of a lightning bolt in the process of erupting into being. However, the more appropriate metaphor might be: in the process of searching and probing and dallying and circling back and losing itself and finding itself elsewhere only to peter out anew and then branching off again, probing further, until it finally makes contact with ground, with Ground Zero as it were, at which point it rebounds into brilliant sudden being (all in a fraction of a fraction of a second) …
… like nothing so much, it occurs to me, as the path this very video took as it coursed through the Internet, finally finding its way to your eyes …
… where it then was instantaneously converted into another electric charge and went surging and careering through your brain, finally erupting to the astounded consciousness you are experiencing right now.