2/13/23

the moon landing never happened

flags, signs, dogs, flow

It is incumbent on an institution that has dubbed itself "The Topological Poetics Research Institute" to enter this space (or time?), whatever it is, wherever it is, and whenever it is. Hello! I hail, already so hailed, fully interpellated into the virtual space(time) of the art situation, one we have all become familiar with, and now, become eerily confronted by. What is the "art situation"? What is the "virtual" gallery? Underlying our queries there exists, it turns out, a Platonic gallery, a gallery where we go to see and are seen within (already) surveilled by its immaterial informational identity. And no! No immaterial. Drop that. Virtual? What does it mean? The phenomenological/virtual blank space, a space that gives rise to the sense of the neutral presentation of the art object, is the work of the platform. Look, all around, at this virtual neutrality, the work of an unseen hand, painted against the interior lining of our aesthetic skulls. Where is this space? Somewhat paradoxically, the extent to which we experience the background of this blank phenomenological space as blank is the extent to which the platform succeeds in its claim to neutral presentation of the art object's institution on the chain. This space(time) on the border of phenomenal existence is where, ostensibly, nothing happens, it is where (when), quite strictly, the idea, concept, material, and activity of the artist are all solidified into the fixed quantity we call the artwork. So many conceptual plateaus. And yet, here I find no work. I find only play. And how far can it go? Into the ludic phenomenal specter a new Orpheus descends, silent as the grey pseudo-void here discovered. To help "see" this virtual space we posit, or it has been so posited, a counter-spherical orb, a convex lens/prism through which passes the light that constructs the neutrality posited by the virtual NFT gallery. Here, the gallery unfolds and twists into a torus, a Möbius strip, Klein bottle, infinite sphere.