THE DROP (LA CHUTE - LA GOUTE) with Alex Boya / (video - 5min)

Heraclitus' 500bce metaphor involving water goes, "You can't step in the same river twice." It is often taken up as an image describing human images and nature. Most recently I saw it in a contemporary new-materialism text on photography; that a photograph is like a whirlpool in a river where the image is a fixed thing (for us) but the materiality is constantly in flow. Long before photography, F. W. J. von Schelling, whose Ideas for a Philosphy of Nature I began to browse for this project, used the exact same image of the whirlpool in the river to discuss human-imagined things and nature. None of these are the source for this work, but they float along together. How does one use an image as a method to ask a question about meaning and nature that is relevant in today's stylized pictorial universe? Without hacking-up old clichés...

This collaboration with animator Alex Boya asks funny but similar questions. How do we humans animate stuff, like water? Like nature? Here we give it eyes and a mouth, which makes it into a character. An entity of concern, you could say. The character has a path - dividing out, dropping, gaining some reasssuring momentum, some pleasure, then the precipitous realisation that rejoining the flow is imminent.