Life is made of daily deaths.
Each moment we become
Different versions of our yesterday self.
Sometimes these changes move slowly,
Sliding under the radar of our awareness.
Some waver back and forth as if undecided,
While others glide gently forward.
Sometimes we shift by a flash of white light,
who leaves no room for reversal.
Sometimes the ones we love leave us
Space to find our own luminous autonomy.
The Atlantic, shot on iPhone
Nothing could be more beautiful than the sunlight dancing freely across silent pools of water in a flash of dazzling magic from the view of an airplane.
Image by Anna Thorne via Instagram
The black fans spin violently across the ceiling,
their blades turning into shrieking bats.
For a moment the obsidian envelops me
and Penn Station is a flourescent hallucination.
No longer was I waiting for a train to arrive,
But for nothingness to return.
For a brief moment I am home,
Purified by the night sky’s lulling void.
The stars become my freckles.
White light glows through the clouds
Like cosmic fields of bioluminescence.
For a brief moment I am not human.
This city is a carnival of thoughts
They never seem to cease
The city is a carnivore of the heart
There never seems time to be
The moon the moon
She follows me
Everywhere I go
It is her I see
Guiding from above
She helps to remind
That what can be felt
Is easy to hide
I think mental darkness holds a kind of alchemical magic. I was at an all time low, the deepest of depths where I could not sink deeper. It doesn’t matter what brought me there, all that matters is that I was there. Eventually, I came out of it. And these past few days since have been filled with extreme awareness, and not that analytical kind of awareness, I mean genuine, heartfelt awareness for the most seemingly insignificant parts of life. I feel extremely alive, possibly the most I’ve ever felt. The deeper the darkness the brighter the light. The deeper the desire is to not exist, the deeper the heart can feel alive in all of existence.
From the series Traces of Being
It’s nearly midnight
I’m standing at the train station
There’s a slight drizzle and a decent chill
I walked briskly enough to make it feel like a summer evening
I’ve had countless dreams involving the scalloped leather boots I’m wearing
I rushed to make the 11:38 with time to spare
For once it’s right on time
I knew something had changed
Jinx on me for thinking it was my overthinking
I only wish I could wander back into the woods
Into a place where no one knew who I was
I dissolve into nothingness
For a brief moment I am nothingness
I was neither born nor died
I am, was and forever will be,
Not as I appear to be
But as I am eternally
The moon on a cloudy night,
she is my luminous mirror:
Visible but vague,
Shrouded in her own obscurity.
Slice through the fog like a knife!
Anna Thorne, Luminous Visions (2021), NFT, Looped Video, 16 sec., https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/303771
Chapter 14 of the Tao Te Ching:
Look, and it can't be seen.
Listen, and it can't be heard.
Reach, and it can't be grasped.
Above, it isn't bright.
Below, it isn't dark.
Seamless, unnamable,
it returns to the realm of nothing.
Form that includes all forms,
image without an image,
subtle, beyond all conception.
Approach it and there is no beginning;
follow it and there is no end.
You can't know it, but you can be it,
at ease in your own life.
Just realize where you come from:
this is the essence of wisdom.
The immaterial nature of NFT's reminds me of Taoism, particularly passage 14 of the Tao Te Ching. We can see NFT’s with our eyes and yet they are ungraspable. We can think about and conceptualize them, but they are ultimately ineffable. NFT’s feel as is they are enlightening angels sent from the future, a future where materiality is transcended altogether.
Our present reality is deeply tangled in materiality, with whole industries dedicated to beauty and perfecting the human form. Don’t get me wrong, I am by no means an anti-materialist, I am simply interested in expanding our current state of consciousness to include the formless, ineffable and ephemeral aspects of reality. By these aspects I do not mean the paranormal but the very real and invisible phenomena that surrounds our daily existence, the phenomena of our very own consciousness.
The mind is not a concrete form, but a very ephemeral, ever shifting entity. It ebbs and flows, some more than others. We are ever morphing and yet the material world we live within feels like it’s constantly attempting to be concrete and static. I live more in my immaterial mind than I do in the material world. I have more in common with the NFT than the material reality my body exists in. It is the immaterial and formless world that feels more natural to me than the literal concrete one. I suppose NFT’s feel like glimpses of home, but I couldn’t explain what I mean by that if I tried.
I’ve always had a particular affinity for the non-material and ungraspable aspects quietly floating around and through our human experience, and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT’s) are no exception to this affinity. NFT’s are formed in formlessness, liberators of linearity, free from the wearing effects of time and the clunky density that confines all objects and beings in the material world. We can look to NFT’s not only as a revolutionary transformation in how we think about and experience digital photography, but how we think about and experience ourselves as well as others.
To best understand the radical transformation that NFT’s hold for digital photography, let’s recall the process of how a digital photograph is created. The photographer looks through a viewfinder or screen, exposes for the scene, and presses the shutter button. In a fraction of a second, a four sided image is born into visual reality. That press of the shutter alchemically transforms photons into pixels. It is important here to remember that a photograph does not capture the forms the photographer sees through her viewfinder, a photograph only ever captures the photons bouncing off of those forms. This fact is what unites digital photography and NFT’s as harmonious companions, for they both live an inherently immaterial, ungraspable existence. After making the image, the photographer uploads it to her hard drive and edits it, making several test prints until finding the perfect combination of edit and paper type to birth the image into the material world. The photograph then gets framed and hung on a pristine white wall. Viewers come to look at the photograph, a beautiful carcass of its initial digital form. The carcass is beautiful but not as transcendent as that angelic, back-lit, pixel-based formless-form.
The material world does not last forever, it rusts and molds, it catches fire and splinters, it imprisons the printed photograph in its clutches of temporality, assuring it will one day be destroyed. As for the NFT photograph, its fate remains entirely untethered to such restraints, free to eternally evolve in an ever expanding digital field. The potential for NFT photography is enormous, for the image is no longer forced to remain as a stagnant print, it is now free to move, to pulse, to slip in and out of video-like character with other images and become a new breed of photography we’ve yet to ever see before. By removing the significance of materiality, NFT’s radically expand (by radical material deduction) the possibilities for digital photography.
With materiality removed from the NFT equation, we are left with a formless conduit capable of placing complete awareness on the affective experience viewers have within themselves when engaged with art (by an affective experience, I mean the personal impact that occurs within a viewer from looking at an artwork, in this case an NFT photograph). NFT’s are capable of placing more significance on the internal experience of the viewer than a physical piece because the NFT’s immaterial nature perfectly parallels the immaterial, ambiguous and ultimately ineffable experience that occurs when an affect takes place. The NFT does not seek to engage or immerse your physical sense of self, but rather it is able to fully engage the non-physical aspects of one’s being. To be more precise, the ephemeral nature of NFT’s engage directly with our consciousness, that equally ephemeral substance we all have yet are constantly discovering. By heightening significance on the viewer’s internal experience, NFT’s can work as meditative mirrors, encouraging introspection over external consumption, internal self-awareness over external-self analysis. The very existence of this immaterial and significant art form points to the notion that what cannot be touched or grasped can have just as much, if not more, of an impact and gravity than what holds form and weight. The NFT is the perfect conduit for helping us to expand our consciousness, for helping us to perceive ourselves and our reality in new ways.
Perhaps the photographic image has always lived in these expanded fields of ephemerality and it is only our level of consciousness that is beginning to rise enough in order to see them. Gone is the day of the jaded outlook, it is time to move forward, with wide eyes and open hearts. Renewal is knocking at our front doors. Those that do not open the door will surely be left behind in the shadows of the rigid, unchanging past. Here is to a future where the power of the immaterial, ineffable and ephemeral forces of life begin to emerge into our collective awareness and appreciation.
This post was published in Kahlo’s Newsletter on October 12, 2021: https://www.kaloh.xyz/p/on-the-new-futures-of-photography
From the series Traces of Being
Nothing holds me to the earth,
My tether often slips,
Up into the air
Away from it all.
I float towards
silent nothingness.
I used to be in love with death,
his jet black shimmering void,
Full to the brim in the peace
of silent nothingness.
But death has lost its charm,
A divine light shines in,
It illuminates my world -
It becomes my world.
And suddenly,
I crave to stay alive,
What a strange new feeling,
I never want to die.
For the past couple of years, the work I’ve made has centered around the light that visualized itself to me in a near death experience back when I was 21. It was one of the most impressionable and transformative moments of my life. This focus on light for so long has led me to remember the darkness that was as equally transformative. The darkness was the first visual that appeared when I died. This darkness was not terrifying, but comforting. It felt the way a warm blanket out of a dryer feels on a cold winter day. The darkness was delicate, tender, loving. It was unassuming, not asking to be recognized or acknowledged. It simply swaddled me in its loving emptiness. In its presence I was completely free from everything: a sense of self (an “I”), of time, of form, of thoughts and emotions. Nothing existed and yet everything existed in that moment. Without the darkness, I would not have been able to see the light. The light brought the “I” back, it spoke to the “I” and returned me back to life and all of its senses (form, thought, emotion, time). Neither is good and neither is bad. Darkness and light are two parts of the same undercurrent. One is not better than the other. They do not battle, but compliment. Light is full of life, darkness is full of emptiness. To truly love one you must love the other.
A dark take on one of the photographs from the series ‘Luminous Visions’
I used to believe there was an omnipotent cosmic thread that guided me through life and kept me going in the right direction. However, the notion of there being a ‘right direction’ implies that there is such a thing as a wrong direction. Even if we called it the ‘best direction’ instead, it still creates a heirarchy and implies there are lesser paths to take in life.
I don’t believe there is only one right path. In fact, I don’t believe in there being any paths or threads at all apart from the ones we construct or subscribe (i.e. religion) our minds to. There are no fundamentally ‘real’ paths because they are created by the mind, not discovered as an intrinsic truth buried in the universe.
This perception is not tactless or encaging but liberating. It reveals that each of us must take full responsibility for our life. Such a life requires a high degree of acceptance and bravery because there is no omnipotent power to cast your mental contents onto. No one is coming to save you, you must save yourself. In this saving, you are reborn in the light of absolute liberation.
If I had to conceptualize a ‘path’, it would be made entirely of light. Why? Because light is pathless. Light is ubiquitous, it is the essence of all things. It cannot be belittled into the concept of ‘path’ for light is eternally present. All seeming matter is condensed light. Break it all down and all that can be perceived is light.
There is no point and that’s the point. There is no end, no final precipice. It goes on forever, for all that has and will ever be is eternity. Even as forms appear to cease while others are born, eternity is the source of all being. Eternity humours itself through the charade of change.
The desire to know that you know is what keeps you from fully knowing.
The role of art making is many things depending on what background the onlooker comes from; historian, critic, viewer, fellow artist, family member, theorist, etc.. All of these backgrounds have one thing in common and that is they are are onlookers peering from the outside. How is the role of art making perceived from within, from artists themselves?
As I was thinking about this, the idea of personal autonomy arose nearly instantaneously. The process of making art, for me anyways, is an extremely personal experience. It is a way of talking to and learning about myself without language, in a visual language only I can fully understand. Eventually, this personal experience unknowingly turned into a miniature universe of my own creation. It was and still is an invisible palace only I have the key to. In this palace, the ordinary world ceases to exist, or perhaps changes so drastically that it ceases to be recognizable. This palace is limitless and allows me to be completely free from the ordinary world, including all the weight of matter and mind: memories, desires, fears, the existence of others and of time itself.
I’ve enjoyed moments of non-perception for as long as I can remember, where there is no one to perceive me and there is not even a me to perceive myself. It will sound contradictory but though this palace was born from my own creation, it is a palace of total surrender. This is a sacred space where I can fully surrender myself to the present moment. It is important to have a space within oneself to retreat into, a private space only you can go. Art making has given me that space of absolute autonomy, a space where nothing and no one, not even myself, can hold me back. This palace is invisible and therefore not stagnant, meaning it slowly grows and grows until one day I believe it will not be a palace that I go to visit but rather a perception from which I will live my entire life through.