Date of Submission
Spring 2019
Academic Programs and Concentrations
Photography
Project Advisor 1
An-My Lê
Abstract/Artist's Statement
There are places, soft spots, in our world where the membrane between realities and possibilities is thinner. Here the familiar constant fundamentals described by natural science to order our understanding of the world are inconsistent. Natural laws are stretched, warped, and refracted in chimeric distortions. To enter is to encounter the unreal and the unknowable, to comprehend the incomprehensible. The familiar and the unfamiliar intertwine and overlap. In the zone we see in circles, sensory experience expands, and minute details become revelations. At the fringes of consciousness and perception we meet with the shimmer of simultaneous wonder and terror.
Within is an un/reality that may be studied and analyzed but cannot be encompassed or explained by empirical observation. The zone defies comprehension. The tools of rationality, objectivity, and empiricism that labor to explain the world and to dominate it abandon us entirely. Familiar modes of knowing melt in our hands. The desperate desires to control and conquer, to relieve human anxiety through cementing knowledge are disintegrated on contact with unknowability. The zone is unlike us and everything like us as we are refracted through its prisms. The illusory boundaries between the self and all else dissolve in impossible light. In our encounter with impossible space and time, the speculatory and the acceptance of the unknowable are all that guide us through.
Open Access Agreement
Open Access
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Soper, Jordon W., "The Zone" (2019). Senior Projects Spring 2019. 196.
https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2019/196
Senior Project Title Page
Senior Project Artist Statement.pdf (12 kB)
Formatted Artist Statement
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