sophie calle

The shape of the future and memory, 1966

"My thoughts on art, like Humpty Dumpty, have fallen off the wall of language and will never be put together again. The 'visual' memories of something terrible are buried under pressure in my tiers of glass sheet. Pictures of the future slip from my sight through the progression of mirrors. Memories have a way of trapping one's notion of the future and placing it in a brittle series of mental prisons. The 'time traveler' as he advances deep into the future discovers a decrease in movement, the mind enters a state of 'slow motion' and perceives the gravel and dust of memory on the empty fringes of consciousness. Like H.G. Wells, he sees the 'ice along the sea margin', a double perspective of past and future that follows a projection that vanishes into a non-existent present."

Robert Smithson, 1966, 332.

thursday night

The house in the forest is like a concrete bunker. Huge, solid, yet peculiarly difficult to look at. It seems impenetrable. There are no doors and no windows. Protruding from the roof is a large, semi-transparent orange tube. It looks like it is made of plastic. A human body would only just fit inside. Perhaps that is its feeding mechanism. I enter the house by some subterranean means but I cannot remember what it encloses.