I needed a statement for the opening and as I wrote it, I realised it needed a new title, one more deliberate than Unravelling.
Subverting the Straight Line.
As I did the work, I gradually realised why I found the pieces of cable strewn on the floor so compelling, and what issues I was trying to understand and comment on by making this piece.
I clearly have a personal emotional attachment to the issues, but I think they have relevance to members of the co-housing group, as we try to make a community for ourselves, and to society in general.
The first room, with its straight lines, its dull colours, and its rules, is identified in my mind with present-day western society, which still in reality places a lot of reliance on Newtonian physics; where cause and effect is thought to be straight-forward, (but where a factory making components for the military can make a rule, which seems somewhat ironic to me, about their products not endangering people); where surveillance is all-pervasive and self-surveillance encouraged, and changes are considered to be deviant.
The second room is a place less well-known to me or to any of us, as it is about what we might create; as a society if we took quantum physics on board, (so a butterfly may cause a storm on the other side of the world, and particles may remember being linked,) let alone chaos theory or string theory; and as a group if we try to change the way we relate to each other and to the environment (which is where my re-use of found materials fits in).
Meanwhile the ‘real’ world will keep on going, and we will have to keep moving between the two environments. So the experience of going through the ‘portal’ in each direction will be just as important as the experience of being in one environment or the other.
