The arbitration of chance encounters in Six transgressions, 2007

In Six transgressions, 2007, six photographs arranged in chronological order from left to right are pinned to the wall.  Each photograph has the scale image of a section of brick wall equal to its area.  Where the syntax is symbolic of an arbitrary set (i.e. the counting of 1, 2, 3, etc. along an axis), the semantics determines by chance.

Symbolic Syntax

Six transgressions uses a symbolic numerical process in positioning frames one after the other in generating equal surface areas along the same border.  The camera gets positioned equidistantly from one area of the wall to the next in each frame.  For instance, the distance between the wall and the camera in frame one equals the distance between the wall and the camera in frame two and the frame after that.  In addition, the areas of a brick wall align to form a continuous border, making the syntax devoid of qualitative reasoning by the entirely arbitrary determination of its subject (brick wall) in each frame.  All that determines the difference from one image of a brick wall from another is the repetition of the frame, one after the next.  The frame assumes a symbolic function since it repeats by multiplying the areas of brick wall along a continuous border.  One frame is entirely indivisible by another frame. 

That the frames are entirely symbolic and arbitrary makes them immobile; and, because they are immobile, the frames arbitrate between a moving world.  If repetition does not add anything new, then it is reversible and opposed to time, which, Suzanne Guerlac notes in discussing: “movement is not reversible for beings that live in time because time moves in only one direction.” (Guerlac, Suzanne, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2006, pg. 78-9).  Syntax gets defined by its reversibility, its ability for inversion and conversion in symbolic form.  On the one hand, the syntax determining the ordering of the photos is repeatable by itself.  On the other hand, the semantics of each photograph, its exact composition, are not.  This is because the process is repeatable, but not the results.  In this way, Six transgressions uses syntax in determining a subject entirely based in time by showing its determination as entirely arbitrary.

Semantic Chance

Six transgressions determines a set of subjects entirely based in time by showing time as meaningless.  In other words, time has no essential qualities in and of itself.  Time has no finite semantic conception nor does it fully express its limits in syntax.  Instead, syntax can only show what it is not: time.  Thus, by showing syntax as the determination of an entirely arbitrary set of subjects (the frames), the subject becomes devoid of meaning, equaling that of time.  This is to say, the quantity of photographs of the brick wall as a set seem entirely arbitrary, making no difference between the frame and the next frame except by the time and place of its exposure that is arbitrary.  As no semantic meaning derives from an entirely arbitrary set, the meaning of each frame is nothing. 

The subject becomes synonymous with time by taking the semantic operation (quality) out of the syntactical operation (quantity).  Bergson writes, “Quantity tells us how much there is of something.  Quality tells us how things feel to us—bright, dark, hot, cold, happy, lonesome, or beautiful”  (Ibid, pg. 45).  Since the arrangement of the image in each frame is determined solely by the repetition of the frame over a given area, in each, quality determines by quantity, yet, quantity alone has no quality. Thus, the area of the brick wall becomes synonymous with chance, as the narration of reading Six Transgressions from left to right tells only of encounters with various phenomena of a brick wall.  A wire hangs in one and leaves another,

If the repetition of images of a brick wall, at once dissimilar and similar, expresses no meaning, it simultaneously shows the images as a set, a whole, as meaningless.  Time, as it gets expressed in Six transgressions, appears meaningless with no narrative other than its locution in a sequence of events determined by chance and the iteration of those events using language’s symbolic properties of syntax and semantics.

Movement

By showing the teleology of time as meaningless in the teleology of symbolic representations of time (syntax) as entirely arbitrary in nature and the synthesis of symbolic representations of time in narration (semantics) as meaningless, there is only a story of movement from one subject to the next.  There is no end to movement, no final synthesis, no anteriority, only the present and movement.  At once, the syntax, in its immobility (the same process that makes it repeatable), reflects what it is not: mobility.  When syntax gets shown absent a semantic qualification and the semantic operation absent a syntactical quantification, movement corresponds to meaninglessness and meaninglessness corresponds to the qualification of a numerical order.  In other words, the absolute immobility of the subject to discern meaning from the next subject lays bare the absolute mobility that surrounds the subject.  In the case of Six transgressions, one notices a difference between one frame and the next, but this difference has no teleological function.

Conjoined edges

When the opposite edges of a frame conjoin with the opposite edges of another frame, then the edges become continuous.  The image of a wall in each frame seems to correspond to the image of a wall in another.  In fact, they are different areas of the same wall joined by the edges of each frame.  The content within the frame determines by the edges of another frame, which is determined arbitrarily to align with the next and to the next.  In other words, the arrangement of six photographs aligns the edges, nothing more, nothing less. 

Disjoined Perspectives

While the arrangement of the six photographs in Six transgressions is arbitrary, the scale is not.  The scale mimics the exact area of the surface of the brick wall, referring to a specific, yet uknown, placement of bricks at a specific, yet unknown, time.  The arrangement of the photographs along a wall refers to another wall of an unknown location and time.  Wall becomes the common reference between the surface of the photograph and the surface of the wall where the photographs are pinned.  What comes to attention is the difference between the surfaces, one mimicking the other, referencing the purpose of the other.  This constitutes a process of mimesis.  It shows the simulacra of a brick wall on top of another wall that, at the time, serves an architectural purpose.  We are less sure of the purpose of the simulated brick wall.  We become less certain of the purpose of the wall holding the simulacra.  Of course, this all happens in time.  This process occurs by the disjunction of utility into simulacra.

Work Cited
Guerlac, Suzanne, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2006.

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