May 23, 2020 — South West Devon
Last night I was sitting quietly with a beer watching the tide drop, when a tree fell in the forest. I’ve passed a lot of time in nature, but never experienced that before. An insistent wind was hitting the ridge above the river and I heard what I thought was a gunshot, a split-second later the unmistakable sound of foliage dragging down through foliage, an ascending splinter, and a final wet and bass-y thud. A flurry of startled crows, then silence broken only by the intermittent dusk song of a blackbird. I slept quite badly last night. My body’s still on Montreal time and posting a picture of myself yesterday made me feel like a fool – opening up a flood of thoughts about media that I couldn’t switch off until the early hours of the morning. I find it kind of odd that in a time where I’ve got the chance to go in, my instinct prompts me to engage with something that seems to be about looking out. Over a billion people use IG to project carefully curated, tessellated lives out to others. We’re using social media to see ourselves seeing – reforming ourselves in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. I suppose I’m asking myself yet again what this says about the nature of the reality that we live in. A sanctioned way to find order in chaos, and community in the loneliness of being human? My daughter sent me a post of a rotating trimmer cord rhythmically reforming a pink balloon blob in slow-mo. It’s really satisfying. The feed it’s on is called @overelax – given the times, I find this quite telling. While typing this and looking out the window with binoculars, I just saw what looked like a pink inflatable unicorn, partially deflated, fall out of the sky and land in the river. Shit, life’s really strange. I found the fallen tree today.
notaselfie #notanartwork #notaresidency #uncurated #14days #quarantine #selfportrait #mirror #reflection #introvertion #outroversion #timealone #wherenext
Éric Bolduc XYZ 