Tim Stutts: ITP Project Blog

My first project in Java-based Processing uses a series of dynamically offset circles to a create a spiraling effect. Sort of resembles a vinyl record. Watch it here.

Mona Hatoum is a Lebanese born artist, who studied at Beirut University College in the early 1970’s. After visiting London in 1975, a civil war broke out in Lebanon, preventing her from returning. She went on to study at the Byam Shaw School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art in England.

Hatoum’s early work dealt with issues of identity and dislocation; perhaps a reaction to her trip-turned-relocation to England from Lebanon. Furthermore, she plays with the ideas of attraction and repulsion. Italian Filmmaker, Frederico Fellini, showed a similar fascination of the beautiful and ugly coexisting in his 1969 film, Satyricon. These opposites are curiously subjective, unlike “up” or “down,” which are physical ( objective ) states of existence. Attraction and Repulsion are changed by their contexts, altered by an inescapable environment. Did Hatoum feel prejudice in England; a combination of her differing physical features from her English contemporaries, and her being branded ( by civil war ) as an exile?

+ And –‘s pulls in the theme of opposites. An electrically charged motor rotates a metal beam over a bed of sand 360 degrees every twelve seconds. One side of the beam is teethed, so that concentric grooves are left in it’s path, as it passes over the sand. The other side is flat, erasing those grooves, leaving a flat plain in it’s midst. At any given moment there is an equal amount of both terrains. If we listen closely we can hear the sound of sand formations changing, perhaps easier than we can actually see the change, which is blocked from view by the beam.

At first viewing the piece can be seen as simply an interesting form that never really changes shape, yet manages to move; these movements occurring at a granular, almost microscopic level.

We can think of + And – as being clocklike, in that the rotations occur regularly—five to the minute—but there are no points along the clock to signify a full rotation other than our own location ( assuming we remain in one place, or at least recall are location, if we are to move ) and the museum environment around us; the constants around it. Without these external aspects the piece could not tell time.

Is + And - a modernized, self-regulating take on the traditional Japanese rock garden? Like a stapler that you can simply slide papers through or a steak knife that you can hold in one place, while technology does the work for you? It is a humorous observation, but one that would reduce the piece to social commentary, disallowing the broader meaning, which it achieves so well.

If we look for meaning in all of this, we realize that the processes are opposites on some level, but of what, that becomes up to our own subjective interpretation. Is one side meant to be beautiful, ugly, good, evil, positive, negative, yin, yang? Or is this piece attempting rather to remove subjectivity all together through a lingering paradox of opposites. In the end I am left with the idea of “different,” viewed through a clear, unbiased lense, and a balancing act, that is controlled by an unseen force over time. + And – is a model of a forgiving / unforgiving universe that we are all a part of.