3 thoughts on “Edie Sequence 9: "What is the felt experience of cognition at the moment one stands in the presence of a beautiful boy or flower or bird?" *”
“What is the felt experience of cognition at the moment one stands in the presence of a beautiful boy or flower or bird? It seems to incite, even to require, the act of replication. Wittgenstein says that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people. Sometimes it gives rise to exact replication and other times to remembrances and still other times to things whose connection to the original site of inspiration is unrecognizable.” (from Elaine Scarry's “On Beauty and Being Just”)When my great aunt Edie passed away in Spring 2004, my father and I travelled from Phoenix to Bucks County, PA. to clean out her apartment. In her closet I found shoe boxes of slides from her many trips around the world & scenes in NYC where she'd lived for 50 years. These “Edie Sequences” are photos of her photos, shot by me as viewed through her AGFASCOP 20 Slide Viewer. The images here are blurrier than the originals, partly because of my crude documentaion, but seem appropriate in the sense that these images are coming to us through time, through the distance of memory. The black frames around the images seem true, as if viewing not only a movie screen's image, but also the space around the screen. Her eye for both the common gesture and the beautiful, the grand landscape and the minute details of her subject are, to me, as hypnotizing as any moving image. -akp
akp…i like the ideas here as well as the kind of accumulative progression of response…umm, to be more clear…i think it significant that you continue to comment upon the sequences with a particular statement…and now with this quote heading yr “repeated” background of edie and how you came across the photos i feel like a field or room of thought/discourse is being generated/opened up….umm, to allow for what? communion? ethical encounter? memory of the never experienced? a past that will reveal the future? i hope to learn more of the web of yr own thoughts around these pictures…i know that the sequences alone…sans any comment box…create an energy that calls in to question ideas of narrative and curatorship…combined with an alternate orbit of the optical dialectic–the ways in which the technical and material realities of the film and its deterioration come to crash (or to seamlessly transform…i’m more inclined to the crash though) against our personal/cultural spiritual mythologies/ideologies…all of these complex relations transmitting textual meaning….and blah blah blah….thanks andyjared
I remember having a wonderful conversation with you about “framing” while you worked at the gallery – this idea of what is a frame? – what can it lend – this contextualization of moment, aesthetic, the meaning or the hummm in the images and their “boundaries” or segways in the framing…
andrew k peterson 
“What is the felt experience of cognition at the moment one stands in the presence of a beautiful boy or flower or bird? It seems to incite, even to require, the act of replication. Wittgenstein says that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people. Sometimes it gives rise to exact replication and other times to remembrances and still other times to things whose connection to the original site of inspiration is unrecognizable.” (from Elaine Scarry's “On Beauty and Being Just”)When my great aunt Edie passed away in Spring 2004, my father and I travelled from Phoenix to Bucks County, PA. to clean out her apartment. In her closet I found shoe boxes of slides from her many trips around the world & scenes in NYC where she'd lived for 50 years. These “Edie Sequences” are photos of her photos, shot by me as viewed through her AGFASCOP 20 Slide Viewer. The images here are blurrier than the originals, partly because of my crude documentaion, but seem appropriate in the sense that these images are coming to us through time, through the distance of memory. The black frames around the images seem true, as if viewing not only a movie screen's image, but also the space around the screen. Her eye for both the common gesture and the beautiful, the grand landscape and the minute details of her subject are, to me, as hypnotizing as any moving image. -akp
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akp…i like the ideas here as well as the kind of accumulative progression of response…umm, to be more clear…i think it significant that you continue to comment upon the sequences with a particular statement…and now with this quote heading yr “repeated” background of edie and how you came across the photos i feel like a field or room of thought/discourse is being generated/opened up….umm, to allow for what? communion? ethical encounter? memory of the never experienced? a past that will reveal the future? i hope to learn more of the web of yr own thoughts around these pictures…i know that the sequences alone…sans any comment box…create an energy that calls in to question ideas of narrative and curatorship…combined with an alternate orbit of the optical dialectic–the ways in which the technical and material realities of the film and its deterioration come to crash (or to seamlessly transform…i’m more inclined to the crash though) against our personal/cultural spiritual mythologies/ideologies…all of these complex relations transmitting textual meaning….and blah blah blah….thanks andyjared
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I remember having a wonderful conversation with you about “framing” while you worked at the gallery – this idea of what is a frame? – what can it lend – this contextualization of moment, aesthetic, the meaning or the hummm in the images and their “boundaries” or segways in the framing…
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