Rose Salane

"In mathematics, a Basin of Attraction is a set of points from which a dynamical system progressively moves toward a particular attractor. In such systems equilibrium through continual motion can equate to stability. [1]

Here, each set of objects indicates the dynamic movement of a user through a site or institution with an end goal of restitution."

Sixty-four surveillance cameras dismounted from a New York City Department of Citywide Administrative Services facility sit together on a low plinth, facing upwards. They were purchased as a unit from a public auction with no indication of where the cameras were formerly used. Each camera is labelled with sequential numbers indicating they were from one site. Their tinted dome protectors have been removed. Seen from above, each of the cameras appear paused mid-action. Minute variations in their degrees of angle indicate former positions perceived as interesting by a device tasked with recording and safeguarding a site.

"Attractors are states towards which a system converges." [2]

This impression, of an architectural recognition of a prior environment, dissolves into potential points in space, moving and traced. The idea of a site here is blanketed, showing us a past world through suggestions about the periphery. Despite the cameras’ inactivity, a general tension or desire to act or to record or be recorded is still alive within the static camera as an object.

In this exhibition, the cameras exist as one example of a site-user condition. In their object form as constant and lens angle as variable, their tracing of a site through repetition and multiplicity begins to capture the phenomena of recollection.

In their current state, without a context or a sightline of interest, the cameras can do nothing. They are no longer part of the site that had incorporated them. They are also highly replaceable, due to the continuous advancements of any technological device, which require a continuous upgrade in product to keep up with the definite image.

Fourteen photographs taken in the storage archives at the Archeological Park of Pompeii are displayed alongside the cameras. Each image documents a mailed letter of apology accompanied by a fragment of the archeological park. Each of these letters arrived by mail over the years at the archeological site, sent by its past visitors. Such mail correspondence still comes to the archeological park today. The letters ask for the ‘artifacts’ to be placed back in their respective locations. However, these removed parts are just small rocks, pieces of an unidentifiable mosaic, or ashes from the volcanic debris. They have no obvious home.

These artifacts are indexed in time by a system more like a curse or a neurosis that ignites a form of self surveillance. In their binary pairings, the artifact becomes both factualized and fictionalized through each owner’s description of seeking forgiveness through the gesture of a return.

In their multiplicity of sentiment and action, the returned fragments-turned-artifacts and testimonies from different beholders demonstrates a cycle that in itself makes a new site for an object displaced. They enter the archive as both imposters to antiquity and witnesses of the strange dynamics that the contemporary traces when it moves across the ruins of the past.

"Convergence is a process that produces a sequence of outcomes understood as approximations that eventually approach a final outcome." [3]

Both object phases invite us to visualize forces that have created new convergences of relationships to a site and stages of belief. I am interested in objects that gather definitions of a beholder, a site and a condition. How can an object reflect how its user internalises a place?

The dynamic movement of a user through a site or institution generates interruptions and repetitions which leave traces at the same time that the system resolves them. The motion of power or projection— as it may have been experienced in a place, by a user, through a desire or control—through an object stages its condition. We often see an institution’s response to unwanted object excess through an auction, deaccession or a liquidation for monetary gain of assets that no longer define a use-value or need to be sold to support a financial hardship. Value is an orbiting, continually-rotating phenomenon, propelled by forces including real-time emotion, commerce, culture, and ritual.

"Gaining a state of equilibrium means that if the system is disturbed slightly it will not change dramatically. A characteristic of such a system is to remain in approximately the same state. The dynamical system’s ability to gain a state of equilibrium is what quantifies the basin’s stability." [4]

Points in time index the past for all of us. For example, when the mind struggles to remember or grasp the entirety of a landscape, we instead recall selected events with pinhole sharpness, and infer the content of the gaps between them. Parallel to personal memory runs the general fear of liability and control of a user through space. The set of cameras once secured the site they surveyed by combining multiple angles of view into a record of activity. The multitude of cameras may point in many directions, but they ultimately converge towards a single version of events. The fragments repeatedly pocketed from and returned to Pompeii by visitors map a sequence of desires and withdrawal (from memory) through an intended keepsake. Place is elaborated into the notion of a spell.

The objects displayed here are selective but particular. They exist in a loop of emotion and transaction. Through removal from their designated place in time and isolation from their source, they are fractals that pose new ways of defining their source. The multiple iterations of a whole becoming a valued part is a process of regeneration.

These parts, attached to narratives, become refractors of complex circumstances that retrace and become a secondary state of a person’s relation to movement, place and experience. If an object has survived through periods of time, despite what the object may be (artifact or junk), its continued preservation (passive or active) speaks to value. However, this determination of the object as an artifact or as detritus itself depends on the given point in time it is perceived. An event of provenance (spectacle) is often what gives momentum to an object that has survived into a transformed world. And so we reflect.

1 - Datseris, George, and Alexandre Wagemakers. “Effortless Estimation of Basins of Attraction.” Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science 32, no. 2 (2022): 023104. https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0076568.

2 - Heylighen, F. (1998) Attractors. Available at: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ATTRACTO.html (Accessed: February 14, 2023).

3 - Convergence (no date) Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/science/convergence-mathematics (Accessed: February 27, 2023).

4 - Ott, E. (no date) Basin of attraction, Scholarpedia. Available at: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Basin_of_attraction (Accessed: February 20, 2023).