Salt Run 2

Salt Run 2

Thoosa project

Bill Hill spring2015

The editing aspect of this video was intended to emphasize the “realism” of the act of  a sunset sail.  I wanted my choices to reflect a relationship between real time sound and action and less an entertaining narrative. I find that there were so many variables that were beyond my control. I also discovered how irritating that is to me as a creator. My intent for the next journey is to find ways of documenting the experience that do not require video imaging. If anything the video was useful notetaking in the recollection of the event. This was helpful for me because the actual events tend to be overwhelming and the documentation helps me to review what I may have missed to the anxiety of the moment. The most engaging aspects of the effort were in exploring what was revealed by the low tide. As an old colonial town, St. Augustine reveals a lot of history when its shoreline waters recede. I also found the strange inter-social politics between the boaters and the people who were fishing on the pier. At one point in the video you can hear a fisherman yell “thanks dude” to the boater that ran over his line. On a self absorbed note, I responded very positively to the way my drawings on the sail looked. I enjoyed seeing them set against the sky and how they must have been a slight spectacle to the other boaters. In retrospect I think I was engaged with the effect of my mimetic representation of clouds on the sail and how they would obscure and complement the actual clouds when looking up at the sail for course corrections. As I was cutting and melting the plastic onto the sail I found myself projecting to the moment I would be sailing. The moments that the design were created would be brought back to my mind as I was sailing. I am not sure what to make of that sensation. Lately I have been exploring the Greek idea of the quadrivium. The primary aspects of this ancient way of conceptualizing our experience included four parts. “Arithmetic, then, studies quantities as such, music the relations between quantities, geometry magnitude at rest, spherics [astronomy] magnitude inherently moving.”[1] I speculate if this sensation of remembering and projecting isn’t a lot like sailing as it is a magnitude, my awareness, in motion or according to the quadrivium theory, sailing is like astrology, a body in motion, my own world propelled through space.

Prior to the salt run 2 sail expedition I wrote this-

Initially the idea was to make my own sail and to launch the boat into a publicly held retention pond or some other utilitarian body of water. The intent was to experiment with different levels of sovereignty within a given politic regarding the other and self. As the project evolved a shift occurred in the project’s focus. I became more interested in the experimental quality of the plastics formally as elements of design and the sensational novelty of sailing itself. This may or may not have to do with the project coinciding with my investigations into the work of Friedrich Schiller and his theory on The Play Drive during this developmental stage. I understand my initial idea as reflecting the desires of what I perceive the current state of the “Art World” to condone. It would have been a good prank: cheeky and antiestablishment. Maybe I just didn’t have the testicular wherewithal to sneak into a potentially illegal trespassing situation. When I think on the initial idea of sailing a dingy on a little lake, the idea becomes about banality and the absurd.  When I think about designing my own sail and voyaging into an area I have never been, I think about romantic notions of escaping banality. At which point are we acting out of sheer curiosity and not out of escapism? When do we act in self-preservation and when do we eject ourselves into unknowns because we are mesmerized by the potential of elsewhere?

Some how this whole into the unknown idea is related to the mission to the moon in 1969. Also the only time  I ever went to Disney as a kid was with my estranged biological father. Jules Verne Manifest destiny. Space Race. I keep going back to Hegel’s idea of the other as the concept of the identity of difference.

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[1] Proclus, A commentary on the first book of Euclid's Elements, xii, trans. Glenn Raymond Morrow (Princeton: Princeton University Press) 1992, pp. 29-30. ISBN 0-691-02090-6.