( Images in this album are computer generated from text prompts using Midjourney )
My home was once the desert - and to some degree still is.
old charred wood remnants of a house deep in the desert, abandoned and run down, wide view, night-time subtly illuminated by the moon, artwork by Wes Anderson
Most of the houses were small. There are many reasons for making small houses, but they reminded me that the outside was part of where I lived, that the dirt and the sky would never leave me; the home a place to sleep and feel safe, with little more needed. As I got older I went to the city and saw how buildings and their complexities drew people away from where the building was in the first place.
When I was a teenager I would investigate the emptiness of the desert, a few times coming across abandoned structures, the broken down parts of what once were called homes, out in practically nowhere. I had found a burned down structure once up in distant mountains, just a small two rooms, the wood blackened and half-missing, the sky overhead; I would stand inside and try to get a sense of what it was like some other time, someone finding comfort in that space, there in their little nowhere.
I made a photograph of the place, a tight shot on a broken window looking out through this forgotten house into peaceful trees. An honest photograph from a dedicated camera of something real, there somewhere in the early oughts. I could look at that photograph but I can also prompt a generative system, and in both find some kind of relationship to my memory of being there.
But we are crafty and inventive if nothing else. The act of remembering - in mind - lends us to create bigger stories, and if we are so positioned, we may take the bait and recall that such an event really was quite something else, suddenly now that this difference would be of use to us. But deep in there is still the bare reality, the run down structure forgotten, only illuminated by the fictions we place upon it.
remains of a burned-down wood house in the desert at night ::50 the light of the moon softly illuminates ::20 fire::-50
Stalwart Resistance
The loss of a home reminded me of my own more direct loss; when I was a child a house I lived in had burned down. Today's theme brought it back after I had searched for desert rubble. When we live in a home, properly speaking, it holds the intimacy of our lives, what amounts to the safety of our habituation. We find safety when we forget fear, and this space away from fear is the intimacy of the home, a space of safety, in some way the house as a body in the world mirroring my body within the house, a bare intimate relation.
Thinking on these terms I investigated an older prompt I had enjoyed, which was the contrast of an igloo in a lava stream, a kind of perilous disagreement (or as I prompted, "stalwart resistance") between the home and the environment. While none of my attempts captured the juxtaposition as I hoped, the images still lent something.
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iilA2
stalwart resistance, ice igloo home inside an active volcano, flowing hot lava magma and steam, artwork by Wayne Barlowe
The House of Theseus
A house never forgets; it is as incapable of forgetting as much as it is incapable of remembering. We are written upon its walls with every glance.
The ship had its parts, bringing to mind the transitory nature of the whole. Here the attempt was to illustrate the parts as the masters sculpting and re-sculpting a single house through time.
House of Theseus, room-size sculpture by [ancient Ur, ancient Greek, classical Hellenist, ancient Roman, medieval master, italian renaissance, german renaissance, enlightenment master, modernist master, surreal master, post-modern] sculptor
Gingerbread
The "Theseusian Houses" left a distance between home and occupant despite the intricacy of generational tampering, propelling me into searching for something wholesome. Between the house and its occupants is a shared ecosystem; if we consider the gingerbread person in their gingerbread place, we may suggest that the gingerbread person has no recognition that everything is gingerbread; the gingerbread house would be as different as the gingerbread computer, or the gingerbread mailbox. Gingerbread situates the neutrality of the gingerbread person's reference; for the gingerbreaded, there is no gingerbread, in a sense - the gingerbreaded must mediate their categories to a lower level, a more diverse one allowed through the obscurity of gingerbread.
suburban gingerbread house, gingerbread people playing in the yard, sunny summer day, artwork by Beatrix Potter
