‘Crystals as
Transscalar
Vehicles’
2024
Crystals as Transscalar Vehicles" is a curatorial installation that reclaims and reinterprets the concept of the hyperobject, focusing on the hyper subject. This project delves into the intricate relationship between personal experiences and the vast, often overwhelming, scales of existence. Through a curated series of objects, each acting as a metaphorical crystal, I explore my journey of trying to comprehend and navigate the feeling of being in a world. The installation weaves together moments of personal growth and the broader implications of these interactions, creating a narrative that spans from the intimate to the universal. By examining objects like river stones, asphalt chunks, and plastiglomerates, the installation highlights the interconnectedness of human experiences and natural processes, illustrating how individual encounters can reflect larger ecological and cosmic patterns.
Searching for the Hyperobject is sifting through sand at the beach or hurdling through the night in the back seat of a cab. It is manically alternating between the peering lens of a microscope and a telescope in a lab. Eventually, everything begins to look the same—a matrix of clasts suspended in viscous texture. Objects propagate and dance beyond the confines of the viewable area, twinkling or glitching, causing a total loss of focus. Eventually, the device becomes the subject, and all that is left is the frame—a lens, a window, an eye, or a hand. This misleading depiction of life as a consensual milieu challenges the viewer to reconsider their place within the complex interplay of scales and dimensions.
“When I touch the street outside my house, I'm touching Los Angeles—a contiguous vector of material bisecting a continent. A slab, a stone, dust and oil, a googolplex of tightly packed anisotropic particles... At nightfall, I sneak to the edge of the highway and break off a piece. 'What does it mean for a worm to be aware of the scale of the planet?' Bruno Latour's evocative questioning of scalar jumps prompts an existentialism that places me somewhere between the hyperlocal and the massively distributed. Like a cosmic traveler floating through the universe, I feel adrift. I look around, grasping to comprehend the haunting transscalar landscapes of the Anthropocene. I stumble upon my fragment of asphalt again, but now it appears polished like a gemstone. It is both an object and a diagram. A morphology of form. A microcircuitry of polyhedral lattices and tridimensional tessellations. Auguste Bravais said, 'Crystals are the acrostics generated by the stochastics of a cage.' As I search for the Hyperobject, I hold the crystal to the light. I embody it, I peer through it, I see my reflection, and ultimately, it holds me.”
