PHILOSOPHICAL SUICIDE

Comprised of two parts, physical and digital, this piece tries to present a case in which certain intrinsic properties of physicality—such as dimensionality and structure—when digitized, would be rendered meaningless, yet new meanings and/or new perspectives could emerge at the same time.

In the physical domain, it takes the form of a cyanotype print. Instead of featuring the flora and fauna, the theme of this print is, however, coffee filters; or to be more precise, the fine structures of paper fiber network—something innately abstract so that they won’t give away the size of this print.

Scanned at 3200 dpi, the fine structures of this cyanotype print are digitized with much more details than that can be extracted by staring at its physical form with bare eyes. (Images uploaded have a reduced quality. Under the best circumstances, viewers would have the liberty to zoom in and out freely.)

Honestly speaking, my original intent with this piece was more nihilistic. When I showed the digital representation to some of my friends, something unexpected happened. Much as planned, they couldn’t figure out the size of this thing, nor could they tell what it actually is. But according to several, the hyper-magnified imageries of a coffee-filter themed cyanotype could be viewed as, the surface of the moon, or even, a rendition of a Jackson Pollock—the last part is a bit stretched, but then if we feed these high-magnification enabled structures to a machine-learning algorithm and associate some coloring-scheme to the patterns sorted out, it almost certainly still won’t become a Pollock, but it can be something, of its own right.

I constantly found myself in the nihlistic and existential quagmire. 

My cheeks hugged by the tingling fibers, and they would not let go. 

It is a quarantine, but it is fine. 

L'enfer c'est les autres. 

How does Jean-Paul Sartre found his peace after formulating the talks? 

I am gleaned from other philosopher's crumbs, but I found few details. 

I demand for a further enlarged thought. 

This is a snare, in the cover of a prepossessing tale. 

I am fooled by the guile and would not go out. 

The fibers have let go.

It has been me. 

Long long ago,

it has always be me.

我深陷虚无与存在主义的泥潭，

无数细微的纤维抱着我的脸，刺痒着，紧紧地。

他人即地狱，

这对白背后的萨特从何安眠？

我舔着别的哲学家的饼干渣，

还不够还不够，远远不够。

要放大，放得更大，还要更大。

这是个披着迷人真理的皮的陷阱，

而我被骗了，不愿离去。

纤维早早得就放我走了。

一直是我，

从很久一起开始，

就一直是我不走。