004: 93 million miles to print
Happy New Year! The Lunar New Year coming later than the Gregorian New Year, this post coming later than its usual Tuesday time...the only constant is change, and the only time is shifting. A day of moon to talk about the sun, and a piece about nostalgia.
A while ago I picked up a MiniDisc player from a thrift store. It was supposed to be a successor to the cassette tape, but the Sony-developed format never really took off outside of Japan. Unfortunately, the player came as-is and did not work at all. I tried taking it apart to do a simple cleaning and see if there were any glaring issues, but could find none, and also found myself overwhelmed by all the little pieces from the now disassembled player. I took the disc tray, and decided to use it create a cyanotype.
Cyanotypes, where the sun is the printer, are an appealing printing process because while most printing relies on a darkroom or a computer printer where the process is obfuscated, cyanotypes are a type printing in which the process can happen out in the open, right under the sun.
There's a nice contrast between the natural printing process, and the technological object being printed. Nam June Paik and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, among many others, are two artists that have explored this notion of technology as nature, nature as technology—that the boundaries are not so clear or obvious. It's also amusing to bring a part of technology that is often hidden into the sun, especially now that the technology is deemed obsolete.
Another Frank Ocean piece, this time exploring our relationship with nostalgia. This was written at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, but honestly has been relevant ever since, and probably will be for times to come.
Nostalgia might be the best tool for this present time, a way to reflect and imagine from the safety of a realized past reality. Nostalgia can be the threads, tying the present to the past: a familiar history to process a confusing present, and a familiar language to describe an unknown future.