Liquidation World Gallery
Six performances: Jan. 25 - Feb.7
“Thoughts on Laser Bath
By Dave Biddle
Being brought into total darkness provides us with an unfamiliar absence of difference in the visual field. The length of time that this visual undifferentiation is sustained for has an effect on how we experience the first appearance of light. When the laser mark finally irrupts out of the black void it might feel distant from us, the way we experience a star in a cosmic context. When the unassuming red spark begins to grow it very quickly takes us out of the cosmic and into the biological, where we might see a single-celled organism forming in the primordial soup of a soon-to-be ecosystem. There’s something about this latent environment that feels foreign to the hand of our own mother. Occasionally, however, a familiar bacterial structure quivers into view, or at times some deepsea constitution might appear at home in the aphotic zone; either instance of uncanny beauty registers a more-real-than-real encounter with Gaia’s second cousin.
After being lulled into the otherworldliness of this mutating entity (the affective scale of which continues to oscillate effortlessly between the cosmic and the amebic), something very interesting begins to happen: there are moments when the positive quality of that alien body in front of us goes from being a flickering figure against a ground of blackness to (suddenly) being a nebulous opening whose interior glows with ancient intrigue. This spontaneous switch between creature and chasm is a quantum leap in the gestalt perception of the viewer; a discontiguous state-change that is not qualitative in nature, but is rather a change in formal perception at the most fundamental level. The apprehension of such a radical state-change indicates the presence of a universal creativity. It’s this viewer’s view that Thomas Nugent’s Laser Bath offers an aesthetic experience similar to that of revelatory thought – the movements of the laser refractions mutating in the empty void evoke the formal dynamics of a profound insight, liberated from semantic meaning and thus free to turn over on itself for no productive purpose.
By Dave Biddle
Being brought into total darkness provides us with an unfamiliar absence of difference in the visual field. The length of time that this visual undifferentiation is sustained for has an effect on how we experience the first appearance of light. When the laser mark finally irrupts out of the black void it might feel distant from us, the way we experience a star in a cosmic context. When the unassuming red spark begins to grow it very quickly takes us out of the cosmic and into the biological, where we might see a single-celled organism forming in the primordial soup of a soon-to-be ecosystem. There’s something about this latent environment that feels foreign to the hand of our own mother. Occasionally, however, a familiar bacterial structure quivers into view, or at times some deepsea constitution might appear at home in the aphotic zone; either instance of uncanny beauty registers a more-real-than-real encounter with Gaia’s second cousin.
After being lulled into the otherworldliness of this mutating entity (the affective scale of which continues to oscillate effortlessly between the cosmic and the amebic), something very interesting begins to happen: there are moments when the positive quality of that alien body in front of us goes from being a flickering figure against a ground of blackness to (suddenly) being a nebulous opening whose interior glows with ancient intrigue. This spontaneous switch between creature and chasm is a quantum leap in the gestalt perception of the viewer; a discontiguous state-change that is not qualitative in nature, but is rather a change in formal perception at the most fundamental level. The apprehension of such a radical state-change indicates the presence of a universal creativity. It’s this viewer’s view that Thomas Nugent’s Laser Bath offers an aesthetic experience similar to that of revelatory thought – the movements of the laser refractions mutating in the empty void evoke the formal dynamics of a profound insight, liberated from semantic meaning and thus free to turn over on itself for no productive purpose.
Cont. ~> Complete Build (2023)