1. Emile Durkheim contemplates trends: "[With] the war of 1870 a new accession of good fortune took place. Germany was unified and placed entirely under Prussian hegemony. The development of suicide was never so rapid. From 1875 to 1886 it increased 90 per cent."
2. He says, "All man's pleasure in exerting himself implies the sense that his efforts are not in vain and that by walking he has advanced. However, one does not advance when one walks toward no goal, or when his goal is infinity."
3. He is now Zeno's arrow. But an open structure alleviates this conundrum reductively. He will apply whatever connections to the open categories, but the limits are still finite. He can create fiction at his leisure, assuming that the gameplay exists within boundaries of a reality.
4. Otherwise, there's the option of ending it himself. And at the very least, the mere suggestion of an end point or an absolute, can induce a drive, whether it is a so-called death drive or a drive to the mall it is suddenly a means to an end. At this point, obstructions operate as motivational aggravators versus repetitive marks of disappointment.
5. When one thinks that they have 'reached zero, then nothing can stand in the way of truth.' A diagram simplifies a reality into abstraction - and when the structure is rigid enough, an infinite number of objects can fill its open slots. (City grids for example endure revolution, demolition, and far outlive anonymous inhabitants.)
6. Formally, these structures base themselves in dry homogeny by equalizing and drawing comparisons, or else to expand understanding of one object as in Arnheim's diagrammatic dissection of a chair.
7. This work on the one side examines modernism's formal depletion of content in relation to the abstracting tendencies of diagrams. It's really a product of research in painting and visual perception as operational strategies to get to something vaguely fictional…
8. And the other side temporally restricts the content, somehow, by way of an associative context. Here lies an acknowledgment of the complex relationship between modernism and the formal considerations of contemporary product display.
9. One of the major successes of strategic marketing is the obfuscation of the end goal, whose existence is clearly emphasized by time-suggestive cues. This work disperses these cues within a formally desolate environment, placing a wedge between rigid reality and fictional reality, with the intention of creating a third speculative reality.
10. Three players enter an arena. Player 1 is maze mouse. Player 2 is a mouse reward. Player 3 is time. All maze mice seek a reward. All rewards are provisional. Time consumes the mouse.
11. The encouraging barriers obstructing promise that are normally transparent lead the mouse through the maze, satisfying its end as a loop. Clear signifiers remove confusion and replace it with desire to reach the cheese.
12. It seems, then, by reorienting these normally transparent signifiers, pairing them with something less contextually familiar, you can reveal the maze to the mouse. You can break the hammer, so-to-speak.
13. Additionally the work assumes a systematic arrangement of signifiers of varying degrees of transparency, from which someone can build a speculative interpretation-
14. Then, we build emotional charisma into the arrangements in the hopes that there might be an empathetic motivation into forming said speculation-
15. Which admittedly often leads to a little bit of dread which we all have our own tender ways of coming to terms with…
16. Why do whales strand themselves en masse? Why do humans drink poisoned koolade en masse? Are they operants of theoretical rules or of choice or if both, what makes these anomalous things metastasize?