Often I use old objects, for as the Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz said “I am much more interested in an old piece of burlap than a new one, for the beauty of an object is to me, in the quantity of information I can get from it, the stories it has to tell.” If I use new or organic materials they only become interesting in context a bone and a machine part must transform eachother. My intention is not to document objects but to see them in a new context where they take on a presence dependent on the world within each photograph. There is a fluctuation between visual intuition and an editorial process that presses me to throw out what is not working and to go beyond the content level of individual objects. I work intuitively, but only part of the time. Objects rich in human implications are the ones which interest me. What if each cereal box, grapefruit rind, and hub cap were perceived to have its own moving spirit? Today, some anthropologists try to figure us out by checking our garbage. Reading objects, Archaeologists search for meaning in bones, earth, and stone. We are learning the rules of the forest, but we know little about the rules of the city dump. Increasingly there is a manmade landscape too, some of it beneficial and some of it unforeseen and chaotic. In the past people primarily had to make sense out of the natural world. In thinking about the way we understand both contemporary objects and old objects as well as the way people have understood objects at different points in time, I wonder at the vast changes in the human world in an instant of geologic time. All is uncertainty and change, but optimists and bingo players are on the lookout for moments of perfect knowledge and perfect cards. New ideas form, the old are shattered, and sometimes old ideas pop up again among the new like graffiti on a wall. By the seventeenth century clockwork explanations begin to invade the spirit world, opening doors to modern physics. Animals floated in the night sky, and each object had its own “Anima Motrix”, it’s own moving spirit. For most of human history people have looked to the spirit world to explain what was going on. I am interested in the way people think about the unknown.
I will not attempt to explain their meaning in verbal terms, because my process is visual, but I can suggest what is on my mind. These photographs have been assembled as a book so that they can speak together. Yet this generation theory with pretensions to a materialist mechanism establishes Gassendi's firm commitment to a unity of the sciences through an atomist ontology that underlies all physical phenomena, including the organic.Introduction to Weighing The Planets, 1987 These accounts-flawed and sketchy-unsurprisingly fail to specify how hereditary information might be borne physically, and in any case do not meet Gassendi's own empiricist standards. Further, his molecular model of atomic structures allows a material means of storing ontogenetic information received from the souls of parent organisms. The relative uniformity of atoms allows animulae to operate equivalently across different modes of generation, spontaneous or otherwise. That proposal in turn relies on his atomist hypothesis. Unlike his fellow mechanists, Gassendi can extend his mechanism to his heredity account, because his proposed vehicle for ontogenetic transmission is material.
The determination of inherited traits requires a means of combining or choosing among each parent's contributions, and towards this end, Gassendi outlines the nature of competition and dominance among animulae. Where reproduction is sexual, two sets of material semina and corresponding animulae meet and jointly determine the division, differentiation, and development of matter in the new organism. Development of the new organism is directed by a material “soul” or animula bearing ontogenetic information.
In his accounts of plant and animal generation Pierre Gassendi offers a mechanist story of how organisms create offspring to whom they pass on their traits. Gassendi's Atomist Account of Generation and Heredity in Plants and Animals Gassendi's Atomist Account of Generation and Heredity in Plants and Animals
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