An Unbound is a constellation of works that form a speculative response to the practice of Selenography (the study and mapping of the lunar landscape).

Insomnias are night-vision videos, the seed, a passage from W.G Sebald's novel Austerlitz (2001), in which the insomnia is countered through astronomical study. The more to erase the more to appear are drawings on slates. The drawings evolve from early lunar crater diagrams, often those produced through naked-eye observation prior to the use of magnifying optics. The image comes through a process of mirroring, it incorporates 'errors' and slips evident in the forms before them, until the document they mimic disappears.

In the impossible act of recording a distant umbra, objects become temporary monuments to a shifting, nocturnal environment. Devices to register phenomena include the body, seemingly conflated with the tools that extend its capacities. The body in abstract but also sensing terms, might also generate documents and produce markers of events. Sometimes the body is a seismograph and demonstrates shifting land-masses. Sometimes it is a polygraph and observes a change in body temperature, a deviance.

FOOTNOTES

Images: above > Insomnias video stills; the more to erase the more to appear drawings. below > research / scans from Sebald, W.G, Austerlitz, Random House, New York 2001.