Floating Form Less 2009

FLOATING FORM LESS

University of North Florida
November 2009
(scroll down for a related sound file and video)

NOTHING….

WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE….

BUT PLACE….

-Stéphane Mallarmé, Un Coup de des…

The words FLOATING / FORM / Less remained on the water for the duration of this third installation, while those on the various stories of the library's windows changed, reading when the installation began, IN LIQUID LIGHT / A VIOLENT SIGHT / REMEMBRANCE, shifting during the second week to A LIQUID SIGHT / IN VIOLET LIGHT / REMEMBRANCE.

Also, in the library's two main elevators, a recording was heard — hidden within clocks hanging on the elevators' walls — of people interviewed in front of the library describing the sights and sound before them. While beneath each clock, affixed to a Mason jar, a living goldfish swam about, accompanying viewers on their rides through the building (the goldfish, a floating reminder of the pond just outside the building — its tiny eyes seeing us, seeing it). Through the muzak of language, the recorded words transported something of the sensual experience of being directly in front of the library into the confined (sarcophagal) space of the transporting elevators, transferring linguistically-described aspects of the library's open exterior — the people, the trees, the buildings, the water . . . the fish — into its contained controlled interior.

Finally, in the library's entryway showcases, ten goldfish (in ten separate goldfish bowls) swam about for the duration of the installation, their floating forms moving ceaselessly in the entryway's transitional space between inside and out, interior and exterior, with a printed picture of watery waves just behind them.

Keynote panel presentation at the conference “Convergence on Poetics,” University of Washington-Bothell, September 27-30, 2012.