Special Calamity Physics
Sarah Sze , from a personal history essay, working off Susan Sontag:
In recent years, images on screens have become substitutes for materials and objects. I’m sent virtual glasses to try on, thanked with a virtual flower, or asked to light a virtual candle in honor of a death. A half century ago, Susan Sontag wrote, “All the conditions of modern life—its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness—conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.” To that material plenitude we have added virtual plenitude.
Sontag continued, “What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.” As a sculptor, I work with ephemeral materials such as live plants, water, and wind; I construct sprawling compositions with ambiguous beginnings and endings. For me, part of the challenge is to recover our sense of time through tactility—through materials, through texture, through the senses.
Sampling can be a common good