Sept. 12-14, 2014 – Harvest Fest. – Burk’s Falls
NVHT-3 Ghosts of Harvest Past
it was a dark and stormy night
This year, driven to continue and possessed with slightly misplaced bitterness, I presented the installation at Harvest even though I was not invited. I did receive a free ticket and really enjoyed the fest. I mostly stayed in the new Crystal 6 structure. The music was so good and so was the lighting (a light at every node of a pyramid-like geodesic structure – pulsing and shifting in unison to the music and the mood of the room).
Wednesday and Thursday I set the installation up and then arrived at 1am Sunday morning (mid festival) with a portable generator and two black lights of my own which I used to illuminate the installation for the night. The organizers were a bit nervous about my presence there. I had most decidedly *not* been invited this year – eh heh. They have been very generous as has Peter Camani for letting me do my thing regardless and for the free admittance to probably the last time I will be at Harvest. It was a trip all right.
This was a new 2-D NETTT, constructed to be exactly the same as last year’s, installed over top of the decaying strings. No one took it down over the course of the year. It was actually in much better shape than I expected after having been through a winter, so I had to take parts of it down myself to exaggerate it’s decay.
That night was pretty wild actually. In the place where I was used to setting up the installation, it had been particularly wet this year, lots of rain and it was pretty rainy and cold for this Harvest weekend. Where there once was solid ground at the base of the landscape’s slope was now a pool of black water.. So my time was up one way or another and it was absolutely meant to be. So I showed up at 1am, cold, wet, it was misty and spooky – it absolutely looked like something out of a horror movie. Here are the results:
it was a dark and stormy night
FUN IN THE SUN
One of the purposes of the NETTT
Why is this important? One reason is that when you enter the installation, you are entering an area that is defined by a non-hierarchical system – decentralized, non-linear – a distributed network. People would get lost in it because there is no central locus of control. It is true that the forest is like that already, but the key is that it was done by me, a human, and therefore is an expression of human systems of organization. I wish to see a way out of the hierarchical, top-down system of control that is absolutely destroying the planet and its inhabitants. This system asserts its presence in all levels of social organization, so it is possible to resist. Criticisms of this system are met with the usual, “do you have an alternative?” I do not need to have an alternative in order to note how dysfunctional and destructive this system is. It is good enough to point that out and is important to continue to do so, though I wonder how much more obvious it needs to be before directing people’s attention to it becomes unnecessary. Secondly, even though I feel compromised by meeting the demands of this corrupt argument (by answering their question which is motivated more by tactics rather than a sincere quest for resolution), I offer this installation as an alternative and its large enough that you can be fully immersed in it.
I definitely like doing artwork installations in the forest.
other photos
This is some of my best work and is really the culmination of four year’s work in this same spot, for the magical and unusal place that is Midlothian Castle and the highly potent event of Harvest Fest. It was a study and you can see the narrative arc, ending with a beautiful death.
I was able to host two events of my own with it (NVHT-2 and a smaller informal one). The map of the installation (NVHT-1, and NVHT-2) generated a reading (the data set of the graph) and this provides material for future work. This project is definitely not done – I still have a few plans and I would even some day possibly host an event or two again at Midlothian Castle.