MOIRA NESS, 2017
www.moiraness.com

"Cyclical" explores Friedrich Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal recurrence/eternal return. Nietzsche believed that all events in cosmic history have repeated, and will continue to repeat, in an endless cycle. Imagine time moving on the outline of a flat circle; everything we have done or will do as individuals we will do again and again - infinitely repeating, lifetime after lifetime.

In this series I experiment with the idea of eternal recurrence through forced visual and written repetition. I overlap sections of a photograph in a mirror-like style and then digitally manipulate them to blend seamlessly into the natural background. The limb of a tree is mirrored and then blended to match the opposite foliage. This is in an attempt to compress the time-based theory of eternal recurrence into a series of two-dimensional representations. I want to push the viewer to think about looking at a single landscape and imagining all the identical cycles that have previously occurred, including their own personal cycle.

I have chosen the natural landscape of Residency 108 to represent the visual base of my eternal return interpretation. Nature is pure in existence, wild in form, and seemingly random in occurrence, yet the theme of repetition within the theory still applies. The finished editing does not immediately stand out, but rather is discovered through the mind’s habitual recognition of subtle patterns, symmetry, and visual discrepancies.

With an obsession for personal documentation I have kept a detailed daily account of my online life in now discontinued or steadily fading online social media platforms(Twitter, MSN Messenger Chat Logs, Blogger, etc.). I select passages from these platforms and submit them into a repetition text-based algorithm. This algorithm selects, at random, text ranging from single words to four consecutive words. It deconstructs the inputted text in this pattern, providing a collection of disjointed paragraphs, which I then decipher. I select stand out phrases/word patterns and use these as the base for creating my piece titles and accompanying writing. The end result is an entirely new interpretation of words written in the past, during a time when the words had completely different connotations. In this new presentation the words are repurposed, creating a forced cycle of repetition.