On a tune, Into Dust

By Jason Tuckwell

In abandoned buildings, deserted rail yards and desolate industrial sites, it is the darkest corners where silence speaks most earnestly, most pressingly. Why do we feel these spaces so intimately, so emotionally? Into Dust draws us into a paradox, a blind spot we confront continually - the apparent objective reality of spatial structures (houses, buildings etc), and the 'irrational' feelings and affects we experience within and from them. But isn't this merely an old psychoanalytical equation, whose solution expresses an inter-relation of association and projection? Abandoned buildings + a million crime show scenarios, Old Industrial Warehouses + Eraserhead or Derelict rail yards + a hundred slasher/disaster flicks = illegitimate projections of fundamentally illogical or irrational anxieties. However, when Ramos and Turner deliberately linger in the supposed emptiness of their abandoned spaces, this superficial anxiety subsides and we are confronted with a threshold opening between worlds, a moment of vertigo, a sudden and unlocatable drifting. To be content with a psychoanalytic interpretation, we must concede an impassable rift between thought and our experience of the world, as though they represent an inescapably determined incompossibility (1). However, Ramos and Turner are unmistakably inviting us across this very threshold, they are beaconing us into the palpable resonances of affect opening within this veritable no-go zone.

Between thought and sensation, the virtual and the actual, Ramos and Turner construct a delicate loom, a kind of vinculum between worlds: a doubled space always becoming from, always disintegrating back Into Dust. From this point of view, the buildings and industrial sites we encounter, as well as ourselves in the act of engagement, do not present as 'things', 'objects' or 'subjects', but as individuations of an entirely different nature; haecceities.(2)

As such, all these previously individuated 'things'; the viewer, the artists, the building sites, the virtual and actual worlds become particles and affects - dust and harmonics. Resonant patterns interchange between these individual haeccities freely - they ride upon compositional dust-tunes, little affectual ditties of all kinds. The loneliness I am feeling in this particular corner, or the strange comfort next to that broken axel, is a composition, a becoming which imprints and recreates us both in a mutual transformation. These component tunes or little compositional ditties choral into crescendos, movements, orchestrations - they accumulate into larger more complex assemblages; qualities, memories, concepts, identities. It is in this way we can speak not only of the individuality of an abandoned building, but also about this individuality qualitatively: as lonely, as ominous or inviting. Such a conception absolves us from indulging in an illegitimate psychological play of association and projection, or an  existential anthropomorphism - we are instead speaking of the sonorous exchange of particles and affects, of dust and resonance, that quite naturally enters into tunes and songs, mutual cross-order becomings of all kinds.

It is to this innate quality of nature to which Ramos and Turner refer, when they appeal to a "flow of nature" between the virtual and the actual worlds - but we are far away from the Art/Nature relation characterised by mimesis and representation; this is Art as direct transmission of Nature, a doubled drawing to affect resonant lines, to enervate pulsing waves of dust between the virtual and actual worlds. It would however be a mistake to assume this relation ends in the simple reflective movement between the virtuality of 'cyberspace' and the world in which we continually find ourselves. The vinculum weaved spans the much wider implications of Deleuzian virtuality, where the particles and affects, where the dust and the harmonics, find in the darkest of spaces an indiscernible whispering upon the plane of Nature - pure affection simultaneously tumbling, a becoming cascade into art form; an isomorphic actualisation at once architectural and electronic.(3)

We are at home in vertigo somewhere between these impossible worlds. Running to one is like running for the horizon, ever matching our speed, always irrespective of our calculated trajectories. Inside this inbetween, all is of particle and affect, of the dust and its resonance. On a tune, it is the dust within we are becoming, and on another, the without to which we are disintegrating.
Finally, perhaps Into Dust simply offers us an unlikely moment of refuge, a strange repose or little reflective pool of quiescence in the storm; a little captured song where we watch the dust drift slowly in a rare moment near silence, against the cacophonic orchestra of Nature, always waiting.

j tuckwell. 2006