The Ecological became a very real and present thing upon arrival and throughout the duration of my stay. The primary focus of this project was to creatively engage the impact of an extreme reduction of the diurnal comforts that most in our society experience, and to convey that through a performative-installation. What ended up happening was I visited a place and then recreated that space at another location months later. So, this got me to thinking about how perceptual objects, be it living and non-living things, transform when shifts in the context switch in place and are re-represented in a different space.
Robert Smithson was thinking this way back in the 1960s when he described the Site and Non-Site as a metaphor that acts between the two. So, regarding my research project, the cabin is then working as the original Site, and the performative-installation is serving as the Non-Site. I rather enjoy the way he spoke about the Non-Site as being a three-dimensional logical picture that is abstract, yet still manages to represent the actual Site somehow. It is here where metaphor creates doubt among the idea of place, space, and the material world. This somehow makes more sense to me than most things in Western culture because, for a brief moment, I feel as though my instilled dualistic nature dissolves into being aware of self-as-self and how the self-appears to others. In Eastern philosophy, this is known as watching the watcher. It is still a dualistic illusion of a sort, but it does feel as though I become the experience of the idea, instead of the static representation of the concept.
Routine-based physical and mental rituals provide my senses a stable paradigm from which I can adequately contemplate the prodigious nature of what it means to be fundamentally and to exist as a social creature in a world that first appears to exist separate from the self. To live is to actively play hide and seek in this paradox, and to perpetually maintain one's imprisonment to ritualistic behavior. And as Gerard van der Leeuw puts it, "The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced."