Eye Drops from Upstairs (in collaboration with Jamie Kydd)

Eye Drops from Upstairs, 2008
Software genrated sound by 3 goldfish



‘Real’

Artworks operate best when they have a relationship with real life. For me this relationship involves a poetic experience of the closeness between realness and fakeness, between meaning and a lack of meaning.

In 1906 Kazuo Okakura wrote in the Book of Tea "It [Tea Ceremony] is essentially a worship of the imperfect as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life."
In Japanese there is a term Bimyo, meaning being ambiguous but making sense. A Japanese Potter, Kakiemon the Fourteenth (the Kiln has been passed down for 14 generations), says in his book "Perhaps we Japanese tend to prefer things to be ambiguous and subtle (Bimyo), perhaps some kind of contradiction or irony. The same goes for ceramics. Maybe I can call it a noise? We don’t feel quite right without this noise or imperfection in our ceramics. How to tell a good noise and bad noise – this is very ambiguous (Bimyo). When you see it first, it is very hard to tell there is anything in it, but when you look at good noise, really closely, you can feel it, feel the sense of beauty.”

Written by Kentaro Yamada and Martyn Reynolds

Exhibitions

Newcall Gallery, Auckland 1 July - 12 July 2008