SNOW

I looked out of my window here, in Friedrichshein, Berlin, and it was snowing! Really snowing, not like the few flakes of snow which momentarily circled in the sky in New York the other week. I was so excited, I grabbed my coat and ran out of the building, unable to stop grinning! (I got a few strange looks)

So this seems as good a place as any to begin…
I’ve been thinking about snow all year. I’m not sure why I have this fascination, but here are a few thoughts (relating to snow and visibility):

Snow is like a kind of flickering in front of an image
A screen, obscuring an image
It interrupts vision
A visual impairment
It obstructs (or shifts) visibility, rendering the visual world (almost) invisible
Or creates the illusion of nothingness / a void
And changes your perception

Maybe this has something to do with the way it reflects light… A completely snow covered environment literally becomes reflective, meaning you must be looking at almost pure light, since I guess very few rays would be absorbed…

This makes me think of snow blindness. I haven’t experienced this, luckily, but I’m interested in the way this natural phenomena can obscure an environment, or vision, literally blinding us. Strangely, light makes it possible for us to see, but an excess can blind us. I’ve heard that when there’s a lot of snow it can also muffle sound and smell, so it would be a kind of all-over sensory deprivation. I wonder how this would affect bodily perception? Whether in the absence of external stimuli, the senses would turn in on themselves? Whether by not seeing, hearing or smelling, you would become extra conscious of these senses?

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I’m thinking about how to relate my project in Melbourne, documenting sightings of things which appear to be snow (but aren’t, of course), with the experience of real snow. The project in Melbourne was interesting in terms of the kind of vision it produced, because it shifted the significance of bits of white detritus, thus granting them a visibility that they otherwise don’t have. Here the snow envelopes you and has an almost opposite effect on vision: rather than heightening it, it becomes obscured. At the same time it doesn’t have the kind of materiality that the non-snow matter has. I tried to catch some on my hand and in a plastic tub, but of course it all melted. It’s not cold enough yet, I guess.




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Also, I'm remembering a work I really enjoyed, at the Sculpture Center in NY. The artist was Tim Hyde and he made a series of seven videos, each 1 hr, documenting seven hours of a snowstorm in New York. The snow is so dense, that the camera has trouble seeing the city and continually shifts in and out of focus. In some parts the screen is completely white and appears to be empty, until you momentarily glimpse a faint edge of something. I think it’s interesting, the way the camera (as the eye) becomes visually impaired, virtually becoming blind. It’s almost like a record of not-seeing (if one could imagine what a video documenting blindness could be like).