Leslie Thornton’s video installation at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) reveals the element of craft in the production of scientific knowledge and illustrates the entanglement between the world itself and the human beings who perceive and shape it.
Handmade (2023) consists of a large video installation on the ground floor of MoMA. Visitors pass through the exhibition as they enter and exit the museum from the floor-to-ceiling glass doors to the courtyard. The space is light, airy, and ambient, a space for movement, rest, and play. Visitors pass over the video or lounge on the viewing sofas, watching absent-mindedly, checking phones, or holding loved ones and calling back toddlers, running at the fringes.
The installation itself illustrates movement, too. A two-panel screen plays separately. On one screen, a digitally manipulated video of a gale force “killer storm” in Lake Huron in Michigan, which Thornton captured while lying down with a handheld camera, slashes and cuts the screen with horizontal and vertical braided vectors of rain. On another screen, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena crafts a handwoven sensing instrument for a research project studying antimatter, particles that have the opposite charge of ordinary matter. These vignettes are interspersed with recordings of fluid dynamics – the movement of rocks under a current of water, the movement of sand on liquid.
Thornton has investigated the process by which scientific and cultural narratives are co-produced. Her interest is at the “outer edge of narrative”, where cultural narrative becomes scientific narrative, and where possibilities for new narratives begin.
Antimatter, as a scientific phenomenon, reflects Thornton’s evolving thematic interests and conceptual considerations. Antimatter is a building block in the creation of the universe, present since the Big Bang. It contributes to the ordering of the universe based on the principle of duality (antimatter/matter). Thornton explores the relationship between order (as expressed by duality) and chaos in her work. The relationship between chaos and order, darkness and light, natural and scientific, is illustrated in Handmade (2023) through visual sign-making which complicates and distorts such neatly defined binaries. Weaving images illustrating how scientific knowledge is tangibly produced through handmade craft, with images of natural phenomenon cut, spliced, and woven into a new visual form, illustrates how the natural and the digital are co-producing, and the binary between the subject and the world, the natural and the scientific, the perceiver and the perceived, cannot be neatly separated.
The craft of weaving produces order (rhythm, pattern) out of chaos (strands, vectors, signs with no referents). Weaving forms pattern from diverse perspectives (humans/nonhumans), and woven forms are intrinsically generative. Handmade (2023) weaves the human and non-human. It illustrates natural processes as much as it evolves them, stretching the limits of what is man-made and what is natural, and viewers inevitably, through the (passive, passing, or otherwise) act of viewing, continue this process of movement, of weaving, through interacting with the piece.
My response to Handmade (2023) takes the form of a poem, a string of words and theory, and an audio recording of the space, woven into my own video of the video installation itself. The installation was filmed, cut, sped up, and spun on its axis, in an effort to imitate Thornton’s own ‘woven’ approach to working with her source material.
Unlike Roland Barthes’ semiotics, Thornton does not seek the pre-symbolic in theoretical (and artistic) renderings of the symbolic, but offers an excess of signs, a plethora of them, chaotic, which are woven, both by the artist, and those that view the work, into hybrid semiotic forms – the evolution of narrative.
The themes of Handmade (2023) continue the cosmogonic process of weaving dualities coproducing new hybrid forms which continually evolve. Thornton’s work historically engages in the collective production of scientific and cultural knowledge. These themes have been described as "an investigation in the production of meaning through media."
My response manipulates a video of Handmade (2023), manipulating the video of the video, splicing, cutting, and distorting it, and adding text and audio recordings of the exhibition site, in an effort to continue the generative weaving of Handmade (2023), in hopes to produce a generative “shared thought” with the original work.