BRAIDED SAND
“Braided Sand. It was a century before they got glass to let light in. Unlock it and reign. A slipper, a coffin, a difference in crystal.”
- The Glass Age
Cole Swensen
Braided Sand engages the relationship of optical technologies to earth materials as a means to consider the natural and manmade processes of transformation that are the bases of photography and other imaging technologies. There is no lens without sand, which itself is the result of hundreds of millions of years of geologic activity. Poetry emerges from seeming paradox - that what is heavy, opaque, and primordial is transformed into material that is transparent, evermore thin, and part of technologies that increasingly speed up lived human temporalities. In doing so the work questions the taken-for-granted use of these materials, juxtaposes human and geologic timescales, and grapples with the poetry of these materials alongside their inherent relationships to extraction.
Digital Video TRT 16:40
