Heraclitus' 500bce metaphor goes "You can't step in the same river twice." It is often used to relate human imagination
and images to nature. Most recently I saw it again in a contemporary 'new-materialism' text on photography; a photograph is
like a whirlpool in a river where the image is a fixed thing (for us) but the materiality is constantly in flow.
Long before photography, F. W. J. von Schelling used the image of a whirlpool in a river to describe how we imagine things
in nature.
How should I make an image today to ask a question about nature (or how we mean it) that is relevant in our stylized
pictorial universe? Perhaps by playing with old clichés... This collaboration with animator Alex Boya asks how do we humans
animate stuff, like water? Like nature? We give it eyes and a mouth, which makes it into a character. An entity of concern, you
could say. This DROP character has a life path - dividing out, falling, gaining some reasssuring momentum and some pleasure,
then DROP has the precipitous realisation that rejoining the flow is the end of this narrative.
