A Brief History of the Sphere (2015)

While photographing in the streets of Kyoto, one of our members made an image of a large sphere made of clay or stone or some similarly dense material. It was wedged into place atop its pallet by bulky rough-hewn shims. This presented a good starting point from which many trajectories could be followed, none of them specific enough that the path was clear. He uploaded the image to an encrypted website we use when we need to communicate from a distance. The other two members, operating from various locations in the Western and Midwestern United States at the time, began replicating the image, though in each iteration the material, scale, or context was changed. Stone to paper to foam, street to studio to web, life size to miniature to infinitely large virtual renders. Each iteration was uploaded and responded to in turn. An object, any object, or its image, in this context of discourse and exchange, becomes anything else. The original is still the original, but the value of an original is negated.

This image, or template for an image, had lost its specificity. It was like a saying we could say over and over again, enunciating it differently to different effect. We came to casually refer to this particular loose structure as The Sphere.

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