projects

The idea of the world as composed of weightless atoms is striking just because we know the weight of things as well. So, too, we would be unable to appreciate the lightness of language if we could not appreciate language that has some weight to it.
- Italo Calvino

Press Release

Two Brisbane artists have collaborated to create a Christmas tree with a subtle difference at South Bank. New media artists Keith Armstrong and Linda Carroli have created an ephemeral public artwork, the Artists Christmas Tree: Unbearable Lightness: Tree of Fortune.

We live in a time of unbearable lightness, thinness, emptiness; a time where hope has become blanketed by fear. Across many cultures, seasonal celebrations - Christmas, Solstice, Ramadan, Hanukkah, New Year and others - traditionally provide a focus for hope and renewal, a time of giving (and taking), a time for reflection, a time to rethink, a time to turn over a new leaf. These celebrations and commemorations provide an opportunity to say goodbye, once and for all to unbearable lightness. This artwork reinforces that opportunity through texts spread throughout the tree.

From afar, the tree appears to be dotted with twinkling Christmas lights. However, when you get up close, you appreciate the difference. Instead of lights and baubles, the tree, a fig tree in South Bank's Cultural Forecourt, is decorated in 60 custom-made LED modules, each of which contains a message of renewal and hope.

Core Concept

We live in a time of unbearable lightness, thinness, emptiness; a time where hope has become blanketed by fear. Christmas is traditionally a time of hope and renewal for many cultures, a time of giving (and taking), a time for reflection, a time to rethink what it is that must be thought. This artwork suggests that opportunity in a networked poem – Christmas as an opportunity to say goodbye, once and for all to unbearable lightness.

Text Direction

We all have a habit of looking for meaning and significance in small expressions - simple ways of understanding or knowing ourselves and our world. This is typified by our obsessions with the pop wisdoms of fortune tellers, horoscope columists and the like.

This work’s texts take on these simple forms in order to be accessible to the broadest public. However within these simple forms lie deeper questions we would like inspire. The texts for the tree are hence designed as a series of ‘mediatations’ which focus upon our everyday use of the key words – hope, fear, light, give and take.

They are structured as five sets of 12 arranged on the fig tree (each of no more than 16 characters as allowed by the modules). Each set is thematically linked and all are connected by the overarching concept of ‘lightness and hope’. The texts aim to create a mental space which emphasises the creative responses of the reader or passer-by. In this way they encourage some degree of reflection or inner response without being moralistic or berating. Some of the texts are incomplete thoughts which provide the reader with an opportunity to (mentally) interpolate their own experience. This is in keeping with the idea of ‘renewal’ within the core concept.

Unbearable Lightness: tree of fortune
Collaborators
Artistic Direction: Keith Armstrong
Text/Concept Development: Linda Carroli
Electronic Design/Construction: Aaron Veryard/Intheory
Module Programming - Marcos Caecares
Producer: Southbank Corporation
Production Mgt: Joanna Jordan
For a different view, click here.
Reviewed by Kimberley Starr in The Courier-Mail, 16 December 2003

The Stuff of Myth and Legend
Linda Carroli

In the classical story of Pandora’s Box, Pandora was the first woman on Earth, whom Zeus caused Hephaestus to form from the earth to bring misery upon humanity. This misery was revenge for the theft of the heavenly fire by Prometheus. The gods endowed her with gifts and her name ‘Pandora’ translates as ‘all-gifted’. She was given a box which she was told not to open, containing all the evils which beset humanity, and presented to Prometheus’ brother Epimetheus as his wife. Impelled by curiosity, Pandora opened the box, allowing all the evils to escape and spread across Earth. The box contained one ‘good’, Hope. Having remained in the box, hope springs eternal.

Feminist researchers have identified commonalities between the characters of Pandora and Eve. As ‘first’ women, they are credited with introducing evil into the world and causing innocence to be forever lost. According to Denise Hooker, “Pandora/Eve’s action marks the moment of transition from the natural instinctual life to an awareness of good and evil. Seen in this light, the opening of the box becomes … an assertion of human freedom. Pandora [like Eve] is transformed into a prototype existential heroine who deliberately and consciously chooses to open the box in a question for knowledge and understanding of the full range of human experience.”

In Western culture, hope has come to be represented as an anchor, that which grounds, steadies or roots us.

In spiritual, mythical and religious beliefs worldwide and throughout time, the tree figures as a sign of knowledge and synthesis. In Paradise, the Tree of Knowledge bears the fruit of both good and evil. Thus, the tree is the image of humanity.

These mythical constructs raise questions and issues about the nature of knowledge, will and morality in contemporary society. According to David Byrne in his satirical work, The New Sins (commissioned for the Valencia Bienal 2001), hope is the most weighted and irrational of all the new sins because “hope allows human beings to suffer, daily and eternally … Hope is empty wishing”.

Mary Zournazi (Hope - New Philosophies for Change) is more hopeful about hope and writes:

I believe we have to find hope in new ways - to overcome the past, and to understand hope and despair in our lives. This involves a sense of trust and a ‘faith without certitudes’ about where hope may lie in thinking about the future. I think the turn towards the future may be found in struggles for individual justice, and in political activity across the globe. Because without this hope what is left is death - the death of spirit, the death of life - where there is no longer any sense of regeneration, change or renewal.

In addressing this concept and these ancillary questions, I will implement a series of ‘mediatations’ which engage our everyday use of key words from Keith’s proposal – hope, fear, light, etc. I have structured five sets of 12 texts which will be arranged on the fig tree. Each set is thematically linked and the five sets are obviously connected by the overarching concept of ‘lightness and hope’. The meanings and use of various words have been explored using the Visual Thesaurus [http://www.visualthesaurus.com] which images words in a diagrammatic manner that is similar to a branching tree or network.

Martin Luther is credited with having introduced lighted candles to the Christmas Tree. According to an online source, on a winter’s evening, while composing a sermon as he walked, Luther was awestruck by the brilliance of the stars against the evergreens. To recapture the scene for his family, he erected a tree in his home and wired its branches with lit candles. The tree has five main branches on which the modules can be arranged in a way that implies major constellations which feature in the southern hemisphere night sky in summer.

These constellations of texts refer to the prevalence of ‘meditations’ and ‘affirmations’ attributable to a range of sources including new age spiritualities, political and media sloganeering, advertising, fortune telling, pop psychology, self-help and ‘home spun wisdom’. Theodor Adorno characterises, for example, newspaper astrological columns as being authoritarian and deterministic, indicative of a type of dependence and abrogation of responsibility. The texts are fragments of vernacular expressions and speech. Through them, I seek to create a mental space which emphasises the reader or passer-by, encourages some degree of reflection or inner response without the moralistic or berating overtones of such meditations and affirmations in other contexts. Some of the texts are incomplete thoughts which provide the reader with an opportunity to (mentally) interpolate their own experience eg ‘a day never came … when I didn’t wonder what happened’. This is in keeping with the idea of ‘renewal’ within Keith’s proposal.

People continue to look for depths of meaning and significance in small expressions as if they open into a ‘metalanguage’. We continue to communicate through and with a variety of platitudes and whimsical ‘stock’ responses as if these were new mythologies and guides for living, abbreviated ways of understanding or knowing ourselves and our world.