Shu ISAKA

After the turbulent outflow of tephra — pyroclastic material — from three caldera eruptions, the perceiving subject, initially called Reconnaissance, passes through an omnidirectional landscape and arrives in an alien architectural interior, somewhere between a museum, an observatory, and a space that is difficult to define as either open or closed. It connects places surveyed through “walking” with other sites. Like airport obstacle limitation surfaces, whose boundaries are continually revised by the city below, this condition appears as architecture itself. If a building’s site is always shifting, architecture remains permanently pre-rendered. In the courtyard, two beings play a board game. A black-and-yellow quarantine pattern has expanded into a Go-like board, on which they use tephra — including pumice from a caldera eruption that the subject has been tracing. They are residents of this prefab structure and collectors of tephra. Gradually, the building reveals itself as a facility for gathering, fixing, and preserving tephra as varved strata. They are not surprised by the subject’s arrival. One explains that, in this virtual space, the subject has become a “virtual camera”: a body with no fixed position, able to exist anywhere and multiply without limit. It is a spiritual body-camera, freed from the material dimension. Yet the space is still sparse, so they suggest doing something to stave off boredom. One being guides the subject to a protruding room. Its old medicinal devices have been replaced by an apparatus for preparing “the Hermit’s Eye,” a medicine that sees time in all directions and leaps through space. It functions like a portal, connected both to the subject’s arrival and to any future departure or return. What the subject first thought was a road is actually a partially missing document called The Lost Tephra Manuscript. Made from compressed tephra-varves, it is written, deciphered, and translated by the other being. Its strata record time from the distant past to geological ages beyond the subject’s recognition. When taken outside, the manuscript resonates with “something uncanny.” The beings nickname the approaching figures Butterfly, Dream, and Chaos, names tied to instability and uncertainty. Yet the three are not the true entity: above them is a single being shaped like a Lorenz attractor, from which they seem to hang by strings. The board game is revealed as a decoy, meant to lure the uncanny figures away from the manuscript by offering them a false objective. Unable to find a winning strategy, the beings ask whether the subject’s virtual-camera body, aided by the medicine, might create a new set of tactics and become a game changer. When the subject returns, the medicine is complete, and a spherical space projects another time. Inside, the subject sees the beings complete their strategy just as Chaos approaches and swallows the entire game. After consuming the sphere, the subject transforms into Méconnaissance: the non-acting subject. It is not apathetic, but a body in which doing nothing may become performative — capable of confusing the “something” that comes to consume goal-oriented situations.

About the Artist

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