Bouldering_Diary_03

My previous post focused on the small details of an ascent of an unheralded boulder in the bush just behind my home. My emphasis was upon representing the climb as a particular algorithmic procedure and upon depicting something of the overall context, as well as a close, but also necessarily fragmented and inadequate, sense of the individual holds. I hope that two things become evident in this – an element of artificiality and an element of attentiveness to specific individual features and affordances. Bouldering structures a particular experience of space, but is also attentive to the particular possibilities that that space offers. It represents then a form of mediation that is not based upon notions of displacement and deferral (the post-structuralist imaginary), but rather upon dimensions of intimate interaction. Rather than the alienating figure of solid media – of prosthetic devices that keep everything at a distance – there is a need to conceive media as forms of practice. Something like bouldering indicates that even within the immediacy of experience there are frameworks, systems, plays of possibility that both constitute that experience and also represent openings to particular realities.