ROAMING BOARDER LANDS
❶ Mind
❷ Birds Eye
umarts focus
research 2025
THOUGHTS
Seeding
9 march 2024
Exploration
"Petrified" refers specifically to a natural process of fossilization, where organic material is replaced by minerals over a long period, retaining the detailed structure of the original material.
Looking at sculptures as "petrified images" is a metaphorical act, suggesting that the sculpture captures or freezes a moment, idea, or entity in a permanent form, similar to how petrification preserves organic material.
This usage is poetic and not literal, as the creation of a sculpture involves intentional artistic and technical processes, whereas petrification is a natural, geological process.
In contrast Generative AI, such as GANs, can iterate indefinitely, generating endless variations on this sculpture. This iterative process could even be driven by the algorithm's ability to learn from each generation, adapting and creating new outputs based on the feedback loop between the generator and the discriminator within the GAN framework. This results in a dynamic, ever-evolving exploration of a ‘petrified image’.
Inspiration work: The Dangers of Petrification
The Dangers of Petrification is an artwork by Jimmie Durham in the form of a museum vitrine. It is not really what it seems to be—more like a form of counter-subversive doubling.
The vitrine holds a collection of stones that have likely met the gaze of the artist upon his wanderings, just like the bicycle parts that jumped at Picasso from the garbage heap to suggest a bull’s head.Richard Hill describes what is going on here as double mimesis: “stones representing petrified objects, which are themselves the stone representations of organic objects.”
The handwritten labels next to the stones are also an imperfect mimesis of authoritative museum classification. The handwriting identifies the maker of this museum vitrine as an outsider, who does not know the sources and protocols from which the proper modern authority is derived. These labels describe the objects as petrified versions of, variously, an apple slice, a loaf of bread, a piece of cheese, a slice of bacon or, a cloud. With the exception of the petrified cloud, they are presented ready-to-eat, perhaps as offerings to the appetites of hungry gazes in search of likenesses, or the desire of half-gods to eat from the fruit of immortality. The tension is all between the hard and the soft, organic tissue and death.
Is petrification the fate that awaits us if we follow our appetites? Wherein does the danger reside? There is incorporation in petrification, which is a process of a slow and gradual replacement of organic tissue with minerals. As Richard Hill underlines, “a petrified object is a copy in which the original cannot, by definition, survive the process of reproduction.”
The stone that is described as a petrified cloud sits on a larger piece of paper with a handwritten description, which speaks of the extraordinary circumstances that lead to the sudden petrification of the cloud at the ocean’s surface, at the horizon, where heaven and earth meet. Is the cloud not the most transient and etheric of matter, an essentially metamorphic condition, quite the opposite of stones that are permanent, immobile, and insensate? This object and its identification as petrified cloud is incredible, unbelievable; it demands a suspension of disbelief.
Jimmie Durham’s vitrine speaks of what we believe stones to be, speaks of their use in architecture and in museums, their claim to permanence and stable knowledge, and restores this knowledge and its objects to the profound uncertainty of knowing—to its abyssal, liminal, and animate character. The metaphors that have become congealed in stones are thrown back unto us: to be frozen with fear and be emotionally hardened. The stones are rebelling against the classifying gaze.