Taro Qureshi

"She had no idea how long she’d been there[...]There were dozens of the arms, manipulators, manipulators, tipped with pliers, hexdrivers, knives, a subminiature circular saw, a dentist’s drill . . . They bristled from the alloy thorax of what must once have been a construction remote, the sort of unmanned, semi-autonomous device she knew from childhood videos of the high frontier. Two of the arms, tipped with delicate force-feedback devices, were extended; the soft pads cradled an unfinished box. Eyes wide, Marly watched the uncounted things swing past. A yellowing kid glove, the faceted crystal stopper from some vial of vanished perfume, an armless doll with a face of French porcelain, a fat, gold-fitted black fountain pen, rectangular segments of perf board, the crumpled red and green snake of a silk cravat . . . Endless, the slow swarm, the spinning things . . . Jones tumbled up through the silent storm, laughing, grabbing an arm tipped with a glue gun. ‘Always makes me want to laugh, to see it. But the boxes always make me sad . . .’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘they make me sad, too. But there are sadnesses and sadnesses . . .’ ‘Quite right . . .’ He grinned. ‘No way to make it go, though. Guess the spirit has to move it.”

-William Gibson, Count Zero

“This explains how contemporary art can be seen as an epistemological metaphor. The discontinuity of phenomena has called into question the possibility of a unified, definitive image of our universe; art suggests a way for us to see the world in which we live, and, by seeing it, to accept it and integrate it into our sensibility. The open work assumes the task of giving us an image of discontinuity. It does not narrate it; it is it. It takes on a mediating role between the abstract categories of science and the living matter of our sensibility [...] It is a rather complex optical experience not only because our point of view is constantly changing and there are numerous optical dead ends, perspectives creating paths that might end in the middle of a plain or at the edge of a cliff, but also because we are constantly jolted by the painting, by this constantly flat surface on which none of the traditional techniques have been used. But this multiple vision is quite normal: this is how we really see things during a walk in the country.”

-Umberto Eco, The Open Work