Tim Hawkinson is one of my favorite living artists. I have been thinking about his art for a long time, but his piece entitled Emoter has been more specifically on my mind recently.
Emoter, 2000
by Tim Hawkinson
This freakish self portrait is made by mechanically animating the artist’s face. The movement is determined by light sensors attached to a TV. The more action on the screen, the more the Emoter emotes. You can check out the art21 video of it in action below along with some of his other early 2000’s work.
It is ironic to think about how much more frenetic this piece would be if it were made today. This is not another treachery post—though more are in the hopper. I think the majority of us are aware of the treachery of screens in this age of the attention economy. Yet, we don’t often watch our watching.
Even still, I go on watching. Then, if Hawkinson’s freakish visage is not enough to bring me to my senses, D.H. Lawrence comes along and calls me out with harsh language that wakes me to my pigheadedness.
Mystic
by D. H. Lawrence
They call all experience of the senses mystic, when the experience is considered.
So an apple becomes mystic when I taste in it
the summer and the snows, the wild welter of earth
and the insistence of the sun.
All of which things I can surely taste in a good apple.
Though some apples taste preponderantly of water, wet and sour
and some of too much sun, brackish sweet
like lagoon-water, that has been too much sunned.
If I say I taste these things in an apple. I am called mystic, which means a liar..
The only way to eat an apple is to hog it down like a pig
and taste nothing
that is real.
But if I eat an apple, I like to eat it with all my senses awake.
Hogging it down like a pig I call the feeding of corpses.
Is there anyway to watch our screens with all our senses wide awake?
Tim Hawkinson Video: