forged textures

Today I burned the last vapours of a hangover on a photo escapade along the coastline. While I'd wanted to capture the root system of a huge gnarly old stump, some other geezer with a serious-looking tripod and lens selection was all over the thing, and I wasn't feeling especially social, so I gave myself another exercise. It involves an idea prompted by a sci-fi book I read about how people might live low-tech inside a massive interstellar sphere (here called a Fullerene orb, I suppose after Buckminster Fuller?). They have no natural gravity, so the rich among them create their own with centrifugal forces, whereas the poor grow fragile and spindly. The author plays with the concept pretty successfully, and my thought was that gravity is a discreet value that determines EVERYTHING we do, so much so, that we tend design our environment with it as a given. But what if we can trick ourselves to give the impression that it can be tampered with? Would our estimations of beauty change? Would we rightly know what we're even looking at anymore? So I thought I'd torture the camera to produce some textured pictures that play with our vernacular and reflexive reliance of gravity. Both as a determining force on our actions and also as a means of orienting ourselves. The outcome was pretty interesting. Many pictures almost produce vertigo, and the hidden patterns we might otherwise miss seem to leap right out. It's almost that as soon as the mind realizes it can't quick grasp the aspect, the imagination quickly creates a new possibility. Also, while taking the pictures, I found that in order to reject the referent force of gravity, I had to focus more on axes and weighted symmetry.
The first picture is from a set I took of the moon last week when I played with exposure, and then the rest are from today's late-afternoon/sunset. Hope they're interesting and not proof positive that I finally drank myself into idiocy last night.