Soundust, 2019, 0:17, Sound file. Recording about dust salvaged from internet which contains information about dust and precautions.

Four arbitrary selected Videos of Youtube contributors with Dust related themes. The connection to Youtube platform is direct. The videos have not been edited or visually appropriated maintaining the initial authorship.

Yans Hapins:

ssissa:

juan pérez gargallo:

Nitesh Kumar:

Although hardly visible, dust is solid mater. Not necessarily local, nor current. Dust in homes, offices, and other human environments contains small amounts of plant pollen, human and animal hairs, defunct skin cells, textile fibers, paper fibers, minerals from outdoor soil, burnt meteorite particles, and many other materials which may be found in the local environment; it is a fine collection of anthropology, geology, astrophysics.

This fine substance which can hardly be evidenced by the eye when analysed in the microscope contains intriguing and reliable information regarding respective environments, populations, urban or rural circumstances, architectural elements, work maters, weather conditions, geological phenomena, astrophysical influences; microcosmic and macrocosmic history.

Regardless its multiple references dust almost definitely escapes our observation or interest. Due to its luck of exchange value, dust fails to meet the standards of two dominant cultures of western culture: Visual culture or more specifically phantasmagoria and market values falling into the space of what is collectively unseen, neglected and/or repressed giving dust a protagonist role in the collective unconscious.

As a primarily non-commodified mater with rich references I found interesting to make an attempt to capture the unseen and the ephemeral by the means of today ignoring the vertical, hierarchical structures which dictate what is interesting and of value.

Who is Flexiguru,  tatiana pepper, Juan Pérez Gargallo, ssissa, and Nitesh Kumar? Their YouTube clips settle on the space of YouTube servers like a fine dust of low visibility. Videos of low global attention -definitely far from iconic lifestyle and the influencer culture-, the videos of the selected contributors capture life scenes of average -if any- beauty and domestic or work environments indifferent to promoted living ideals demonstrating an almost tactile realism.

Similarly to the YouTube clips, Soundust is an audio piece of unknown authors, sourced from the internet. In this sound piece, a male voice warns that air contains dust particles which can be harming. The sound installation works as a visually immaterial sculpture resonating with the space. The fact that it is invisible doesn’t make it any less of existing. On the contrary it alludes the materiality necessary for the internet in order to exist: servers, energy, workers’ labour; a vast mentainance mechanism which allows information flow. Like dust, sound touches surfaces, walls, ceiling, floor and flows in the space in an invisible yet existing process. Although the purpose it served is still unknown, the sound footage is an object on its own right, able to fit in a new context without further references.

The curtain is a proposal for installation in the space carrying itself a self-provoking conflict. It is a noticeable construct made of heavy PVC sheets of transparent quality. Transparency alludes to psychological terminology in group therapy and self-improvement practices (transparency of self, aims, objectives,emotions, thoughts) yet it is a construction used to maintain air purity and a nearly clinical environment by keeping dust away. As a physical entity the curtain construct discloses the precarity of our times, the one of the body entering into a new space with the risk of receiving or leaving on it impurities.

[The picture is an online-sourced one and in the whole project I am not contributing with a work made by myself but rather collecting elements of no attribution of aesthetic interest from the inexhaustible internetic source.]