beginning again is a repetitive performative action of volleying a balloon into space. Dull thuds of gloved hands against the balloon’s skin and footsteps of the performer occur again and again and again. The performer initiates but does not control the trajectory or speed of the balloon’s arc which is affected by its own resistance and the room’s air currents. Stein’s notion of time as a continuous present is of “more and more of everything, beginning and beginning and beginning.”[1] Time is the present, the now, not a continuum of the past-present-future. The present is repetition: the sense of difference lies with the perceiver. ArtLab Digital Features, Visual Art Department, Western University.
[1] Gertrude Stein, “Composition as Explanation” (Poetry Foundation, Chicago) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69481/composition-as-explanation.
