What is this project about?

My Swan project is about close-looking and mindfulness. It’s an experiment in how strong attention and concentrated awareness can actually create what we see outside ourselves, making things be and become.

In concrete and practical terms: I’ve been looking for a swan in Humboldt Park in Chicago since October 2012. I started looking for the swan knowing (or really, believing!!) I wouldn’t see a real swan out there. But that if I kept taking photographs and making other recordings, and I kept talking and thinking about the swan— than I figured that its obvious absence would, over time, become the same as being present in all the photographs. Oddly enough: After about five and a half years, the swan actually showed up in the park–though in the form of plastic swan-shaped paddle-boats, which was quite a surprise for me, and upsetting at first. My high-minded desire to undermine our naïve notions of representation seems to have conjured a flock of kitsch swans for rent!

What made you start this project?

I read Patti Smith’s memoir about her and Robert Mapplethorpe. In the first chapter, she wrote about seeing a very impressive white swan in Humboldt Park when she was a child. I know the park very well, as I’ve lived in a house right next to it since 2001. I was very sure there was no swan in that park! At least not now. Who knows about in the 1950s!

I’d done a previous project in the park, way before this, using antique cameras, taking the same photograph of the boathouse, at least twice a week, for a year. That was a study in time and contrast and changes in my vision in the same place but at different times and lighting and feeling. For me that was a way of creating vision outside myself. I was making a relationship between photography and painting, about which I feel there is a lot false dichotomy that I hear other artists talk about. I think both are about the maker’s vision at a given moment or series of moments- as long as we give up the idea that the camera is a recording device showing an external reality. I don’t believe in an external reality outside our minds so I don’t see photography and painting as different in any way: they both MAKE IMAGES WITH THE HELP OF A MAKER’S MIND. The swan project in also a further way of me trying to show this similarity between painting and photography.

With the swan project, I was interested in photographing the absence of there actually being a swan in the park because I had stopped photographing people while I was in graduate school. I stopped making images of people because I was concerned about issues of exploitation and objectification. So making images with the subject gone was a desire I had, at that time, as an ethical impulse.  I do think that cameras are somewhat violent on their subjects– they impose a belief in objective reality that I think is dangerous, as well. Which is why I often use low-tech equipment, and not-fully-functioning older gear. I feel the rush towards new technology is inherently violent too– and somewhat fascistic, especially the psychotic belief that new technology gives a more accurate rendition of the truth, whatever-the-fuck the truth is.  So I was interested in 2012 in using the camera in a way that might defeat it’s inherent violence;  photographing a swan that was invisible or long gone— or maybe fully imaginary!! –seemed like a way of turning photography against itself and defeating its violence.

Why are you using crappy cameras and older technology (like the tape cassette)?

People and animals are, to me, both creatures of equal agency and volition and I wanted to do something addressing technological violence towards living things.  Older equipment seemed to fit for that reason too, which is maybe a very Uni-bomber or Luddite reasoning for me to have, but I also found the older technology often fit better with what I wanted to do, in the sense that I could reference what was driving this work through the media and materials, like the Patti Smith tapes being used to make audio and video recordings in the park. It became also about how the mind uses association to create the world around itself and how all of seeing, the entire action of perception, is an act of sympathetic magick that involves relationships with living, thinking things, and with our embeddedness in the particular objects of our technology.