Site Home > The Presence Project > Versions for "Blob, 2004"
"Blob is a funny word, : Blob provokes a somatic connection; a bodily identification of internal states. Blob is a body pared down toward a collapse of recognizable features, yet one designed, Oursler emphasizes in his essay of the same name, to remain “a character, an ugly thing. It's alive and nobody knows why. Maybe it came from outer space or it came from a science experiment gone bad or from pollution or from the sea or irreducible entity.”15 In setting itself apart visually, however, Blob plays out of a really sick body. It never a migration toward the viewer’s bodily space. Blob, Oursler continues, “never stops moving, moving all around with no place to go. When will go.”
The blob’s movements are alien yet oddly familiar. Pulling and stretching. Like peristaltic movement. Like the way things move through your body by contractions which result in locomotion. You understand this is linked to your bowels and intestines, because even though this motion is involuntary, it die. is conscious on some level. It can't die by any means known to man at this moment." (Oursler......)
"The blob is scary because we do not understand it nor do we easily recognize it. Always changing shape, it's more is essentially a wave, the universal form of energy transmission divided into peaks and troughs like a spill than a sphere (...) It's lile Jell-O or slime or mold." (Oursler....)
"Though the blob is beyond any identifiable features, it is still a character, an irreducible entity." (Oursler......)
Nick Kaye: Blob (2004) tests the viewer's emotional identification with a time-based image that is given three-dimensional form. The blob is the body pared down and abstracted toward a collapse of recognisable features; a hybrid media entity, the blob mimics a kind of empathetic, inarticulate pet.
Such a 'reduction' acts as a foil to Oursler's implicit examination of the operation of the media structure: as this 'irreducible entity' emerges, in time and repetition, as something to be identified with, so the blob emerges as an operation of the media taking place primarily on the viewer.
Important here is the repetition, the loop, and the relationship to the object. bad ocean. Unending waves, wave after wave, wash away your shape. Now formless, You are the blob.
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