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<h2 class="gmail-western"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:"Liberation Sans",sans-serif;font-weight:normal">Dear
Empyrists,</span><br></h2>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">Followers,
fellows and contributors to the UNFINISHED series of the past almost
month, Greetings!</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">It
has been a remarkable set of threads to wear on the eyes, in the
mind, and woven through the hard disks, drives and devices we hold
close and probably dear. Thanks so much to Shu Lea for hosting and
her care in facilitating the beginnings and endings. I have been
lurking mostly during busy presence-focused weeks here in FI.</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">I
wish to address in this thread of unfinishedness what I hope is the
familiar trope or concept of *What is left behind* in ephemeral
practices, and *What remains* from our actions or conceptions. Since
sometime 2003-4, in my biography, now here & <<a href="http://www.agryfp.info/">www.agryfp.info</a>>
I have used the following statement "What is left behind as
social, digital, material and ephemeral residue of 'being t/here' has
been a consistent concern"</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">I
offer an unfinished process, one that in the background has been a
guiding motivation of some kind for me: 'castles in the air' (ref:
title of a traditional scottish song, as recorded by James
Ballantyne, 19th C., a popular image or ‘meme’ ever since) that
was poetic, virtual, and personally or collectively historical.</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">+++
Quarryscar (1999) +++</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt"><a href="https://archive.org/details/agryfp-1999-quarryscar">https://archive.org/details/agryfp-1999-quarryscar</a></font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">My
example, ‘Quarryscar’ is a project that I conceived 20 years ago,
and was the basis of 2 funding applications to Scottish Arts Council
Public Arts fund, which they wisely *I still reckon* turned down
their financial support. At the time I only had the vision, not the
skill or capacity arguably to realise the project. My budget was
laughable, my production schedule naive. Although I was disappointed
it didn't happen at that time, I am happy it still stands unfinished,
archived as something 'not-yet-become' (ref: Ernst Bloch, The
Principle of Hope Vol.1), as a motivator to keep going, stored with
unrealised potential..</font></font></p><p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt"><br></font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">More
recently, i</font></font><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">n
2016, I put online to my <a href="http://archive.org">archive.org</a> account the related files
</font></font><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">[linked
above]</font></font><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">.
On this archive page is a collection of files (see righthand panel on
the link above) which relate to a digital 3D visualisation project to
virtually 'fill in' Craigfoot Quarry that exists in the 'Castle
Craig' spur of the South-facing Ochil Hills above Tillicoultry,
Clackmannanshire, Central Scotland.</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">(I
also uploaded a photo album of scanned newspaper articles to FB </font></font><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">[&
today will also upload to archive]</font></font><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">:
</font></font><a href="https://www.facebook.com/agryfp/media_set?set=a.10154454317888343">https://www.facebook.com/agryfp/media_set?set=a.10154454317888343</a>
..)</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><br></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">Anyways,
to return back in time back then in 1999 when the project was
conceived, I was living again, age 24-5, at my parents house in
Tillicoultry, after returning from a 5-month travel to Finland,
without own apartment or work (I lived in Glasgow previously), but
dreaming of undertaking master studies in virtual reality
environments. Living again, almost directly under the quarry, approx
400m away from the quarry entrance, the glen and the quarry
influenced me again as it had in my late teenage years. To reveal
something personal, a vulnerability added to the unsuccessful funding
application documents: The quarry was also the site of a recorded as
accidental death of my aunt in the early 1990s, in which she fell
from the top edge of the quarry to the bottom. The physical scar in
the landscape, was also, for my immediate family, an emotional one to
also bear witness in the everyday life. I was certain, then, that my
project concept was also my way to recognise & acknowledge the
impact my aunt's death had in my family, aswell as process this 'in
the face' of living with this scar, for the first time directly every
day since I left to Glasgow, and it's School of Art in autumn 1993. </font></font>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:"Liberation Sans",sans-serif">My
project proposed to involve the combination of landscape 3D contour
data, photogrammetry, digital animation graphics & modelling.
Ambitious technically, indeed, arguably unfeasable without large
cultural grants 5 or 10 times more that I was asking for. The making
of, or the result of the artefacts proposed, was also to encourage
discussions with local members of the community about local history;
ecological activism; industrial surface mining & extraction as
aggregate stone matter (mostly to built roads); visual, ecological,
particle and/or noise pollution.</span><br></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">There
was also an intriguing historical archaeological reference that a
renowned old Pict fortress of the Maeatae tribe sat on the brow of
land that was carved away by the quarry.. One that overlooked their
supposed southern boundary to (Brythonic) Goddodin Manaw lands, and
further beyond over the Firth of Forth waters and Antonine’s wall
the Northen limit of Roman occupation and colonisation on the British
Isle(s).</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">While
there was evidence of small scale quarrying since 1880s, the
Craigfoot Quarry opened in 1930 by R.W. Menzies, exploiting a fault
of Quartz-Dolerite, also known as Whinstone. There was further
evidence in local Alloa Advertiser newspapers of local residential &
municipal protests at the expansion of the quarry from mid to later
decades of the 20th Century, as the quarry size permanently affected
the South -facing vista of the Ochil Hills.</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">To
return to the imaginary and the poetic reference of the *castle in
the air or sky*.. The ancient indigenous castle that used to have
material and emotional ground underneath it to exist, but little else
now as resource. Instead of making roads & highways, I was
thinking instead of informative routes and dialogical ways of
engaging present, personal & collective past and imaginary
futures. It is a path that I have continued ever since, especially in
my Msc thesis from University of Teesside, and my very longplay
Doctor of Arts study at Media Lab, University of Art and Design
Helsinki, now Aalto University ARTS Media dept. I present myself and
will do in defence, as being invested in ‘autoarchaeologies’
(abstract as slides below in reference links).</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><br></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">I
reflect 20 years later, that it was probably for the best that this
project's imaginary of filling in the land lies undone.</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">Firstly,
it probably wouldn't have been that useful for my close family to
make a public art work from this context & location. Even if it
might have been a process I needed to engage with conceptually, it
would have been difficult to not reveal the personal side of my
relationship to the quarry if the project became public. My aunt’s
death was a small note only in the local newspaper at the time, and I
hardly discussed it with my friends of the time. It was buried under
or among the psycho-dramatic aggregate of small town life, hanging
out on the street in shop-door gangs, getting wasted more or less,
and eventually absorbed into provincial Scottish/Northern British
Happy Hardcore or London-style Hardcore Jungle techno-utopias of Rave
Culture (The later I nowadays claim ‘saved my/our life(s)’ from
cynicism and apathy of post-Thacherite social collapse).. The themes
seeped into my Art School application portfolio, and out a little
within my Fine Art Printmaking degree work.. </font></font>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">A
virtual, digital skin, covering up the gap in the photographic
landscape, even if semi-realistic visually, I learned later after
studying computer graphics & virtual environments in 2000-2001,
is still uncanny valley never-mind uncanny quarry.</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">The
quarry was closed, as I write, at least 5 years ago. Physical
land-scaping of the site--or it's filling in and re-landscaping to be
precise--is only now happening with the gentle and slow processes of
mother nature, healing at it's own pace. Certainly not by
Tillicoultry Quarries Ltd. it seems, 20 years later, despite
historical requirements or conditions to do so, in exchange for
planning permissions granted by the local municipality Central Region
or Clackmannanshire Council to expand the quarry at different times
of its later history, when environmentalism was a recurring concern
among local resident 'citizens'.</font></font></p><p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt"><br></font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">In
writing this elaborated statement, the unfinished nature of the
project, exposure and reflection now meets the current times. If the
project is ever attempted in the future, and it is certainly very
feasible technically 20 years later, the question is, would it make
any difference? Is it possible to mix the poetic and the literal
concrete? </font></font>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">When
scars exist on our flesh and blood bodies we accept them as survivor
marks of some pain and healing. When scars exist in our emotional
landscape, we encourage revisiting them and gradually putting them to
rest, to fill them in, let’s say, connecting to the Quarryscar
imaginary that has ‘not-yet-become’.. Can we accept this in our
ecological and physical landscape? </font></font></p><p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">When is activism about the land
done? Like, done. Over. Is it ever?</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">After
all natureculture and the ecosystems are forever and ongoing, we are
part of, but will carry on regardless without us humans in the energy
links and exchange.</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">Thanks
for reading this far, I now hand these words over for you. </font></font>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">My
best,</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">andrew</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><br></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">....</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">Master
thesis & contemporary research related to stratigraphical
metaphors and autoarchaeology:’</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt"><a href="https://archive.org/details/agryfp-2018-towards-autoarchaeological-archiving">https://archive.org/details/agryfp-2018-towards-autoarchaeological-archiving</a></font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt"><a href="https://archive.org/details/paterson-2001-agryfp-cagta-thesis">https://archive.org/details/paterson-2001-agryfp-cagta-thesis</a>
</font></font>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt">Supplementary
materials which reference to the location & context in 1999:</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt"><a href="http://www.rampantscotland.com/songs/blsongs_castles.htm">http://www.rampantscotland.com/songs/blsongs_castles.htm</a></font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt"><a href="http://www.tillicoultryquarries.com/locations/craigfoot-quarry">http://www.tillicoultryquarries.com/locations/craigfoot-quarry</a></font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt"><a href="https://archive.org/details/paterson-1999-agryfp-tillicoultry-mill-glen">https://archive.org/details/paterson-1999-agryfp-tillicoultry-mill-glen</a></font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt"><a href="https://archive.org/details/agryfp-1999-fibreoptic-one-sec-flicker">https://archive.org/details/agryfp-1999-fibreoptic-one-sec-flicker</a></font></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><font face="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><font style="font-size:11pt"><a href="https://archive.org/details/agryfp-2005-1999-archaeology-and-the-sea">https://archive.org/details/agryfp-2005-1999-archaeology-and-the-sea</a>
</font></font>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;line-height:100%"><br>
</p><div><br></div>-- <br><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><pre cols="72">--
andrew gryf paterson
<a href="http://m.fi" target="_blank">m.fi</a> +358 50402 3828 [permanent, telegram]
<a href="http://agryfp.info" target="_blank">http://agryfp.info</a> [<a href="http://archive.org/details/@agryfp" target="_blank">archive.org/details/@agryfp</a>]
socialmedia id: agryfp
</pre>
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