This is a book about attention and memory. I am a sculptor, so it is also a book about size, dirt, artifice, work, and eye. The text is a set of stories and interruptions that pile up to make a play of overlapping loops. My organizing principle is the image of the round-trip, so one may open the book and step into it at any point. Most of Katherine Wetzel’s photographs are of a single sculpture. It is a self-portrait, a particular kind of round-trip, and it is small: one-half life-size. Called Pupil, it is jointed and movable, and I pose it. I think of it as an instrument.
So writes the sculptor Elizabeth King in the foreword of her book, Attention’s Loop, a philosophical essay in image and text. The recognizably figurative sculpture that serves as the focus of the book is both subject and speaker, and performs in a sequence of brief stories that address and enact the complexity of representation, and of consciousness itself. This artist’s book was first published in 1999 and anticipates questions now at the heart of today’s efforts to distinguish human from artificial intelligence.
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Attention's Loop: A Sculptor's Reverie on the Coexistence of Substance and Spirit
Elizabeth King and Katherine Wetzel
This is a book about attention and memory. I am a sculptor, so it is also a book about size, dirt, artifice, work, and eye. The text is a set of stories and interruptions that pile up to make a play of overlapping loops. My organizing principle is the image of the round-trip, so one may open the book and step into it at any point. Most of Katherine Wetzel’s photographs are of a single sculpture. It is a self-portrait, a particular kind of round-trip, and it is small: one-half life-size. Called Pupil, it is jointed and movable, and I pose it. I think of it as an instrument.
So writes the sculptor Elizabeth King in the foreword of her book, Attention’s Loop, a philosophical essay in image and text. The recognizably figurative sculpture that serves as the focus of the book is both subject and speaker, and performs in a sequence of brief stories that address and enact the complexity of representation, and of consciousness itself. This artist’s book was first published in 1999 and anticipates questions now at the heart of today’s efforts to distinguish human from artificial intelligence.