Table of Contents -2018

This is a table of contents,

and here is one temporary reading.

it represents a journey from the earth to the moon and back.

I began with the table. 

Currently, I’m tasked with sorting out my parents’ home, the home where I grew up, that hasn’t changed much for many many years, only decayed. I noticed the table, the one my dad made maybe even before I was born, the one that’s always been there as part of the archive of the home. 

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The table held our old bakelite Bush 22 inch television. My earliest memories of it relate to the Apollo missions, and in particular Apollo 8 with the first manned flight round the dark side of the moon. Later, the lunar landings. My memories are – as early childhood memories are – not necessarily concerned with the expected events but other things peripheral to them. – I mostly remember my mum’s emotional reaction to the men in space. – I suspect the residual visual memories I have of seeing the lunar landings are concatenated, jumbled and falsified, but images of the moon’s surface on a black and white screen are a ghost image over my earliest memories of home and technology. Without technology I would not know the moon as I do, yet with the t  v taken out of the picture, the table and the moon retain a domestic/cosmic connection. 

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I wondered if the surface of the table could stand in for the surface of the moon and how I might mediate that connection with technologies available to me now – not just by replacing one screen with another – it needed to be more human than that – by some form of interactivity – a collaboration of sorts.

The suitcase, another object from the archive, is where the aforementioned journey is archived.