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. 

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. 

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.