#third meaning

The installation will be on view until October 2023. It’s definitely worth a visit if you’re in Seattle.

The indifference of freedom of position of the supplementary signifier in relation to the narrative allows us to situate with some exactitude the historical, political, theoretical task accomplished by Eisenstein.  In his work, the story (the diegetic, anecdotal representation) is not destroyed--quite the contrary: what finer story than that of Ivan or Potemkin? This importance given to the narrative is necessary in order to be understood in a society which, unable to resolve the contradictions of history without a long political transaction, draws support (provisionally?) from mythical (narrative) solutions.  The contemporary problem is not to destroy the narrative but to subvert it; today's task is to dissociate subversion from destruction: the presence of an obtuse, supplementary, third meaning--if only in a few images, but then as an imperishable signature, as a seal endorsing the whole of the work (and the whole of his work)--radically recasts the theoretical status of the anecdote:  the story (the diegesis) is no longer just a strong system (the millennial system of narrative) but also and contradictorily a simple space, a field of permanences and permutations.  It becomes the configuration, that stage, whose false limits multiply the signifier's permutational play, that vast trace which, by difference, compels what SME himself calls a vertical reading, that false order which permits the turning of the pure series, the aleatory combination (chance is crude, a signifier on the cheap) and the attainment of a structuration which slips away from the inside.  It can thus be said that with SME we have to reverse the cliche according to which the more gratuitous a meaning, the more it will appear as a mere parasite of the story being narrated; on the contrary, it is this story which here finds itself in some parametric to the signifier for which is is now merely the field of displacement, the constitutive negativity, or, again, the fellow-traveler.

-Roland Barthes | The Third Meaning

Apollo Extension Test 1 and Apollo Test 5, 20 Sept. to 1 Oct. 1965, at Apollo Mesa Dike in the Hopi Buttes Volcanic Field, Territory of the Navajo Nation, Arizona (south of Dilkon); (a) Joe O'Connor in early version of Apollo spacesuit; USGS photo P45, F96547c USGS Open-File Report 2005-1190, Figure 031a.

Brittany: One who was a dinosaur in a previous life. She usually demonstrates her past life through excessive roaring when stressful situations are encountered. "Hear that Brittany roar!"