no.252 | The Most Beautiful World in the World

The Graflex reveals so many beautiful worlds—future worlds made out of this one. –From a chapter entitled, The Photographer Cleo Allfrey , in The Antidote by Karen Russell

I have always thought of the making art as a world building exercise. Each new plastic vision a photograph offers is constructed from what is already there; we just couldn’t see it before. Walter Benjamin called this the “optical unconscious.” Of course, he was making a complicated argument how the distracted state one finds oneself in the cinema primes one for the absorption of political messages. It’s a kind of riff on the gesture of art seducing the viewer into contemplating unpleasant truths. I believe in that. I also believe in the special type of open invitations art creates to enter deeper modes of contemplation about who we are and how we would like to live. Like portals, pictures give us entry into new worlds contained within the pedestrian world we trod in on the daily.

This week’s picture for me is that kind of portal. A feather on the beach that contains a rainbow; a spectrum created by the rearrangement of symbols (code) of light captured in another image made on the same beach. This image is from my show that just came down from the Galveston Art Center, entitled Slow Bell.

The audio is the first track from a soundscape that played in the exhibition. I recorded the guitar on the beach and then layered the recording at home with field recordings from Galveston, lap steel, bass synth, and piano.

Dan Schmahl from Rising Tide Projects based in Galveston did an amazing job printing up an O-Card for the (inevitable) cassette and accompanying 16-page full-color book on the Riso, shown below filmed on the beach with the help of Paul Stautinger.

1. Stream tracks for free now at Porch Swing Orchestra.org/slowbell.html

2. Your favorite streaming services (except if your fav is Spotify, which should be nobody’s favorite at this point) should have it up by the time this gets posted, but for sure by 2.15.2026. Try Tidal!

3. Get the cassette by itself (or bundled with the book) and/or download on Bandcamp:

4. Get the book by itself (or with the cassette in a bundle) on Metalabel. You get free downloads if you buy the book or the bundle and can even just download the files there too.

5. Buy the book in Galveston or at the Dallas Art Fair later this spring from Rising Tide Projects .

Book Event + Performance
Saturday, February 28, 6-8 pm, with a live performance at 7pm, Do Right Hall. Brought to you by the fine folks that run WRONG GALLERY in Marfa, Texas. Book your trip. Jason Reed and I will driving out west to stretch out our 58-foot accordion-fold book, BOOM AND DUST, in the gorg space built in 1886 that was the first church of Marfa. It is an all adobe structure. It’s super cool and the ideal place to reprise the soundtrack that PSO recorded for the book live.