Makom-Al-Makom_catalog-new

E18 to sink one's fingers in them or scoop up a handful of sand. In fact, visitors to Sharabani's exhibits have been caught attempting to capture the virtual objects, complete with a handful of sand (figure 9). This would suggest that the interfacing of sand and digital media fosters somatosensory arousal, and at the same time, cognitive dissonance. Ullman's installations, too, incite viewers to tactile engagement with massive bodies of rust and sand, and with the haptically suggestive sand tables. In addition, I propose that Ullman's carefully balanced mounds of earth induce a similar bodily tension as that displayed by Sharabani's dancers in Sand Table . But while these works address the unreliability of ground, and signal displacement and disembodiment in myriad ways, still, a specifically phenomenological inquiry is prone to disclose a compelling presence effect . 11 On Gumbrecht's account, this means that the installations under scrutiny tap into "a layer in our existence that simply wants the things of the world close to our skin." 12 They thus reaffirm – if only fleetingly – our presence or emplacement in a material body. Fragile Traces: Ephemeral Architectures and Views from Google Earth Ullman's career as a sculptor debuted in the 1970s, with American Earth Art as a context for his early projects. 13 In one site-specific work, performed in 1972 as part of the collective Metzer- Meisser art project, Ullman exchanged earth between two identical pits dug on the grounds of Kibbutz Metzer and Meisser, its neighboring Arab village. 14 The exchanged earth was layered with connotations of historical yearning and the actuality of violent conflict. The work invoked the Hebrew term adama (earth), which, in enfolding adam (man) and dam (blood), evokes both the painful conflict over the land and the possibility that the contested territory might be shared. 11 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. 2004. Production of Presence, What Meaning Cannot Convey . Stanford: Stanford University Press. 12 Ibid., 106. 13 Zalmona, Sands of Time , 2011, 361-371. 14 Ibid., 371 . Figure 9: Visitor scooping up sand from Sharabani's installation