The-Island-was-a-World_catalogue-digital

16 Carmit Blumensohn and Oren Eliav in Conversation Carmit Blumensohn: Can you tell us about The Island was a World ? Oren Eliav: The cycle called The Island Was a World consists of a poem, a video, and paintings in varying combinations. It is an ongoing project, partly exhibited at the Open University Gallery. It started as a sentence and an image – The island was a world. An island is land surrounded by water. It forms as soon as it stands out from its surroundings. It simply comes into being by having shores. If the outlines blur, the island ceases to be but becomes the world, the whole of reality. In painting, an island is any spot of paint appearing on the white canvas. Somehow, as the island edges diffuse, it becomes self aware, forgetting it was an island, and remembering that it is a world. The Island experiences everything that is happening and transforming within it. Through caves, through the eyes of birds and all the creatures that inhabit it, the island observes. It writes laws, discovers patterns and codifies principles, and uses all of them for further, never-ceasing creation. The island, which lost its center and shores, disappears. The Island’s experience is shaped by "nodes", which interact, communicate and pass information, points of contact with reality. As they "spoke and heard, traded and kept, did and sang, fit and changed", the world was being made. These points of consciousness are represented by birds in their various forms. There is evidence of life on the Island. These are signs of life that once existed, but are also instructions on how it can be created. Every image stands for a code, a rule, an algorithm, or a pattern underlying the island's reality. For instance, an image of a pile of rocks. In our world, rocks arrange themselves following a "natural" or a physical law. But in the realm of images there is no gravity or any other force. The law which determines the appearance of the next pile of rocks comes only from scanning and observing countless images of piles of rocks. The island is a mathematical model that generates images from patterns hidden within it. These are collected into laws that shape and govern its existence. Like us, the island is a generative consciousness creating images of reality.