Hollis Frampton Selection 1: Ordinary Matter (1972)

A vision of a journey, during which the eye of the mind drives headlong through Salisbury Cloister (a monument to enclosure), Brooklyn Bridge (a monument to connection), Stonehenge (a monument to the intercourse between consciousness and LIGHT)...visiting along the way diverse meadows, barns, waters where I now live; and ending in the remembered cornfields of my childhood. The soundtrack annexes, as mantram, the Wade-Giles syllabary of the Chinese language. I suppose there is extra-ordinary matter. Almost everything in the world is made of ordinary matter. But where I got the title was... simple in a way. We think of matter as being gas, liquid, and solid, let s say; as occupying three states, and those are the ones that we experience directly. But there is something that physicists call plasma, which is very attenuated gas: a hydrogen atom; then you go on for a few yards, there is another hydrogen atom... There is hardly anything there. And that plasma behaves differently from ordinary matter. Well, it turns out that most of the matter, most of the substance of the universe, of the whole universe, is not the ordinary matter which we are familiar with, but this plasma, and what we are tuned to is these little cloths of dense, organized stuff, which we go flying through as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world. But it turns out that it s a very special case in the universe indeed (...). I suppose I think of it as a kind of acceleration from Travelling matte, the eye is groping and feeling its way and staggering, and so forth. And in Ordinary matter the need somehow to worry about those words and still photographs, and so forth, is behind. Ordinary matter is for me a kind of ecstatic, headlong dive. (And it goes through nature, architecture, high peaks of contemporary civilization, and through the oldest monuments that we have - the scope of it in time and space is so wide...) and finally the eye that was trying to see out, through the little hole - through the fist, in Travelling matte opens up and does, to an extent, really see out, or I feel it does, and ends with something that is a very old image in my eye, of running through corn fields as a child, with the leaves slapping me in the face, and the sun hitting me, and so forth... - Jonas Mekas interviews Hollis Frampton, Village Voice