UC San Diego

Fe (Plasma Iron Turnover) is a work, or compilation of interrelating works, endeavoring to generate a custom strategy for conducting experimental information exploration. Beginning with a single event in world news, the explosion of a gas plant in Western Australia in June of 2008, Fe (Plasma Iron Turnover) teases out the physical, contextual, and subtextual cues of the story to develop and articulate a methodology for discovering related events, both backwards and forwards in history, and for producing visual artworks, written text, and materializing the transitions between events, objects, and ideas. The following text is a written component of this larger project. This text, entitled Kunmurrng/Osteoblast: X-ray Painting and Radiant Energy, links the practice of X-ray painting by an indigenous language group in Australia to the immediate reception of X-ray technology in Europe and America at the turn of the twentieth-century. A middle ground can be found between these seemingly disparate practices and cultures, one of strategic viewing. "Kunmurrng/Osteoblast: X-ray Painting and Radiant Energy" is not only a unit within the larger project of Fe (Plasma Iron Turnover), but also a forum for organizing principles integral to "Fe (Plasma Iron Turnover); namely, the important moment of initial perception and what information is afforded to the viewer for making subsequent decisions