Since its conception Oculi’s axis has been Australia, its

ostensible home. As well as its physical base, Australia has been

the place its members have felt compelled - even obligated -

to explore most thoroughly.



For Australians in general however - geographically isolated

as we may be - the digital revolution has exposed us to the

world and the world to us in ways that, prior to this era of

ultra-flux, were inconceivable.



The digitisation of information has fallen in lock step with the

march of globalisation. As a result, we are now required to

have an increasingly internationalist outlook on geo-politics,

trade and economics, defence, refugee crises and, tangentially,

climate change. Such manifestations of globalisation have

broadened - even confused - our notions of home.



Nowadays, borders as we know them are threatened not only

by Neo-colonialism or imperialism, divine entitlement or

marauding armies and the puppet masters that control them,

but by creeping deserts, rising water levels and mass migrations

of starving people on whose land seeds can no longer be sewn.

Conversely, infrastructure built from the earth’s delicate resources

to satisfy the demands of our shrinking world, simultaneously

erode and divide the homes and habitats of the creatures to

whom borders serve no other purpose than to confine.



It is in this atmosphere that, in many ways, the necessity for

a concept of home has never been more fundamental

- as a counterweight to everything else that pulls us from it.

Home is difficult to define yet open to interpretation. From

the heart of home as we most commonly know it: in bed with

a lover or nursing a child, a favourite place or one’s spiritual

haven; to one’s tribe or place within a broader community:

suburbia, a region, a province, a country or continent.



There are symbols that define a home: a flag, a street sign, a

pile of sticks or a cardboard box, a fence or a wall, a gabled

roof or the ocean that surrounds an island; and those that

evoke: a letterbox, a postcard, a change of season, a memory

or the view from an aeroplane window and the journeys that

take us to and fro.



The idea of home is as fluid as the boundaries that define us

physically and as transient as the human race itself.



Andrew Quilty

April 2013. New York City

http://www.oculi.com.au