paper

I began to consider what rules and obstacles are, and how we might be deflected by them and see things in different ways, or as new things. I considered the things in my life that are fixtures, not necessarily obstacles, but those that occupy spaces in my thoughts. Each of these spaces has a surface, an organizational system. I took about 15 feet of white paper and double sided scotch tape and began to make the paper meander and coil on itself to make multiple enclosed spaces, one for each thing that I am pre-occupied with. It would take hundreds of bent surfaces to represent the number of thoughts that I multi-task on. 15 feet was not enough.

I found that to make the paper meander in S shapes was easy, but to create circles in it required an abrupt fold, like a cusp of a change. If sufficient meanders and circle shapes are made, the floppy paper becomes self supporting, collapsing on the edges of the structure. I want to make small holes through the walls of the paper to allow light to pass from one cavity to the next.

plate glass gravel water sound

I continued with the glass/water/rocks experiments. First I should note a few leftovers that I found when I returned to my assemblage.

When the water evaporated, a powdery deposit remained.

This substance was chalky and did not hold together well but left some interesting patterns, particularly on the stones themselves.

I left what silt was in the glass, then prepared to try an experiment to the previous with plate glass instead of a goblet. The assemblage:

-Scrap of plate glass

-Gravel from previous (silt washed off)

-Small container of water to wet rocks

-Hammer (for just in case)

Similar to the previous iteration, I held the glass with the rocks and water on top and agitated laterally. The glass, being flat did not hold the rocks well. 

Notably the individual rocks did not move uniformly. Some moved greater distances when agitated and some appeared to move more in certain directions than others. A whole mess of research could be done on the effects of shape size and mass on movement in these circumstances. 

I however was in no mood for analysis or physics. Instead I decided to try a different approach and decided to try to get the plate to resonate with the rocks on top.

When I was researching resonance the other day I came across forms know as Chlandi patterns. If the rocks one uses are small enough (say sand) and placed upon a vibrating plate with free edges, they will form regular patterns dependent upon the mode of harmonic excitation of the system. 

Chlandi patterns:

from “The Physics of Sound” by Berg and Stork

I figured I would try for something more like this, and that it was OK to continue using the gravel because the results for sand are already known

I slid the plate so that most of it hung off the edge of the desk and placed my backpack on it so that the plate would not fall off.

I attempted to make the plate resonate by tapping with a finger and a pencil. I was not satisfied with the results. I remembered a description of a Chlandi apparatus where the plate was driven from a central string which itsself was excited by musical bow. I didn't have one nor a way to get a string through the center of the glass but I looked around for something similar. I found some thin plastic tubing. This I drew along the edge f the glass farthest from the desk.

This made some interesting noise and left behind some cool shavings

 I also spotted a flue brush with a handle made of twisted wire - I tried this on the edge. It was much better at creating vibrations - the texture of the tightly twisted wire seems to do a very good job of 'grabbing' the edge of the glass just right.

Note that this quickly erodes the sharp edge of the glass. This is potentially very useful! I don't know of any other way to do this besides expensive diamond grit abrasives. Also if done in a more controlled manner it appears as though this would begin to cut the glass like a saw (certain types of PVC saw work in this way). This also leaves behind a fine dust of metal and glass.

The really interesting stuff happened though when I tried to record the sounds. I will play them in class because I haven't figured out how to do that here and also I think the real breakthrough one will have a cool effect over Skype.

Echolocation

http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/the-blind-man-who-taught-himself-to-see-20120504

So this is incredible.

Daniel Kish has taught himself echolocation by clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth... he's so good at it that he rides his bike in LA traffic and mountain bikes.

Fun fact: with echolocation, you can "see" around corners and behind you.

Different textures trap/throw sound really differently, so in a certain sense, it is very possible to "see" texture in a very tactile way.

Buoyancy - why and how.

In researching buoyancy, I looked a several sources on the web; wikipedia offered a lengthy involved discussion about columns of pressure in water and containers.  It was a little too involved for me to focus for long on, but I did get the gist of what was said.

Simpler explanations described buoyancy as a comparative relationship between the density of water to the density of a floating object.  The formula for determining the density of water is

mass of water / volume of container = density

When the density of the water is greater than the density of the object, the object will float.

Does this seem logical to me?  Not always.  Why don't more things float then?  Why won't a small pebble float instead of plop and sink?  I guess that one pertains more to the column explanation than the container explanation.  Also, I wonder, why if I crushed the pebble into dust, the dust flakes would float?  Same volume of material?  I guess the dust is not as dense although it would be the same volume, or would it?

Something I know about buoyancy and animal fur is that some animals fur or hair becomes more hollow in the winter in order to conserve body heat, therefore, the carcass of an animal will float on the water in the wintertime, but in the summertime it sinks.

Why does Ivory Soap float?  Does it really have to do with purity, or is that all marketing blather lather?  As I suspected, it  has nothing or very little to do with purity.  It floats because there are more air bubbles whipped into it during the manufacturing process.  Whether it has perfume or not has nothing to do or a negligible effect on whether or not the bar floats.  On the other hand, despite the fact that it has air in it, I've never really noticed that the Ivory bar doesn't last as long as other comparable bars, of course triple milled soap lasts longer than Ivory.  No bubbles, and lots of perfume.

Some things I would like to test for buoyance: sheets of wax, brass wire tied into a sort of netting, empty jars, full jars, a book maybe, cooking oil (why does an oil slick stay on the surface of the water when it's so dense and disgusting?).  I noticed alot of what looked like oil on the river last weekend, I wondered not only why it floats on top, but why it all seems to stay together in a puddle the way it does.

Things I did since Wednesday

As far as ferments go...

1. I stomped a barrel of apples I had sitting around the studio with my feet. It stained my toes.
2. I hand-pressed (with my fingers, I mean) a couple barrels of moldy apples. One of the barrels I combined with the leftover mash from a previous ferment. The mash smells moldy but will hopefully ferment instead of mold further.
3. I made a mouth cider using dogwood tree fruit and crabapples. I had to combine the two fruits because dogwood gave me cottonmouth while crabapples made me drool. The mash blew the top off the first jar so I split it in two and today the tops blew off again. I was drinking beer before I chewed, so maybe I got some desirable yeast in the culture.
4. As far as other ferments go, I inherited a SCOBI mother and made a 4 gallon tank.
5. I also received a sourdough culture from 1981, so I'm going to be doing some baking as well.
6. I tried isolating the yeast from my toes by doing smears on agar plates, but I think that might only grow bacteria. I have to do research on this, but will be trying to find ways to grow only the yeast or a symbiosis of bacteria+yeast.

bag time

I took a video while inside the bag with a camera that was held stationary.  I was interested in trying to capture the incredible wealth of sound that exists in a stationary location when you expand your "skin" outward and bring a foreign device between this skin and your former boundary of self.  This was hard: the recording doesn't show what I experienced, which was a soundscape of a huge landscape.  Watch the video here:

https://vimeo.com/52347170

In addition to this, I also tied a huge bag of frozen chicken around my hand, covered my head, and attempted to feel around with that.  There is great potential here, I think: the shape of the world changes when you are experiencing it with a different extremity.  I wanted to explore this further, but I ran out of time before class.  

The recording/mapping of the shrunken body is harder than imagined.  What are ways this could be changed?  How to eliminate the rest of the body? How to isolate different parts of the body?  How to shrink the whole body simultaneously?  The constant locating of being able to touch your body/feel distances between different parts of yourself feels like a roadblock here. 

New potential emergent qualities: 

The potential for the experience of huge spaces to exist in small spaces. 

The potential for multiple skins that being to feel viscerally connected to your experience of self.  

The potential for the shape of the world to change radically based on changing the shape/weight of your appendages.  

Breaking two

To further explore the properties of glass, gravel and rocks I thought of a few similar trials.

The primary theme with these three is to use a flat sheet of glass instead of the bulbous form of a goblet.    One possibility is to use lay the glass flat and rub the gravel across its surface repeatedly. For some time now I have imagined it might be a good meditative exercise to polish a large flat stone. This does not deal with the resonant qualities of the glass that I liked so much from my first trial. To affect resonance I could use a similar assemblage with a horizontal plane of glass and gravel; these would in this case be driven by a speaker at varying frequencies. 

The final assemblage idea I had was more similar to my first trial. In this permutation a piece of plate glass is leaned agains the wall and gravel and water are dumped onto its surface near the top and allowed to roll down the surface into a catching bucket.

After all rocks have reached the bottom, the upper bucket is filled with the contents of the lower and the process is repeated.

http://youtu.be/97P2atefeig 

(High Quality Video)

100%

 

 

Low quality below.

 

I wanted to see my china floating today on the river in time with the water lapping.  I put the china between two sheets of plastic saran wrap and wondered if the boyance of the wrap would keep the china from sinking.   I took photos and set the videos to a narrative of found sounds to experience the china waves in time with sound waves.  Although the story is abstract, its very pleasing and harmonious to me.  I enjoyed this greatly.

Surfaces

www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5lX_jW3muc&feature=plcp


This is the link to watch a movie of splits and fissures developing on a stretchy surface. I tried this with a balloon, a piece of thick rubber, and a stretchy snake toy. Plastic wrap worked the best.

My task has been to make a non-deliberative, democratic, utopian, mechanism that changes (moves). My first thought was to make a game exploring the utopian ideal of health care for all, but I changed my mind. There are too many games, and I had too fixed an idea of the game that I wanted to make; I did not  feel this was a useful thing to pursue. Then I got sick, and the significance of access to treatment for strep became especially important. I could go to the doctor and get antibiotics, but the kids I teach may not be able to. I developed scarlet fever, which if left untreated can lead to heart, brain, kidney or lung problems. 

I was so miserable that I decided to take antibiotics, even though they kill beneficial bacteria as well as the harmful ones. My project became more concerned with germ warfare: me beating strep.

I researched the nature of strep infections and found out that this bacterium has adapted to infecting us amazingly well. Its surface can mimic human tissue so that macrophages cannot easily find it and kill it. Then, if our white blood cells do attack it, they are injured by the rupture of the strep bacteria. An immune response occurs in which there is a cytokine wave of activity: our throat swells, we get a furred tongue, blood shot eyes, runny nose, fever, if the response is especially strong we can even attack our own tissues, making the access for strep even easier. Strep is present in all body secretions.

Not only are there physical responses, hosts can become abruptly obsessive- compulsive, absent minded, depressed, inattentive, paranoid and have recurring tics when strep toxins attack the brain. 

If not treated, these mental conditions can become permanent. Treatment with antibiotics quickly reduces the effects. Physically, most strep cases are resolved without medicine in about ten days, and perhaps this is the ideal thing to do if no side effects seem to be occurring. What if it is left untreated? At its worst, gangrene, meningitis, erysipelas, defective heart, kidney, septic skin that flakes off, missing fingers...Mentally, obsessive behaviors and depression, and inability to concentrate.

What experiments could be done with this? This is not a bacteria that I want to experiment with. I don’t have enough knowledge of science to know what the results might mean. I can make theories and not be able to test them. 

I kept a record of food cravings, questions, behaviors and moods throughout.

Apologized to my gut for killing its lovely bacteria

Is dementia made worse by long lived strep infections?

Do people on Greek islands live longer because they have less exposure to strep, is it their relatively stress free lives that make infections less likely, or their diet?

Do kids have a pre-sickness, off-color mood swing? (anecdotally, teachers said yes when I asked)

What happens to kids who have ongoing strep infections? Do they become inattentive, and is this a reason for ADD diagnosis? 

I am unusually bad tempered. I could bite.

I am very tired

I cannot eat because I feel sick

I keep forgetting to take the antibiotics

I crave yogurt and sauerkraut

I am mixed up about which day it is

I forget everything, make mistakes, don’t remember the important stuff at the grocery store, send out teacher comments a month early by mistake (but only to one teacher)

My skin is flaking off and I have blisters on my hands

Terrible arguments with Bill, we are both tired, though he has no infection.

Wednesday

I suddenly feel better

I think a happy thought, and realize I haven’t been having any mental dialog for days

Eat lots of yogurt

Had an egg. Big mistake!

Drink lots of hot tea

Sleep a lot

Rash is going away

I rethink my experiments: are behaviors I have because of strep? Is strep controlling my actions because having me forget to take antibiotics is good for it? I make a comparison of behaviors that are good for ME and bad for IT. I realize I am behaving in ways that are good for IT, and resolve to behave in ways that are bad for IT, and good for ME

I feel an urge I don't usually have: to clean surfaces. I get a sponge and cleanser and clean the shower, the sink, do an extra hot wash of stuff in the dishwasher, including tooth brushes.

I still cannot think of ways to do actual experiments with this bacteria that are real. I can only do thought experiments that have metaphorical results.

Go for a walk

Notice the sun is glinting off ripples in the pond and the reflections are making tiny strobe-like stripes on the pond grasses, and these are reflected in the water surface. I didn’t have a camera and wished I did.

I think about surfaces: surfaces that break let in strep, or anything else

My skin is a game board, a surface separating me from out there

Surfaces separate worlds, and shape events

Surfaces can be physical, but they could also be mental constructions.

I watch the sun go down in the water surface and realize that the sun would be going up, not down if I filmed the reflection only.

Try to think of tangible experiments I could do with surfaces:

If I put a piece of metallic foil on an elastic surface and stretched it, the foil would crack.

Resolve to take pictures of things that have surfaces that hint at containing worlds: we have a lot of derelict trailer homes and houses around, the Republican signs, and the anti-gay marriage signs have been beaten up over night; they lie bent and ripped in the road, lots of people around us own small lapdogs and leave them in the car while they go shopping. I see them staring out the windows looking anxious and frantic.

Wonder what conditions allow a condition of one world to have an effect in another e.g. getting sick, fighting and warring, revolutions. Is it lots of small things that escalate and impinge on our awareness, and suddenly we do something? I can’t test this hypothesis. 

Silicates...

My most recent experiment for 'break like waves' was to try to break rocks in the way that water waves break rocks. I placed gravel from my driveway into a glass goblet and filled with enough water to just cover the rocks. Initially my plan had been to use a can but because glass is more similar to sand and rock I used the glass goblet instead.

The assemblage

             I held the goblet in my left hand and shook it back and forth as I did some reading. The rocks swirl and some water spilled out. After a short time I began to notice differences in the sound of the movement. Instead of just swishing and scraping I began to notice more distinct and isolated sounds, perhaps the sounds of individual rocks striking the sides of the container. It was almost musical. I assume that this was a combination of the reduction in water level, changes in shaking pattern and my brain beginning to tune out the more uniform droning noises.
             After approximately 15 minutes I noticed that I could occasionally feel the glass resonating in my hand. After roughly 20 min I noticed a crack beginning to extend from a chip in the glasses' rim (this was present before the experiment). The water had become opaque and looked like grey milk.
             For the most part the rocks lay in a single layer on the bottom, but occasionally one would jump out of this layer and roll around on top of the others. Sometimes freed individuals would circle around the mass of other stones. These began to occur after approximately 30 minutes.
             After approximately 1 hr. the glass was set down and a new horizontal crack formed.

           There was not much water left in the glass. Water was again added to bring the level again close to the starting amount. The inside of the glass began to be coated with a grey powdery substance, particularly around the rim. During handling an audible 'ping' was heard and it was noted that one of the cracks had expanded. Shaking continued for perhaps another half hour.
           I set the project down for some time while I was at my job and continued it later after work at Ben and Rachel's house. I again refilled the  water and continued agitation for approximately an hour. During this time I did not notice much except that the existing cracks continued to grow.
           I continued again two days later, again refilling the water first. After approximately 45 minutes I noticed that the crack had grown to nearly encircle the goblet. Pieces were  loose and fissures were visibly wider.

Fifteen minutes later several significant pieces of the rim broke off.

The vessel still held the rocks and water so I continued. After about 15 minutes more the remainder of the rim broke off.

I continued agitating and for the next ten minutes rocks fell out of the glass one at a time.

I continued to agitate for some time more. The system appears to have reached a temporarily stable state: there are no visible cracks in the remaining glass and there are less rocks and water contained within. I hypothesize that it would take several more hours before the next dramatic event.

Germ warfare

I am writing an instruction manual for an invasion by strep, and a resistance manual for humans. Research into strep shows that it has evolved over eons to invade us, and we cooperate passively.

Mary's Rules

My rules for coping with troubling internal dialogues that disrupt my creative processes:

Trust, but be skeptical.

Disappear, but be present.

Shine and help someone else to shine.

Experience and share Yes more often

Draw no foregone conclusions

The show isn't finished until the fat lady sings

Go somewhere new once a week

Take more photos and learn to use my new DSL

No software

Go to two new shooting locations each week.

Explore more, doubt and worry less. 
 

bag on head

I decided to put myself through a series of physical experiments in vertigo and blindness in order to start to find some atypical ways of experiencing systems that feel familiar. 

First, I covered my head with two trash bags to cancel any light from coming through.  Then I spun around in multiple directions in order to disorient myself.  Then I attempted to navigate the space without using my hands, periodically spinning whenever I began to find myself in familiar territory.  I did this in my living room, up and down the stairs to my bedroom, and finally, over the railing down into my kitchen.  

I was interested in exploring ineffective communication of the body to the environment, and ways that this disintegrates down when the body is displaced from its normal modes of data collection.  I was also thinking about the concept of a "skin" of a body as being an entire environment that is uninterrogated and allowed to exist without challenge or critique from the outside world.  The idea of expanding and contracting skins congruent with safety were especially interesting to me. 

Points of interest: 

The double bag was very thick.  Depending on how I moved my head, the potential for hyperventilating was very possible.  This actually was pretty interesting, and I spent most of all three experiments playing with the line of physical comfort.  There was something that was momentarily interesting for me in following the breath- only moving at the speed and quality that my breath was allowed to come.  Forcing your voluntary movements to follow an automatic system that is suddenly made vulnerable is pretty interesting to me, and I'd like to explore this further. It brought the sense of orientation inside really deeply, and I lost track of the edges of my body and nervousness of pain really quickly. 

There were moments when leading with my head felt very interesting- asking your body to lead with what feels most vulnerable felt very alienating from normal navigation-  moments when I trusted the environment and allowed myself to move freely while leading with my head were pretty fascinating: negotiating the body's desire to keep itself safe/in control with total abandonment of physical safety felt like pretty interesting territory.  

Things that felt safe/unchallenging to sense of body's boundaries: over awareness of height or speed or lack of breath pulled me back into the body. Moments of dizziness or total disorientation felt really promising.  I think if there was a way to do this longer/slower/in an unfamiliar space that would be informative.  

https://vimeo.com/52111647

Coevolution as Communication

Alright so for my experiment I'm implicating a few different things that are currently in my studio, including myself. Here are pictures:

 So here I have a snake I found and let go in the studio, a batch of "Rachel's Right Foot Cider", two carnivorous plants (Venus fly trap and Honey dew), moldy rose hips, a "Ben's Mouth Cider" that didn't turn into alcohol but something else, and fruit flies eating my apples. I'm also trying desperately to add another important element into the mix: a colony of ants. I went out in search of one locally but was frustrated not to find any. I then tried to buy a colony, but as it turns out its illegal to ship queen ants across state lines. I've emailed entomology labs on campus to give me a colony of Myrmica rubra or Formica. I'm planning on setting up an ecosystem in my lab with things that seem complementary in some cases and strange in others (again, including myself).

I think the snake's a dead end. I let it go and I'm quite sure I'll never see it again. The cider is interesting... I've been drinking some each day in order to get my own microbiotic populations used to it. At first I had an upset stomach, and at this point it still doesn't feel totally normal but its getting better. The two predatory plants I got to interact with the fruitflies that have been eating my produce. I also have a couple failures--the moldy rosehips and the unknown dangerous saliva-fruit juice mix that might be botulism (but probably not). How these will fit into the system, I don't yet know. When I get the ants, I expect they will predate on the fruit fly larvae as well as the fruit, and possible might find the fungus and botulism edible. As for myself, I'm an agent that holds this web together--I have to water the plants, will have to keep the ant nest moist, and will also have to compete with the fruit flies and ants for the fruit. Maybe I will also find some way to utilize the jar of potential botulism.

There is a circle here: apples to cider to me drinking it that changes my internal symbionts but these apples are temporal, rotting, and being eaten by other things before that has a chance to happen. I just need some goddamn ants...

Some rules

Rules

Don’t follow rules slavishly. A rule, after all, gives a boundary to what you do.

Don’t be concrete about what you want to do at the outset of doing it. Having a fixed goal ripples backward through a process and cuts off possibilities for exploration. So, understand that there are different reasons for having tasks, some need goals, others do not. 

Don’t clarify what you are doing until the last possible moment, notice as much as possible about it.

Your work shouldn’t be a pleasing arrangement of stuff (or an ugly one). It should be more useful than that. It should have a purpose, be a mechanism for change.

Some rules from an NYT article 10/24/12... in principle: be happy

“We wake up late and always take naps. I don’t even open my office until 11 a.m. because no one comes before then.” He took a sip of his wine. “Have you noticed that no one wears a watch here? No clock is working correctly. When you invite someone to lunch, they might come at 10 a.m. or 6 p.m. We simply don’t care about the clock here.”

Leriadis also talked about local “mountain tea,” made from dried herbs endemic to the island, which is enjoyed as an end-of-the-day cocktail. He mentioned wild marjoram, sage (flaskomilia), a type of mint tea (fliskouni), rosemary and a drink made from boiling dandelion leaves and adding a little lemon. “People here think they’re drinking a comforting beverage, but they all double as medicine,” Leriadis said. Honey, too, is treated as a panacea. “They have types of honey here you won’t see anyplace else in the world,” he said. “They use it for everything from treating wounds to curing hangovers, or for treating influenza. Old people here will start their day with a spoonful of honey. They take it like medicine.”...

The couple were born in a nearby village, they told me. They married in their early 20s and raised five children on Thanasis’s pay as a lumberjack. Like that of almost all of Ikaria’s traditional folk, their daily routine unfolded much the way Leriadis had described it: Wake naturally, work in the garden, have a late lunch, take a nap. At sunset, they either visited neighbors or neighbors visited them. Their diet was also typical: a breakfast of goat’s milk, wine, sage tea or coffee, honey and bread. Lunch was almost always beans (lentils, garbanzos), potatoes, greens (fennel, dandelion or a spinachlike green called horta) and whatever seasonal vegetables their garden produced; dinner was bread and goat’s milk. At Christmas and Easter, they would slaughter the family pig and enjoy small portions of larded pork for the next several months...

Read the whole article for some great rules:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/magazine/the-island-where-people-forget-to-die.html?hp

Changed my mind

I am not completely satisfied with using a game to explore the utopian, participatory, democratic, non-deliberative, mechanical, problem solving experience. A game though, seems the best way to do it. Using the monopoly structure as a model for a game seems like using a recipe, and perhaps it is this that is unsatisfactory to me. Changing from this model seems important, but if it is changed too much it could lose the advantage of being a process that players area already familiar with. Re-defining games might be needed. 

As play occurs if a board is used, we would see it from above, and have a clue about what to expect, and make strategies. If the game were played inside a life-size maze with branching passages, players would have no idea of what the future might hold, being unable to see it. In this sense, it would be more accurate, and more jarring. It would also reflect a natural system more.

Recipes for Co-evolution

1.     Change your microflora by consuming alternative populations of microbial communities: ferment cider and drink it, for instance. When your stomach gets upset, drink small quantities each day until equilibrium is reached, then start again. Make a body b&b for microorganisms.

2.     Contract some viral or bacterial illness; allow your immune system to adapt and destroy it; contract a mutated version of the illness a couple weeks later.

3.     Develop a new method of gathering fruits and nuts that undermine the squirrels’ strategies. Allow them to develop other strategies and then undermine those as well.

4.     Start an email debate with somebody and never stop responding to them.

5.     Acquire a new symbiot and allow it to lose all of its redundant, unnecessary genetic material while it potentially gains new material that may benefit you or it.

6.     Live with a colony of insects (bees, ants, wasps, etc) as a type of symbiot or ‘pet’. Allow it to perform some function for you (clean your floor, pollinate your plants, make honey, edible larvae, etc.) while you develop strategies to coexist with it so that you don’t get bit in your sleep, or stung, or your food isn’t stolen…

7.     Allow two colonies to live together in your space. Allow them to develop different functions and utilize different resources accordingly. Maybe create new resources.

8.     Inoculate the webs of your toes with the most desirable culture of yeast such that any cider or wine you stomp will be the best in the land. Soak feet in the best bath of these ciders to continue to develop the best community.

9.     Inoculate your mouth with the best culture of yeast such that any apples or grapes or fruit you chew and spit out will turn into the best alcoholic beverage in the land. Drink the best batches in order to propagate the best culture.

10. Illegally poach wild game from a protected park (so that there are no influences other than yourself). Use one strategy, allow animals to develop or learn their own strategies for avoidance, and then develop a new one again.

Spinning some wheels...

Experiments for delving deeper into flawed communication systems and possible ruptures occurring through closeness. Emphasis on code/translation.  
  
(An attempt to move away from bodies.)


1.  Light a house on fire.  Use some tinder and the crumpled up evacuation route from the house for the first spark.

2.  Become a psychrotropic bacterium.  Seek states in milk where you will be kept at exactly 7 degrees Celsius.  Seek to become ingested.  Discover if you have been effectively pasteurized.      

3.  Tell somebody you love but rarely see that you want to see them in a public place, and you might be running a little late.  Don't show up.  Use google.maps to watch the location for any sign of them.  Spend whole days waiting for the image to change.

4.   Leave a large bowl of water on top of a radiator for one year.  Do not refill it.  Leave it through the changing seasons and through the heater being turned on and then off again.

5.  Write source code geared not for the understanding computer programers, but for the understanding of computers.  Develop a language that only the computers would understand.   Distribute widely.  

6. Wrap a chair in strips of fabric into long strips.  Cover the chair so that it becomes cocooned with a small protected internal space.  Light it from the inside.  Realize this space is not for you.

While trying to get bodies out of the way, I find myself instinctively gravitating toward systems that need bodies to operate. Bodies are still implicit in all of these examples.  The interest fulcrum then becomes to examine what happens in the absence of a body, in the crumbling of these systems.   In many ways, this feels kind of reactionary- maybe I am not allowing myself to relax into a new place and examine the potentials, and am just making work about the lack of what was.  More to the point: I think I am just hiding the body in the moment before or after the situations I am describing, not really removing them.  I'd like to push/explore this a little further with more time.

Cracks

        Wave



Leaf

 

 

 

 

                Layers and filters

five alternatives

Five possibilities for 'breaking like waves,' done quantity over quality, attempting to eschew former methodologies (personal, embodied experience, participatory, lived). 

1. One way that waves break things is through continued battering over time. To break rocks, as waves do, this piece would consist of a rock tumbler, full of rocks. The piece occurs as the rocks are tumbled into sand.

2. Another way is to consider the military. The plan for this iteration is an assault. Waves of soldiers are sent towards a fortification until it is breakthrough occurs.

3. Waves can break things by imparting too much energy. The instruction for this iteration is to derive the resonant frequency of a wine glass then bombard it with sound waves of that frequency. The sounds sets the glass into resonance and energy builds up in the structure. The piece is complete when the vibrations cause the glass to shatter. 

4. This piece is purely visual. It is a painting of water waves breaking like they do. The underpainting will be yellow. Layers of blue and green are glazed on to create an image mimetic of semi-translucent water waves, breaking like they do. 

5. A dog (or other animal) is tied to an elastic system of restraint which allows some movement. The force with which the system pulls the animal back towards its anchor point is proportional to distance from the anchor point. The animal is underfed for a day or two and a choice food item is placed just outside the reach of the animal (as permitted by the system). The animal repeatedly advances towards the food before becoming exhausted and being pulled back by the system. This is similar to the way in which waves advance and retreat on a shoreline (minus the food impetus). As the animal tires, successive attempts fall shorter and shorter, similar to the approach of low tide.

Trees, Amber, Cracks, Contrails and Scans

Five new processes which work around my blocks (No symbols or metaphors).

1.  Creating withTree rings as a physical index of time, weather and industry From Tree rings in new growth: tree(a) linked in a forest to the matched rings of an older tree(b).  Then,regresses backward in time, matching the rings from tree(c) to tree (d) and backward until forest is exhausted of older trees, the (e) link is then traced back to logging activities of early New England:  furniture, housing timbers, exports back to England; and /or trees found in use by Native Americans.  Also re trees: to create new paths and trails based on these physical linkages of newer trees to older trees.

 

In the same regard, making new trails as indicated by tree genetics: how do trees within particular forests repopulate themselves, which trees are parent trees to younger trees, can tree lines be proven through tree's genetic code, can genetic code of trees in one forest be linked backed to progressively older world forests

 

2.  Creative works from Amber and inclusions as a physical index of time, weather, genetics, botany, geology and world bio-systems, habitats and eco-systems

 

 

 

 

3.  Creative works based on cracks as physical memory of time and index of disruptive forces:

From Cracks, to cracks in cement, to cracks in sidewalks, to cracks in the foundations of houses, in walls, in ceilings and roofs; to cracks we peer into (chics emerging from eggs, cracks in fences, cracks in a wall to spy with), to cracks as both positives and negative spaces, to cracks that observe us, to cracks in a psyche, to cracks in collective psyche, to cracks in reality, to cracks in time / place

 

4.  Photos or other visual memories (non-permanent) of physical movement indexed: contrails, waves / wakes from shipping lanes, steam / exhaust from trains, tracks of snowmobilers, ATVs and sleds in snow, snow shoe tracks, tracks of tires in mud, sneaker prints, animal prints in sand, snow and mud

 

 

 

5.  Brain scans as physical and visual index to memory and memory loss: Alzheimer’s, coma survivors, amnesiacs, forgetful people, scans of people with brilliant memory: musicians, savants, children's memory vs. elder memory, memory issues for women in hormonal change - pregnancy, menopause, hormonal replacement therapy

 

A participatory, democratic, utopian, non-deliberatory game-machine

 My task of creating a participatory problem solving machine, with democratic, utopian and non-deliberative (organized in such a way as to avoid deliberation) qualities seemed impossible, but as I listened to Republicans declare that they will cripple steps towards national health care, I become very angry and a solution crystallized in my mind.  The machine could be in the form of a dice game in which the experience of taking part would provide information, provoke an emotional response and transformative action in solving the problem of denial of health care to millions of people. A dice and random picks from consequence cards would govern most of the game.

Theoretically, our culture has options about health care and healthy living, and allows us to choose how we live, even though some choices are very hard to bring about. Most cannot revert to living off the land, or to a utopian simple existence, so we are largely glued into the processes of every day modernity in which access to medical care is denied because of economics. Even in cultures where there is little knowledge or ability to provide care, humanitarian actions and counseling are not withheld because of an institutionalized resolve not to provide them. Knowing that you may not be qualified to receive care is part of the fabric of US life. It is an integral condition that we seem unable to alter. What ever one’s view on having a longer life, or taking up too many resources on the planet, we have undemocratic inequity in access to care. We deny sections of the community the dignity of being cared about. We shut them out of being able to make the choice about length and quality of life.

I decided to make a game similar to Monopoly but played with real cash, with money amounts based on health insurance premiums, and minimum wage. Community Chest and Chance Cards would be researched and have consequences based on actual misfortunes of uninsured people, and the anxieties of individuals trying to keep insurance through their jobs. Consequences could also be good outcomes e.g. spontaneous remissions, or secret donors paying a bill, establishment of nationalized health care. Game pieces would be miniature (for the table top version) people: a pregnant woman, a child, a person with a pre-existing condition, a self-employed person, a part- time worker, a homeless person. Properties would be medicines, hospital beds, dental offices, emergency rooms, organic vegetable gardens, other countries with health care systems, etc. Games typically have a fictional, feel good quality to them, but my game will not have this soft appeal. I intend it to be given to people who make decisions about health policy, to acquaint them with the reality of life with no access to health care. The goal is to survive, and it will not be enjoyable.

Death (leaving the game) would be the penalty for a player who runs out of money. Who would win? The last player to die. Death in my game would not be literal, although it would be a tempting way of making the game very memorable! Much as I want to compel reform, bringing about actual death is not part of the game. The goal is to provide role play for decision makers so that they can fully understand the difficulties of life without access to health care. The game will not provide a solution to the problem of access to health care. Rather, it will offer an experience that can make problem solving more desirable, more urgent and relevant to decision makers who appear disconnected and ignorant about the problem.

Could this game be played by other parts of “Earth”? It could be devised so that each non-human species could have their concerns examined, or each biological habitat, or plant form. Assuming that destruction of habitat, loss of food, polluted water, over-hunting, predation, disease, climate change, old-age, decline, reproduction are all  concerns of living things.  If humans were playing, we would be playing on another biome’s or organism’s behalf. How would we really know what another life-form’s concerns are? What if my cat were playing? Could she even play, or be aware of gaming or luck? Non-living things presumably don’t have concerns. Perhaps they worry about entropy?