Territory/Problem v.2

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1.     NOTES:

How to produce an exchange? THE PROBLEM

Bodies are not vessels but are produced via exchange.

Borders that I’m dealing with are biological;

Things that cross and are exchanged are fluid and fermenting.

Turn questions into statements: all silence is sound, all pollution is food. These are problems worth having and define different territories.

MONDAY 5 pm

What are bodies and how do they come about?

2.     TERRITORY:

I make strange fermented beverages that allow for bodies of different species to mix, exchange, and communicate within a bounded space.

A body is an environment. An environment is an ecosystem. An ecosystem is an ever-flowing dynamic exchange of energy and materials. A body is an ever-flowing dynamic exchange of energy and materials, like a jungle, marketplace, puddle, etc. It is always an enormous amount of different things that constitute it, and always open to the world outside itself (another body/other bodies?). The types of exchanges define the type of body. A body is a collective action.

Strange is non-normative. The normative is unreflective business-as-usual. Strange is anything that begins to deviate from this; evolution is always strange, a perpetual queering. Seeing something as strange is being unsure about its value.

Beverages are a fluid body that allow for exchanges across biological borders. Like any other body, they are always many. Beverages are active, dynamic, changing, and produce change in the environment it may find itself in. They are almost human in the way they can affect other humans. They find themselves in the same nature/culture dichotomous problem that we humans do, and are great at solving this problem in many different ways at once.

Species are normative containers and cultural borders. Fluid bodies can cross these borders as they do biological ones; exchange endangers all species involved.

Exchange is always communication. One might say it’s always language, although this language isn’t known until the exchange happens. Like any language, it’s based in material. To exchange with something is to begin a dialogue with it. This dialogue is never neutral, however, and very often has physical repercussions. At the very best it’s a positive evolutionary emergence. At the very worse, it can be a kind of inter-species physical brawl or illness that establishes dominance. Somewhere in between it can be a lively conversation, debate, or argument. It’s also important to say that exchange isn’t based on the reciprocal and equivalent logic of economics; it’s probably very rarely equal and evaluates each material component in terms of its own values. In this way, exchange is always anti-capitalist.

Fermentation is an evolution, transmutation, or alchemy in the sense that it transforms bodies into different affective bodies. It is a political agreement that establishes a culture within an environment that can be contained within a glass jar in my studio.

Boundaries are enacted, always, even biological ones. They are enacted for the sake of organization, but are always fleeting and being poked through. Organization is useful, but always temporary never universal.  If we allow ourselves to be poked, fleeting, we will find we are (or can be) perpetually reorganized; the opposite of organized is reorganized, not disorganized. Boundaries are created in order to be created again.

To repeat my territory:

I make queer politico-alchemical body/fluids that allow for environments of different containers to converse, debate, or brawl in order to agree upon and establish reorganizations. Environments must combine at designated meeting places for this to happen, and these meeting places are themselves meta-environments, subject to the same flows and processes.

3.     The problem (worth having):

Environments are ecosystems, flows and exchanges. Conversations/debates (no brawls) reorganize and reconstitute environments. (How is one selective with this process such that we arrive at an environment worth having?)

Translation: Bodies are environmental, produced relationally through symbiosis, exchange, associations. What a body is: up for grabs. How does one make a body worth having? What due processes need to happen for this to occur?

Another related problem: the Universe is bodies, through-and-through.