"little spoon/big spoon/what's in a spoon"
An experiment:
I began by thinking about bodies as objects. As a three dimensional tensile object that bumps up against a variety of stimuli and learns navigational patterns and norms through trial and error, a body is in many ways an animated object. This pushes up on paradigms of mind/body and Westernized concepts of bodies and feminist rejections of these things, but it is not only a response to these things. It is an awkward middle ground: from firmly within these paradigms, I wanted to slow down, to observe, to record, to poke, to be led. A phenomenological interaction body, I realized, could be useful. Assume nothing. Observe everything.
As somebody who has worked a lot with performance and the “knowledge of the body” I was interested in getting under/behind/through/away from some of the instructive looping patterns of what we think we know about What The Body Knows. I wanted to purposefully fuck up some of what I knew about bodies. What is the invisible universe we depend on in order to navigate our bodies through space? What are the shifting pressures that must exist in order for us to describe ourselves as “resting” on it?
With these points in mind, I went through a long series of experiments all designed to de-center the body and focus in on pressures. I wanted the experiments to lead me: this is an area where it is too easy to half-heartedly do an experiment in order to support what you already knew. I wanted to surprise and scare myself in pursuit of what the experiments needed.
These experiments included:
A Problem Worth Having:
All of these experiments lead me to a specific kind of understanding moving through the world: a slowed down (sometimes by speeding up) attention paid to our environments and our bodies as objects in these things. What are the ways that the landscape around us and inside us interacts? How does it ask attention be paid? How do we give it or not give it? After lots of writing and distilling, my problem became:
2. Two diagrams
1. Paradigm:
The paradigm I am responding to is the general area of body/mind dualism and western ideas of bodies and movements. This is marked by: unaware moments of moving through space. Only noticing the things that obstruct us from what we want. Allowing the physical to be the means to the end- the end being us achieving a new mental space. The physical becomes a disembodied way of moving from a pre-decided point A to point B.
Becoming what pushes back against you- losing track, making patterns, forgetting signs. Allowing your environment to move you. Allowing your boundaries to expand or contract. A trail obscured, moving inward to disperse outward, falling into/becoming what pushes back.
Elements to watch for that indicate paradigm adhesion: tracking devices, subconscious pattern making- the things that grab you, the things that push you. Success-oriented movement.
2. Intentions:
Large scale:
There will be translation issues... the ways we inhabit spaces literally and abstractly (Physical movement and also through language/relationships) What does how we move mean? How could how we move change us? Not in a schmultzy sense, but quite literally: chemically and physically, how does how we move change us?
There are issues of tracking and recording when new ways of moving are discovered: self and space are fusing. What we used to call space is now “that which pushes back against us” and what we used to call the self is now that which pushes back against you. How can this be recorded? How can it be tracked? How can it be talked about?
This project:
I intend for people's trajectories through space to snag, falter, and realign by becoming what pushes back against them. I intend to somehow be able to capture some signifier of this in order to allow dialogues to extend beyond the lived experience. I expect this to fail me at every turn and be instructive in new ways of trying.
3. Speech:
Clarity is key. I think that the attitude/culture/language that surrounds this territory should always be explicit and clear.
Here’s an example of a potential spoken/written entry point around explicit explanation of these ideas:
“In these exercises/for the next hour/for the length of this exhibit/in your imagination/whatever is applicable, it would be cool if we could attempt to decenter and disembody how we think about our physical experience. Imagine your body is no longer a complex and incredibly detailed site of controlled cultural meanings and memories. It has become a receptive object. No other meaning is necessary. The boundaries of where you think you end and begin are no longer necessarily relevant. Allow things to push on you. Imagine yourself as a liquid: endlessly adaptive and receptive.”
* there are multiple other ways to get at this. I’m interested in exploring all of them.
4. Action:
In order to experience this work, people would have to participate on some level. This potentially varies from explicit physical involvement to a mediated empathetic experience. The levels of mediation are important- writing about the experience, videos, pictures- all the methods of showing somebody else experiencing these things have the potential to be pretty interesting/valuable, but I think ONLY with in combination of the shared vulnerability of participating in making your own meaning. I think the individual experience is important. Also, it could start to feel counterproductive/hypocritical really quickly if I were to make a performance about the internal stage and its transformative potentials and ask people to sit in a proscenium arch theater in the dark, staring straight forward with their eyeballs. The modes of experience are what’s being experimented with, so I think that needs to happen literally.
Here's some possibilities I'd like to explore:
Group exploration: people will be guided through a series of exercises in some kind of unfamiliar location. Initially this will happen in an unfamiliar location to most (such as a remote wood or field), and then people will be taken to a gallery or into a crowded area to do the same exercises in different environments. The exercises will primarily be designed to interrupt normal modes of moving through space. Senses would potentially be altered somehow. Bag on head, etc. This would be done in a workshop style in a group, with instructions given by me.
Geocaching: this will be solitary experimentation, with instructions to complete some kind of "task" given on paper or potentially via an iPod or walkman or some shit like that. People will come to the experiment on their own, participate alone, and leave when they are done. There is no record or documentation of their participation.
Viewership: the ideas above, mediated somehow into a more traditional performance. This is potentially the most challenging. Interactive theater comes to mind. How can I move people to move through this traditional mode differently? Bribery. Flattery. Some desire to be included. Make participation more exciting than observation.
5. Livelihood:
I imagine this project to be financially viable. It will be funded through enticing online campaigns, as well as me seeking out temporary employments in the vein of seeking out these experiences and experiments. In addition, I will use my funded time at UMaine to help support this.
Possibilities:
* work with furniture makers. I’m getting increasingly interested in objects that hold weight, and the potential flexibilities they hold. How does tension hold? How are boundaries defined? What pushes back? What expectations are put on the body? On repetition.
* work with engineers. I feel like they would have interesting things to say about becoming what pushes back. How do different substances push? What is suspension? How do things bear weight? What are physical limits? How are they defined?
* work with biologists. What happens chemically in the body when we move? When we attach emotional experience to moving (making ourselves safe/unsafe, etc)?
6. Effort:
I want to create openings and opportunities for people/me to be surprised and led by their own experiences I want to muddy the waters of the body as a service object that facilitates higher planes of knowing. Perfection would look like finding ways where people can use their own bodies to confront their ingrained movement tracks and expectations. Perfection would look like crafting some kind of vehicle where people would be able to/be willing to participate in these things easily.
7. Mindfulness:
These are not all discrete pieces, but things that create a general trajectory:
It is a trajectory of personal and public practices/exposures beginning to blur. Exploring these things is a highly personal experience, and the ways in which it moves out towards others seems to be most often an experience of asking other people to participate in highly personal ways, albeit sometimes mediated by other levels of experiencing through empathy (documentation or mediated performance). The real core of this territory demands experience, which is a difficult and exciting thing to ask people to do. A sense of care and empathy is needed in designing these experiments. Focused attention is demanded.
8. Concentration:
In regards to method of sharing this work: I think the more traditional modes of theater are not relevant to this particular trajectory. I would like to begin experimenting with combining the performative, the interactive, and the concept of a workshop all into one cohesive unit, which would be able to be create an unstable situation that would be instructive about what is effective. I think that this is a terrain that is asking for more inhabitants, and that flexibility will be key, as the population of the terrain is wildly variable. Nothing is happening until the experiments begin.
Colliding or overlapping worlds to explore
1. Premature babies: get in touch with the local hospital, figure out how to get on the list of people who hold premature babies. Who can I talk to about the research behind this.
2. Training service animals: talk to the people on campus who train security dogs. What is the process like for people with new issues of blindness... learning to trust what pulls you.
3. Discussion with people who meditate. Get in touch with that club on campus. What’s that experience like? What is the muscle memory like? How do they manage pain? What is the general experience of the body?
4. Self-identified heavy drinkers that I know: what do you like about the feeling of being drinking? How can you describe your body in terms of lightness and heaviness? What do you have to say about the idea of falling?
5. Call Mathew Ingrim from the National Forest Service’s specialized unit of forest fire fighters: Smoke Jumpers. Talk to him about the experiences of sewing parachutes that you will eventually use to jump out of a plane. Talk to him about the pressure changes of the environment when you are about to jump, when you jump, when you begin to fall, and when you hit the ground. How does this inform other kinds of movement? Is walking different when you spend all your time jumping out of planes?
* For point three and four... add additional experiments in MEDIATION... how is writing about different than talking about different than experiencing? What are effective ways of mediating these experiences? Is anything to be gained by mediating some of these experiences? Or is it all about direct individual experience?
Written research
6. Johnson, Mark. “The Meaning of the Body: aesthetics of human understanding”.
Making vital connections between cognitive science, movement, and meaning making.
7. Deluze, Gilles. “Difference and Repetition”.
8. Ahmed, Sarah. “Queer Phenomonology”.
9. Research the biological chemical processes of what happens to people when they experience adrenaline that could be associated with bodies moving in space. Fear, etc.
10. Work with concepts of “body mountains” with Myra Morales from the Sense Lab. What does it mean to attempt to lose your body in the physical experience of another? What is proximity? What is nearness? What are boundaries in this area?
Pivot points from class
“The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
-Marshall McLuhan
“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”
-Marshall McLuhan
“What is happening, when, as a result of the abolition of great distances, everything is equally far and equally near? What is this uniformity in which everything is neither near nor far? is, as it were, without distance?”
- Heidegger
“We succeed in reaching it by attending what is near.”
-Heidegger
“The tick responds to three stimuli and three only: first light... it will go to the edge of a branch and sit there for years without needing anything else. It follows light to the end of the branch. Then, smell. It smells an animal passing under the branch, and it drops. Then, it looks for the least hairy part of the animal and it drinks.”
- Deluze
The sensory arc of desire. You see. You move toward, drawn in by smell/other senses. Finally, you arrive. You inhabit, and you touch. You see. You move toward, drawn in-
-class notes during “Emergence” lecture.
a two month examination of pressures, pushes, and crumblings
An experiment:
I began by thinking about bodies as objects. As a three dimensional tensile object that bumps up against a variety of stimuli and learns navigational patterns and norms through trial and error, a body is in many ways an animated object. This pushes up on paradigms of mind/body and Westernized concepts of bodies and feminist rejections of these things, but it is not only a response to these things. It is an awkward middle ground: from firmly within these paradigms, I wanted to slow down, to observe, to record, to poke, to be led. A phenomenological interaction body, I realized, could be useful. Assume nothing. Observe everything.
As somebody who has worked a lot with performance and the “knowledge of the body” I was interested in getting under/behind/through/away from some of the instructive looping patterns of what we think we know about What The Body Knows. I wanted to purposefully fuck up some of what I knew about bodies. What is the invisible universe we depend on in order to navigate our bodies through space? What are the shifting pressures that must exist in order for us to describe ourselves as “resting” on it?
With these points in mind, I went through a long series of experiments all designed to de-center the body and focus in on pressures. I wanted the experiments to lead me: this is an area where it is too easy to half-heartedly do an experiment in order to support what you already knew. I wanted to surprise and scare myself in pursuit of what the experiments needed.
These experiments included:
a) Placing myself in a position of physical minority: laying under piles of leaves for long periods of time, laying at the wrong end of sleeping bags, etc.
b) moving through very familiar physical sequences (i.e., making coffee, making a bed) and recording the sound and visual through a variety of technologies. Observing the difference in the qualities of these experiences when they become mediated or separated from the immediate translation of your own body.
c) Interfering with normal homing devices and sonars: the eyes, touch, taste, etc: using a variety of methods and modes to attempt to confuse the brain. Odd pairings of sensations, etc.
…. as always, these experiments unearthed things that became the new norms of my experiment universe. (note: experiment + universe = experiverse.)
* hierarchy of attention in movement, especially in moments of uncertainty or fear.
* the heat, intensity, and general loudness of objects in relation to a human body that is paying attention. How things speak to a body.
* traditional modes of moving in other mammals or objects that require different things from a human body: echolocation, boat sonar, following smell trails, etc.
A Problem Worth Having:
All of these experiments lead me to a specific kind of understanding moving through the world: a slowed down (sometimes by speeding up) attention paid to our environments and our bodies as objects in these things. What are the ways that the landscape around us and inside us interacts? How does it ask attention be paid? How do we give it or not give it? After lots of writing and distilling, my problem became:
Becoming what pushes back against you.
2. Two diagrams
Eight Questions
1. Paradigm:
The paradigm I am responding to is the general area of body/mind dualism and western ideas of bodies and movements. This is marked by: unaware moments of moving through space. Only noticing the things that obstruct us from what we want. Allowing the physical to be the means to the end- the end being us achieving a new mental space. The physical becomes a disembodied way of moving from a pre-decided point A to point B.
Becoming what pushes back against you- losing track, making patterns, forgetting signs. Allowing your environment to move you. Allowing your boundaries to expand or contract. A trail obscured, moving inward to disperse outward, falling into/becoming what pushes back.
Elements to watch for that indicate paradigm adhesion: tracking devices, subconscious pattern making- the things that grab you, the things that push you. Success-oriented movement.
2. Intentions:
Large scale:
There will be translation issues... the ways we inhabit spaces literally and abstractly (Physical movement and also through language/relationships) What does how we move mean? How could how we move change us? Not in a schmultzy sense, but quite literally: chemically and physically, how does how we move change us?
There are issues of tracking and recording when new ways of moving are discovered: self and space are fusing. What we used to call space is now “that which pushes back against us” and what we used to call the self is now that which pushes back against you. How can this be recorded? How can it be tracked? How can it be talked about?
This project:
I intend for people's trajectories through space to snag, falter, and realign by becoming what pushes back against them. I intend to somehow be able to capture some signifier of this in order to allow dialogues to extend beyond the lived experience. I expect this to fail me at every turn and be instructive in new ways of trying.
3. Speech:
Clarity is key. I think that the attitude/culture/language that surrounds this territory should always be explicit and clear.
Here’s an example of a potential spoken/written entry point around explicit explanation of these ideas:
“In these exercises/for the next hour/for the length of this exhibit/in your imagination/whatever is applicable, it would be cool if we could attempt to decenter and disembody how we think about our physical experience. Imagine your body is no longer a complex and incredibly detailed site of controlled cultural meanings and memories. It has become a receptive object. No other meaning is necessary. The boundaries of where you think you end and begin are no longer necessarily relevant. Allow things to push on you. Imagine yourself as a liquid: endlessly adaptive and receptive.”
* there are multiple other ways to get at this. I’m interested in exploring all of them.
4. Action:
In order to experience this work, people would have to participate on some level. This potentially varies from explicit physical involvement to a mediated empathetic experience. The levels of mediation are important- writing about the experience, videos, pictures- all the methods of showing somebody else experiencing these things have the potential to be pretty interesting/valuable, but I think ONLY with in combination of the shared vulnerability of participating in making your own meaning. I think the individual experience is important. Also, it could start to feel counterproductive/hypocritical really quickly if I were to make a performance about the internal stage and its transformative potentials and ask people to sit in a proscenium arch theater in the dark, staring straight forward with their eyeballs. The modes of experience are what’s being experimented with, so I think that needs to happen literally.
Here's some possibilities I'd like to explore:
Group exploration: people will be guided through a series of exercises in some kind of unfamiliar location. Initially this will happen in an unfamiliar location to most (such as a remote wood or field), and then people will be taken to a gallery or into a crowded area to do the same exercises in different environments. The exercises will primarily be designed to interrupt normal modes of moving through space. Senses would potentially be altered somehow. Bag on head, etc. This would be done in a workshop style in a group, with instructions given by me.
Geocaching: this will be solitary experimentation, with instructions to complete some kind of "task" given on paper or potentially via an iPod or walkman or some shit like that. People will come to the experiment on their own, participate alone, and leave when they are done. There is no record or documentation of their participation.
Viewership: the ideas above, mediated somehow into a more traditional performance. This is potentially the most challenging. Interactive theater comes to mind. How can I move people to move through this traditional mode differently? Bribery. Flattery. Some desire to be included. Make participation more exciting than observation.
5. Livelihood:
I imagine this project to be financially viable. It will be funded through enticing online campaigns, as well as me seeking out temporary employments in the vein of seeking out these experiences and experiments. In addition, I will use my funded time at UMaine to help support this.
Possibilities:
* work with furniture makers. I’m getting increasingly interested in objects that hold weight, and the potential flexibilities they hold. How does tension hold? How are boundaries defined? What pushes back? What expectations are put on the body? On repetition.
* work with engineers. I feel like they would have interesting things to say about becoming what pushes back. How do different substances push? What is suspension? How do things bear weight? What are physical limits? How are they defined?
* work with biologists. What happens chemically in the body when we move? When we attach emotional experience to moving (making ourselves safe/unsafe, etc)?
6. Effort:
I want to create openings and opportunities for people/me to be surprised and led by their own experiences I want to muddy the waters of the body as a service object that facilitates higher planes of knowing. Perfection would look like finding ways where people can use their own bodies to confront their ingrained movement tracks and expectations. Perfection would look like crafting some kind of vehicle where people would be able to/be willing to participate in these things easily.
7. Mindfulness:
These are not all discrete pieces, but things that create a general trajectory:
It is a trajectory of personal and public practices/exposures beginning to blur. Exploring these things is a highly personal experience, and the ways in which it moves out towards others seems to be most often an experience of asking other people to participate in highly personal ways, albeit sometimes mediated by other levels of experiencing through empathy (documentation or mediated performance). The real core of this territory demands experience, which is a difficult and exciting thing to ask people to do. A sense of care and empathy is needed in designing these experiments. Focused attention is demanded.
8. Concentration:
In regards to method of sharing this work: I think the more traditional modes of theater are not relevant to this particular trajectory. I would like to begin experimenting with combining the performative, the interactive, and the concept of a workshop all into one cohesive unit, which would be able to be create an unstable situation that would be instructive about what is effective. I think that this is a terrain that is asking for more inhabitants, and that flexibility will be key, as the population of the terrain is wildly variable. Nothing is happening until the experiments begin.
Bibliography
Colliding or overlapping worlds to explore
1. Premature babies: get in touch with the local hospital, figure out how to get on the list of people who hold premature babies. Who can I talk to about the research behind this.
2. Training service animals: talk to the people on campus who train security dogs. What is the process like for people with new issues of blindness... learning to trust what pulls you.
3. Discussion with people who meditate. Get in touch with that club on campus. What’s that experience like? What is the muscle memory like? How do they manage pain? What is the general experience of the body?
4. Self-identified heavy drinkers that I know: what do you like about the feeling of being drinking? How can you describe your body in terms of lightness and heaviness? What do you have to say about the idea of falling?
5. Call Mathew Ingrim from the National Forest Service’s specialized unit of forest fire fighters: Smoke Jumpers. Talk to him about the experiences of sewing parachutes that you will eventually use to jump out of a plane. Talk to him about the pressure changes of the environment when you are about to jump, when you jump, when you begin to fall, and when you hit the ground. How does this inform other kinds of movement? Is walking different when you spend all your time jumping out of planes?
* For point three and four... add additional experiments in MEDIATION... how is writing about different than talking about different than experiencing? What are effective ways of mediating these experiences? Is anything to be gained by mediating some of these experiences? Or is it all about direct individual experience?
Written research
6. Johnson, Mark. “The Meaning of the Body: aesthetics of human understanding”.
Making vital connections between cognitive science, movement, and meaning making.
7. Deluze, Gilles. “Difference and Repetition”.
Ideas of patterns making meaning. Poetic interpretations of positioning ourselves as the same and different as a mode of moving physically and describing our physical experiences to ourselves.
8. Ahmed, Sarah. “Queer Phenomonology”.
Connections between social sciences, phenomenology, and the ways that we assume normative behaviors are the only logical choices. Very helpful for identifying ways that we fall back into movement and object paradigms.
9. Research the biological chemical processes of what happens to people when they experience adrenaline that could be associated with bodies moving in space. Fear, etc.
10. Work with concepts of “body mountains” with Myra Morales from the Sense Lab. What does it mean to attempt to lose your body in the physical experience of another? What is proximity? What is nearness? What are boundaries in this area?
Pivot points from class
“The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
-Marshall McLuhan
“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”
-Marshall McLuhan
“What is happening, when, as a result of the abolition of great distances, everything is equally far and equally near? What is this uniformity in which everything is neither near nor far? is, as it were, without distance?”
- Heidegger
“We succeed in reaching it by attending what is near.”
-Heidegger
THINGS THAT GATHER
EMERGENCE
COMPLEX CAUSALITY
“The tick responds to three stimuli and three only: first light... it will go to the edge of a branch and sit there for years without needing anything else. It follows light to the end of the branch. Then, smell. It smells an animal passing under the branch, and it drops. Then, it looks for the least hairy part of the animal and it drinks.”
- Deluze
The sensory arc of desire. You see. You move toward, drawn in by smell/other senses. Finally, you arrive. You inhabit, and you touch. You see. You move toward, drawn in-
-class notes during “Emergence” lecture.
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