Rachel's Recipes

Core values to consider....

Flawed communication systems. Possible ruptures through closeness.

Code/explain

Genetic code/socialized explanations 1. Pick up your cellphone.  Count the number of calls you have made in the past day.  If the number is even, move down to option two. 

If the number is odd: nonsense mutations/stop codon: call the third person on your call list and ask them if they have ever felt like something crucial to their understanding of the world suddenly vanished without a trace.  

If the number is even: Frameshift mutation. Call the second person on your call list.  Ask them to describe a time when they felt like they had a relationship that experienced complete communication breakdown. 

2. Make an indel timeline of traumatic events that have happened to your body since your remembered beginning.  Imagine that time has compressed. Read them out loud as if they were a single long traumatic event.

(Indel: any system that contains insertions, deletions, and any combination thereof.  This remains true even if a period of several years passes between each event.)

coded behavior/rebuttal

3. Set a knife facing an apple on a stable surface where it will be undisturbed.  Set the knife so the tip of the blade is exactly two feet from the apple.  Move it closer to the apple by one eighth of an inch every day.  When you are within one inch of the apple, move the knife back three feet.  Continue process until apple has completely decomposed and knife blade has rusted off.

4.  Embroider “Te Gusta” or “Mon Ami” on a small throw pillow.  Use only pastel shades.  Set on a couch.  Make everybody who walks into your house hold it and read the phrase out loud.

Precision/bridge:
Exact physicality/physical structure
1. Self-anchored suspension/exactitude
Take everything out of your backpack.  Balance it all on top of a box of eggs.  When you succeed, take everything off.  Take one egg out of the carton.  Now balance it all on top of the egg.

2.  Clean tracelessness/moveable
Take two cinderblocks and a piece of two by four.  For one entire day, you may move only by using these objects.  Your feet can never touch the floor. Don’t avoid stairs.


Weight/Sameness

physical weight/homogenous 1. Get two cats of the most opposite size you can find.  Through incredible control of their diet/exercise, attempt to make them exactly the same weight.  

2. Take a family or group of humans or non-human animals you know well. Assign the different members of this group different "classes" based on the emotional/social equivalent to the wrestling weight classes.
3. Sit on one side of a teeter-totter on a playground.  Have somebody slowly spit into a bucket on the opposite side of the teeter-totter under the weights balance.  When you need to pee, you may add this to the weight that counters your own.   

emotional weight/twinning

4. Ask one of your friends to tell you about the saddest thing that has ever happened to them.  No matter what they say, interrupt them with "omg, the same exact thing happened to me."  Do this for as long as they will continue to talk to you. 

cartography/sameness 

5. Draw a topographical map where every line is the same thickness.  Interpret as desired. Draw a sketch of somebody hiking this mountain. 

 

Synthesis/Conflict

Biological synthesis/interpersonal conflict
1. Eat the first three plants you see after reading this.  Call your mother and tell her you ate poison and you need her to come over right now.  Call the police and tell them your mother is trying to kill you.  

total synthesis/inner person conflict
2. Eat any foods that cause high cholestrol.  Do it in excess.  Do it until you develop high cholestorol.  Attempt to lower your cholestorol through high fiber and exercise.

factors in combination/physical clash
3. Try to play chords on a piano with opposite hands while somebody stands behind you and tries to physically restrain you.

Diagrams and things

Process word: Socialize
Thing word: Breakdown
Object: Small hairy nonhuman animal (SHNA), squirrel

Combo 1:
SOCIALIZE: Domesticated animal
BREAKDOWN: Stability, low energy
SHNA: Nature as seperate, for observation
PROMPT: Take your dog jogging through a nature preserve, listen to your iPod and let your dog bark at things it sees.

Combo 2:
SOCIALIZE: Microbes/Disease
BREAKDOWN: Domain of inactivity, low density
SHNA: Scientific classification
PROMPT: Contract Syphilis, don't get it treated because lack of health insurance. Display symptoms, eventually die.

Combo 3:
SOCIALIZE: Tight Symbiosis
BREAKDOWN: Process, activity, energy
SHNA: Animal rights/activism/separate but equal
PROMPT: Practice ethical vegetarianism and alter your lower intestinal microflora as a result, according to what you eat, for more efficient digestion. In this experiment, your political alignment changes your biological body.

Combo 4 (actual):
Deep values/organizing principles: To radicalize/choose least familiar point on the map.
SOCIALIZE: Body-space
BREAKDOWN: Blackholes/domain of activity, density
SHNA: Peer consideration/life partners
PROMPT: In a public space, socialize with squirrels as inseparable equals; hunt and kill them ethically and humanely as a source of sustenance. Eat them not only for nourishment/calories but in order to converse with them (and specific surroundings). Consider other value systems than good/bad right/wrong; the Thompson River people of NW America: 'The flesh and skin (goat part) remain in your possession, but their real selves (the human part) lives just as before, when it was covered with goat's flesh and skin' (Sahlins quoting Levi-Strauss quoting J. A. Teit).

Combo 5: Same variables as above.

As I collect and forage for food, actively compete with squirrels that are doing the same thing. Establish an antagonistic relationship.

Combo 6: Same variables as above.

As I eat food and generate waste, establish a space where that product can be utilized and consumed by squirrels; conform to squirrel aesthetic; make 'art' for squirrels

Combo 7: Same variables as above.

As it gets colder outside, clean squirrels in such a way that you can use their pelts for warmth; use as a comforter/quilt/duvet; become bedfellows.

My words: CODE/EXPLAIN.... also "chair" should be incorporated via the choices I made in the first round of this assignment. 

My new word pairs:  
precision/bridge
weight/sameness
sythesize/conflict

Code: 
genetic code..... sterile, lab, computer, precision, network, systems.
secret code.... radio, invisible, mail, war, boundaries, communication, exclusion, risk.

Chair:
 Bodies.  Weight. Wood.  Saw. Processing plant.  Floor. Gravity.  Opposable thumbs.  Nails/glue/fasteners. Symmetry.

Explain: 
language... bodies, difference, bridge, found sameness, multiple interpretations, misunderstanding, conflict. 

Deep values:
Flawed communication systems.  Possible rupture through closeness.  

Possible imagined private projects: 

precision/bridge
1. Steal a soiled lab coat from a lab.  Using every available apparatus you can find (microphone, microscope or magnifying glass, fingers, tweezers, nose, plastic bags, fingerprint dust, plastic tape, fingernails, etc.)  Slowly comb the coat for any remnants.  Extract them and catalog them in plastic bags.  This should include such obvious and easy to capture items as stray hairs and anything in the pockets, and also anything that can be cut off the coat, as well as harder to capture items such as the armpit or other sweat smells, and the way it feels to wear the coat. 

weight/sameness
2. Record the sound of a tree growing. Simultaneously but separately, record the sound of yourself cleaning a chainsaw.  Set the two recordings next to each other.  See what happens.



synthesize/conflict
3. Observe and record the movements of the ant population in any location.  Start ascribing meaning and words to their movement patterns.  When you have developed a full alphabet, attach as many needles to your pinky finger as ants have legs.  In the new language of the ants, announce that you are putting crumbs down on the ground near them, and you will kill them if they try to eat them, but as long as they don't eat them, you can coexist.  See if they break the truce.  If they do, kill them.

4. Sit (in a chair if possible) across from a stranger in a public place.  Send flirtatious or welcoming signals with your body while thinking really hateful and gross stuff.  Or do it the other way around.   

Shots were fired from a blow gun at conceptual mapping for terms 'fall,' break,' and 'drawing.' Results for each dart color were recorded and are as follows. Commentary describing a potential outcome of the combination follows each one.

Yellow

Fall

to be tricked or deceived

'fall for'

Break 

Separate

Drawing

Pen on paper

This pairing leads me to a literal interpretation of these terms. I imagine this work would be something like an optical illusion, drawn in ink whereby there is some separation or disconnect between the way the image is perceived and the physical content of the drawing. 

Red

Fall

to lie within a category - to fall in the territory of

Break 

a style of dance

Drawing

delineate define

This piece I would imagine as a performance. The dart managed to land close to my major outlier for the term ' break' referring to break dancing. Furthermore to lie within a category/ define or fall into the territory of, all suggest formal boundaries. Thus this too would probably be a breakdance, falling within the conventions of that established style: start with some top rock, drop to sixstep, etc. The outcome is delineation. This, as any dance gives the potential for an individual to demonstrate uniqueness through their particular use of conventions.\

Black

Fall

'falling out' as in human relations

Break

as a habit

Drawing

by instruction as in a Sol Lewitt or paint by numbers

This one is a little different and I don't need to make it because it has already been made. This piece looks like the AA handbook. It is a set of instructions for dealing with bad habits and falling out relating to substance abuse. 

Combination chosen in relation to deep value

Fall as in line or love

Drawing out as conclusions

Break like waves

These words can be applied to my larger artistic mission. I gather information and draw conclusions. I then attempt to bring my actions towards alignment with resultant philosophies. Often working towards these ends is a loving process but in a more total sense of love that also includes labor and frustrations. In service of these I break like waves towards my objective - shaped but willing to assume many forms, to strike against and spray off into many directions,to recollect and mount again…

((egh... I guess that was a little corny))

New experiment

I have not yet made anything to represent these word pairs. I was watching kids take standardized tests most of the day, and made this document while they were working. When they were done, kids came and made a dot on the graph with their eyes shut. They liked that part.

New interpretations of "Alter" were:

Static, creeping
Convulsed, fusion

for "method" I got:

 dark, dilute
 thinning, invisible
gossamer, drifting
thinning, frosted

for "container" i.e. the boundary surfaces of this milk experiment, I got:

approaching, lake
fusion, droplet

Releasing Drowned Energies

In expanding upon the associated fields of my original verb word "remember" and my thing word "narrative", and the different types of containers "boxes" that these two terms could be conveyed in, I thought about human perceptions of our world and the three dimensions that we live in, (up / down, left / right, back and forth). It seems that the constructs of our worldly dimensions are defined by a type of box, one which is constrained by our perceptions of what is and what is not considered physical reality.

With this second experiment, I have shifted within associated fields to two new words. Instead of remember, I will use ritual and in place of narrative, I will use epithet. In conveying how the two new words are related to one another, I will change the closed box/book container that I presented in class to the open container of possible inter-dimensions. I am determined that in the process of combining epithet with ritual, that I can create a shift in realities, and though I might not be able to see the shift take place with my own sensory perceptions, it might be felt or seen in another dimension, just as well and none the less.

How this all came about: In contemplating the concept of realities and dimensions as boxes, I thought of a walk I'd had taken last summer at a cemetery in Orono, and the memory of a headstone that I had come across, of a twenty-six year-old man named, John Jackson. Some research into John's life revealed that he had been a graduate student who was teaching at the University at the time of his death, in 1870. According to the History of the Maine State College and the University of Maine, by Merritt Caldwell Fernald, John Jackson had been harvesting a field of wheat for the agricultural school on a hot July afternoon, when he and some of his students decided to go for a swim in the Stillwater River, not far from where the Beta house is now. John was swept under when he missed a ford in the river and drowned. His students and friends searched for his body into the night and finally pulled him from the river the next day. It seemed, John had no one in the world close to him except his mother who lived in Northern Canada, and she was unable to attend to his funeral arrangements. Sadly, his friends, students, and colleagues buried John in the Riverside Cemetery on a high, wooded ridge that overlooks the river. His epithet reads:

John Jackson, Aged 26, Drowned at Orono July 19, 1870, “I know my Redeemer liveth.” Erected in memory of a good and faithful teacher by members of his school in Dennysville.

This story of the drowning and the narrative of John's epithet, got me to wondering if the river might possibly be holding the physical memory of John’s drowning and if this were true, it must be a terrible thing for John to be forever trapped in the memory of his struggle by the river’s place memory. I've heard of place memories before, existing as a type of haunting, and I am quite sure that I have experienced a place memory, myself. I once clearly heard dresser drawers being pulled open and shut in my own bedroom, but I had no such a dresser to make that type of noise, so the only explanation, as far as I was concerned, was that I was experiencing a "place memory", or an event memory that exists in another dimension.

I am convinced by this experience that memories of things, happenings, noises and events can be moved in and out of dimensions, so with this conviction in mind I decided to go to the river today, and collect the memory of John's drowning out of the water. I took a jar with a copy of the epithet inside of it to the river and filled it with water. I used the epithet as a way to attract and direct John’s memory energies into the jar. When I got home later on, I put a small stone in the jar with the water. The type of stone I used is believed to resonate at such a frequency in the universe, that it calms stresses and disturbances inter-dimensionally. I plan to let the river's and John’s memory of the drowning, set in the jar at my house with the stone for a week or two. During that time, I will offer calming and reassuring prayers to the jar, and I will read John's epithet frequently in order to keep his memory active and moving within its dimension.

When the time is right, I will go back to the river and pour the water from the jar back into the river. It is my hope that when I pour the water back into the river, that the river will release the memory of the drowning and in the same way, if John's memory of his drowning is also still in the river, that it will be released by the new energies that I’ve poured into it.

Older Stuff

Here are my diagrams for my mundane object, a sewing needle, and one from my practice, my drum kit.

Drum Kit

 

"Gods"

Values that emerge from normal use include a gathering of people to hear or practice music. Rhythms give rise to different sensibilities of motion.

"Mortals"

This type of instrument brings about certain kinds of music. Also gives rise to a player that is able to coordinate limb movements in a greater variety of ways.

"Sky"

This kind of practice reveals a certain percussive version of organized sound within the context of Western music. I have seen the elements of such an instrument used differently to generate drone notes and other effects. In my own practice however I tend towards a more conventional use of the kit. To me this is a dance, a leisure activity. Like most musical instruments I see it as an extension of vocal abilities or a type of singing.

Sewing Needle