Truth in the Sovereignty of Subjectivity

A slightly and intentionally rhizomatic response to Brian Prugh’s article, can an artist be Wrong?

            I would first like to state that Kenneth’s Goldsmiths, NYC project, “Capital”, is a contribution to knowledge. Goldsmith is researching New York City’s history, gleaning texts and arranging them according to a similar structure of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades project, arguably one of the first post-structuralists works, and I appreciate this ironic twist.  

            He may not be contributing to logo-centric knowledge, as per ideas of truth, falsity and factual accountability of such, however he is working with directly gleaned information that holds an amount of truth in itself. The way that he is presenting holds a great amount of truth that mimics the way we move through information in this age, gleaning and trying to organize and understand it the best we can.  Goldsmith’s approach is capable and certainly in dialogue with a paraliteral inquiry and knowledge of ones experience, seemingly presented in an effort of aesthetic pedagogy, juxtaposing vernaculars of current times and places, and times lost, exposing the rift between. Is this exposure in the spirit of post-structuralism literary theory not a contribution to thought? Whether one agrees with this methodology is an entirely different issue.

            How can an artist make a claim of truth? Should an artist make a claim of truth? I don’t believe an artist can make a claim of truth and offer it up as so, without being didactic in a way that is imposing on the public. It becomes rather an authoritative action that is counter-productive to the efforts of dislodging people from falsity or dogma. Goldsmith may be attempting to give the public an aesthetic education, but where history and his activity are the authority in lieu of him.

            When theory turns praxis we are in a bit of a dilemma. Goldsmith is offering a theory; he is pointing out perhaps what we already know that history is not, and cannot be passed down in a truly objective manner, that our sense of a historical continuity if false and problematic.   Any criticism, valid or not, that Kenneth Goldsmith is not up to anything new, would probably not phase or please Goldsmith, who defines himself as an uncreative writer and doesn’t think anyone needs to write anything new. Goldsmith is in the spirit rather of first priming the public with this liberating action, revealing the discontinuity of our history and knowledge of such. This is an effort, in the same effort of Walter Benjamin, to free us from one of the last remaining gestalts of our time, capitalism, one that has yet to be eclipsed since Benjamin’s time.

             “The public can only achieve enlightenment slowly” - Kant

            The ethical via politics is aimed at the public; its target first and foremost is the masses, the aesthetic on the other hand aimed at the individual. How can we make, or more importantly make a public claim about the truth of our subjective endeavors?  We can only move forward in hopes of tilling the soil.

            He is revealing a striving for freedom, a striving for his own understanding of history, asking us to question ours.  Goldsmith is engaged with the flux, engaged with the flux as one who might consider themselves as agnostics to be, as one who believes that truth isn’t something that can be neatly packaged and presented as such, as one who believes in multiple truths, at least in that there are truths that cannot be objectively resolved. The artist can lay the pieces out but it is not the job of the artist to put the pieces together. It may take juxtaposing all sorts of ‘weirdness’ before anything fruitful will emerge and when it does it most likely won’t be something that one can point to and label as “truth”.  Internalized truth can be found, but it is an internalization that will and should remain in the sovereignty of subjectivity because the last thing we can hope to find is an accurate judgment of another’s subjective experience. What Brian seems to be calling for is a more activist approach to art, actively speaking.  I would rather have faith that the truth will reveal itself, and any attempt to force a truth, is outside of artistic endeavor, this may be the goal the horizon of ethics, ethics through political action, of which such starts have failed. Kenneth Goldsmith not offering us a teleological model rather calling us to reconsider our own connection to the continuity of the capitalist system, while landing us in the present moment, which is neither fixed nor static.

            “Enlightenment can only happen by self-liberation of individuals “who are capable of thinking for themselves despite established authorities”

Kant “What is enlightenment” New York Modern Library 1977, p.55

Print in the Age of Relational Aesthetics

            In a time when the gesture of the written script is vanishing, along side of many branches of linguistic tongues at a rapid pace we wonder what next follows the simplification of syntax in relaying specific nuanced ideas as well as our bodily disconnection from the gestures of our thought. In this distillation of our communication, greater eloquence and specificity will be needed to covey our ideas more elegantly and effectively in the fullest expression. At the same time that our language is becoming a distilled universal it is trying to communicate about more and more ideas and more and more aspects of many different cultures.  Our products are presented in editioned multitudes for consumption, our information presented in the possibility of infinite repetition within the Internet. All of these having a similar shared visual form that is also shared with the graphic arts. These objects as multiples have become a network of potential contexts within the shared visual vocabulary and are new part of the new possibilities of communication and understanding.

            Within the context of relational aesthetics and current movements within contemporary art, using recent modes of presentation from sculpture as a counter point example, take the work of the sculptor, Michael Jones McKean, stating, as many others, that objects carry with them specific content, and it is not so much the objects themselves that he is sculpting with, instead, the content associated with these objects. I think that a similar attitude should be embraced when thinking forward of printmaking and its possibilities for the future. In the same way that objects carry a specific history and context, so too, the specific processes as well as the graphic marks, and gestures that each process lends itself too carry with them, their own histories and contexts. Each process offers a specific language, and like the inability to translate properly the meaning from one language to another, the same is true about the way that information can be translated via different print technologies. And for this reason I would advocate for the sustenance of the knowledge associate with these. And as future printmakers implement these technologies they should do so with the intentional use of the context and history each graphic process implies an question what sort of network that they are creating through their use in combination and if it is appropriate to the ideas that are generating the work.

There are inherent conceptual concerns, historical baggage, and philosophical implications of print technologies, processes, and media and we cannot dismiss the connectedness of print with its various manifestations of past and present usage. Print exists at a specific intersection of time and technology. Seeing and understanding this specificity is crucial to, and will direct its future as an art form. First, I would like to state that print is a technology, some uses dated, while some on the cutting edge of technology. Each technology offers up its own possibilities, each with their own limitations, and conceptual baggage.  I would also argue that each art form/media, has it’s own paradoxical properties of possibility and limitation, and everyone with their chosen form needs to wrestle with its place in the continuum. 

            Breaking down then some the physical properties of print, which differ from each specific print technology to the next: repetition, (with the possibility and implication of an infinite repeat), reversal (transformation), matrix, (stability, fixedness), process of delay and indirectness, transfer.  These properties carry with them content that every printmaker should address in their practice, not necessarily with a concrete answer but at very least an awareness to these greater questions and implications behind each of these qualities.

             The properties of each property can be broken down further. There are specific conceptual concerns regarding the matrix, it’s ability to reproduce, exactly or with variation, many matrix technologies offering up the theoretical possibility to be repeated infinitely. The arrival at matrix from original idea/image to printed form requires a specificity of labor and process ends with a determinacy that is unlike any other media. The stability of the matrix, which allows for ease of read of the printed image. This read of a seemingly unlabored image is a characteristic unique to print; it is also an illusion, as the evidence labor is lost. Labor, the read of and inability to read labor, is something to be considered.

            There is a different sense of unfolding of time of which the print, in contrast to painting, a stamping, an immediacy of the whole, a resolve. If fact I would argue that time does not unfold at all I print, instead the instants flicker, instant totalities is read all at once. Different areas may in fact, unfold more slowly and function in this manner, but this is an attribute of composition not of print technology. It is not a material unfolding in the ways that paint can lend itself to. This assertion of a certain totality, in contrast with the build up of painting, the searching for form is a property of painting, which is different from printing. The printmaker must arrive at a decision about the determinacy of the image before the image is realized in printed form; many of the problems are solved ahead of time. While, the painter, drawer, or other direct media artists, must wrestle with and problem solve the issues directly on the chosen substrate.

            This indirectness and delay through process is something that cannot be skirted around, but rather each printmaker needs to determine the role of these and how this lends itself to, or inhibits the read of their work. We are surrounded by printed material; we live in variable editioned microcosms of attempted culture through capitalism and the spread of corporate colonialism.

            Print whether it wants to be or not, is associated with all of these attributes; having risen out of the need to spread and share information. Print is tied to this history, tied to the conversation of technology, and the history of communication, production, edition, and seriality.  If a printmaker wishes to be loosed from this there are specific knots that need to be untied. Printmakers cannot disconnect themselves from these issues at least without fully grappling with them first. Printmakers need to own their history, own an awareness of their unique coordinates, which intersect the greater terrain. We need to realize print is a specific technology, that in its own uniqueness of process, it is a process with a history and generating images out of this technology should not be done with arbitrarily.

            If a printmaker is discontent with their role, place in the artworld, they should evaluate their own conceptual concerns within this paradigm.  If the monetary value of prints if a particular concern, this needs to be realized for what this is, that people desire the uniqueness of a work, the ontological artifactuality, is of imperative importance when determining stature and monetary value of a work. Although, this financial point seems negligible and a good print seems to fare as well as any other art form.

            Prints are often just lacking the physical presence that a painting has, as well as most all works on paper. In their fragility, and need to be framed, work will not hold the same presence behind a barrier of glass, as that of being faced with the raw materiality.  Print is tied to ideas of ephemera yet at the same tied the imagery has the ability to slam its fist on the table with a certainty and conviction that painting is not able to hold to. The strength, fragility and intimacy, for instance, of an intaglio line are comparable to no other.  This is a paradox to be embraced and also teased apart.

            A major conceptual concern of contemporary drawing and painting is the idea of the material trace. Here as well, the directness, the artifact, is an entity that a painting and drawing holds up in contrast to the print. The materiality of print, as well as the process itself, as already stated is often lost in the process. In painting and drawing this struggle, (which is not just about the struggle and heroic nature of abstract expressionism, the struggle as struggle is not enough) but the direct residue of these efforts is of a different philosophical interest than of imagery that has been refined and processed. This underlying issue cannot be understated or ignored.

            The philosophical concerns underpinning print and in line with is history and inherent properties; the matrix, reproduction, edition, these are all part of how we experience and live in the world and should be exploited by the printmaker as we move into the future. They certainly cannot be ignored or wished away nor should they, as the terrain is rich and teaming with possibilities. Romantic notions to hold on to dated technology for the sake of itself will not move this field forward in the way that is seems to wish to go. We all wish to dislodge ourselves from the histories of our chosen field and have a fresh clean break, but this can only be done with a keen awareness of the implications of the processes we are projecting forward.  

           

University of Iowa Hospital Art Tour Response

Touring the University of Iowa Hospital’s Art Collection as a voyeur to the true intention of the work’s placement in the hospital left me feeling a bit sick to my stomach. I felt embarrassed and ashamed to be there touring work, passing by people in stretchers, clearly in critical condition, doctors stressed and on a lack of sleep, loosing my way, trying to find the art amidst the signs pointing to trauma, burn units, ontology, endless ailments, in endless directions. I left feeling that going to a hospital to look and judge the art was a moral transgression. Any aesthetic experience I had looking at art, was trumped by the surrounding context, of the reality of life and death, that art may be only capable of a respite from those thoughts. A worthy respite at that, but to enter into such a context willingly to such ends is besides the point of the purpose of the placement of this art. At one point I was clearly lost and a doctor asked me if I needed help. I replied that I was on the art tour; he replied that he couldn’t help and quickly lost interest in my confusion. I felt like a fraud and a joke, and wished I had chosen a real profession like this doctor.

I did witness the success of the intended role of art in this setting, to provide the stressed workers, and patients, and their families a bit of rest amidst this chaos.  I saw a young girl and her father, walking away from the children’s unit, stop and talk and touch William Lasansky’s sculpture, titled Diana and Muffin. It is a small bronze sculpture of a young girl and her cat. A few moments later another man waiting for the elevator was on the phone and seemed to be exhausted and relaying information of a family member’s condition over the phone, stopped and rested his hand on the sculpture.  This sculpture physically served as a surrogate of comfort.  There were several intricately crafted dollhouses scattered throughout the halls.  I watched as people stopped, and let their eyes gaze at the meticulous work. I heard people praise the amount of sheer labor and care that went into the houses. A young girl ran up to another and jumped up and down and moved quickly around one of these houses with great enthusiasm, I wondered what she was in the hospital for.  

I paused for a while at Dick Huss’s piece; commonly referred to as “the blue bowl” I let my mind get lost into the unearthly blue, and the intimately cared for and crafted patterns. A lady passed by and exclaimed, “Wow, that’s amazing”.  I thought about the care and precision that this artist, as well as many others put into their work.  I thought of the patients coming here to the hospital fighting for their lives, searching for someone to give them such care and precision to extricate their illness, and certainly if we as humans are willing and able to put such care and labor into our objects, we know and are reminded that people will do even more for each other. I understood quickly that seeing a scarred body, such as recent controversial photographs of women that had undergone mastectomy which were decided against,  wouldn’t serve this audience.  

Much of the art seemed in need of some dusting or care. There was a large painting by Clayton Gorde, a double mandala form, that was shoved behind some couches that we serving to protect it from obtaining more scars of gurney’s passing by. The surface bared evidence to the reality of its history of time in that space.

And while I was able to stop and appreciate and ponder the Sol Le Witt, and the Ellsworth Kelly and think about these works in relation to the knowledge I have, of the greater continuum of both of these artists works, my thoughts quickly shifted to ponder their role in the hospital context. Did the pieces lend themselves as a clearing, an open pause to the patrons of this place? Or work the just another fleeting austere moment between instrumental signage.  At one moment I passed a piece a mosaic of individual squares that had been done by patients in collaboration with graduate art students. I read the list and recognized some of my friends names, including my friend and former colleague, Megan Dirks, who lost her life in her own battle with cancer just months after this project was completed.

Feeling pretty depressed, out of place and anxious to get out of there, I stumbled upon two lithographs, black and white line drawings of Philip Guston. Both images were drawings of shoes in different settings, images akin to his well-known paintings. The manner in which they were drawn, incessant but with a great deal of pathos, spoke to the exhaustion and mimed the way I was feeling. For a moment, I was that worn out shoe, pathetically trying to hold itself together.  Robert Rauschenberg ‘s piece, Blue Line Swinger, a triptych of fragile imagery and text alluding to temporality, Past, Present, Future, I also connected to in a different way than I would have in a different context.  I was heightened in my awareness of the mundane and meaning, within the ephemeral moment, which this piece speaks clearly too.

My aesthetic experience was so embedded in the context of the hospital setting and I refuse to extricate one from the other, as that is missing the point of the project, the purpose, and placement of the work there. I find the value of this work as I have stated in its ability to shift thoughts away from the seriousness of the setting. Fortunately, at this time in my life, I was a visitor to the seriousness and therefore trying to force a read that could only ultimately be inaccurate and inappropriate. This work is there for the patrons and workers of the hospital. There is a great variety of work, with a variety of aesthetic empathies, some more attuned to my sensibilities than others, but ultimately this is not the place for the critic and I feel it a perversion to try to do so.

When Things Go Missing

The scent of the old pine tree
All the more fragrant in it's absence

Understanding,
all for the point
of proving to yourself,
That it can't be understood.

Declaring myself as an existential investigator

This offer is good for today only.

On Being: Lost at Sea
A tale of trying to stay afloat
While thinking of stopping and moving
In search of an authentic,
Synthetic experience.

Mimicking biomimicry,
With aiming, for improving
My visual diet.

Thankful, today,
That I left my ID at the bank
before losing my wallet.

A few thoughts forming in response to Hume

Reflections on: David Hume’s: Of the Standard of Taste

First thoughts on the sophistication of taste and experts:

Are not what we consider experts only those who have learned the proper vocabulary to apply to the variety of sensations?

“In order to appreciate wine, it's essential to understand the characteristics different grapes offer and how those characteristics should be expressed in wines.” –James Laube, Wine Spectator 1996

For one to properly determine if something, in this case wine, is good, we need an understanding outside of our pure experience of if we are to make an accurate analysis. We need an understanding of the fundamental properties, and as stated here how they “should” be expressed. The person that has learned to be an expert has learned how to use the right signifier to point to his sensation. The person has learned also, what it is that they should point to.

Could one, determining the elements are functioning as they should, and still not like the wine, even if objectively they can know that it is a good glass of wine?

The discussion of aesthetic is presented here first in relation to culinary sensation. We are immediately dealing with a problem of signifiers.

Praise an blame in aesthetics, maybe these are overstatements? This seems to put the realms of aesthetics into a realm capable of mania. Perhaps this is a breach on where healthy convictions should lie, when it comes to such things as art, albeit a fine wine, or a visual masterpiece. Is a work of art worthy of such extremes as praise or blame? I am inclined to say no. The question then comes to mind of art as propaganda, art for commercial purposes, religious art. Is that which is praised or blamed, the art itself or the message behind the art, or the convictions of the artists? It is true that art seems capable of producing mania in people. If it can produce mania, could it cure, or subside symptoms of mania?

to be continued...

A vague question can only expect a vague answer

Ferrigno-

A (beginning) definition of Art

It is important to determine if specific things could be defined as art, than to determine if a general term “art” is thing which can defined.

Anything has the potential to become an art object.

Nothing is art on it’s own.

An action is required for something to become art.

Art is a closed definition with infinite possibilities.

Things may resemble art without being art.

Things can be attempts at art without being art.

What is art for one may not be art for another.

One may find mimetic art to be art by the appreciation of the artists intimate concern to details of the perceived world, or through the empathy with the pained labor that such acts of rendering take. Also, one may have emotive experiences based on their own subjective experience that another does not share. The combination of associations of subject matter and the methodology of the subject matter will result in different potential emotive/ psychological affects of the viewer. One can see Richard Estes, Guggenheim, a coldly yet intimately rendered painting of what could be thought to some a high temple of art. This could be read as a commentary on the art world system. For me, the image triggers memories of my pilgrimage to New York, and spending time at this building.  Scale, materiality, all play a role into what kind of an experience a work will illicit in the viewer. In this manner one can be moved by the artist intimate attention to detail and care taken in the process of communicating an image. The image painted in photo realistic manner, perhaps opens up to me, my own experience more, than having this image been painted in an expressionist manner, where my experience of the subject matter would be filtered through the artist subjectivity first.

The manner is which information is transmitted, the creative interpretation of source to output has the potential to lessen or strengthen an artistic read.

The term art is a generality, just like the word game is a generality.

To define a thing as art, one should consider the use of a prefix for clarity.

Instead of, “is it art?” Does it have potential to be considered as one or a combination of the following?

A. Visual Art

      -Digital image

      -Material trace

B. Conceptual Art

C. Performance Art

      -Music

      -Dance

      -Ephemeral event or happening

This may or may not include an artifact.

Not all artifacts are art. All artifacts have the potential to be art.

Art may be spontaneous. Spontaneity is not art on its own.

Computer/Glitch art and animal should maintain their boundaries as a separate category for the sake of conversation; reside within the prefix.

It is likely that life and things designed by life, technology from humans and extracted from the natural world; that both things of nature and things of man have a spontaneous emergent feature to make objects that resemble art.

Geometry resembles art. Geometry in various forms seems to be inarguably an emergent feature of human production.

Art may be used for an Emotional of Intellectual end, or a combination thereof. Depending on the degree of implementation and the success of the read of the viewer, the work has potential to be held in a higher status.

Art can be inclusive or exclusive.

Form, content, and context should all be considered when trying to determine if something is art.

           

An Attempt to define what is a game:

 An interactive activity with others, self, or technology, involves repetitive actions and rules. The type of game determines the amount and type rules. Games may be played for competition, skill building, or pleasure.

Art may be played as a game. Games can be played as art. Games that are not played as art, are not art.

Art can be a critique. Critique alone is not art.

Entitlement and gratitude

Wednesday, May 16, 2012 9:33 PM

Entitlement and gratitude:

The recognition of luxury.
Exquisite care one takes,
When worrying about tornado's.

His face is less attractive,

it's grumpy,

he scowls.

Late on the stage for concert,

With a 25 year old pet sea turtle.

Sometimes it gets so far from quiet.

The objectivity of Perceiving flowers:
Intimacy and disconnect:
A possible invasion!
Your mothers eyes,

Come to your senses.
The moments is now,

lived and dreamt,

weaving a pattern in a linear fashion.

Time, fabric, patterns,
Claiming our ancestry.
A degree of transparency,

when transparency is nought.

For sale:
Your mothers back yard

I'll be a living stone.
I will disappear,

Without going anywhere.

For I know I am an illusion
And I've heard you are too

Dear Mother,
They thought you were the spiritual chief Sitting Bull
I hadn't seen the resemblance before,
Now I cannot help but not see it,
And I believe,
You were meant to be together.

There exists consistencies within,
We watch the straight line growing.
Informed by chance

The summer failed to flower,
And we are left waiting .

updates and information

Of course we crave blood,

When we forget we’re alive

His brain is an infinite well organized filing device

I will never hold so much I hold still

and it keeps passing by

You dreamed she would hold you

As wallpaper fills your memory

You see the land and you hold the border

Without question you assume it's yours too keep

You find yourself in a basement

The experience has so far past that you yearn for it now

It won’t come back

You felt the rain that day, inside and out

and have never felt it again

Everything was in its right place

you may or have may not noticed

a provocation of self

is that some kind of joke?

that space between green and yellow

the boredom between blue and green

the land and sea

the earth and sun

next time for sure

…………………..

What was once hell going through

when looking back

looks like heaven?

You're left here son
left here 

In the morning

The supermarket

An aisle over

An aisle under

Is gone

The bastard child

The toothless whore

Have gone to bed

A tangled hierarchy

Quantum non locality

On the edge of the most beautiful universe

……………..

One tangled mess: 

Dream, little brown bat

Engage yourself to a wealthy man

End up in love

a young philosopher in a movie

Paper bird airplane circling over head lands in my lap

Colored clay in forms squeezed together in chains

Running from authorities.

A Muddy a rich man took me in

wartime, museum.

Helium balloon lift off

Timeline of housing over lifetime to scale model

No hand flip

holding hands in the shower with Steve martin

the spoken voice,vs the written words

there is no comparison

the imagined, always imagined

the now of technology

the was of theology

the inability to truly reconcile ourselves to another

a new way of writing

what will weld the fragments

what could be the whole

same source anew

a related but new

whole

the insurgencies are many

we were in love

he read my writings.

I didn't care

we were in the backseat of my car.

……………….

 the moments of shared experiences

moments of personal experience,

self and the world

self and nature.

the evolution of self

involved

the self and others

a valued experience

the ultimate experience

self and nature

a shifting to that of our shared experience

shifting scales of place and time

shifting of self to nature

a shift of the nature of self

the decomposition and insecurity of the natural world becomes realized

we age as well

the condition of the environment declines

the current status is that of loss.

………………..

ambiguity and suspension of time

I see their expressions and can imagine their feelings

the task to ground all anxieties

to current moment and the future

within context of life thus far

the moment of anxiety and the present time

just a moment that will be added to the moments

fragment to fragment

we separate color from colors

and piece them together again

……………………………….

On Drawing:

Drawing as an idea a proposition on how things might be.

Painting a solution a proposition on how things actually are.

Things take on a different complexity when they are meant / or emulate specific things in the natural world. This is also where subjectivity seems to enter, while as when a form maintains an ambiguity but hold true (a synchronic harmony with) the natural world the beginning stages is more objective, the subjectivity has the opportunity then to enter in a new way, when one is able to become aware of their own subjective associations. while certainly some forms would be in this case more prone to certain associations as a whole. opportunity here lies for transforming the objective into the subjective with a certain

degree of self awareness and also is open at the same time to a shared experience.

in or out of the same time,

which really doesn't matter.

imagining experience

I see Ai Weiwei

I see him pouring porcelain sunflower seeds from his hands, I hear them fall, they sound like water falling. splashing to the bottom as they pile up, like grain pulled from the field releasing from the combine.

overflowing. he is still

they are cold to the touch

originally it was an effort to understand everything

but now I have giving up on that.

explorer of everything, inventor

the visual field of information

the moment of where the visual and emotional experience are one in the same.

the aesthetic of marvel

a complete synesthesiastic experience

total sensory integration

none of which is likely plausible.

………..

certain corridors must be explored

he needs to move faster if he's ever going to make it

that's when I realized it was time to go

an internal golden glow

a niche to sit in, forever

green shag carpet

the mountain, trees were symmetrical

I was so fucking naive.

I get angry just thinking about it

call the papers

he'll never return

we went ice skating in that charming little town

I thought I could make it my home

it wasn't meant to be

I lost the baby that same day

gardens of infinity

that city of fountains

never taking me in.

 Memories are pillows in France.

A distant discovery in the making

Underground in the summer of 1888.

It was equally exhausting as it was exhilarating.

You'll rest tonight, sharing a pillow.

………………

lord,

I just want to stand here and warm my toes

comfort is freedom

who ever told you otherwise?

but I left my home

it was comfort but not freedom.

or maybe it was freedom?

maybe I was just too cold to notice.

survival- survival and safety

safety to survive

survival freedom

and freedom to survive

it's not what your mother told you

it's not what you dreamed

for all those years

only a trace of similarity

if he paid attention to my intervals of definitive activity

you would see it is very short

I haven't forgotten

and I believe you’ve tried to notice

the current is stable

the viewer tries to hold on

hold on to that stillness that stability

for where there is safety, there is freedom

but I am too cold my toes are cold!

come stand by the fire

promises of a night of warmth

I didn't even notice at the time

Some how you remember

The colors that are colored your memory.

moments of significance

where significant to who?

The road lead somewhere

I remember

it was a well lit path but not well worn that I followed

to a more epic collapse than I could ever empathize or imagine.

to know ones space and time are a mans desires, a mans stability

but to be unsure, to live in a time where time a place have lost their identity within the infinite expanses of the intellect, penetrated at every angle accessible to our sensory devices.

all we can hope is for an emergent order.

one that we hold as true as one we at least once had faith in.

this lord, this mother

thank you mother teresa.

On Forms of Freedom:

On the various experiencial forms of freedom and technology:

What is our experience of freedom and what is our experience of freedom through technology? What is our experience of technology itself? Any experience of freedom is viewed as a positive. One can experience freedom in the natural world as well as experience freedom via technology. The majority of any experiences in today’s world more often than not are interwoven with technology. Nearly all actions and events in life take place in a way that is connected to and relying on technology that we have crafted from the warmth of our homes, the ease of transportation, and the availability of goods to consume.

            We have been like a frog in water that has been so slowly getting hotter that we didn’t even notice until now that it’s boiling. Suddenly we find ourselves in hot water and we have nowhere to jump so we better figure out how to turn the heat down. This needs to begin with an opening of our eyes to this that the world is revealing to us. We need to see technology as the veil of experience that it is. This is not to dismiss the beauty of it, as veils are things that hold a sense of mystery and wonder, but nevertheless it is concealment, a filter.  The information pouring into us through the viaduct of the internet is hitting us at an unnatural pace unlike any before and we drink it in, the good with the bad as it’s filter is not one of refinement. 

            We are almost completely enframed by technology; most of our experiences of freedom are through technology as opposed to our ancestors, whose experiences were in nature, who have always been striving to order the apparent disorderly natural world. Anymore the majority of us living in industrial nations have little interactions with nature directly in it’s natural state and the experiences of freedom it offers which is much more varied in range and more intricate in form. We must recognize the differance of these experiences that technology offers us, and the experiences of freedom that nature offers us. Our ability to summarize our experience of freedom in relationship to technology seems much more plausible as we are talking about an experience of something that is an extension of ourselves, not of the natural world.

            We created the veil, and it serves us in many ways. However we must acknowledge each experience for what is, as different forms of experience. When we experience nature directly we are experiencing the “other”, yet we are a part of it. Technology is a part of ourselves, and when we experience the technology although going more complex every day, there is a safety and an assurance it offers us, while often the workings of are unknown to us as individuals we understand that it is under the control of humanity. The mysteries and complexities of the natural world that we are a product of are much more terrifying in their unknown, in their being outside our grasp.

               We are searching for a truth of our experience both of the world and of ourselves as individuals, and desiring a proper relationship therewith. The enframing that has ensued upon us by the demands of modern world have left us with little time to appreciate the luxuries of either technology or nature. It is hard to see technology as luxury as new developments striking us at first with enthusiasm and awe quickly become necessities of survival within the enframent.

           

Forms of desires and freedom:

            It makes sense that our first desire after survival would and should be the desire for freedom. We hunger for it, we fight for it and many prepared to die for it. For what are but prisoners if we are without freedom. Today we are not prisoners but we are not completely free. Many of us are fighting for survival and in a different way than our ancestors before us. We are fighting to survive within the system because there is nowhere to jump to out of it. The experience of freedom is becoming a scare commodity. The moments of our lives that we experience true freedom come quickly and leave us quickly. Our experience that was once a liberating relationship to technology has become a means to an end of survival. The majority of our personal energy is used in this quest.  We are running out of energy keeping up with the demands of the hyper-industrial society as well as the standing-reserve of the earths resources are running out. We are in an unbalanced, unsustainable state.

             I believe man and his essence have been mutually evolving over time as his experience has been changing, as his relationship to the natural world has been changing, yet there is something fixed about it’s structure. The form of our desires seem more fixed, certainly has had a longer lifespan that of the structure of the technology we have developed to fill these desires. These desires that have existed with us all along, before we stitched together the veil of technology a veil that was designed to protect us and aid our survival.  The way humans have conceived of themselves has changed over time, and is changing over time, as is our essence and we should be steadfast be aware of this changing to ensure that it does not fall stagnant nor fall into an entropic pattern of our own devices.

             These primary desires and our yearning of efficiency in these manners of survival, freedom and comfort will; surely not subside and seem to be in the line with the state of nature.  Nature does the same thing, however in a manner that is much more elegant.

We have been blind, or is has been concealed until as of late, to the standing reserve of information and intelligence that nature uses to carry on with life for billions of years. A new mining is in order, one that will allow us to sustain a setting ourselves and within the algorithms of nature rather than a “setting-upon” in a way that is challenging to nature. For ours is a crude ordering compared to the sophisticated ordering of nature, who still strives in the same way to take the path of least resistance, but manages it even a much more sophisticated and efficient manner without disrupting the whole. This standing reserve of information is locked into the dynamics of nature and requires the much more agile tools, that of the mind, to unlock.  This is a different task and a placing ourselves in a different relationship to technology, no longer that of drills and axes, eager to quickly consume any bit of readily available energy.  Our demands for the luxuries that technology has to offer will not change of subside, and I don’t see that as where the problem lies, what we needs reconsidered is the means to the end and at what expense. We need to see past the enframent of our doing, and see the enframent that is of nature, that is a part of us, that which allows for and challenges our survival.

We are a part of nature yet the only part of nature that makes things so that we are destroying nature, by taking from nature and ordering these elements in a manner that is turning them out in a way that is both toxic and destructive to ourselves and the rest of the environment. The choosing to deny the truth of this revealed through environmental and scientific analysis is a choosing to be blind. 

Man has turned man into a standing reserve.  As Heidegger mentions the “supply for patients to a clinic” man has turned man and his health or rather illnesses into a standing reserve for profit. How disgusting is this? Drug companies hold a monopoly over information that is used to save our lives. I heard a figure the other day that between the distributors of these medications and the CEO’s of drug companies there is a 400% difference in their annual income.  Who is free here and by what means? The question raised by Descartes, is man an expression or a utility? A further question would be is man only an expression of his utility?

The problem is both in the means of production driven by efficiency but also by profit, at the cost of the quality of human life and the condition of our environment. The ship has been taken over by pirates driven by greed alone.  A new ordering, a new revealing is being made, nature and the state of the nation are revealing this to us, a state of emergency, that the old ways cannot sustain us much longer.  Heidegger states, “Man ensnares nature as an area of his own conceiving” this is a thought whose form needs inverting, as the reality is that man is an area of nature’s conceiving, and from this orientation we should proceed.   We need to map a new mindset of technology.

The results of the current mode of manufacturing technology in our present world are something that we need to, as Heidegger phrases, “get spiritually in hand”. These results being both the impositions that this has made on the environment, the human condition and the functions of society. The environmental problems caused by the production of technology is undeniable, albeit or not one believes in global warming, we are polluting the environment and killing off entire species of plants and animals.  We are disrupting nature through these industrial endeavors.

Heidegger is calling us to examine our relationship to technology. If the purposes of technology as listed above is to maximize efficiency pertaining to the needs to sustain our life then we are no different that any other thing in nature. This is the end that we most all desire; the problem or concern right now is the means to this end. 

Heidegger states, “The cultivation of the field has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon nature. It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it” For anything to have value it must be something that produces, it must yield something that we can use as a means to an end maximum yield at minimum expense. The expenses are beginning to reveal themselves, the bill is adding up. We must switch from a setting-in order upon nature to a setting-in-order upon our technology in a way that is informed by nature and our experiences. In this way will open up new freedoms within a new paradigm.

The field of biomimicry is opening up these new possibilities to us. See the world as a standing reserve of information, a decoder, rather than of just energy to consume. Through biomimicry we begin to see nature as an intelligent being, we see the technology of the natural world. And we need to see outside of ourselves, past the veil to be able to live in harmony with the natural world as well as new ways of seeing ourselves and or place in this world. Nature wants to use minimal material and with maximum amount to strength. For example, GM is creating skeletons for new cars based on the algorithms extracted from skeletal systems in nature, anti-bacterial surfaces are being engineered informed by the way that nature has solved this problem on a sharks skin, that allows no bacterial to grow. How are we so vain to think that the answer to our technological needs could be brought about by our own means, means that are so crude compared to the sophistication of nature. However too, we must recognize that the insights and tools of science of technology have brought about these new insights. Our current technology is revealing worlds to us previously unseen, so while our current ways cannot sustain us we can now see more clearly the workings of nature and that is a major insight that we must open our minds to, and invert the method of setting upon an order that challenges nature, we must now see that nature is challenging us through the revelation of sophisticated methods of solving problems.  Nature will win, it has been around longer, and it doesn't care about us.  We will lose if we don’t adjust our perception and means to satisfying our primal desires. It is hard to see what the implications would be for our experiences of freedom. I think it would be an invigorating one that would allow us the move forward in new holistic ways, in a way that is responsible to society, responsible to ourselves as individuals and responsible to our environment. I would find it truly liberating to know that my existence was not relying on the destruction of the environment, leading to wars over oil, etc.

We can begin by seeing our desires and the desires of the natural world to be succinct. We must then see the way much of our current technology has enframed us and see new paths from point A of our desired functions to point B of our security and well being that is paved by paths that are creating conditions that are conducive to the life and in synch with nature’s algorithms. The instrumentality of technology seems a fixed structure, and I don’t see that as what needs to change rather we need new instruments, new ways of building these instruments, and in the end we will have music that is more informed and sustainable.

            The clear divide seems to be technology as something we experience and something that serves us as utility.  We aren’t ready to nor should we be ready to give up technology and the ways it serves us but we should be actively ensure its evolvement and aware of it’s evolvement and it’s effect on our essence. Thinking of the internet, television, the deluge of information that we encounter via technology on a daily basis. I feel that Bourriaud’s statement on individuals in modernity, “like the laboratory rat doomed to an in exorable itinerary in it’s cage, littered with chunks of cheese”, is a fairly accurate statement with regards to our current situation.  We are more and more removed from direct human relations, they are watched they are there in more forms than ever pouring into our living rooms every day, and we are left with the “society of the spectacle”-Guy Debord. We are free to judge from a safe distance, however it seems fair to wonder when the spectacle will lose it’s charm, its sparkle seems to be loosing it’s luster for many of us.  As we move forward with technology and move with awareness and responsibility, we can do this with hope and in the spirit of discovery, that which is both of ourselves and of the natural world as, “Other technologies may allow the human spirit to recognize other types of world-forms”-Nicolas Bourriaud.

            I think of the way that we interact with the material world, almost everything we touch, walk on and move though has be processed through technology. By stating this, is not to pass judgment of it but rather be aware of this.  Our interactions with the material world are becoming more and more filtered and we have to recognize that we are becoming more and more removed from our experience with the raw material world.  Which would one dare to argue is our more “authentic state” in relationship to our experience in the natural world, or in the technological world. We certainly cannot live without the material world of nature, yet we can question our survival within our current technological framework.  Can we transform our technology into a more authentic extension of ourselves?  The technology we have created is one set of information, and nature’s technology is a different set of information. We can rather figure out a way for those to work together or allow them to remain in opposition. The latter seems clear as an ignorant choice, that of disorder, when we what we need is innovation. May the clouded lens of our perception become clear. 

           

Tit for Tat/Quid pro Quo:

That the pace of production has picked up is undeniable. It is harder and harder to commit to endeavors that take a serious investment of time. The space for individuals to invent new paths is shrinking. I have seen this happen in my lifetime. I had naively thought that by becoming an artist I could escape technology. I didn’t want to end up sitting on a computer all day. I wanted to have a hands on experience with the world. The rise of technology in just the past fifteen years is noteworthy. My first year of college, no one had cell phone, within three years everyone did. This changed things. Now I too have a small computer, an iPhone that I carry with me everywhere. A recent study I heard about was the study of brain waves when individuals would look at their iphones, and the same patterns emerged looking at their iphones as looking at loved ones. What does this say of our experience to technology?  As an instructor of drawing I have had students that are art majors in my class that had never drawn with pencils, only through a digital pad on the computer! I am not sure the fair reaching implication of this; I am just noticing the shift.  Artists spend less as less time developing a single work of art; this could easily be said of architecture and on down to items for consumption.  These pressures that don’t show a sign of ceasing, are transforming the way we create in the world.  Technology is a force to be reckoned within any creative endeavor today. It is requiring us to be innovative if we are to evolve and maintain quality in life and in the objects we create.