BLOG 1
EXPERIMENTATION IS A PROCESS BY WHICH THINGS COME INTO BEING
MAKING IS AN UNPREDICTABLE ACTIVITY
MULTI-SITED RESEARCH: the object of study may itself not been known before, but emerges on the links.
Do not follow a goal.
Let yourself flow into affection, exploration, intuition, questions.
In the path of experimentation/observation, we build a relation with the things we are doing. With matter, with the digital, with whatever we are working with. Instead of following a goal, explore. Let yourself to be affected. Change of plans may appear, that is: being in relation, being affected. This could bring unexpected decisions. An act of listening and talking. Communication, in sort way.
To embrace other’s agency to drive my own practice, is necessary to focus on processes, experimentations, exploration; instead of results. Trust in the process.
Looking for a final result already in mind is a human-intended action despite the world. No affection. That’s the kind of art education that I received in my undergraduates. Pure conceptual art. The idea first. The processes as just as a gap to achieve a pre-conceived idea, but not a process itself. Clever ideas with no-body.
Reading ‘Alien Agency” I concluded that a posthuman and non-materialist art practice involves a methodology of work that embraces processes and its unpredictability. It needs a methodology that listens. It needs an artist that allows itself to be affected by the matter of study; an artist that gives up control.
To be able to do this, I insist, we need time. Time for connection. Time for experimentation. Time to be with the other.
“(...) I know that when you are working in this way [durational performances], phychological and physical change takes place. You are affected by duration: your perception and your reality becomes different. So, if its done truly, int the way that Tehching did it, transformation takes place (...)” Marina Abramovich in Time (2013).
Some time ago, I attended to a lecture about “non-human theatre”. In it, the play writer highlighted that this was still theatre for humans by, for example, the use of human language. Nevertheless, there was something about the process that could be less hierarchical, instead, center in learning from others. This talk comes to my mind now. Contemporary art might still be done by “humans” and for “humans”, but I like changing the focus on the idea/goal and take it into the process. Listening others.
The act of listening is different from the act of seeing/observing. In this last one, there is a distance between the observer and the observed. As in front of a landscape, the observed is always in front of us. Even in a tiny distance, you need distance to focus your eyes. A completely different situation is the act of listening. Sound is a surrounding phenomenon. We are always in the middle. There’s no distance. Moreover, listening implies bringing to the inside what is outside. We need a connection with ourselves to be able to listen.
// Areas to explore (computing)
My interest about the concept of time, affection, living with others; misses a computational question that I haven’t find yet. To achieve connections, I’ve concluded the following areas of study to explore:
- Relations human-machine, cyborg relation, how to live together, interactivity, sensors, computer vision, bodies in relation.
- Book: Vehicles, Valentino.
- Autopoiesis, Maturana-Varela.
- Book: On the mode of existence of Technical Objects, Simondon.
- Computer predictions or a posthuman/non-materialist unpredictable approach.
-
Bibliography
Salter, C. (2015). Alien Agency. Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press.
Time (2013). London: Whitechapel Art Gallery.
BLOG 2 : 16th November 2020
“(…) our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.”
D. Haraway (1984)
When I read this phrase for the first time, I agreed with it but, I wasn’t sure how to deal with it. We’ve seen many cyberpunk movies depicting the “ghost in the shell” imaginary: from the film that titles that phrase, to many other productions such as Terminator, Tron, Blade Runner, Ex-Machina, WestWorld, among others. Beyond the fact that these “living machines” have been pretty much conceived as “human-like” replicants —; I kept wondering how “frighteningly inert” are we. How inert am I?
I’m not going to dig into the life-inert dilemma, nor into “we are all cyborgs” nor either into “all matter is vibrant matter”. But I’m interested in this turn from “life” to “inert”, as Haraway suggested. Inert, here, doesn’t seem to mean “absent of movement”, or “absent of action”. “We” keep breathing, our hearts keep beating, though, Haraway’s words feels very accurate. The dystopian cliché: wake up, go to work, go back home, sleep, and wake up again: an eternal loop of linear automatism. Or pretty much as "Matrix" (1999): living human-battery supplies that feed the capitalist system. Empty automatic behavior. No time for decision-making. No space for a sensitive and relational being. In addition, processes of homogenization, loss of individualization and alienation.
On Vimeo, I found a video of Franco Biffo Berardi talking about his book “After the Future” (Sujo Docs, 2011). Here, he explains that “the future is over”, so we would need something beyond the end, beyond the future. That, he says, is time. Time to live.
“We don’t need more things; we need more time. We don’t need more property; we need more joy. Today, we have developed the conditions to produce everything we need in terms of exploitation. So, the problem now is not about growth, but enjoy the world we’ve achieved. (…) the possibility of self-care, self-therapy, self-education. “ (Sujo Docs, 2011).
“We need to stop working and start living”, he says.
If we need to start living… that sentence already contemplates that we stopped living.
“(…) frighteningly inert”.
That’s finally the meaning that I was looking for.
We are frighteningly inert, frighteningly dead. Dead in the middle of the end of the future.
Berardi was very emphatic in the phrase “we need time for living”. He repeated it several times. And even when I find his approach very snob, I agree with the sentence. Actually, it is the core of my current research.
Berardi also mentions Simondon’s ideas of “individualization” and “singularity”. If I understood correctly, he is trying to explain how “the history of capitalism is the history of homogeneity” (Sujo Docs, 2011) which flats our human singularities. I would add that this homogenization is not new at all. Started with Europe and its violente colonization around the world, erasing and literally killing lives and cultures that were different, therefore, unacceptable. Today, finally, the process went back into the colonizers. Homogeneity has reached us all.
Berardi claims: “we have more information but less meaning”, and this might produce an effect on our human relationships. Alienation from nature, from other people, from our work and from ourselves, as Marx categorizes. I deeply believe that we need time to live, as Berardi says. Living is living time, we can’t just skip it. Living takes time, it involves duration. A concept that I was studying in Byung-Chul Han’s book “The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering”.
But before going any further, I would like to highlight Marina Garcés’s “Nueva Ilustración Radical” (Garcés, 2017), in which she also rises the phrase “the end of the future”, calling it a posthumous condition. I like that she introduces the concept of “life of dignity” as the condition for a posthumous future. She observes:
“The end of modernity, of history, of ideologies and revolutions. We’ve been seeing the end of progress: the end of the promise of the future as development and growth. Today, we see resources running out, water, oil, clean air, and the extinction of ecosystems and their diversity”[1] (2017, p. 13).
What we find here is a liminal state. “The limit of a livable life”, she says. In this context, "life of dignity" would mean something like "basic socio-human-being needs". A basic standard to live and die healthy, “properly”, with no-alienation and back to our bodies, back to our relations with others and the world.
Let's remember the initial idea of "inert" for a second. A life without dignity would be, then, an empty and inert automaton. Living, then, it's not just about joy, as Bifo manifests, it's –a lot— about dignity.
“Dignity” is the more spread word in the recent Chilean revolt (2019-): if you ask any Chilean the reasons behind their protests, they would probably say: "for a life of dignity". This is a very open answer, I know. It's not about pensions, it's not about taxes, it's not about education; it's about all of them. Is a structural problem. The basics are broken.
Bibliography
Garcés, M. (2017). Nueva Ilustración Radical. Barcelona: Anagrama.
Haraway, D (1991). ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, in Haraway, D. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books, pp. 152.
Sujo Docs (2011). Bifo: After the Future. Available at: https://vimeo.com/25367464 (Accessed: 16 November 2020).
[1] Translation from Spanish by Camila Colussi
BLOG3: 1st December 2020
Cycle and transformation
Last week, a student asked me about my project “Better Times Are Coming”. “Cycle and transformation” was the core of her thesis, so she was looking at artworks that could express her approach. She asked me if my work could be thought from that perspective. Sadly, I realized that it doesn’t.
The concept of time and transformation are very significant to me. I built the project about ideas of cyclical history versus progress, linearity, eternal return and the possibility of change. Mainly about the possibility of change. When this student asked about my work, I realized that I was talking about transformation, but the structure of the piece was purely cycle. It might show variations at each cycle but, at the end, it doesn’t allow transformation. The code is fixed, stable, even when the interactions alter sound and graphics, it always resets itself as a brand new repetitive cycle.
Lately, I’ve been approaching to theories of chaos and predictability. Fractals, recursion, feedback. Cybernetics and theory of systems. Complexity. Change, cycles and transformation. This approach comes from a relational understanding of existing in the universe. No more individuals, but complex agents of fluid systems, inseparable and in mutual co-creation. This interest comes from my first divagations about the concept of time and duration. Time and alienation. Time to be-in-relation. Bodies-in-relation. How to live together. I’ve been thinking about the idea of "to affect and being affected", that is basically a state of feedback. This takes me to question my artwork in terms of structure. “Better Times Are Coming” is, then, a contradiction. So, now on, I would like to take my practice under this state of “being affected” to allow a possibility of transformation.
In the last entry of this blog, I analyzed Haraway’s words “(…) our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert”. To do this, I intersected thoughts about /time/ and F. Berardi’s “After the future” lecture, as well as M. Garcés’s “Nueva ilustración radical” book. I pointed out Berardi’s expression “we need time to live” and it's relation with the concept of alienation and automaton: “inert” as a lineal behaviour of automatization. An unaffected body. Even when I disagree with many aspects of Berardi's thought, I would like to add his observations about contemporary human sensibility —which he describes as the trigger of many contemporary psychological sickness that include depression, anxiety, fear, among others— . Berardi argues that the current speed of the machine and the whole capitalist system run faster than our human capability of empathy and sensibility. Then, we find ourselves living in a state of automation that disables sensibilities. Alienation comes again. He connects this observation with what he calls "cellular labour", and somehow is still a problem about time and duration.
From another perspective, I would like to mention the author Jane Bennett in her book “Vibrant Matter”, in which she explores the idea of “thing power”. She criticizes the live-inert dichotomy, not just to question “what it means to be alive”, but also to show the interweaving nature of matter: there isn’t a real individualization of subjects or organisms. We are all parts of the everything. Membranous and porous. No boundaries but a fluid matter that groups us in different forms. A constant state of affection.
Bennett critics the idea of /inert/, but I keep thinking Haraway's words:
“(…) our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.”
The phrase contains a certain intuition of something missing. From my perspective, that is affection. The chance of “being affected” by others. The becoming into a lineal automaton that is not able to process any information beyond its determinism.
That takes me back to my artwork “Better Times Are Coming”, and how its structure is cyclical: varies each cycle, but it returns to a zero starting point every time with no transformation in it. With no real influence on its body —the piece's body—. If I want to research about time and duration to approach to the idea of “bodies-in-relation”, I also need to start looking at the possibilities of affection in the structure of my practice.
BLOG4: 7th December 2020
Predictability
After reading “Personalities without people” by Katherine Behar, I realized how important might be the research on processes of computational predictability for my work.
Behind the question about time —productive time—, I’ve been looking at concepts such as flexibility, transformation, change. This with the intension to question any kind of determinism. I want to believe in alternative futures beyond the socio-economical-historical rules that seemed to condition the human existence —I’m thinking in a cause-effect conception of history, in the political power over socio-cultural systems as education, in cultural norms as the ones related to gender, among others. Maybe closest to Foucault’s disciplinary society of control—. I don’t want to believe in fixed realities. I’m against linearity. Then, my interest in Einstein’s Relativity Theory stands not only in the specific idea of “relativity” within the theory, but also due to the mutable behavior of science, therefore, in the flexible possibility of living the world. There might be many other examples inside the scientific history, but I started looking at this one.
A new focus came to me after reading Behar’s text, after watching the fourth season of “Westworld” , and the micro-series “DEVS”. Big Data, artificial intelligence and algorithmic predictions being used to order and configure the world. Not only the market, as might be easier to see, but also every detail of existence. This is ‘predictability creating determinism’ in a different way that I previously thought. The traditional conception of history: past-present-future. The movie “Back to the future” (Robert Zemeckis, 1985) comes to my mind. Everything is the way it’s supposed to be. But now, DEVS or Westworld as something closer to Gattaca, in which humans are born knowing the trajectory for the course of their lives. There is no space for imagination or speculation —in Behar’s words. The code determines a fixed future. There is no space for the impossible. No space to “think-differently”.
“(…) is becoming impossible to be anything other than possibly” says Behar.
Nevertheless, is interesting how this phenomenon of algorithmic predictability is happening at the same time and after Zygmunt Bauman “Liquid Modernity”. Liquid reality. The fall of the great pillars that supported the human socio-cultural models. A moment of uncertainty, multiple directions and twists. A time that questions everything:
Gender,
the conception of history,
the conception of “true”,
the “true” in science,
the theory of everything,
situated knowledges and no-innocence,
the human and the non-human,
new materialism,
a new turn for objectivity and the subject,
we are not individuals but multitudes,
we are not Darwin’s competitive creatures but collaborative porous webs,
we are not women,
we are cyborgs,
we are not States anymore,
and no democracies.
A moment of transformation that looks and questions
what we are,
what we thought we were
and
what we could be.
And COVID. One day to another we were moved to a land of uncertainty. Many might agree with me when describing the first lockdown as a moment drown by the feeling of uncertainty. No-body knew what to do. How to do your job, how to continue with your studies. In a limbo. No projections. No toilet paper or general shortage. I remember being just in my bed, not even taken a shower, and just watching Netflix while waiting for any news about what to do next. Normal life was stopped. Maybe around a month after, our social life took its new path. The new normal. The workspaces re-organized their way to work. In my case, university re-organized the way to teach. We got deadlines again. Goals.
Even at the era of predictive algorithms, pure uncertainty happened.
BLOG5: 15th December 2020
OOO-OOF
Last class, we talked about OOO and OOF. We discussed that the first one runs the problem of reducing subjects into objects. Which is particularly problematic when analizing it from feminist and decolonial perspectives: being reduced to an object is precisely what feminism and decolonialism has been struggling for so long.
When I first listened about OOO, it was something such as:
“The concept of ‘object’ shouldn’t have a negative connotation. When 'object' is used to diminish a subject, it implies a subject-object hierarchy that diminishes the object by itself. OOO attempts to modify that kind of hierarchy to establish a horizontal relation in which we are all objects”
I liked this.
Let’s tear down the hierarchies.
Nevertheless, OOF is critical and I also agree.
OOO seems to look from a white-West-male standing point as it doesn’t face the complexity of historical objectification applied over women, original cultures and people of color. OOO seems to miss an important social gap that is still in conflict. It risks erasing historical social struggles that still need to be pointed out.
From a computational approach, we discussed that computational systems are reducing humans —and everything— into a very simplistic and utilitarian capitalist objectivization. Numbers. Pieces replaceable from a bigger machine. No humans. No people anymore. Then, the question objectifying appears even more relevant.
Nevertheless, ‘the subject’ is also a problematic concept. As a counterpart to “OOO, everything as an object”, we could say “everything is a subject” to establish more horizontal relations between human and non-human organisms. But this doesn't seem right either. "Everything is a subject" might “humanize” things and beings, which is not the idea either.
I like some approaches such as Lyn Margulis symbiosis theory, which establishs that organisms in the universe are not individuals but porous multitudes.
No more subjects.
Here we return to the very first problem of making disappear the subject —either if that is human or non-human. How to be multiple but also a subject. At the end of the class, we concluded that non of these existing concepts are longer valid, and that we are in the path to build new ideas of the self and our communities and complexities.
Materialities
From a different perspective, I would like to point out that the art practice could be an interesting platform to explore this object-subject conflict. I must admit that I’m pretty much a thinker than a maker, and that my art approach has been much more conceptual than a material one. We could keep theorizing about OOO and OOF, and that’s totally fine, but right now I consider that I need to move a step aside and focus on materialities – or at least for a while until achieving a balance. The first text that we read for this class had an accent on material processes and I agreed with that. Nevertheless, I haven’t been able to do apply it. I’m stack in the ideas, blocked by the hope of a successful result. Thinking too much instead of making. When thinking about OOO, OOF and new materialist approaches, it implies moving forward with more dedication into the making, into prototypes, failures… a necessary procedure to focus on materialities, objects, things, organisms… Getting lost in the making.
BLOG6 : 8th February 2021
CLOCKS AND EARTHQUAKES
In 2010 took place a huge 8.8 earthquake in Chile. Back in those days, I read that this earthquake changed the axis of the Earth, therefore, time was modified in a fragment of a second.
"The days will be shorter"— it said.
The physical phenomenon of the Earth shacking changed time —or at least time in the way we measure and grab it in our clocks—.
I was impressed. Time is usually indescribable, as Saint Augustine first said. We experience it through its immateriality. Time just happens, like floating in the air, making us old without notice. But there is also the fact that time seems to run without any influence... in an autonomous and automatic mode. Unattainable, ephemeral, eternal and untouchable. Today —after Einstein's Relativity Theory— we know that time is in relation to space, being affected by gravitational forces, for example. But this understanding is not obvious to our human senses and the experience at our human scale. That's why the idea of the earthquake changing time was so powerful. Time relativity was not just at the scale of the universe, but possible to imagine a time-pause, for example, or maybe a time-disruption, time-mutations, time-malleability.
Of course, time didn't change. The Earth changed so the measurements of how we understand time in relation to Earth’s movement. Time didn't change. The rotation of the Earth got shorter. But, for a second, it was beautiful to think about time in a different way.
2th March 2010 / Earthquake in Chile changed the Earth's axis
https://www.bbc.com/mundo/ciencia_tecnologia/2010/03/100302_terremoto_eje_men
"As a consequence of the earthquake, the days will be shorter".
I'm so attached to clocks and its scientific formula. It's hard for me to think about time in subjective terms, which might actually be the most sincere experience that everyone has in terms of time. Clocks are just a mediator. An outsider and imposed measurement.
EARTHQUAKE'S SENSOR
When I moved into London, I used to feel that it was trembling all the time. Basically because that's the way you live in a land that shakes: you are continuously in a sub-conscious alert-mode. You know that the Earth shakes. You know that a bigger shake could happen any moment. You know that a bigger one might follow a softer one. So, if you feel any movement, you need to pay attention. You need to pause to feel, to connect and go to a save spot if it's necessary. Most of the cases might be your imagination. But other cases might actually be minor, imperceptible tremors. At least for me, it was like feeling a constant immanence. A constant instability.
I didn't know there were not Earthquakes in London when I first moved in. I never googled it. I just carried the Earth-movement-alert with me. The first weeks in London I tried to pay attention to feel the tremors, but after a year I just got used to the idea that the land here is fixed. It doesn't move. Which is very weird.
Tremors and earthquakes are one of the manifestations of the complexity of the "liveness" of nature. It remind us that there are forces that run parallel to our daily lives, and they can affect us. It reminds us that we are not in a bubble of civilization. Civilization is not control and it's not a solution. We are part of a whole and we are vulnerable. To survive is not to control but to connect with your environments.
Moon Ribas / cyborg tremor artist
https://thoughtworksarts.io/projects/seismic-sense/
Moon Ribas is a Spanish cyborg dancer that has implants in her feet. These implants emit a shaking signal every time they sense an Earthquake around the Earth. She makes her dancing compositions in relation you this. Her next project is coping this sensing in relation to the moon.
Sismo detector APP
Recently, I found a free app that alerts me when there is an Earthquake around the Earth. It's not that accurate as Ribas's might be because it works based on people's data. If you sense a tremor, you create an alert in the app. There might be a gap with places in which there is no internet or where this app is not known. Nevertheless, I get alerts almost everyday, or at least every week. The alerts are draw in a map, so you can visually follow the location of this constant activity.
The app also twitters the alerts.
Some common places where earthquakes happens:
- Pacific América (Chile, Perú, Colombia, Mexico, USA, Ecuador).
- Caribbean Sea (Cuba, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, República Dominicana, Panamá, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala)
- Pacific Asia (China, Indonesia, Japan, India)
- Mediterran (Italy, Spain, Greece, Croatia)
- Middle East (Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, Yemen, Syria)
- Oceania (New Zealand, Papa New Guinea, Solomon Islands)
- North Africa (Morocco, Algeria)
- Iceland
May 18th 2017 - Changes in the duration of the day and other 4 facts that you might not know about earthquakes - BBC
https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-39961842
"At this very moment that you are reading this note, somewhere in the world, the Earth is shaking. And it is that, on average, there are about a million earthquakes a year on the planet. The vast majority are so small that they go unnoticed. However, based on observations since 1990, there are 17 earthquakes each year that are greater than 7 on the Richter scale, and a large one above 8, according to the United States Geological Survey."
USGS
United States Geological Survey is a scientific organization of the United States government that, among others, studies tectonic activity. The following website from the USGS monitors earthquakes including very low ones. I could work with this data.
Eternity / Time stops
At the moment you feel the tremor, you stop whatever you are doing. It is a moment of immanence: waiting until it passes, or waiting for the earthquake. Once the earthquake starts, eternity also starts. Time feels long even when the movement was just for about a few seconds.
Camila Colussi - Blurred Democracy
Last year I did a sound-light sculpture that used vibrating motors to make the word "democracy" shake. The shaking was in relation to sound amplitude, which corresponded to the sound recordings of social protest in Chile 2019.
Even when the project is not tremor-related, I've saved it here due to the use of vibrating motors, so the fact of the present of the vibration or, in a different a way, a sort of tremor.
PROJECT
I've been thinking in starting a work in relation to tremors and earthquakes. This might come from two perspectives:
a) earthquakes changing time.
b) the comment of tremor / waiting for the earthquakes. A moment in which time stops, and you need to be in connection with the moment and everything around.
Nevertheless, I still don't know how to start working with this ideas. I keep thinking in Moon Ribas and her sensors. Then, I was thinking and building a earthquake sensor as Ribas's (one connected to all Earth through USGS data), and doing something with that data. Something like a different sensor that does something more than saying "there is an earthquake". Maybe some lights or graphics get activated, or something about sound. But I still don't know what. Maybe I could make a connection with my other parallel projects:
- resin clocks
- distance sensor speakers
- light installation
BLOG7 : 16th February 2021
PLASTICITY AND INDETERMINACY
Thoughts about
change / transformation / determinism / the possibility of alternative futures
follow me since long ago.
I used to think about it in terms of culture and social norms. Your identity and how you should behave, what you should achieve, what is expected from you. Society as a written book of linear and rigid possibilities.
I used to think about it in relation to politics and history too. Will politics always disappoint us? Corruption and abuse will never be left behind? Is Power so powerful that it is untouchable by any sort of influence?
Yes and no.
Power changes and remains.
History changes and remains.
A year ago, when the Chilean riot started, the remains of dictatorship were updated. I was told that history is there to remind us to do not commit the same errors over and over again. And there was history repeating itself in a stubborn cycle.
Repetition repetition repetition.
Or maybe,
repetition, sure!
repetition inside change.
In my previous work —“Better times are coming” (September, 2020)— I was trying to deal with this situation and I was working to deny determinism. I don’t like determinism.
Today, the research that I’ve been following seems to show that indeterminacy embodies nature and it does in different ways. Neuroplasticity. Epigenetics. Symbiosis theory. Thermodynamics. Quantum physics.
This is a beautiful surprise. It changes everything.
The following are short notes about the theories previously mentioned. I need to study them to talk in more extension.
Catherine Malabou / Plasticity and Affection
Plasticity is about how structures and forms of life previously considered rigid are in fact ‘plastic’ and in constant mutation and transformation. The capacity to give and receive form.
Plasticity has a dimension of affection: questions about form. The forms we take, the forms we are, the forms we aspire to be. But also, plasticity in the form of Alzheimer and brain injury (studied by Malabou) could be understood as indifference and dis-affection.
Carlo Rovelli / The order of time / Processes rather than things. Everything is a process. Which means, changes. Instability. Nothing fixed.
Karen Barad / Queer Quantum Physics / No identity is fixed.
Emergence /
Prigogine / Thermodynamics / Thermodynamics beyond equilibrium / Determinism can never be total.
Pasquinelli // The role of error and trauma in the design of intelligent machine. Adaptation.
As I said before, my alliance with indeterminacy comes from hope. I want to believe that things could be different. That something unexpected could happen. And now that indeterminacy seems to rule, I wonder how to deal with it.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m thrilled by this approach. But today, February 17th 2021, when thinking about indeterminacy I can’t stop thinking about COVID. Another way to call it could be uncertainty. An open future is also about uncertainty. Before COVID I might have said that uncertainty is part of the wonderful universe of multiple possibilities. But COVID has been harsh. At least at the beginning months of this pandemic, uncertainty was one of the rougher feeling that affected us all, I might say. And not precisely in a positive way.
Change is terror and hope. The hope for a better future.
The terror of the future. That’s the problem.
But, I guess, this complexity is part of the process. We need to figure it out how to deal with it. My psychologist would say that.
Then,
I wanted so much to believe in change and transformation that now I’m wondering how to deal with it.
The next step after change. What do you do?
The next day after revolution.
Re-organize.
Sure!
We reorganize ourselves. We move.
Movement.
Moving together. You, me and the universe.
Adaptation.
Such a cynical answer. Not because it’s not true, but because it’s so easy to conclude but difficult to apply in practice. Or maybe it’s not difficult at all. Not per sé. It might be difficult to our culture of settlement. An agricultural culture. We need to look at our nomad remains. We need to look at it with gentle eyes and without judgments of civilization and hierarchy. I read this nomad theory somewhere. It’s not my original idea. I just don’t remember where.
“This era of plasticity is also an era of anxiety. The ground is moving all the time, beneath our feet”– Says Benjamin Dalton interviewing Catherine Malabou. [1]
// (tremor and earthquake research)
This is a good point.
We are supposed to be living in the era of change and acceleration. Nothing lasts. There’s no duration. And at the same time, I guess, again, nothing changes meanwhile everything is changing.
No, no. “nothing changes” is kind of an exaggeration. Drama, I know. But in a way... I’m confused.
[1] Dalton, B. (2019) What should we do with plasticity? An interview with Catherine Malabou. Source: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8656-993X