Things I've been engaging with this week
- Listening Stones Jumping Rocks exhibition @ Adam Art Gallery, Wellington, that explores the Anthropocene, the converging of natural and human histories, and "narratives of mourning and hope" in a "re-examination of the boundaries between human and nonhuman, life and living, speculation and imagination". Have been enjoying exploring the coverage of the exhibition online (as much as I'd like to be there in person) and seeing the different ways this topic has been addressed both conceptually and materially.
- a few of the course reader texts, mostly surrounding OOO, language, ecology, etc. (Tim Morton, Donna Haraway, Hito Steyerl). I will write proper blog posts for them in future, some rough notes are below.
- Nick Yee's book The Proteus Paradox, which discusses game theory, the Proteus effect and the paradox that emerges through digital space - i.e. while avatars and digital environments offer us the ability to shape virtual worlds with complete freedom, we often end up recreating the dynamics, mores and structures that exist within our current offline world, even if obsolete or detrimental. Not 100% applicable to what I'm looking into currently, but I found it interesting nonetheless.
- have also been playing around with Blender, learning more basic skills. My hope is to next week start reworking some of my sketches from EOY 2021 into assemblages, digital memory forests, etc.
I've more or less decided that this term will be for up-skilling, experimentation, and play. Partially because I want to learn a lot more from the programs I've been using over the break (Unity, virtual reality drawing programs, Blender), but also because at this stage I don't really know what I want to be doing! And the best way for me to find that out is usually to just do. I don't want to get stuck in tinkering with digital tools, so I want to continue exploring non-digital drawing (potentially in an expanded field sense) as well, and have specific small projects in the works that actively utilise these new skills as necessary. How this will come about, I'm not sure...
Thinking about ecology, layers, trajectories and agency of non-human entities, flux and reciprocity
Below is some footage I captured down at the Orakei Basin walkway. I was initially just drawn in by the pattern on the surface of the water, but it's something I've since thought on a bit more in relation to some of the readings I did over the weekend and some of the themes explored last year in the studio...
What drew me to it initially was the shifting pattern of the surface, which almost looked computer-generated and artificially geometric. Watching it back, I became aware of the human and non-human sounds in the shot (different voices, water, footsteps, breeze, traffic, etc.) and the particles in the water. It made me think of what Morton and Haraway discuss in their work ("Thinking Ecology" and "Tentacular Thinkings" respectively), that all things are interconnected in such an inextricable way, a sprawling mesh of information and being, and that all things are made up of other things... It made me think about the environment (its own unique ecosystem, in, around and below the water level), the pollution in the water breaking down further and further until it is consumed or absorbed into something new, and the whole layered process of cohabitation, amalgamation, flux, and exchange that was going on. Overthinking, perhaps, but it did remind me of a strange kind of looking glass.
Edit: I ended up figuring out how to motion track in Blender - this footage was taken from a walking track around the basin, and I was curious about the events and path that had caused the tiny pieces of plastic and debris in the water to end up where they were, and wondered where they were going. I decided to attempt to track their motion in their present environment, for the sake of curiosity... In actively focusing on such tiny pieces of matter, I wanted to draw attention to their presence.
Last year, while I didn't delve too deeply into the concepts, I was starting to explore Object-Oriented Ontology and Vital Materialism (especially around my work Self-field). I think that this is something I want to go back to, as in thinking about layers, boundaries and agency I keep coming back to a curiosity about organic systems in the world around us. Jondi Keane's writings on cognition also influenced this, specifically his theories around how humans, the environment and its non-human agents all engage in collective knowledge-building in the space we share. This theme of broader interconnection is a theme that I've come across this week in writing by Tim Morton and Donna Haraway. Something I came across in a podcast by Pip Adams in her reflection on the Listening Stones Jumping Rocks exhibition was her thoughts on fiction writing. She suggests that it gives her permission and ability to "lie" to the reader, but that in doing so a sort of optimistic moral bubble can be created where the reader, distanced from events, can theorise about what they would do in the fictional situations they encounter without any real-world consequence or change being enacted. But through leaning into the messy reality of our world within fiction writing, a space is created for the reader to question the real world a lot more effectively, and in a way that Adams believes that this messy, ambiguous space brings about more change. I think that digital technology holds a similar ability - to me, there's a knowledge that digital mediation puts things through a filter of sorts, for better or worse depending on intention and reception, but digital media give us a space to theorise and question the "offline", "real" realities we inhabit by acknowledging their illusory qualities, or to view the world through new eyes or perspectives - this is something Pipilotti Rist also talks about in relation to cameras and film. Just a passing thought for now; I will flesh it out a bit more in future.
תגובות