True Blue Island

“How one lives as a private person is intimately bound into the work. And at some point I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and come out with personal truth. If we are to understand the human condition, and if we are to accept ourselves in all the complexity, self-doubt, extravagance of feeling, guilty, joy, the slow freeing of the self to its full capacity for action and creation, both as human being and as artist, we have to know all we can about each other, and we have to be willing to go naked.” -May Sarton

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To The North from  7/18 – 7/31

Dreamings – Jukurrpa– are an integral aspect of life in Central Desert society. Stories told for more than 40 000 years, Dreamings not only speak about the landscape and its vicissitudes, they create spacetimes of experience. This creative alchemy sustains not only a reciprocal relationship to the land, it is also an enactment of the Law.  Law creates-with life, setting operational constraints for the perpetuation of the creative nexus between Dreaming and life. As story, Dreaming evokes the lived landscape, a spiritual and lived experience. To dream is to take response-ability seriously. It is to operate at the threshold where culture and law overlap, where the future-pastness of experiences in the making take hold.

For Aborigines, life is Dreaming in the sense that the coordinates of spacetime out of which everyday lives emerge are significantly in line with creation and recreation of the land and its Laws. But even this is too simple: the land is not an extension of the Aborigines – it is them. To be the land is to become in relation to it, in relation not to space itself, but to the living coordinates of a topological relationscape that embodies as much the Law as it does the grains of sand that prolong it in realtime. The land and the Law are not two, are not juxtaposed. They are not sustained in a present-future symbolism. They are one: a becoming multiplicity.

The Dreaming alters all dimensions of experience even as it embeds pastness in futurity. To simply locate a Dreaming as a story of creation is to touch only one aspect of the concept. Dreamings are mythological and cosmogenic tales that are not simply stories of creation (with all attendant dramas and misunderstandings, love stories and disappointments) in the Biblical sense, they are also stories of the creation of the future-present. Dreamings do not exist once and for all (although they also do that): they are tales for the retelling through song, voice, dance, paint. Dreams are for keeping alive.

The cosmology of the Dreaming must be understood as both actual and virtual. It is as an overlapping of the two, where reality and dream are not opposed but superimposed. Aborigines of the Central Desert animate time in space.  In their rituals, the present is ancestralised not as a nostalgia for the past but as a becoming-future. The past and future, the actual and the virtual are traces of becoming whose dimensions are experienced in shifting continuity as through the spiral of a Nietzschean eternal recurrence. When time is activated in this way what emerges is a time-line that is not linear. The present is always in the mode of an embodying withness not of a forgotten past but of a reexperiencing in the future-present.

To experience Alhalkere is to feel the recomposition of a living landscape that is not separate from the perception of perception that recomposes us. Alhalkere is the Dreaming insofar as it incurs concern for the event that is the shapeshifting of experience. Moving-with its own eventful becoming, Alhalkere becomes a metastable system that cannot be thought outside the experiential field it opens. Touching (with) us, Alhalkere asks that we have concern for the Dreaming.

It is to take the immanent materiality of the Dreamings seriously and to note that what paintings such as Alhalkere do exceeds the parameters of their landmarks. Their concern is for the embodied eventness of land, not a pre-determined location.

The relation the Dreaming proposes is not composed separately from its eventness. Dreamings are here and now as much as they are then and before. Dreamings are neither nostalgic nor predictable. They are concern for the present passing.

A Dreaming is not an entity, not a place. It is a movement, a song and a dance, a practice of mark-making that does not represent a spacetime but creates it, again and again.

Timespace is at the heart of this complex art as are conceptual slidings, performative experience, rituals of appearance and disappearance. This timespace is not haphazard: Dreamings must be performed lest they disappear into disuse, their songs forgotten or unsung.

Topology refers to a continuity of transformation that alters the figure, bringing to the fore not the coordinates of form but the experience of it. Topologies suggest that the space of the body extends beyond Euclidean coordinates to an embodiment of folding spacetimes of experience: pure plastic rhythm.

Topological spacetime refutes the dichotomy between the abstract and the concrete. Topological spacetime is not 1 + 1 but n + 1, always more-than. The Dreaming is an evocation of such a topological spacetime of experience. It situates land, body, space, time, experience all in one structural node, an elastic point that fields the perpetual movement of time.

To think topologically is to think dynamically: it is to situate the movement of thought at its transformational vector, deforming it into its potential. When we re-render the form static, when we stop the process, we are shortchanging the experience.

The desert is not one space: it is many overlapping spacetimes of experience that Aboriginals call Dreamings. These Dreamings can be drawn into maps, but such maps will never lead us anywhere if we expect them to do the walking for us.

. Space here is performed, folding into durations that become part of the materiality of the painterly event.

Bringing futurity into the mix, the sixth panel seems to virtually contain all the other canvases, holding the series together even while exhausting it, the paintbrush squeezing out its last drops of colour. In Whiteheadian terms, the subjective form has coalesced (concresced).  It is the event that composes the series even as it marks the beginning of its perishing.

where “the world within experience is identical with the world beyond experience, the occasion of experience is within the world and the world is within the occasion” (Whitehead 1933: 228).

). Percepts are “independent of a state of those who undergo them” and affects do not arise from subjects but pass through them (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 169).

Emily Kngwarreye’s art moves the body through the interpellation of increasingly complex sensations that are connected not to one final event but to the perpetuation of events alive in the “whole.”

When movement is no longer indexed to position (when mapping becomes an event), position itself becomes mobile.

the figure is the movement of becoming itself.

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Gilles Deleuze suggests that the figure need not be conceived as the figurative. For a more detailed explanation, see his work on Bacon in Logic of Sensation (Minneapolis:Minnesota UP, 2003).

It is the rhythm of the land I see in Kngwarreye’s relationscapes, a rhythm that refuses to subjugate the image to the text, the dance to the music. The rhythm is all around, it is the “whole lot”: the weather, the seasons, the births and deaths, the rituals and performances, the body painting and batiks. These rhythms are sensations of the boldest kind, sensations that alter the very core of what it is to sense. There is no inside/outside to the sensations: they are as much of the body as of the land, extending synesthetically beyond all comprehension of three-dimensional spacetime, leading us not toward a dimension as such but toward a topological hyperspace of relationscapes, to an immanent transcendence that is profoundly of the land, of the here and now. [insert image 59 – Kngwarreye Merne Kame 1995]

Ben Shahn — The Shape of Content

Peter Greenaway — Vertical Features Remake

Anne Carson — Fragments of Sappho

David Abrams — The Spell of the Sensuous (Husserl / Merleau-Ponty)

Gilles Deleuze — Deserted Islands

Annie Dillard — Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

My own Journals 

Gerhard Richter

Luc Tuymans

Majorie Perloff – Radical Artifice

Jules de Balincourt

Lynne Drexler

Ted Ames

Yet we should not be so ready to interpret these dimensions as “supernatural,” nor to view them as realms entirely “internal” to the personal psyche of the practitioner.  For it is likely that the “innerworld” of our western psychological experience, like the supernatural heaven of christian belief, originates in the loss of our ancestral reciprocity with the animate earth.  When the animate powers that surround us are suddenly construed as having less significance than ourselves, when the generative earth is abruptly defined as a determinate object devoid of its own sensations and feelings, then the sense of a wild and multiplicitous otherness (in relation to which human existence has oriented itself) must migrate, either into a supersensory heaven beyond the natural world, or else into the human skull itself — the only allowable refuge in this world for what is ineffable and unfathomable.  p 10 

remain transparent 

Magic, then, in its perhaps most primordial sense, is the experience of existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences, the intuition that every form one perceives — from the swallow swooping overhead to the fly on a blade of grass, and indeed the blade of grass itself — is an experiencing form, an entity with its own predilections and sensations, albeit sensations that are very different from our own p 9-10

paint primordial senses and multiple intelligences.  every form painted is one experienced.  

painted directly or from memory of experience.

The traditional magician cultivates and ability to shift out of her common state of consciousness precisely in order to make contact with the other organic forms of sensitivity and awareness with which human existence is entwined.  only by temporarily shedding the accepted perceptual logic of his culture can the sorcerer hope to enter into relation with other species on their own terms; only by altering the common organization of this senses will he be able tot enter into a rapport with the multiple non-human sensibilities that animate the local landscape.  it is this, we might say, that defines a shaman: the ability to readily slip out of the perceptual boundaries that demarcate his or her particular culture — boundaries reinforced by social customs, taboos, and most importantly, the common speech or language — in order to make contact with, and learn from, the other powers in the land.  His magic is precisely this heightened receptivity to the meaningful solicitations — songs, cries, gestures — of the larger, more than-human field. p 9

 

It is partly what is missing in the poems, what we don’t know, to which we bring our own desires and interpretations, that enhances its erotic spell.  

In the fragments of just a single line, the words assume a particular, devastating power. [you burn me]

By bringing her particular kind of austerity to the translation, Ms. Carson has deepened Sappho’s mystery and yet brought us closer to her

Sappho’s poetry is filled with a golden eroticism. It is redolent of Attic sunshine, the sweet smells of the Aegean, Grecian meadows.

It is an eroticism from an ancient time when lines between homosexuality and heterosexuality were blurred, before distinctions were made and fear and prohibitions came into place.

It is said that Sappho died for love of a younger man, Phaon, a ferry boat captain, that she threw herself off a cliff because of him.

But that is probably a lie.

nytimes

Reasoning About Control: An Evidential Approach Authors: Leonard P. Wesley; John D. Lowrance; Thomas D. Garvey; SRI INTERNATIONAL MENLO PARK CA ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CENTER

Abstract: Expert systems that operate in complex domains are continually confronted with the problem of deciding what to do next. Being able to reach a decision requires, in part, having the capacity to “reason” about a set of alternative actions. It has been argued that expert systems must reason from evidential information — i.e., uncertain, incompletes, and occasionally inaccurate information. As a consequence, a model for reasoning about control must be capable of performing several tasks: to combine the evidential information that is generically distinct and from disparate sources; to overcome minor inaccuracies in the evidential information that is needed to reach a decision; to reason about what additional evidential information is required; to explain the actions taken (based on such information) by the system. These are a few of the formidable control problems that remain largely unsolved. If expert systems are to improve their performance significantly, they must utilize increasingly sophisticated and general models for dealing with the evidential information required for reasoning about their behavior. To this end we present an alternative, evidentially-based approach to reasoning about control that has several advantages over existing techniques. It enables us to reason from limited and imperfect information; to partition bodies of meta- and domain- knowledge into modular components; and to order potential actions flexibly by allowing any number of constraints (i.e., control strategies) to be imposed over a set of alternative actions. Furthermore, because it can be used for reasoning about the expenditure of additional resources to obtain the evidential information needed as a basis for choosing among alternatives, this approach can be employed recursively.