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thanks for sending me this, mike!

[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8453814925462673894&ei=0GCjSJ2aEImSrwKx08DTDw&q=richard+serra&vt=lf[/googlevideo]
Some quotes (please watch it for yourself):

mediazation (something that has been reduced to a flat surface, a screen that allows you to partake in its own reality, and not the situation of the reality in which it exists, a frame, a box), direct experience, metaphor, the immediacy and actuality of the place and moment, this being like that, the intensity of the work as it exists in its’ place, curves: concavity, convexity – no one knows a curve until they experience it, until they walk it. the latter part of the 20th century was devoid of curves, it was the tyranny of the right angle, we are entering an era when the curve will predominate and the corner will evaporate, art evolves through misinterpretation of what came before, and to use it as their own ideological purposes, every new generation purposely misinterprets what has come before, if you are just re-articulating what has come before you are being academic and probably treading water, a lot of art that doesn’t reinvent form, it lays a new content on an old form, if you look at pop art it is just rehashed cubism with new commodities thrown in, form, to a certain degree negates value, and that remains interesting to me.

Interesting. To me it’s not a question of either/or, it’s a question of integrating these experiences (in Serra’s words mediazation, and the experience of things as they really are in their place and moment), and understanding a given moment as a series of realizations that are built from a sequence of understandings embodied in different logical constructions (metaphoric, direct experience, etc.). He mentions simultaneity a few times, too, btw, and I’m not so sure we have any real ability to sense a genuine simultaneity in detail. I think our, or at least my, understandings often come down to sequence(s), anyway>>

To me, any given, known moment seems to be a cubism of different, but related logical constructions, and the exciting discovery comes from acknowledging the different logics present (whether based in the mind, physically instantiated in objects, or somewhere in between), and exploring that moment via the specific, shifting light that each provides. Put another way, the experience of a given moment is derived from the interaction between different modes of understanding that reside equally between the external and internal worlds. the oscillation between expression/participation, and observation of the specific modes, and their concentration and collective sequence seems to be where the fun is. cultivating an ability to see things this way and to accurately express one’s experience in those terms strikes me as a promising practice for thinkers and mashup artists of any discipline today.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eil7HfMg5Xk[/youtube]

a performer i know shared this story with me:

he and his family moved to nyc from puerto rico when he was in the fourth grade. he was asked by his teacher to memorize and recite a poem to the class. he chose ‘little brown baby‘ – (read the comment below the poem from january 7th).

while he was memorizing the poem his family was happily watching caddy shack in the next room. he decided to recite the poem the way bill murray’s character spoke in caddy shack. he doesn’t really know why he chose to recite the poem that way.

after his recitation his teacher took him by the arm into the hall and told him that what he’d done was horrible, and to never do something like that again. she was visibly upset with him.

his teacher was caucasian, and he had frequently experienced caucasians as unwilling to express their true feelings to someone’s face – and had heard they often seemed nice but then, behind your back, would do mean things. he was amazed that she would be so honest and direct with him about how she felt.

at that moment he decided to become a performer.

…but they do not create illuminations”. so says werner herzog in the interview below.

i recall a quote from hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach:

Gödel showed that provability is a weaker notion than truth, no matter what axiom system is involved..

the limits of formalization are interesting to me, and i’m intrigued at how dogmatic some of us seem to be about facts and their related logical structures. their real use to us is in our continued development of them, and their continued evolution with us, not in treating a currently useful arrangement of facts and logical structure as some sort of natural, invariable law.

logical structure’s (in general) mutability, development, and usefulness as a method for understanding the present as clearly as possible is an index of our intellectual evolution.

in speaking with an art student yesterday about her investigations and documentation of specific biologic structures i noticed that she seemed equally passionate about the circumstances surrounding the creation of her images: the people she met along the way, the places she visited, the impulses that lead her to focus her attention on her subject (the oldest living things on this planet), etc.

i recalled another quote from werner herzog:

the poet must not avert his eyes, you have to take a bold look at your environment and see what is around you, even the ugly things, the decadent things, even the dangerous things.

and it occurred to me that what was around her work was more than the photos she had chosen to show me, and i encouraged her to express the complex interaction of fact, impulse and gesture that the images were a part (a fact, a bit).

our experience occurs at the intersection of facts (logical constructions) and impulse. when the artist creates a gesture that contains the interaction of both of those elements in such a way that they permit an experience of what herzog describes as the poet’s gaze, the quality of that moment is aesthetic.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4i5WkkXdmc&NR=1[/youtube]

in the clip above he mentions an incident in the video below, that also contains the quote about the poet’s gaze.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ugQrfDrcq4&NR=1[/youtube]

while sitting in an artist’s studio yesterday i noticed how insulated i felt from the forest just yards away, and how pretty the woods looked through the small window cut out of the cinderblock wall, framed by all sorts of chemicals and gizmos.

last month i spent time visiting my father in massachusetts and spent a lot of time in the woods, which i loved. on the return trip i found a deer tick embedded in my leg. i’m still waiting to find out if i have lyme disease or not.

tonight, just after sunset i was looking at the sky and hills across a football field cut into the woods. the humidity began to increase, and i heard a high-pitched, rustling, patter coming toward me from the trees to the west. it was beautiful and i couldn’t figure out what it was.

a moment later i felt rain drops and realized i was hearing the rain coming toward me.

i walked under a tree for cover, saw a rail thin cat scrounging around for food, and was suddenly harassed by a squadron of mosquitoes. i headed indoors.

sitting with the artist we talked about how toxic to the environment concrete is, and how we’ve used it extensively.

i recalled some thoughts of werner herzog regarding nature included in my best fiend:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjjnZvtwtqA[/youtube]

i wondered if our aboriginal ancestors (we all have aboriginal ancestors) experienced nature as violent, chaotic, dangerous and agonizing. it occurred to me that if they had, then the recent environmental onslaught that we call industrialized society seems to be a sort embodiment and monument to what i imagine as our ancestor’s wish for control and violence against that great uncontrollable and dominant force that sustained, tormented, toyed with, and killed them. an entire epoch in human development that could be characterized as the ‘fuck you, nature!’ phase.

having temporarily isolated ourselves from much of the chaos and difficulty of living (as opposed to vacationing) close to nature the view through our assorted windows looks pretty and maybe even more healthy and comfortable that our rooms, studios, and offices.

like a lot things we’ve distanced ourselves from we’ve romanticized it.

our built environment may even be causing us more harm, confusion and misery than that view of a tree with a squirrel in it ever could. maybe we’ve gone too far away from nature and should live closer to the earth. why not?

except that our garbage and chemicals seem to be buried everywhere, and like much of our technology the essential stuff (in this case the most nasty and toxic materials and processes) is active but often undetectable except to some select experts.

the causes and effects of our actions are on a global scale and the causes and effects are highly dispersed across space and time, and as i’ve been writing about, our ability to sense relationships and coordinations of distant events is poor to begin with. we’ve set a trap for ourselves.

one could even argue that as our technology caused us to spread further apart we began to require our technology and other intellectual constructions to keep us ‘together’. by privileging the intellectually constructed we find ourselves increasingly clumsy in regard to our instincts. perhaps our instincts, seemingly constant for at least thousands of years, provided a sort of check and balance system for our relationship with the earth. perhaps lately we’ve been blindly building (or digging) ourselves into a toxic hole of our own design.

it seems that many hazardous chemicals that we’ve put down are leached out of the earth by plants that look, feel and taste good to us.

our forays into ‘anti’ biotics may have set the stage for highly virulent, uncontrollable bacteria and viruses.

global warming?

fresh water crisis?

hmmm. nice moves, nature.

Cesar, in response to Richard’s installation, described a difference between the hypnotic and the meditative. (I’m recalling these comments from memory a few hours later):

The hypnotic requires no conscious work from the subject. To me this suggests that the hypnotic is an intellectually effortless act of complacency and submission.

The meditative requires work from whoever wishes to meditate, and suggests a process of adaptation and interaction with one’s environment that directly involves the consciousness and, by extension, the interplay between the body and environment, between environment, body, feeling, and thought.

Cesar went on to say that creating hypnotic work now, in our culture, must be handled carefully and critically.

overheard at a crit.

during the question and answer period after last week’s talk at MICA someone brought up this post (improved interface design, not instinct), and asked if i knew anything about mirroring as a technique in early education and how it had been, according to the person asking the question, minimized as a technique over the past twenty years, and how some educators are attributing certain undesirable, difficult and minimally empathic behaviors in young people to this lack empathy in the technique of their teachers.

interesting.

here’s a link describing mirroring from an educator’s point of view.

mirroring is an interactive technique of listening, imitating, and adapting, for both student and teacher that seems to foster a sense of empathy. in brief, the idea seems to be one of implementing a lesson plan by using the vocabulary of a specific student.

take a moment and think about all your gripes about our current young generation.

take another moment and think about what you’ve been attributing those behaviors to: music, drugs, popular culture, ‘the computer’, ‘the internet’, ‘technology’, many, many other factors.

in addition to the lack of mirroring, the past twenty years also featured removal of civics classes from public schools, as well as the removal of art and music whenever the budget got tight.

the person who raised this point also went on to say that educators are concerned that they’ve ‘lost’ (her word) two generations, as the current younger crew will impart their values on their own kids.

mirroring is now becoming popular again in masters of education programs.

i didn’t catch the person’s name who raised these points, but i want to thank her.

i have an umbrella that i hate – it is too big, slightly bowed (so it always falls to the ground whenever i lean it against something), and seems to become inverted if i so much as sneeze while it’s open. i have also tripped over it about fifty times and stabbed countless scores of innocents with its ridiculously long and pointy metal tip, which looks like a mini lightning rod – man i hate that thing. for some reason i’ve managed to keep it around for years, while the nice, compact umbrellas i sometimes buy seem to vanish overnight.

this weekend i ended up toting the dreaded umbrella every day as i couldn’t figure out what was going on with the weather. this morning i did a little research and found this link on how to predict the weather by observing clouds.

Below are my lecture notes from the beginning of my talk to MICA’s Summer MFA in Studio Art, and Graduate Art Education students.

The second half of the talk featured various artworks of mine that can be found by looking under the artworks category on this blog or clicking the projects tab in the upper right corner of this page:

Lecture Notes:

Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914):

Nature is a far vaster and less clearly arranged repertory of facts than a census report; and if men had not come to it with special aptitudes for guessing right, it may well be doubted whether in the ten or twenty thousand years that they may have existed their greatest mind would have attained the amount of knowledge which is actually possessed by the lowest idiot.

Both man and animal come to this world with two classes of ideas which adapt them to their environment.

In the first place, they all have from birth some notions, however crude and concrete, of force, matter, space, and time; and, in the next place, they have some notion of what sort of objects their fellow-beings are, and of how they will act on given occasions.

Our innate mechanical ideas are so nearly correct that they needed but slight correction. The other physical sciences are the results of inquiry based on guesses suggested by the ideas of mechanics.

The moral sciences are equally developed out of our instinctive ideas about human nature.

Man has thus far not attained to any knowledge that is not in a wide sense either mechanical or anthropological in its nature, and it may be reasonably presumed that he never will.” pp 214-215 Philosophical Writings of Peirce, edited by Justus Buchler.

We come into the world with instincts for mechanics, or natural law, and anthropologic interactions, so says C.S. Peirce.

An example of Mechanical instincts is at the top of the post.

An example of Anthropologic Instincts:
My four month old niece is suddenly able to focus her eyes. My sister says that one of the ways infants learn about things like eating solid food is by watching other people eat solid food – obviously infants don’t consult books about such things, their instincts provide the necessary knowledge via an impetus to interact and observe.

Intellectual Constructions, a third mode of interaction, increasingly significant since the industrial revolution.

An example: Einstein’s Simultaneity (1905):

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wteiuxyqtoM[/youtube]

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) from Genetic Epistemology:

…if this redefinition of the possibility of events to be simultaneous at great distances from each other went against the grain of our logic, there would have been a considerable crisis within physics. We would have had to accept one of two possibilities: either the physical world is not rational, or else human reason is impotent – incapable of grasping external reality. Well, in fact nothing of this sort happened. There was no such upheaval.

Why in fact was it not a crisis?

It was not a crisis because simultaneity is not a primitive notion: It is not a primitive concept, and it is not even a primitive perception.

…our experimental findings have shown that human beings do not perceive simultaneity with any precision.

If we look at two objects moving at different speeds, and they stop at the same time, we do not have an adequate perception that they stopped at the same time.

Similarly, when children do not have a very exact idea of what simultaneity is, they do not conceive of it independently of the speed at which objects are traveling.

Simultaneity, then, is not a primitive intuition; it is an intellectual construction.

Godel’s (Kurt Godel, 1906-1978) Incompleteness Theorem (1931): There are limits to formalisation:

Axioms are statements that can be taken as true without proof.

Theories can be taken as true if they don’t violate any of the axioms upon which they are built.

Some theories can be true without proof.

“This sentence is not provable.” is true but not provable in the theory.

An axiomatized logic structure is a structure based on axioms.

Intellectual constructions use specialized, axiomatized linguistic structures (like calculus, or other systems of calculation guided by the symbolic manipulation of expressions, like Boolean algebra, the axiomatized logic upon which modern computers are based) to formalize specific ideas. Their development is fundamentally different than knowledge developed from our mechanical and anthropologic instincts.

What does logic formalize?

Any axiomatic system contains the undemonstrable propositions or the axioms, at the outset, from which the other propositions can be demonstrated, and also the undefinable, fundamental notions on the basis of which the other notions can be defined.

What lies underneath the undemonstrable axioms and the undefinable notions?

A feeling may lead to a thought, which may connect to a belief, which may lead to judgment/decision. A belief is an organization of thoughts, a logical system, possibly an axiomatised logical system.

The root of thought is feeling.

If our thoughts develop from feelings and if our feelings are an index of interactions with our environment the resulting logic has a physical connection to the world as our feet have a relationship to the ground.

The necessity for considering feeling itself as well as considering axiomatised logical systems, since it is from human feeling and thought that logical systems develop and maintain an intuitive quality.

Summary:

We have primitive instincts for natural law and learning from each other by observation and interaction. Neither of these requires a formalized logic system nor a specialized linguistic structure. Both of these seem innate and similar to instincts observable in other animals.

We have an environment increasingly embedded with physical instantiations of axiomatized logical structures (the computer, [and, by extension, the internet] a Boolean algebra machine, is an example). To which we respond intuitively – as we do to any physical structure we encounter.

Feeling > thought > belief > judgment/decision (logical structure, possibly axiomatized logical structure).

Godel’s theorum demonstrates that our axiomatized logical systems are fundamentally different than our intuitive understandings of natural law and learning by observing and imitating each other.

Axiomatized logical systems require specialized linguistic structures and fundamental concepts based on knowledge derived from specialized linguistic structures, i.e, intellectual constructions for which we often seem to have no clear intuitive understanding.

two excerpts from this post:

I’ve been doing some work in a small room with a sliding glass door that opens to the rear of my father’s house. I’ve been leaving this door unlocked, and a moment ago I tried to slide it open and found that the movement of the door was impeded by a small piece of stone that had found its way into the track on the floor. As soon as I tried to open the door it stopped at that lower corner, and I immediately knew that something was blocking its’ way, and where the blockage was, I could feel it. A matter of seconds later the track was clear and here I am.

My instincts – based on observable natural law, and observing the behaviors of others, permit me to make relatively quick inferences in a variety of situations.

Our intellectual constructions do not, in my experience, and in general, respond successfully to quick inferences. They are more complex and require knowledge that is often not immediately available. Often the required knowledge under the surface isn’t itself stable.

When I was trying to open the door I could feel and observe where the obstruction was, and I could infer how to remove it, quickly.

When my friend tells me my blog suddenly doesn’t appear when he points his browser to it, and when I take an look and have the same experience, and that experience doesn’t provide enough information for me to even guess what’s wrong, I consult my host’s tech support, then read a few documents, then look at a few message boards, then try, then fail, then try again, etc.

What I observe in both cases (door/blog) is that I have an impulse to make a quick inference based on the available information, to act on that information, to observe the result, refine my actions, minimize error, achieve the result, etc. I have an impulse to engage in classic negative feedback.

With the blog (an intellectual construction within a network of intellectual constructions) the necessary information is far from anything resembling a surface.

With the door, all of the necessary information was right in front of me, literally, the entire time, and my instincts lead me to the right conclusion right away.

I think that a major challenge we face is how to function within an environment for which we have increasingly insufficient, and often difficult to locate information within a psychological domain in which our instincts are prompting us to use what is immediately available to make quick inferences to solve the problem.

Our mechanical and anthropologic instincts and interactions are all based on information that is an intuitive, common, aspect of our interactions with the elements of our environment. I characterize the nature of these intuitive interactions as real-time proof.

It is by triangulating our actions within the intuitive and intellectually constructed that we come to understand our experience.

I am interested in observing how axiomatized logical structures and intuitive understandings function together, and how different environments may affect the degrees to which one mode may be more prevalent than another at a given moment.

I wonder it is possible to manage, or exert influence over these interactions in such a way as to increase knowledge holistically within this general environment.

The aesthetic experience, to me, is a point of balance between the instinctual and the intellectually constructed.