these images were made as powerpoint slides in a presentation for an ongoing project. in the act of making the slides i was confronted with the inability to show my ideas in the round, to reveal all of the places where they overlap and loop back and connect across, and to move into and through the ideas. there was no way to convey, as a conversation can, all of the correlations which are the atomic structure within and thus comprising the synthesized notion on the surface.
thought fields is the first visualized iteration of a long percolating observation. these pieces attempt to shift the flat digital world into a kinetic structure that mimics ecosystems – subterranean and atmospheric. just as the physical is expressed in layers, so too are the energetic conceptual worlds and lives we inhabit. thoughts are a meshing, melding, melting of association and connection to previous learned, discovered, and inherited information. both niche and knowledge are defined through relation.
there is something about the looping of memory: from oration reverberation of voice sonic waves carried away for who knows how long, to print of impermanence in sand or soil, to a deep carving that withstands time and erosion on clay tablets and cave walls, to easily destroyed and easily made paper, to this plugged-in archive. (t)here is anything you could want to know and so many of its variations, where it seems something cannot ever be retracted and can become a single grain of salt dissolved forever into an ocean of information. the internet is kind of like the earth as it holds a record of all that has ever occurred and also is unknowable in its entirety on a human scale.
these fields are trying to fit somewhere in the discrepancy between embodied dimensional reality and the flatness of the digital spaces onto which so much human attention is being poured. each field of thought has a visual diagram of evolutions – existential, personal, social, internal, external – that is the wellspring of the field.
archetypes phase in and out of personal and collective imagination and association. tracing back through the process of creating the slides is meant to reveal, to root, my presenting self (now past) as a moment in a lineage, a node on a web, of citation. they are the macro: zooming completely out to then dive in, so as to show the framework of my own perspective. it is an attempt to remove myself from any position of fixed centrality into one of simple iteration, possibility, and potential change.
the way we both give and receive information, the mesh of mode, is the undercurrent of all of this. the matrix of reality, i believe, is regulated through emotional disposition - it appears cerebral because thoughts and feelings are together running along a mobius strip of existence. from an embodied vantage point of viewer, listener, audience, receptor, we are asked often to assume, infer, fill-in, or simply ignore the lived experiences, conceptual position, and/ or personal interests of the source of our attention. thought fields are meant to uncover the basis of my assertions and my claims, not necessarily in others words or works. to reveal myself, my own collection and synthesis of disposition, dreams, desires, ideals, internal revelation, gleaned facts, integrated practices, and relational dynamic.
in trying to hold an instance long enough to learn something about the truth of this time and place, it slips so quick that after thirty-three years i can still only gesture to the notes made in a moment. a working hypothesis is that we are in a realm of shadows and mirrors. quantum physics seems to argue, or evade arguing, that none of this can be known. there is no great structural, logical answer, there is no singular shape that can be found beneath everything for nothing has a shape at all. but i want to try (and i am not alone in wanting to.) it seems too easy to me that trying (and even this hypothesis) is at odds with the propositions of quantum theory.
mirror is the reflection of a form in exactness, only flipped along the z-axis: meaning flipped from the through-ness of an image. a shadow is the imprint of a form on a flat surface, reflected back by light outlining that form, which is creating a void of light by blocking it. there are literal physical explanations for these occurrences so common that they are defining of all experiences in this time and place. because of the ubiquity of such phenomena they are archetypal, meaning they come to represent, are used to communicate emotional and spiritual occurrences.
this is a gestating notion, the first few reaches outside of a situated place of understanding, which means i feel there are threads to follow but i make no claims of wholeness. just that it is not binary that it is not this / that, left / right, not opposite, nor good / bad. but that the polarity of everything is perhaps something contained inside of another thing and the inversion is that center outside containing the others outside within. in this wondering wandering are so many portals: are we all on the same side of the mirror? seeing one thing in reality and its inversion in the reflection? is there another world just along the axis? can we learn to permeate the boundary? are we meant to?
the definition of technology i currently hold is: the awareness and application of how life’s parameters and possibilities. essential to this definition is that life itself is the original tekknos. life here is defined as the inhabitance and expression of energy in and through tangible form. i believe that tekknos/ technology is not inherently ethically positioned: what is done with technology, how it us used or not, determines the constructive or destructive power of such material realization. simultaneously once space has been made and consciousness is opened to something it cannot be closed: it works like an object in water, the liquid not being replaced with the form but in being displaced around it, that form remaining separate, itself, yet also becoming a part of the entire.
the flat, glass, two-dimensional computer screen seems like the shadow. it does not reflect back depth, does not reflect back the truth of being in bodies and all the power of our minds going to some place that more or less, does not exist. or only exists if we put ourselves into it. the internet is a place that feels like, gives the illusion of being beyond our own reality where we must navigate (or put energy into avoiding) sensitive, unpredictable permeable bodies, brains, and emotions, with contradicting chemistries, with slowness, with mortality, with theoretical solutions. but i am not convinced this flat screen place is place at all. does place require depth, an ability to go into? the screen takes in whatever we give it, flattens it, and reflects it back with the designed surface of our world but the DNA of binary code. it seems like us but is it us? you can have everything you think you want immediately -except food, water, shelter, touch, smell…) but only one thing at a time. this river of information, hyper-links make paths where all the stones you took to get there have visually disappeared – for we are talking visual when it comes to these flat looking glasses – and thus sort of evaporated from your field of thought because you are there in present about to absorb it too into the past by jumping and landing on one of these stones in front of you.
when you make a choice in life, out there* (turn for a moment fully away from this screen and say “out here* where* i am”) / from here (where i am) it happens with and in and from a body, happens in response to or amidst the recognition of temperature, happens because of or alongside of the feeling of sunlight or your hand on your other hand or your legs on leather, it can occur with and without thirst, happen during the act of chewing some berries or blowing your own breath across the surface of a mug full of hot tea, happen right before you have to pee or when you have a sour taste left on your tongue or your stomach feels a little weird. like, choices happen that are not related to all the sensations you are always feeling but they are situated, still, in that context. and those mentioned are just little bits about your own personal causation of sensation, it did not even touch the constant reverberation of input from all the other beings coming and going and being above and below and beside you.
it is very much like and unlike the dimensions and complexity and mess of life in-body, in that there are infinite ways to get from one point to another out here and it is just a matter of relationship to experience which translates into knowledge. but out here, you cannot control the intersection of your line of living and knowing with that or those belonging to another or others; you cannot control the intersection of your beliefs with the contradiction or variation of your own body or other’s bodies, or your own emotion or other’s emotions, or your own actions or other’s actions.
there is so much in the ether but not quite from this explanation: more on the mirror / shadow dichotomy / loop and how it is or is not polarity and binary, full transparency and accessibility to all of the lineage of my thought relayed here in the text, discussion of citation itself as an eco-poltical act, descriptions of possible iterations of this work, talk of light and color gradient as a visual metaphor for truth, my own views on the poisoned well of the current internet and visions for a future of biotechnology which is symbiotic with our own bodies and that of the planet – one that steps inside of a cycle rather than simply drains from it, a sort of “green-net.” also floating around but absent in clarity is the belief that tekknos is always ever biological and appartai, that each can support life in expansion, evolution, self-sufficencey, and interrelation but that they are currently,largely, dysregulated, misdirected, and even unconsciously engaged and certainly out of sync with one another.
thought fields are a small gesture towards embodiment in the digital world. and i am not convinced it is entirely possible, or even something that i personally desire, sometimes i would rather just return to the earth. but consciousness is open to it, so it cannot cease to exist, which means it is time to recognize it as a metaphor and a tool: both are best used in moments of specificity, rather than relied upon in ubiquity. those purposes can become multiply with ingenuity and imagination. in the very human way, my curiosity is piqued, i am interested in setting boundaries and wading into potential, i will likely keep at it.
the source slides:
