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Deconstructionist Written Thesis, Poetry, Prose &Short Essay, May 2015 Rachel Wolfe, Los Angeles, California
As a walking mass of conflictions, | may barely breathe at all. As a sensing terrain of conditions, | see. As an act of longing, | may create something of me for an Other.
ITERATIONS OF SENSE INTERPRETATION (a table of contents for continents)
I. Within and among the contents are continents.
II. Defining sense.
III. I have nothing to say and why | want you to care.
IV. An ode to the distance of an ice mountain.
V. The deeply felt through the reception of sense data in the multiplicity of awareness.
VI. An elaborate theory for the simultaneous production of habitat.
VII. Memory as a function for the translation of sense data to story.
VIII. The transience of eternal ballerina meets astronaut beauty.
VIIII. A Hard Drive
X. Roland Barthes becomes you.
XI. All rivers find their way to sea, somehow.
WITHIN AND AMONG THE CONTENTS ARE CONTINENTS
Worlds. Within and among worlds are tables. Tables of contents of ecstatic and horrific continents. The unpleasantries of the peasants are present. The uprisings and revolutionaries are present. The unspoken sounds of peoples are present. The unfelt senses of the bodies are present. The worlds divided as continents. The worlds divided as countries on continents. The worlds divided as states in countries in continents. The on and the In became interchangeable.
Conquest-able, conquerable, confused. The Second World War. The Second World War stories. The Second World War textbooks. The atomic bomb. Pro-nuclear power. Cameras. Communication. Technology. Space launches. Launching revolutionaries. Hippies. Islands. Big things and small things. Matter. Voices. Noises. Politics and business. Hospitals and pills. Products and debts. Selfishness and sad. Look within, the polite ~~| don’ t have time to care what you have to say. While you are busy not paying attention to what | do, buy this thing here to cure you of that which is not me. Know no within. Nothing. Contents of desire an endless hole of goal. Longing lives upon land. Longing lives upon sea. See. Lands of we are different. Cultures. Standards. Regimes. Locations. Geographies. Topographies. The body. Feeling. The modern day sin. Sins will save you from your own doing. See the sin. Feel the sin. Sin speaks in feelings we fail to say. The failings fall. The fall. Winter. Ice. Wait. Spring comes. Spring granted. Again. The continents divide. The water rise. Ready or not. See or be surprised. See and be surprised. See. Sea.
DEFINING SENSE
Sense data. – Stored interpretations of information from sense-able objects, feelings, experiences synthesised through the body as occurrence. Accumulation and organization of sight, sound, taste, touch, scent-inclusive of balance, acceleration, kinaesthetic, pain, internal senses, chronoception, plant senses, animalist senses of electrical and magnetic fields, water pressure and currents.
Sense Agent. – Image as emissary. Representation embedded with sense.
Raw data. – Undifferentiated experience.
Tele – A. A prefix that means “at a distance, ” especially a “transmission over a distance, as {(n telephone, tele-therapy, television, te/ecommunication.
Tele – B. A word-forming element meaning “far, far off,” from Greek tele-, combining form of tele “far off, afar, at or to a distance, ” related to teleos (genitive telos) “end, goal, result, consummation, perfection,” /iterally “completion of a cycle.”
Telos philosophy — The study of purposiveness, study of ob/sects with view to their aims, purposes, or intentions. Teleology is central to nearly all philosophical theories of history.
Telematics – Systems invested in the tracking, documenting, and tracing movements such as in GPS. Images as traces of movements.
Transcendence -Religious contexts describes reaching ‘beyond the material. The particular interpretation of transcendence spoken of in this document addresses boundaries within material properties. Transcendence as a practical function for agency.
Pluralism – Multitudes of perception through continually available sense and contexts. An al/ times/realities occurring independently and inextricably from each other.
I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY AND WHY | WANT YOU TO CARE.
Art presents an opportunity to say what no one else has said but was been clear all along. To make clear an obvious paradox by working out ideas, through the wilful act of expunging concepts and visions, translated into creations for viewer experience. Language can be debated; experiences occur and become negotiable via translation to language. In and of themselves, experiences, tastes, truths, personal, deeply felt, real. The point of translating occurrences into sense is one of my primary preoccupations. In other words, the construction of stories told about the experience. Then, what is lost in that translation and perhaps arriving at a different way to commune with the experience and sharing that experience.
There is a logical coherence absent from the parts of what | create. A sort of inversion of self-denial and confrontation present, which in its totality becomes something of a truth in itself. In this way, working toward being very quiet in my art, develops a capacity to direct more concentrated experiences. The less |, as an imagined self, is present in the work, the more direct communication | am participating in, within myself, the creation, the viewer.
The principle qualities of synthesising an opposition, is to integrate the opposing perceptions into a new understanding and embody it. We are never what we think or what we feel, but what we embody. The language tolerated for describing sense experience for the body must expand. Every effort to produce a communication of the body encounters a loss in the first effort to translate the sense into words. That loss is great enough that sparks an impulse within myself to create something that will, in a way, say nothing. In the saying nothing, | am able to transmit communication in another way, through sense, and activate the viewer s senses of perception, ideology, and self. Through the ways in which humans have come to
make sense of their experiences to themselves. The personal becomes subjected to exposure, and the viewer becomes vulnerable in some way. This vulnerability allows the deposit of non-spoken communication of what | am presenting into their body. One could easily argue this is manipulative or subversive tactic, and they would be right in doing so. What should allow me to do such a thing then would be to impart a tremendous amount of trust. Trust in my personal telos. Trust my aim in saying nothing and extending an offer to wonder, question, think, sense, and feel. Then to open up a story, or historical narrative, to bring to surface the suppressed senses servicing an outside force, giving rise to the probable conditions for transcendence, or creative power. Power is not the same as force. Real power is in the ability to create, and cannot be bought or sold. Force is the pretence of power as the wilful manipulation of an Other.
THE DEEPLY FELT THROUGH SENSE DATA IN THE AGE OF DYNAMIC AWARENESS
In my practice of photographing, | engage in a wilful act of observation, meditating upon the deeply felt. To do so, | slip into a mediary space, someplace between pre-language and sense translation. This space mistakenly get described as an abyss, but there is much within this space-complete drives of sense data. My body services the subject, and the record, to be extended to a viewer. The photograph stands witness to the representation of the senses | encountered communing with observation through my potential other-selves as mediated by the narratives with which pass through genetic code, behavior programming, societal regulatory practices. These streams of narrative encounter a potential disruption or seeing through the act of image making.
Encounters may not be objective by practical means, and they may also offer opportunities to see what is to be seen-trading an idea or ideal for something real. Ideas about objectivity are mediated through systems of force, control, trade of commodity and information-which are embedded in the mechanical functioning of the camera itself. While the camera, as a charged object and potential symbol of the situations camera technology was created through, maintains an opportunity to allow me (or any active photographing person) to consciously and temporarily liberate the thoughts which any sense which brings me closer to alive, closer to the real.
When believed | am, and emerge with an active observation of This Real, I would describe as something more connected to my being in a body, something deeply felt, subjective and sharing with others perceived different—a wave pattern of sense data recording and imprinting upon a nervous system. In working this way, an awareness of the complexity and multiplicity of sources of histories, stories or emphasized sense data becomes increasingly available.
The idea of a point of origin now confronts substantial opposition through sense data to see the energy expended to uphold stories of singular origins as counterproductive toward creating a different vision.
As vision produces will necessitated by the principles of transience, or in a simple term: action or movement, the dynamic awareness of simultaneous multiplicities (of perspective, perception, values) has grown increasingly present in daily life through telematics. These encounters with technology offer opportunities for a variation in vision which has not yet been seen-or has been seen but not acknowledged as the receivers of sense data are not sufficiently sophisticated enough to process.
An important distinction must be made here. This position clarifies the necessity for the body to develop as a sophisticated receiver of sense data. The most technologically advanced systems are contained within the potential of the body, by compounding intellectual competence with sense and feeling-making intelligence cognitive and sensual. The motif which ties the sensual, the deeply felt, the sense data, the intellect through dynamic awareness is water.
AN ODE TO THE DISTANCE OF AN ICE MOUNTAIN.
A sensation of meaning and wholeness forms by developing an ability to select and arrange sense data in accordance with the longing the life has for the sake of the life itself. From this mutable positioning, the life synchronises in harmony with the transience therein.
The roots of the longing branch into Old Saxon, Old High German, and Old Norse language, which describe a sense of, to yearn for relating to the meaning ‘to seem, be, or grow long, hence the action of reaching out or extending toward.
The word Langian, in Anglo-Saxon, is impersonal in sound and form, with a tone of accusation toward the person who is longing-as if longing were something of a ‘wrong’ action to partake in. To say ‘| long for’, then means, ‘it longs me [of]’, what ever it may be.
Want and desire are clear and urgent, driven by force, always guided by a knowing. Longing is something that ‘happens’ between us and another thing, is not directed by will, is far from being a process of acquisition; but instead a choice for union. Longing meeting its union is experienced, feels, as a re-union. Longing is less clear, containing more unknowns, residing in the intuitive, and often described as spiritual in nature. Spiritual longing and melancholy have much in common. Something which is said as it ‘happens’ or “comes about’ relative to ourselves and an Other, cannot locate a “cause’ or origin in what the melancholy, or longing, is about or for.
Wanting requires separation from the thing that is wanted. Longing implies a distance. The distance never interferes with the connection or union, however far the subject/object of longing may be. The tension experienced through longing creates a pull, similar to that of a string across a bow for shooting arrows. The two ends of a bow are never separate, but of the same implement with which one may point the exerted force toward a target, or telos.
Art and receiver must long for an experience of sense data transmission for an experience to occur. As a creator interested in form, | make an agreement to dive into a longing within myself which finds itself situation against and with the longings of other bodies, and create from that. The final form, whether in a photograph, image, projection, arrangement, creates a union, for myself personally, for the form itself-which also contained a longing to find its union in material, and the union with the receiver which stands simultaneously personal and independent from me. For the communication to occur, a mutual longing must be there-otherwise the translation will likely fail on some level. To engage in such a risky process seems futile to a mind oriented toward production and affirmation of selfhood, but to a body possessed by unreasonable aims seems quite plausible and necessary.
Longing, as differentiated from desire, has a never ending quality, an abyss, an eternity. Desire is fleeting- an empty preoccupation as a diversion to the pursuit of creating wholeness, the real as the value of the deeply felt. As one might chase feelings and thoughts (in the mode of desire), one will encounter a ~running-out~.
The substance of longing aches as the sense carves out a hollow to be filled. The substance of desire was always full, never empty nor having room for anything to unite with at all. Desire sits as a lighter-fluid filled brick, waiting the arrival of its object, the lit match. Poof. Just like magic, consumed before recognizing its existence. Longing, even in the event of its union perpetuates, is eternal. Longing is ruthless, continually and without reason, caring out an expanded space of more longing, with which more union can take place. This process of emptying and expanding carved lakes, rivers, mountains, oceans, filling, emptying, filling, emptying, modifying and shifting forms, melting, freezing, thawing. There can be no art without these transient qualities. There can be no life without such.
An ice mountain embodies the formal qualities of longing. In, within, and of, or embodied by the ice mountain at a distance-are the forms of water, ice, snow, slush, melt, vapour clouds, streams, hidden ponds, secret valleys formed by and contained within such forms. The ice mountain contains the secrets narratives of sense data, of earth, of human, of nature.
AN ELABORATE THEORY FOR THE SIMULTANEOUS PRODUCTION OF HABITAT
Heracles, the weeping philosopher, had a deep connection to the sea. The deeply felt sense of the ever-present transitory qualities of life can since be represented by water. The connection of the representation of the body through representation of the sea has material relations with the blood that keeps our organs alive. The blood within the body contains the same ratio of salt the world’s oceans do. These traces (representations) of the deeply felt emotional body connect our human bodies with the water of this world.
Heracles s contemporaries responded with laughter or opposition to his philosophy and disposition. Philosophies are not expressions of truth, but rather expressions of humours, preferences, or personality. Heracles s sentimentality was marginalised, and stories weakening the relevance of the deeply felt continued to be built upon. Tear came to be known as sadness instead of the possibility of representing, signalling, or being a sign of transience, transformation, mutability, that makes us more alive by continual awareness and caring of the
temporary nature of our lives. Condemning the subjectivity in favour of objectivity situated this attitude as a truth over time. And today with our awareness of the multitudes of truth present blows the logical mind to space.
Telematic technology invigorates an awareness which affords us physical space around our bodies. This space can become an empathic zone where the deeply felt can be explored without the direct sense of threat a body may encounter when exposed to environmental vulnerability. The imaging technology involved in creating representations about the direct, subjective relations we have to the world through our bodies-or rather the systems in which we navigate the world relative to other features of life. Through the moving representations these systems provide, we can educate our subjective relations we have to the world through our bodies.
The then take a step forward with this awareness through technologies, the revaluing of nature serves as a primary act toward a continuation of the body. Choices contain simultaneous effects in directs outward from the body, as indicated by Site A.
Site A.
Previously the desire to formulate, predict and know outcomes of choices was the choice story in the industrialised worlds. This led to great technological achievements, which had implications with interests bringing about great horrific events. Please refer to Site B. for a description of what occurs when attempts are made to solidify or merge differences of separate bodies or entities.
Site B.
Richard Feynman regarded the hypothesis of matter being made of atoms as the most useful phrase toward humanity as follows: little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.
Differences stand to be accepted, not through dismissal, but through consideration. Take Site C. for example.
Site C.
Charles Krauthammer, essay in Time magazine: Perhaps the deepest cause of moral confusion is the state of language itself, language that has been bleached of its moral distinction, turned neutral, value-free, non-judgmental. When that happens, moral discourse becomes difficult, moral distinctions impossible and moral debate incomprehensible… the trouble with blurring moral distinctions, even for the best of causes, is that is can become a habit. It is a habit we can ill afford, since the modern tolerance for such distinctions is already in decline. Some serious ideas are used so promiscuously in the service of so many causes that they have lost all their power. Genocide, for example, has been used to describe almost every kind of perceived injustice, from Vietnam to pornography to Third World birth control. A new word, holocaust, has to be brought in as a substitute. But its life before ultimate trivialisation will not be long. Only last month a financial commentator on PBS, referring to a stock-market drop, spoke of the holocaust year of 1981. The host did not blink.
The sites described above reiterate there being no escape from all the qualities of ourselves as humans, but an increase in the signal for a deep longing toward a revaluing of nature and the body. The deeply felt and subjective nature of human body. We must remember our bodies inextricable relation to the conditions of the world’s water.
Traditional Chinese medicine describes the principles and qualities of water as the emotional currents in the body. The ability with which we are able to support these currents depends on the sophisticated network of neurological, cognitive, and emotional intelligence. Suppressed energy finds an outlet in one way or another, in an effort to maintain balance in the system. The telos of continuing life flow as exhibited by an imbalance in the system can seem difficult to accept or trust. A deeper knowledge of principles and qualities must be gained to guide the system toward a state of equilibrium. Overriding the principles with the aims of desire will eventually lead to further deterioration, providing conditions for disease to prosper. The more loudly the water (emotional) body talks through visible and material symptoms, the more undeniable the attention toward certain qualities is necessitated. Such can be viewed on a global capacity through evaluating water conditions of the world. The events and occurrence happening in the world, can be directly related to the relationships we have with our emotional bodies.
Certain ancient practices, such as Taoism and shamanism can become relevant today mediated through our new encounters with technology. A technological shaman, a mediary or visionary of the future can provide a useful guide toward facilitating the development of new levels of intelligence into matter. Through the efforts and innovations in art and technology, a revaluing of the simultaneous formation of body and nature habitat can be perceived, created, and appreciated.
MEMORY AS A FUNCTION FOR THE TRANSLATION OF SENSE DATA TO STORY
The past, barely a memory, has not passed at all. Already a memory, the future has not arrived. The present existing as a memory of a story. To see the present for as it really is, asks we suspend stories, just long enough to see the present flying past. To be busy attending to the present, leave little time for conscious story building. Yet, the body stores records of time moving through and past us.
Stories service making sense of occurrences. What occurs shares much in common with that of a trauma. Experience can scarcely, if ever, be known. Experience can be felt, and is sometimes unrecognisable to the body. A new feeling (however wondrous) can be experienced as a trauma, or rupture from a dominating story. The unknown and the story are deeply related to each other in this way. The more direct articulation the deeply felt is encroached upon, the less story there is to tell. Words demand of us a capacity to breathe new meaning into them. Perhaps their sounds will shift, their structures engage different systems, and it will require a vision, and such efforts require art. Art can stand service to the producing of stories, or to have no story at all. What art!
Historical narratives can be described as dominant stories selected from available sense data. Ideas such as progress, efficiency, and production service the strengthening of struggles with force and control. Feeling and sensation have received the ultimate walking orders under these ideas. Deleuze and Guattari describe a desire for a body of parts as a machine. In this orientation spirit is often attached to such historical traumas of religion and witchcraft. Feeling and sensation can be the simple words for spirit, or that which we cannot directly see-but sense. The telos of longing works to produce something quite different from desire. To act from the depths of longing creates something lasting, perhaps something eternal.
Narratives, as powerful drivers of occurrence through the world histories, can be written through bodies by recovering sense and feeling. Developing and attuning abilities to receive and choose sense data simultaneously creates a different habitat. The inner and the outer simultaneously create each other in this way. The habitat of experience moulded and shifted by the programs which we write for it.
All sense data carries with it a program for form. The viewable qualities of the form, under current social and cultural narratives, necessitate mediation through means external to the body-through machines. The specific tools of mediation referred to here are imaging systems.
The function of the eyes relative to the body systems, camera and the lens, the radiation of the x-ray, Kirlian photography, neurological scanning and mapping, telematics and image based communications. In other words, the previously unseen and unfelt become seen and felt.
Each of these tools of mediation have been imparted with specific visual looks, and scientifically speaking-not arbitrarily. Colors, as developed and described through mathematical functions of frequency and density determine the reception such physical properties have in relationship to the body. The perception of such colors came long before we could describe them with a language. Observation and experience led to inquiry, which led to understandings, which lead to fine tuning understanding and reaching new observations and experiences. The cycle of discovery repeating upon itself-leading not to discovery at all, but to habit. The metanarrative of progress serves then as a telos to covering up other narratives which could Just as easily function, but are created as non-sense or impossible.
Art experiences can offer the development of practices which may rupture dominant narratives, however brief, but long enough to insert possibilities which were otherwise deemed beyond, without sense, or impossible-but were really available on a different level of sense data reception all along. As scientific discovery births from rigorous practice, art can also birth discovery toward the relevance of developing deep embodiment and the provocation of a longing.
A HARD DRIVE
The past never past, all happenings lasting
a ripple fulfilling —
dropped rocks occurrence belonging
to the eternity of occurring.
Imperative operations shout,
the exiles of choice –
as redemption to the damnation of occurrence.
Plentiful servants replay fantasies —
Drivers of destruction amputate fruition
Drivers of torture replay horrors
Drivers of seeking discover
Drivers of longing find union
Drivers for the sinking of islands
Drivers for the detonating of ideas
Mount the all times
For written action
Asks a softer driver
To feel today.
ROLAND BARTHES BECOMES YOU.
As a text, you may take me or leave me.
By taking me, you may receive me as your text.
By leaving me, you deny me as your text.
Our existence is mutually inclusive of each other.
The relevance we create of each other-
A resistor toward creating forms.
Your involvement with empathy and compassion-—
A measure by which the rigidity of your form mandates,
A measure by which survival requires adaptation.
Your empathy situations your tolerance.
Your choice creates.
THE TRANSIENCE OF ETERNAL BALLERINA MEETS ASTRONAUT BEAUTY.
The creation of certitude and belief relies upon agreements and collisions of perception through each other. We matter to ourselves and whether we like it or not, to each other.
Life moves over a multiplicity of perception, over time. Time and life are inextricably related, no one to each other, but variations or expressions of a multiplicity. To pull time in separate directions paradoxically does not expand duration but drains and dissolves the time/life multiplicity. The choice to remain habitual (decline) or open (expansive) determines regulatory paradoxes. To be open to multitudes of differences in perception allows for the creation of variances in certitude and belief. Variances and frequencies of It can then be seen as a principle of specific forms to be formed from agreements and collisions matter to the deepest longings we have. flow in cohesive (not unified, not separate) general direction over time.
As the paragraph above describes eternal movement, this transient quality, can be experienced through the meeting of a ballerina and the astronaut. The symphony of such metaphors are powerful as the and our often The expansive sensations a body under centripetal force is as undeniable centripetal force of the earth rotating on its axis, unrecognised acknowledgment of our sense of this action. as the ballerina floating on stage, hovering as viewers unknowingly hold their breathes, disbelief of a human inhabiting a space we can scarcely comprehend at the hope in their hearts, when we stare in all-and yet the ballerinas do, have, and continue to amaze, to momentarily suspend the tyranny of the astronaut encounters this same different means. The variations of multiplicities from gravity can be ballerina and astronaut. For these land locked logic-gravity, while suspension through a completely expressing the potential in the forms of the resists witnessed entities to meet then, deeper logic and offers an opportunity for a glimpse at transience itself.
Attempts to deny the sensation of awe and wonderment undermine real power-that of creative power. The wills of force ask us to be smarter than systems. To outsmart ‘the system to be good artists, to be good people-this story can find rest when the liberating qualities sought
can be recognized in a pairing as graceful as a ballerina and floating astronaut uniting. For the gravity of the situation is built into our inner ears. We, thankfully, have not outsmarted our inner ears. For the inner ear we cannot see. We must feel it-—the expansion of acceleration relative to ground in movement. Feeling is our hope for saving our bodies from outsmartedness, from willing over nature. For as complicated as nature has been for humans, we have no idea what we are dealing with when it comes to ourselves. We ought to consider more fully such creations we set forth into the world, lest we lose our ability to feel at all.
ALL RIVERS FIND THEIR WAY TO SEA, SOMEHOW.
The sea contains the bodies of the world. The unfelt, the felt, all find their way toward the incomprehensible mass of undulating, circulating body of shifting light, shipping vessels. Somehow we al| find our way back to the sea. An interesting, observed biological fact is that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. Our bodies are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea — whether to sail the breeze and skim the dances of light in the wet folds of the sea, to fish for our hungry stomachs, to explore depths of darkness, to discover artefacts of ruin or possibility, or to watch the rise and fall of our breath in rhythm with the waves, “ we are going back from whence we came. “
En close
On any given day, one thing may excellently be created; two things sufficiently created; three things partially created, and any number of things barely breathed at all.
