Dispatch by Dr. G. for Bodies in Space Explores….
Wear your heart on your sleeve?
Turn ice cold in the face of fear?
This month, our Artist of the Month feature focuses on the work of Leslie Park and David Gilbert, winners of the March 2012 Brain Awareness competition run in my “Critical Practice” course at Art Center College of Design. The undergraduate course includes a neuro-aesthetic perspective on how we read and experience images and objects.
Given the chance to conduct their own review of neuroscience literature in an area that tickles their fancy, Park and Gilbert started to scavenge the burgeoning literature focused on the brain and emotions. Their peers hand-picked the team’s image as outstanding, the intensity of which matched the duo’s in class presentation. Click here for Park and Gilbert’s rhetorical review.
BTW, timing as such, the team didn’t have the chance to read Richard Davidson’s new book, THE EMOTIONAL LIFE OF YOUR BRAIN. Click here for a super interview with Davidson by ABC Australia’s All in the Mind reporter Natasha Mitchell.
(Source: bodiesinspace.com)
Dispatch by Dr. G for Better Brains….
We walk, eat, dream, sleep in space yet rarely do we stop to notice the spatial features of our experience, unless of course you’re one of the numbers of people who exercise spatial navigation (think dancers, Navy Seals and kids using their “spidey” senses) or among the population diagnosed with “spatial neglect.”
Of all the “senses” spatial perception and spatial memory may be one of our most curious human features for as the Nobel prize winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel reminds us, spatial learning and memory is actually not a “sense” but rather the cognitive result of multi-sensory processing that results in a “mosaic map” of spatial awareness!
In this episode of BrainBright!, we interview Dr. Charles Butter, Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Michigan, an expert on the peculiar consistences of spatial perception and spatial neglect especially found in artists who were stroke victims. Our interview touches upon Dr. Butter’s new publication CROSSING CULTURAL BORDERS, Universals in Art and Their Biological Roots.
Click here to listen to Dr. Butter on the neuroscience of spatial neglect!
(Source: bodiesinspace.com)
Spacious Mind Dispatch, Green Beacon reporting on 2012 Earth Day Celebration in Los Angeles….
An old Chinese proverb says that if you want to correct the world, you must first correct the state; if you want to correct the state, you must first correct the family; if you want to correct the family, you must first correct yourself.
It was an honor to experience “Mindful Eating” with Deborah Eden Tull in celebration of Earth Day. In addition to being meditation teacher, she has been an organic gardener and farmer for many years and is certified in Permaculture Design, Bio-Intensive Organic Gardening, & Compost Education. In addition, she has been traveling to, living in, or teaching about sustainable communities internationally for the last 20 years, including spending seven years as a monk at the Zen Monastery Peace Center in Northern California.
According Deborah, three key points define the Mindful Eating and Food Revolution:
— Everything we need can be found in nature.
— How you treat yourself and how you treat the planet are one in the same.
— In making the shift to a mindful life, it is less about changing the world “out there” and more about lifting the focus of our attention from the mind of “something wrong” and “not enough” to the present moment, where peace, clarity, and interconnection reside. Compassionate action arises from present moment awareness.
How do we realize these ideals? Deborah guided everyone through a meditation to get present to ourselves and to the world around us, then onto a mindful eating exercise that had us meditate on raspberries and strawberries. First to connect…look…. smell, then to reflect upon all that went into getting the fruit to us, such as the soil and sunshine that helped the food grow, to the hands that picked the fruit, as well as the distance and energy it took to get it into our hands.
After more farm fresh food savoring and writing about our experiences, she gave an eye-opening, interactive powerpoint presentation that chronicled a brief history of food cultivation and it’s delicate relationship to this planet, whereby the Food Revolution begins with each and every one of us. Suffice it to say there is so much more to this amazing workshop and is one that we will definitely host again, so stay tuned….
Deborah’s next Mindful Eating workshops are in Laguna Beach on June 16th (a daylong) and at Golden Bridge Yoga in Los Angeles on June 18th. To find out more about Deborah’s workshops and retreats visit DeborahEdenTull.com and check out her book The Natural Kitchen: Your Guide to the Sustainable Food Revolution and her next book: MINDFUL LIVING REVOLUTION: How to Live Sustainably from the Inside Out, is coming soon!
Mindful Eating Taste Test: Try sitting outside with a simple piece of organic fruit (freshly picked if possible) in a non distracting place, where you can focus, get present and inhale. Notice the texture, the color and when the pulp and juices pass from your lips into our mouth. Notice how your taste buds respond. You will be amazed at how much more flavor you will experience!
Image credit: Julie Solomon, EarthDay 2012, GreenBeacon.org
(Source: bodiesinspace.com)
Salomen Huerta, Untitled, 2000, 12’ ’ x 11 3/4” oil on canvas
Bodies in Space Explores, Dr. G dispatch: April 2012 Artist of the Month: Salomen Huerta
When i first met Salmon Huerta, he was standing on a ladder lathering paint across a large mural at SPARC — a social activist gallery in Venice California. Playing off the theme of the four horseman of the apocalypse, Huerta covered the mural with big bold strokes each filled with the drama of growing up in Los Angeles barrios! Now, with nearly two decades of solo exhibitions under his belt, Huerta continues to explore imagery tethered to personal and cultural memory, again tackling symbolic and figurative representation on scales that mirror life as we know it. Gone is the expressive brushwork, traded for the smooth, GQ fashion surfaces free of blemish or uneven application of paint.
Salomen Huerta, Untitled, 2000, 14” x 14” oil on canvas
And what Huerta’s handling of space? In the artist’s own words:
“…. I create the size of the work according to the size of the gallery walls. I want the viewer to have a feeling of oneness. an overall physical and emotional experience. I want the viewer to be connected to the work as they are looking at it. I also think about the scale of the paintings in proportion to the viewer. When doing the work I think about the idea and then I feel my way into the size of the painting. This is my process in preparing paintings for a show. I think is like an installation artist preparing his work for a space….”
Salomen Huerta, Untitled, 2000. 68” x 48” oil on canvas
Click here to learn more about Salomen Huerta’s thoughts on contemporary art, body awareness and self representation.
(Source: bodiesinspace.com)
What does it mean to be human?
When ancient philosophers and playwrights posed this question centuries ago, the logical and common sense presumption was to distinguish human beings from gods, beasts, flying animals, and creepy crawling things. Think Plato, Aristophanes, Confucius, Lao Tzu and Shakespeare: The vestiges of their thinking (and wisdom) point to language and ideas that invite comparative “ontological” analysis — an area of study that picked up fuel with early modern philosophic, psychological and scientific questions raised by Darwin, Nietzsche, W. James and Freud in the West, and extending to Nishida Kitaro, the father of Japanese philosophy.
Today, the question “what does it mean to be human” calls for a new and equally challenging comparison, namely our human relation to machines in light of the greater forces we often ironically refer to as “Mother Nature.” Throughout the 1990’s for instance, I raised the machine/nature conflict in my “post-human” seminar organized for grad students in arts and design for whom the conflict centered on the cult classic film METROPOLIS. These were heady times when the coupling of human/machine in the work of international artists Stelarc or Eduardo Kac and in the academic writing of Donna Haraway demanded critical thinking about the biotech implications of neurotech, robotech and gentech on our lives. This too, was the era of popular and triumphant “transumanism” — Xman, Grey’s Anatomy (McDreamy was a neurosurgeon!) and The Matrix — all science fiction narratives that reflected the serious scientific revolution actually happening on ground with the competitive race to map of the human genome, the US Gov. earmarking of funds for neuroscience research (thank you George Bush Senior) and the visionary AI writings of Ray Kurzweil. Let us not forget, 1990’s ushered in a new age of digital prosthetics extending our conceptual and neurological sense of self to the mobile and personal use of laptops, cellphones and virtual worlds.
Image credit: Eduardo Kac, “Genesis,” 1999, multi-media installation
It’s been more than a decade since teaching post-humanism and to my delight, questions concerning our the present and future state of our humanity are now pressed through the sieve of both science and spirituality. BEING HUMAN conference organizer Peter Baumann and his curatorial cohorts are among those asking the “spiritual” question. Baumann, a professional musician and self proclaimed seeker of spiritual wisdom, shares the voice of the technotribe, the art/sci geeks who turn to 21st century science for spiritual guidance and who now gather by live stream - a defining feature of our techospiritual age. Opening the conference with the claim, ‘We have no handbook to humanity,’ Baumann echoes Buckminster Fuller, the Puck designer / inventor who had raised the point for the modernist generation, alienated from traditional religious, political and moral stories, rituals and objects that had enabled cultures to persist on Spaceship Earth — lovingly named by by “Bucky,” who followed others in making this quaint futurist call.
That Baumann turned to neuroscientists, neurophilosophers and evolutionary biologists to lay out humanity’s handbook was itself the conference message. (That’s right, neuroscientists, not high order members of New Age Spiritualism, nor revisionist minsters of the Church, the Synagogue nor Sweat Lodge.) With University of Wisconsin meditation and compassion researcher Richard Davidson moderating the event, the dialogue was decidedly “academic,” emphasizing a cognitive science / neuropsychological logic that revealed both the deconstructive and constructive aspects of brain/mind mechanics. Heavy on Ivy League research — Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and the UC system (Berkeley, San Diego) — east and west coast American academics were saddled with the question to define humanity for our age, the brain age, charting a current understanding of perceptions, decision-making, emotions, culture and reflective/integrative practices, e.g., wisdom or mindfulness practice for the Being Human crowd. Perhaps the binding agent of a proceedings so decidedly analytic, came through the sensory imagery shared by two artists, poet Jane Hirshfield and film-maker, Webby Award provocateur Tiffany Shlain, each adding palpable, reflective fiber and tone to the skeletal ideas paraded across the conference stage. Art as whole-brain breathing space for intellectual engagement?
For those who have spent any time penetrating the mystery of our humanity, it was no surprise to find the conference cartography mapping the usual suspect nodes of the symbolic, the syntactical and the self-aware aspects attributed to “mind.” Yet, by drawing neuroscience into the center of the conversation, BEING HUMAN curators signaled a powerful collective need to map as well, the simple fact of our “embodiment” — a supple form of self aware experience known to all who have trained in mind/body integration, e.g. from dancers, actors and athletes to yogis, martial artists and massage therapists. For a moment, the body-mind crowd was redeemed: Neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger joined pop stars VS Ramachandran, David Eagleton and Beau Lotto in naming “the body “as both necessary to concepts & experience of mind … and as an illusion!
Image Credit: Dr. V.S Ramachandran on stage with Richard Davidson and Beau Lotto, Being Human 2012, Palace of Fine Arts.
The body image illusion meme was so central, so vexing that when Lotto, commanding the stage like a Magic Castle magician, revealed the hidden mechanics of how we perceive color or estimate spatial location in a simple ball throw, the crowd went wild! Together, Ramachandran, the emergent Yoda of neuroscience, and Metzinger gave resounding stamp of authority on body image illusion pointing to the famous RUBBER HAND illusion and the network agency calibrating visual, haptic and proprioceptive awareness ( Scientists, any thought on using somatically gifted research subjects for future research? Hint Hint.)
Taken alone, illusion surprise is deeply satisfying. I’ve found kids 5 to 35 will delight in magic tricks playing with scale and proportion, light differentials and attentional blindness (the now famous Simon & Chabris Gorilla test). But to presume body misperception must necessarily lead to concluding the self is “merely an illusion” pushes ordinary human intuition and ordinary language into the defensive zone. Perhaps to calm the philosophers in the room, conference speakers shared ample evidence of neurological distortion, like spatial neglect or phantom limb for — research which helped to push Ramachandran into the popular limelight; still, I remain wondering why conference bloggers sitting nearby raced to the easy, reductive nihilistic conclusion (our sense of a whole, enduring self is an illusion) rather than sit with the more uncomfortable yet liberating idea that we exist and persist as a constructed process!
As if to derail nihilistic thinking, BEING HUMAN insured a social and cultural imperative with talks by primate specialists, medical and cultural historians along with clinical and behavioral psychologists, most notable and compelling being emotion analysis expert Paul Ekman. Considered a virtuoso of micro-facial analysis (his work gave rise to the popular TV show “Lie to Me,”), Ekman’s evo devo perspective gave cultural fat and psychological skin to what might only be thought of as a conference on neuro-analytics. His frank bordering on contentious clinical view was matched by a round table of leaders in the “mindfulness and compassion” movement: Jon Kabat-Zinn, Gelek Rimpoche, and Richard Davidson who had relinquished his role as moderator and handed the torch to Sounds True publisher Tami Simon. The curatorial move was not lost on this writer, a pointed reveal of how neuroscience has drawn Asian meditative and contemplative practices into the lab bearing forth research that impacts 21st century health, education and business systems. Also patently obvious as a pattern of conversation? The repeated use of the terms “attention and awareness,” two brain/mind threads in the rich weave of “3 C” research and practice: cognitive, contemplative and creativity neuroscience. (Shameless back patting aside, I called for “3 C” studies and focus on attention and awareness thirty years ago in my own doctoral research and now advocate it as a robust paradigm for applied neuroscience.)
Sounds audacious or ‘sounds true’? Stepping back from a conference that placed neuroscience within the cult of healthy narcissism, I would be hard pressed to argue with the organizing effort given my own applied neuroscience advocacy goals and values. In fact, kahuna kudos to Baumann and crew for daring to resurrect the question from a neuroscience perspective on a world stage — in San Francisco no less. Doing so is sure to help popularize the disruptive and recuperative aspects of the neuroscience revolution. Public Will, after all, determines how and when we rethink BIG questions for new generations to inhabit SpaceShip Earth.
In the meantime, it is enough to kick-start both zany and easy defensible projects that tell new stories about our constructed selves. We, who are said to come from stardust, have yet another chance to understand ourselves, this time by taking that old narcissistic urge and face ourselves in the mirror of neuroscience to discover our own beautiful, ever-changing and enduring reflection.
For wisdom seekers fascinated by our human relation to our world’s oceans, join the upcoming discussion ‘Your Mind on Blue’ on April 15 at Fort Mason in S.F.
For Marvel Comic readers and toy designers intrigued the narrative aspect of biotech, consider the legal distribution implications of Mutant Toy Rights in the age of “being human.”
Image Credit: Rubber Hand Illusion, Science Magazine 2004: “Probing the Neural Basis of Body Ownership,” by Matthew Botvinick
BEING HUMAN was sponsored by Science 2.0, Mind and Life Institute, and the California School of Integral Studies.
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P.S. Regarding the logic of no-self: The constructive aspect of personhood has served as a cherished intellectual argument within in Buddhist philosophy and within the French Deconstruction and yet, when one considers these arguments whether in conversation, or in private thought, the idea that we, in and of our selves, are merely an illusion often leads to the unfortunate conclusion of nihilism (not to mention a positive spin on borderline personality disorder). It also points to the ideological acquiesce of a morally and socially responsible active self. Consider, for instance the heavy critique of Buddhism by moral and social activists calling for holistic paradigms that attempt to recuperate a divided self (I refer readers to recent responses to the Occupy Movement http://www.tricycle.com/blog/buddha-buzz-teacher-thoughts-occupy-wall-street )
(Source: bodiesinspace.com)
Dispatch from Dr. Sutherland for Spacious Minds...
Stress takes a horrible toll on our mental and physical health. Stress is not just a state of mind—it’s a physiological state as well. Risks associated with stress continue to pile up, including increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, mood disorders, fatigue, chronic pain, and increased inflammation. And reports of long-lasting (and even inter-generational) stress-induced alterations of the brain are changing the way we view this toxic state.
For many of us, the workplace is the primary source of stress in our lives. The costs of work-related stress continue to rise—not just for workers but for employers as well. In response, some companies have begun to address the issue right in the workplace. This month, for instance, several studies show that specially designed yoga practices could be used to reduce stress right in the office. A study from Wolever et al. published in The Journal of Occupational Health Psychology (funded in part by Aetna, Inc.) randomly assigned the health insurance company’s employees to a twelve-week program in yoga or mindfulness, or to an assessment-only control group. Some participants learned Viniyoga, a therapeutic, breath-centered style of yoga. Viniyoga emphasizes adapting the asana postures according to the needs and goals of the individual. In weekly one-hour sessions, employees learned a sequence of movements specifically designed for the study by the American Viniyoga Institute. Subjects receiving the “Mindfulness at Work” training participated either in person or online in weekly hour-long sessions and a two-hour practice intensive at week ten. The mindfulness practice was developed for the workplace by eMindful, Inc., a company that also partially funded the study. Both mind-body methods significantly improved self-reported levels of stress and perceived sleep quality. A physiological measure of autonomic balance also improved, demonstrating that the practices impacted the nervous system. Both Viniyoga and the mindfulness practice reduced workplace stress, but the Viniyoga subjects reaped greater benefits in some measures. While mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) programs abound in clinical and therapeutic settings worldwide, the study shows that more embodied mindfulness practices like Viniyoga are at least as effective at combating office stress.
Importantly, many of the harmful effects of stress are mediated through over-activity of the sympathetic nervous system, and specifically of the HPA axis, formed by the hypothalamus, pituitary, and adrenal glands. With ongoing stress, chronic activation of the HPA axis results in sustained physiological stress on the body and brain. An Australian team of researchers writing in Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine report the immediate physiological effects of yoga and mindfulness. The authors measured physiological indicators of stress in people who had received just 15 minutes of yoga, mindfulness meditation, or work as usual. The yoga instruction emphasized deep breathing and used chair-based postures; the guided meditation was delivered in an mp3 audio file. Just after the 15-minute yoga or meditation, participants reported they were less stressed, and their physiology indicated they were more relaxed state with less sympathetic activity.
Notably, the authors hypothesize that the benefits of both practices may arise from a reduced breathing rate (which was also seen in the Aetna Viniyoga study). Their analysis of the physiological data also supported the idea that a physical yoga practice—some form of asana—might help prepare the mind for meditation, perhaps increasing benefits to the nervous system. In any case, the practices likely have brain benefits on top of relaxing the body’s physiology. Future study might shed light on what deeper aspects of neurophysiology are affected by breath and meditation used in concert with body movements.
In a report from Noggle et al. in The Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics, high school juniors and seniors took either a normal physical education (PE) class or a Kripalu yoga class, another breath-centered yoga practice that also emphasizes self-awareness. School-aged teens benefited from yoga training—that’s no big surprise. But could it work? The authors also determined that the yoga instruction in a high school PE class was feasible and appeared to improve psychosocial measures of well-being in teens.
Take Home Message: To protect our body-mind, we all need to reduce our stress however we can. And while many of us discovered years ago that yoga is a great way to do it, now the data show it too.
(To learn more about Dr. Sutherland’s work as a yogi and a science writer, click here.)
(Source: bodiesinspace.com)
Dispatch from Dr. G. for Better Brains…
‘The New York Times Book Review calls Carl Zimmer “as fine a science essayist as we have.” In his books, essays, articles, and blog posts, Zimmer reports from the frontiers of biology, where scientists are expanding our understanding of life. He is a popular speaker at universities, medical schools, museums, and festivals, and he is also a guest on radio programs such as Radio Lab and This American Life.’ Zimmer’s url: http://carlzimmer.com/
In our 3rd BrainBright postcast, science comedian and GGI Fellow Brian Malow interviews the esteemed science writer Carl Zimmer about the time he has spent thinking and writing about the brain, including Soul Made Flesh and Brain Cuttings.
Click here to listen to part 1 of the chat on SoundCloud!
(Source: bodiesinspace.com)
Veronique Bohbot, Ph.D., neuropsychologist
Dispatch from Dr. G. for Better Brains!….
Can using GPS systems make us stupid?
Will failing to use our spatial memory contribute to greater prognosis for brain disease?
Systems designer and GGI Fellow Aaron Bocanegra managed to catch up with spatial memory expert Dr. Bohbot to learn more about her spatial memory training research and its implications for spatial memory improvement from cradle to grave.
Coming soon! Our BrainBright podcast interview.
(Source: bodiesinspace.com)
Image credit (K.McCarty): Mark Changizi, Director of Human Cognition, 2AILabs
Does your brain learn more like a cat or a dog?
Did writing and speech evolve as special learning and communication systems?
Dispatch from Dr. G. for Better Brains!….
Months ago, I posted notice of Dr. Mark Changizi’s new book HARNESSED. I finally caught up with the noted scientist and science writer to discuss the challenging questions he raises regarding the evolution of neurobiological and neuroaesthetic features that “transformed Ape to Man.”
In celebration of Brain Awareness Week, we are spotlighting the neuroscience of spatial intelligence leading in with Changizi’s HARNESSED theory.
Click here to listen to our new BrainBright podcast interview posted on SoundCloud.
(Source: bodiesinspace.com)
“Exit Velocity Faster Than the Speed of Light,” 2011 63 3/4 x 63 3/4” oil on linen
BODIES IN SPACE EXPLORES DISPATCH…. Dr. G. reporting on Artist of the Month: Awkward x 2
Painting as an artistic endeavor, is often a lonely project. The questionable 19th century image of the artist toiling away in his garret, preparing for the moment of curatorial discovery, remains lodged into the global, collective brain. While today, there are plenty of women and men who choose the intraverted life of a studio painter, there are renewed signs of painters collaborating with writers, dancers, musicians, scientists and technologists to produce works of art and speak in the “language” of light and movement — a reboot of early and mid 20th century efforts to bring arts, science and tech together for deep play and deep think!
To celebrate the 21st century project of Jeremy Gilbert Rolfe and Rebecca Norton a.k.a. Awkward x 2, is to enjoy the focused energy and utter intellectual commitment the team brings to the acts and processes of painting, thinking and writing. To appreciate the meatiness of ideas presented below (in response to our 2012 “bodies in space” theme), allow me to suggest: Take a deep breath (be sure to exhale). Read each sentence aloud, pacing yourself to make sense of what you see and the patterns of insight and understanding that emerge in your beautiful brain.
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Think about moving.
Think about moving fast…now faster, slower, and then still. Think about twisting and adjusting to what surrounds you. Think about where you are. You are on a planet in orbit around the sun while your skin cells compensate for degeneration and your whole body depends on defying gravity.
Indeed the whole thing about standing up, being human, depends on defying gravity. That’s a body in a space but also on a surface. The body is itself united by a surface, its skin its largest single organ.
We are extensive bodies, an extension which reaches further (goes to greater lengths) at faster speeds nowadays than ever before thanks to contemporary technology, increasing our mobility in social networks and in the process becoming selves that we weren’t before. The screen is a space that we look at and within which an incredible amount of spaces can be digitized. We can be visible on our screens and on others at the same time. We can telecommunicate visually online in real time, allowing ourselves to be visible at home and far away when talking on a shared channel.
Also, where are you reading this? On a computer I suspect; on a screen in all probability. You are looking at the screen and you are reading these words. You are in an extensive space; the words on the screen share it with you. It includes your body and the computer. Within one, the electricity that runs through your body and brain (part of the body) and allows you to read the words; within the other the electricity that makes the computer able to make and present the words you’re reading. The space to which I just referred runs through and between and around both, the words and the brain jumping across the space. Or is that quite right? When you’re reading the words aren’t you ‘in’ their space (the space that makes them possible,) and likewise aren’t they ‘in’ your head the minute you see them, while ‘you’, somewhere in both places at the time, try to decide what they mean?
To talk about extending the body brings up the question of the tools that the body uses, and which to some extent come to use it. Perhaps, for the sake of what I have to say here, we could agree that there are two ways in which tools are extensions of our bodies. There are prostheses that work only in one direction. With the assistance of a chainsaw I can extend my strength and body out to cut down a tree. With a pen I can write on a page. Additive features such as glasses let me see with a vision that is not what my natural sight has grown to be. Then there are tools whose prosthetic function works in two directions at once, extending the body and at the same time changing it, by working on the inside rather than the surface. Writing, in introducing more and more grammar to language (more and more subtle distinctions between types of space and time, in word between varieties of duration) alters the way we do thought. The computer, uncannily rapid like thinking itself, changes our idea of what the mind is like and how it works. In both cases this happens whether ‘I’ like it or not. What gets changed by both is what I think ‘I’ represents, I have the subjectivity I have because I can read, or so I am obliged to think…
“Awkward x 2: The First One,” 2010 27 5/16 x 31 1/16” oil on linen
Our bodies are part of this world, and with that, our bodies are in space. I won’t say how much, that is incalculable. How much of a fraction of space do I think I take up when I think about how much is out there? And by out there I mean the furthest limits of it all. When I think about it like that, I think that I am hardly any space at all. What if I twirl a hula-hoop while standing on a rubber ball, performing multiple moves at once? Does this do more? Does it fill up more space? How do I think I may make any impact in this incredible dimension of space that we are capable of thinking about if I must also acknowledge that a pea grabs more attention on my kitchen floor than I do in our galaxy? We can spend a lot of time thinking about the greatness of what cannot be seen but in which I can almost certainly say I can feel myself to be in the middle of, leading us both out and into ourselves and what is invisible inside.
I am it happening or this is happening because of me. When converging within another body I as a subject immediately break into two and then not uncommonly three, each of which converge, on my way to developing any kind of converging with the other that started it all. As in, for instance: “I look out my window, and watch her as she goes by. I say to myself, you’re such a lucky lucky lucky lucky guy”. Suddenly I am two, one there to be addressed by the other, both me (or ‘I’). And in a flash ‘I’ realize there’s a third, also inseparable from me, entirely a product of ‘my’ imagination, which it is in charge of: “But it’s just my imagination, running away with me. Just my imagination, playing games again…” ‘It’ does it all the time, in other words, to cause ‘me’ to be what ‘I’ am, which can only mean that ‘I’ am a body which is itself the meeting place of at least three, of which one addresses the other while the third jerks them both about, or, better, gives them a reason to be. I come divided up and without a manageable center of control. It’s much more a matter of a dialog pulled along by the non-verbal. That’s me in space, a thinking and at the same time unthinking body. Narcissistically, I suspect all the other bodies with which I converge or as completely incomplete as I am, otherwise I’d have to suppose they were all where they are meant to be. There’d be no randomness, without which it’s impossible to imagine order of any sort, and it’s the latter that tends to structure the imagination in the first place—as in a subject/object relationship set off by looking out one’s window and then finding oneself (as first person pronoun) speaking to oneself (as second person pronoun)…
Pronouns are shifters, they move from subject to subject standing in for all of them and belonging to none, she stood there while she stood there… each a different she and each she in her own space, distinguished from one another only by location in fact…
“Light Gouache, ” 2011 14 x 11” Gouache on Mylar
A body is made up of spaces, which are themselves made of many spaces. One might even say that human and all other physical bodies are made of objectively tiny bodies in a subjectively infinite or at least immeasurable space. Kenneth Price, master of tiny sculpture, just died and I heard that someone got him going in an interview about how it was that he had been overlooked because he made works which were small when everyone knows that important works are always large, and he said something like (I don’t have the exact quote) “Small is the most enormous thing there is”. I’ve learned since that it was a quote from Joseph Cornell, whose work was not as small as the best of Kenneth Price…
I’ll suggest, then, this: one may talk of a body being made of spaces but not of space being made of bodies. Also (following Deleuze, more or less) any convergence of bodies or parts of bodies makes a new body. (Deleuze defines a body as an array of forces working together, an anatomical body in this no more or less complete than, for example, a language.)
Which makes me think about our theme with this in mind, when we talk about bodies in space, what are they doing? For one thing slow repetition above, for sure, but the constant production of the irreversible down where we are. So another question follows, maybe: does this constantly change the space or is it just the bodies that change? Obviously not. To mention that space in which we are and from which we are simultaneously for the most part quite distant, I have no sense at all, from minute to minute, of what’s going on inside any part of my body, let alone what it looks like, and that’s just as well. I am quite sure, however, that my sense of my body as a body is not the one I’d have had five hundred years ago. Likewise, surely, with the space it’s in. For example and most obviously, I can’t even see space without having to untangle it from a photographic version of itself, or from my involuntary tendency to adjust it to it, perhaps. They didn’t have that problem five hundred years ago. Other things had saturated their perception and separated them from direct experience, whatever or however that might (at any given time) have been conceived.
Some say we are separated from direct experience with the everyday because of increased interaction with the computer, but that surely is an old thought by now. The computer is the everyday. My connection with it runs from touch to vision. I touch it with the bottom of my palms resting on the laptop, my fingers on the keyboard of signs, my eyes observing and directing. There is almost no resistance, and sometimes a total flow when the words move across the screen as my fingers do on the keyboard. My fingers move around like a draughtsman directing a sketch of a building by playing a piano. The movement of the keyboard is also a movement left to right with text on a screen. A key is a thing and a sign at the same time. The movement on the keyboard clicks, making silent words between ourselves and our bodies which we don’t quite think of as ourselves while knowing them to be the absolute physical limit of ourselves, which we think the world and hear our own voices or the voices of others as we do so.
I can be an avatar in cyberspace, and this cyber space could be imagined to be as empty and full as space itself, we would just have to think about how to simulate it. I was once at a dance recital and afterward was introduced to my friend’s new boyfriend, a scientist working on a project to extract and study liquid from one of Jupiter’s moons. I do not know much about space, but thought to ask about something I had heard about the limits of it. I asked him if there was an end to space, and if what surrounds it is called non-space? He said yes, non-space is outside space. Space has an edge of light. He then told me that the universe is a hyper-sphere and the galaxies are drains, or at least this is how we can think about it. Light in the universe is constantly moving around the hyper-sphere and its being pulled through drains. We do not see all the sky lit up because we are looking up and we are seeing non-space and light thrown around in a hyper-sphere too large to measure. We are a fleck in atmospheres of light, on a planet of planet-like orbs scattered and spinning around like mobiles within forces gravitating towards one another, seen through beams of light visible or nearly transparent, light years away but here all at once, moving in all directions and turning on and off with the explosion or burnout of a star. We twirl and float in it all. Balancing like a girl with a hula hoop on a large rubber ball, except that she could fall and get up with causing the eternal destruction of life as we know it.
And so the vision of space that I was informed of by a scientist who studies Jupiter’s moons can be interpreted onscreen, and I can run around in it, in its definitions and equations and graphic representations. Moving my fingers on the keyboards around on the keyboard, while at the same time smelling a freshly baked slice of bread sitting on the desk beside me waiting for the moment I take a break from the computer to settle my hunger. I am, as I do so, suspended between a variety of abstractions and the entirely physical, albeit only at that moment olfactory, sensory excitement provided by the smell of toast. I take this enormous disparity for granted, just as I take for granted that my body is a combination of wet and dry, soft and hard, made of movements of which I am conscious and from movements of which I cannot possibly be conscious, suspended halfway between the atom and the limits of the universe.
The fastest speeds that bodies achieve are the ones we can’t see, and the smallest similarly invisible, and when the smallest is the fastest it can go anywhere. It can go so something so as small as to be only felt, that is it can go to sensation and to thinking. Made me think that you can blow everything up with dynamite except the atom, which takes a very deal more just to split. Tough little mother that atom… kind of elemental as you might say…
In conclusion, I cannot experience myself as a space. I can’t think about space with space, either, in the conventional sense of ‘thinking’. I’d argue that that’s what painters do, but that’s because painters can’t only think about it quantitatively. Mostly I can only think of space with what it’s not, for example the grid, whether in my paintings the affine grid that measures and generates movement at the same time, or the grid made out of horizontals and verticals, where spaces are at once contained and turned into depths, every repetition announcing a difference, every difference held in place (or not) by the other differences. Neither kind of grid is actually to be found in space; it’s like language being unable to explain its own ground.
Exit Velocity Faster than the Speed of Light is the title of a painting made by the collaborative between two conversions—each with an ‘I’ made up it turns out also of a ‘me’ and an imagination they both share—that is the collective subjectivity that is the ‘I’ that has written this essay, and the painting’s title refers to a description of how to account for us not being able to see black holes, rather we see the halos of light produced around them. The title can just as well describe thought or anything else reminiscent of our model for immediacy, which is the electronic. Of which we may also say that one cannot only not see it, but you can’t separate it into bodies and space either.
—- Awkward x 2, February 2012
To learn more about the painting and ideas of Awkward x 2, click here.
(Source: bodiesinspace.com)