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| dust_and_shadow:experiments [2018-02-05 11:14] – maja | dust_and_shadow:experiments [2019-07-22 13:03] – maja |
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| === Desert Attunement === | === Desert Attunement === |
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| Field trip for locals and travellers to experientially attune to the desert environment, through practice-based experiments with layered time, durational desert abiding, heterogeneous listening, material wonder & wander, solitude and (in)difference etc. | Field trip for locals and travellers to experientially attune to the desert environment. Through "durational desert abiding" we'll explore the embodied sense of layered time, observing & listening, material wonder & wander, solitude & (in)difference. (March 7-12 2018) |
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| Questions: How do we attune to the desert without falling in the trap of dualisms as wilderness/civilisation, urban/desert, etc. What could be the different ways and means to experience layered time in the desert? What would a contemporary form of desert geomancy be like? What does "brutal mysticism" in the desert look like? What if we refrain from speech and use the visceral language of experience? | Questions: What could be the different ways and means to experience layered time in the desert? What if we refrain from speech and use the visceral language of experience? What does "brutal mysticism" in the desert look like? |
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| Proposition: We need time to land and arrive in the desert before making any interventions. Experiential attunement to the desert environment is an imperative. We must tread lightly and see the desert with new eyes. We can observe and weave threads of connection with other people and places. | Proposition: We need to spend time in the desert to experientially attune to the environment. Communing rather than examining. We can attune to the desert without romanticising wilderness or drawing a hard line between the desert and urban civilisation. We tread lightly and see the desert with new eyes. |
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| === Thalient Lab === | === Thalient Lab === |
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| A field experiment formed around the question "what would a thalient lab in the desert look like?" (March 8-18 2018) | A field experiment formed around the question "what would a thalient lab in the desert look like?" (March 12-23 2018) |
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| Proposition: There are ways and means to communicate with entities we share the planet with. At all times there are other beings listening. We can hear each other if we pay attention. One of the means to establish contact could be through technological mediation | Proposition: There are ways and means to communicate with entities we share the planet with. At all times there are other beings listening. We can hear each other if we pay attention. One of the means to establish contact could be through technological mediation |
| === Attunement Walk === | === Attunement Walk === |
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| Dust & Shadow (audio)walk celebrating the arrival of desert spring in a panpsychic tradition. (March 24 2018) | [[audio walk|Dust & Shadow (audio)walk]] celebrating the arrival of desert spring in a panpsychic tradition. (March 24 2018) |
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| Question: What arts become possible if we widen the 'sentience spectrum' and emphasize experience and interaction with diverse beings? | Question: What arts become possible if we widen the 'sentience spectrum' and emphasize experience and interaction with diverse beings? |
| Proposition: We need a new form of geomancy to align with the reality of the desert. To better attune to our surroundings we can practice the craft of silence and heterogeneous hearing and become human receptors and listening devices. Deep listening and attunement can help us uncover sacred refugia and wild sanctuaries in urban surroundings of the everyday. | Proposition: We need a new form of geomancy to align with the reality of the desert. To better attune to our surroundings we can practice the craft of silence and heterogeneous hearing and become human receptors and listening devices. Deep listening and attunement can help us uncover sacred refugia and wild sanctuaries in urban surroundings of the everyday. |
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| | <blockquote> Solvitur ambulando... </blockquote> |
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| {{:dust_and_shadow:d_s_walk.jpg?600 |}} | {{:dust_and_shadow:d_s_walk.jpg?600 |}} |
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| {{>http://www.flickr.com/photos/foam/39070110461/in/album-72157681429258454/}}\\ | {{>http://www.flickr.com/photos/foam/39070110461/in/album-72157681429258454/}}\\ |
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| | === 12'' === |
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| | The soundwalk remixed for a 12 inch vinyl, consisting of two ~18 minute tracks, "Dust" and "Shadow". The packaging includes a sample of desert dust, which can be used for further physical manipulation of sound. |
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| | === Library salon === |
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| | The Desert Salon in the Hayden library is envisaged as a "physical narrative". It is a space filled with objects and media collected together as fragments of a possible future scenario. In this case, it's a scenario for an alternative future of Phoenix with a somewhat Solar Punk inspired atmosphere. The design is intimate and contemplative, inviting deceleration, solidarity (with humans and other-than-humans), appreciation, care, elation and relief, without losing a sense of irreverence and resistance. |
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| | In this scenario, the Hayden library still exists, but it is used slightly differently. It became a monastic entity for rethinking time and re-attuning the urban clock-time to the rhythms of the desert. It's a hybrid between a study space, listening bar, an intimate lounge room and an exploded publication. It is suggestive of a library in a speculative desert university, where Occult sciences, fictocriticism, coven studies and dust theory are common fields of study. |
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| | Moodboard: https://www.pinterest.com/deziluzija/dust-shadow/ \\ |
| | {{ :dust_and_shadow:20190715-d_s_library-design_guide.pdf |Design guide}} |
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| | <blockquote>At best, the listening bar raises good questions about whether there might be an unrealized public-listening or group-listening ideal in a ritual as familiar as going out for a drink. (...) I understood something about the tactility and enlivening qualities of sound better than ever before: Sound can be a three-dimensional space in which to put your body, and in which your body may be acted upon and opened up, even when you are sitting still. I seemed to understand the physics of it: tones as standing waves, and me in the middle of them, one of them. Or, if you prefer the language of another sense, it was like seeing colors after knowing only grays. (...) As a natural consequence of hearing in that detail, I could also sense the physicality of the people making the music — their throats, hands, reflexes, sensibilities. (...) The room’s goldenrod curtains stay drawn, and its interior is unremarkably brown enough that you can turn your attention to the spectacular thing going on before and around you, which is sound. |
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| | a total break in your waking hours. A cleaned window. An open window! |
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| | [[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/dining/vinyl-records-listening-bar-kissaten.html|Ben Rattlif in NY Times]] </blockquote> |
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| | //The production of the vinyl and the Desert Salon in the Library have been awarded the IHR Seed Grant:// https://ihr.asu.edu/research/seed/audio-attunements-desert-living |
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| | <html><a href="https://cdn.wallpaper.com/main/2017/05/factory_0000_tunf_02.jpg"><img src=https://cdn.wallpaper.com/main/2017/05/factory_0000_tunf_02.jpg width=800></a></html> |
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| | === Visual experiment === |
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| | <blockquote>This film is a proposition in the full sense that Alfred North Whitehead intended this term. A proposition, for Whitehead, is neither true nor false in itself. It is a lure for feeling the world that “might be.” A proposition is what places a concrescing subject (an occasion of experience) in relation to a potential predicative pattern. It is the potential togetherness of subject and predicate that characterizes a proposition and not its actual exemplification. But propositions do not hang in the thin air of abstraction; they always emerge from somewhere and are entertained by an actual subject within a particular milieu. The proposition’s relevance and importance (or its “truth”—in William James’ sense) is contingent upon the world that it finds itself within. This experimental film fabricates a propositional space in which subjects (Phoenix, urban desert, etc.) are drawn together with predicative patterns (shadow Bellmont, pharmacological uncertainty, communicational indeterminacy, etc.) to lure us into certain modes of attunement. Since the world we inhabit may not yet be ready to entertain such a proposition, we must actively forge the conditions under which it might begin to. -Adam Nocek </blockquote> |
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| | The ideas for the film have been translated into an audio-visual lecture performance for the launch of the Desert Humantities Institute in the fall of 2019. |
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| === Seasonal feast === | === Seasonal feast === |
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| The seasonal feast for the arrival of desert spring in a parallel shade world, Shadow Belmont. (~March 19 2018 & 2019) | The seasonal feast for the arrival of desert spring in a parallel shade world, Shadow Belmont. (March 19 2018) |
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| Questions: How to translate animist attitudes into worldviews compatible with contemporary techno-materialist societies? How to (re)animate pre-modern sensibilities without dualisms of light/dark, good/evil, love/power? What would be celebrated in a regenerative eutopia in the desert? | Questions: How to translate animist attitudes into worldviews compatible with contemporary techno-materialist societies? How to (re)animate pre-modern sensibilities without dualisms of light/dark, good/evil, love/power? What would be celebrated in a regenerative eutopia in the desert? |
| Proposition: It is possible to transform zombie utopias into fertile compost for regenerative eutopias. Myth-making and reactivating myths can animate inert cultural, geological and architectural markers. Conviviality and kinship includes diverse entities and different lenses of interrelation. We can draw inspiration from animism, panpsychism, shinto, shamanism, etc. | Proposition: It is possible to transform zombie utopias into fertile compost for regenerative eutopias. Myth-making and reactivating myths can animate inert cultural, geological and architectural markers. Conviviality and kinship includes diverse entities and different lenses of interrelation. We can draw inspiration from animism, panpsychism, shinto, shamanism, etc. |
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| Prototype: Equinox eve 2018 (March 19, sunset; equinox time: GMT Mar 20, 16:15) | Prototype: Equinox eve 2018 (March 19, sunset; Spring Equinox time: Tuesday, March 20, 2018 at 9:15 am in Sonoran Desert. |
| Feast: ~Equinox eve 2019 (equinox time GMT: Mar 20, 21:58) | |
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| The feast could consist of the following elements: | In the dry and hot Sonoran desert, spring is a time of replenishment. A time to celebrate blossoming of plants and ideas alike. Days are slowly warming up, heralding the season of flowering cactus and renewed growth. The spring equinox - when light and darkness, the mundane and the sacred are (at least cosmically) equipoised - invokes a sense of balance, alignment and attunement. Time to celebrate the connections with all beings we share this season with... |
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| | The feast can include the following elements: |
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| Durational attument through a range of embodied practices | Durational attument through a range of embodied practices |
| * trance-inducing music, drums, movement, dance | * trance-inducing music, drums, movement, dance |
| * participation of human and non-human entities | * participation of human and non-human entities |
| | * build cairns |
| | * walk in spirals or through labyrinths (purposeful meandering) |
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| Atmosphere | Atmosphere |
| * new life: leaves, blossoms | * new life: leaves, blossoms (some Sonoran [[http://www.arizonensis.org/sonoran/fieldguide/plantae/sonoran_desert_flora.html|desert flora]]) |
| * green and yellow colour | * green, yellow, purple, red colours |
| * freshness of spring and bitter energy of new growth | * freshness of spring and bitter energy of new growth |
| * purity of white ('sacrificial virgins') | * purity of white ('sacrificial virgins') |
| * scattered long communal tables (with table cloths) | * scattered long communal tables (with table cloths) |
| * stations for food prep | * stations for food prep |
| | * rock formations that scatter/focus sunlight |
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| Storytelling, guiding | Storytelling, guiding |
| * economies of exchange, gifts, offerings | * economies of exchange, gifts, offerings |
| * parting tokens | * parting tokens |
| * totems | * totems, rainsticks |
| * "may you walk in beauty" (navajo) | |
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| Food & Drink | Food & Drink |
| * breaking and sharing food together, abundance in collectivity | * breaking and sharing food together, abundance in collectivity |
| * end of winter foods in the desert (to research foods of the place) | * end of winter foods in the desert (to research foods of the place) eg [[https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/culture/health-wellness/spring-equinox-the-desert-is-reborn/|cholla buds]], nopalitos, yucca, ocotillo and palo verde flowers (tea) as well as dried/preserved seeds (for eating and planting), herbs, grains and flowers; pinyon pine nuts, chia seeds, amaranth, sumac, sunflower seeds, mesquite flour, agave and aloe vera juice...) |
| * water | * water |
| * fresh, green, bitter | * fresh, green, bitter |
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| (This experiment could be produced as an actual feast or a speculative open air museum with stories and artifacts suggesting alternative myths, lifestyles and ecosystems) | (The full-scale of this experiment is beyond the scope of this project. It could be produced as an actual feast or a speculative open air museum with stories and artifacts suggesting alternative myths, lifestyles and ecosystems) |
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| {{>http://www.flickr.com/photos/foam/24209031777/in/album-72157681429258454/}}\\ | {{>http://www.flickr.com/photos/foam/24209031777/in/album-72157681429258454/}}\\ |
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