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A collection of experiments as embodied manifestations of specific propositions:

[T]he importance of propositions is not limited to matters of truth and falsity. Language is used to evoke attention to features of the world that another person may be missing. Perhaps someone wants me to look up at a branch in a nearby tree. She has propositional feelings of a rare bird being there. Her interest may be in my entertaining the same proposition, but the most effective method may be just to point with a certain expression on her face, or to say “look quick” with some excitement. These gestures may lead to the result better than the sober statement that there is a rare bird there. - Giorgias Romero

vegetal cabling


Thalient Lab

A field experiment formed around the question “what would a thalient lab in the desert look like?” (8-18 March 2018)

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

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Thalience is an attempt to give the physical world itself a voice so that rather than us asking what reality is, reality itself can tell us. It is the discipline that chooses among multiple successful scientific models based on which ones best satisfy our human, aesthetic/moral/personal needs. In other words, given two or more equally valid models of the universe, thalience is the art of choosing the one with the most human face. It is the recovery of the natural in our understanding of the Natural. (…) thalience would use objective truth as an artistic medium and merge subjectivity and objectivity in a creative activity whose purpose is the re-sanctification of the natural world. To believe in an uplifting and satisfying vision of your place in the universe, and to know that this vision is true (or as true as anything can be) would be sublime. Thalience would be an activity worthy of post-scientific humanity, or our own biological or post-biological successors. -Karl Schroeder

Attunement Walk

Dust & Shadow (audio)walk celebrating the arrival of desert spring in a panpsychic tradition.

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.

The participants are invited to attune, to experience diverse forms of listening, and to practice a geomancy for the age of climate chaos. Walking in silence through the Sonoran dust in the shadow of civilisation, the participants may begin to hear the murmur of matter, uncover desert refugia amidst urban life, and forge new connections with the unexpected.

Date: Saturday, March 24, 2018
Time: 6:00pm-8:00pm (golden hour 6:00, sunset 6:40-6:45, blue hour 6:58, dusk 7:08, night 8:06)

Location: Moeur Park
Meeting locale: North Shore Volley Ball courts, Tempe Town Lake
Park on E Lake View Drive under the 202 highway overpass. The walk will begin under the overpass.
GPS coordinates 33.435206,-111.941293

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Seasonal feast

The seasonal feast for the arrival of desert spring in a parallel shade world (Shadow Belmont)

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. We can draw inspiration from animism, panpsychism, shinto, shamanism, etc. Conviviality and kinship includes beyond human relationships. Myth-making and reactivating myths can animate inert cultural, geological and architectural markers.

Prototype: Equinox 2018 (March 19, sunset) Feast: ~Equinox 2019

The feast could consist of the following elements:

Durational attument through a range of embodied practices

  • Unfolding (meditation on budding, warming, thawing)
  • Long and slow attunement meditations
  • “Passover”
  • from meditative to ecstatic/dionisian attunement (and back again)
  • trance-inducing music, drums, movement, dance
  • participation of human and non-human entities

Atmosphere

  • new life: leaves, blossoms
  • green and yellow colour
  • freshness of spring and bitter energy of new growth
  • purity of white ('sacrificial virgins')
  • waves of pleasantness punctuated with being thrown out of the comfort zone
  • scent: mesquite incense, scents of the desert

Architectural elements

  • layering
  • shade and shadows
  • desert wabi-sabi
  • (cotton) banners or other markers of place
  • scattered long communal tables (with table cloths)
  • stations for food prep

Storytelling, guiding

  • Matriarch (a gentle holding of the space for ceremony)
  • Reading and stories in different voices
  • Symbolism of new myths
  • Attuning harmonics
  • Maps here/there
  • 4Cs of Arizona (new fetishes)

Blessings and offerings

  • economies of exchange, gifts, offerings
  • parting tokens
  • totems
  • “may you walk in beauty” (navajo)

Food & Drink

  • breaking and sharing food together, abundance in collectivity
  • end of winter foods in the desert (to research foods of the place)
  • water
  • fresh, green, bitter
  • figs, olives, prickly pear, oranges/lemons (? not native but thriving)
  • preserved, dried, smoked, fermented, dessicated
  • lamb or cattle (with consent!)
  • tea from local herbs and medicinal plants
  • mezcal, pulque, tequila…

(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)

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  • dust_and_shadow/experiments.1517016817.txt.gz
  • Last modified: 2018-01-27 01:33
  • by maja