more than a single event

All manner of research relies on noticing and on being alive and alert to the possibility of the unexpected.

One of the researchers I admire most is Jocelyn Bell Burnett, the physicist. She ‘discovered’ pulsars. She noticed an aberrant signal on a printout from a radio telescope and then eventually, much later and almost serendipitously, noticed another.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-4e93q1NdI

Bell Burnett’s doctoral supervisor won the biggest science prize going for this noticing – and it’s often referred to as the No-Bell as a result.

Hippocrates Tree

Tree of Hippocrates, Kos, Greece
Tree of Hippocrates, Kos, Greece

“The Tree of Hippocrates is the plane tree (or platane, in Europe) under which, according to the legendHippocrates of Kos (considered the father of medicine) taught his pupils the art of medicinePaul of Tarsus purportedly taught here as well. The Platanus in Kos is an oriental plane (Platanus orientalis), with a crown diameter of about 12 metres, said to be the largest for a plane tree in Europe.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_Hippocrates

 

Disruptions

Thinking about interruptions/distractions reminds me of notions of ‘the event’ which I am thinking about a lot at the moment for my MA writing.

Dennis Atkinson explains

For Badiou an event is a radical disruption that leads to a subsequent truth procedure which reconfigures the existing knowledge frameworks, practices and values of a social context (2012: 9)

So it is though a commotion causing rupture to prior thinking that the subject can reach new truths. Atkinson explains that it is in this state of disruption that one can be led to uncertainty and not knowing, which leads then to an emancipated state of ‘real learning’.

Is it possible to create a pedagogy of the event, keeping focus on radical leaps effecting local and personal disturbances?

Searching Noticing Checking

“But I never liked doing things systematically. Not even my Ph.D. research was done systematically. It was done in a random, haphazard fashion. The more I got on, the more I felt that, really, one can find something only in that way—in the same way in which, say, a dog runs through a field. If you look at a dog following the advice of his nose, he traverses a patch of land in a completely unplottable manner. And he invariably finds what he is looking for. I think that, as I’ve always had dogs, I’ve learned from them how to do this. So you then have a small amount of material and you accumulate things, and it grows, and one thing takes you to another, and you make something out of these haphazardly assembled
W.G Sebald interviewed by Joe Cuomo, 2001

We worked with this text once before and we identified the dog as a kind of frenetic flaneur, a wanderer (see Pat’s recent post, Dérive).

Now, watching my own puppy Lois, I can identify with this text differently. There is a really interesting paradox in her search, one that I think I share…

Lois is searching for what is known, a ball or a rubber chicken but this search is almost constantly interrupted by noticing and being distracted by other unknown or unexpected things: chicken bones, poos, other dogs. This gives rise to what seems to be an almost sadistic confusion of progression and diversion. By the advice of her nose, she is simultaneously excited and frustrated by the stream of information. And added to that, because she’s a pup who is learning the rules, she is intermittently looking back to me to check that she’s doing ok.

The pace might be different but this seems so like being in the studio, so like planning the summer school, so like learning:

Searching Noticing Checking

Come In

By way of welcome to those still arriving.

As Summer School approaches and we invite people to the Noticer I’ve been wondering what encountering it for the first time might be like. How have we made sense of it to date or is it less about sense and more about recognising and allowing space for a need to deposit a collection of resonant things in proximity to one another?

While many of the posts have sort to make connections across the various ideas being shared the reality of a blog is a much more linear affair – and a dense one at that! So how does one encounter and, if not make sense of, make friends with this proliferation of stuff so as to be able to join in? Might it be that we (posters to date) have been aided in this task by the fact that we know one another and have a sense of each other’s interests, specialisms, practices etc? How do we invite others in? How might we come to know you?

It seems to me that the impulse here is in the ‘bringing’ or the ‘offering up’ more than any notion of consumption. And perhaps this is the Noticers particular invitation; to value what(ever) arrives with it, to allow disparate ideas and experiences to find a non-hierarchical space in which to co-exist for a time. It should allow for different knowledge and different knowing, it may re-test well versed ideas or suggest other possibilities, or not do either of these things. What I think it does do is recognise the often joyous, affirming, sometimes almost physical and active state of recognition. What we are encouraged to do is to respond.

Welcome.

Dérive

The dérive is tool to stimulate noticing – see Guy Debord’s theorisation in the Internationale Situationiste journal. It was specifically directed to noticing the mutual interactions of spatialities and subjectivities.

The dérive is a walk in which “participants let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there” (p. 62) It is a playful psycho-geographical practice.

The dérive usually involves a small group walking independently but pooling their awarenesses and impressions at the end of a designated time. They often recorded their experiences in writing and/or image.

The dérive is beyond a casual stroll and usually involves strategic experiments in the production of random-ness. These might be in the form of reconstructed maps, instructions, throwing a dice or other predetermined prompts.  An oh yes – there’s an app for that too!! This kind of guidance helps to break the invisible boundaries of habit and familiarity.

( Long youtube lecture on the Situationist Internationale and the dérive by Tyrus Miller)

Wanting Is Easier Than Having, Debra Baxter and Additive Process

wanting-is-easier-than-having-pg-66-67

Below is an extract from the opening text SOMETHING LIKE A PHENOMENA in Debra Baxter’s artist book Wanting Is Easier Than Having. Baxter’s description of how she moves through the world and her process of making speaks to Pat’s ideas of ‘noticing with the body’ and Alice’s thoughts on the power of objects – in particular the ability to form (or break in Baxter’s example) relationships between yourself and others.

I opened the door. He looked nervous as he stepped inside my apartment. Just inside the door hanging on a nail was an amulet, or more accurately, a piece of thrift store jewelry. It had a thick chain, a horseshoe shape, and a large iridescent green stone in the center. I saw him look at it and I said “It has powers”.

I could see the color drain from his face. He told me I was delusional. He looked at the amulet and said that it was a piece of junk. Clearly, any hope for our date ended then and there.

What he failed to understand was the power of objects – real or imagined. I have spent close to 17 years since that date trying to make powerful objects and trying to understand what makes certain objects feel more potent than others.

Power is certainly not the only goal of my making, nor is “power” the only word for what I’m cultivating. I’m invested in energy, potency, strength, momentum, and reaching for the opposite; in finding strength in vulnerable places. Pressing opposites against each other is a large part of my practice. Over the years these themes keep surfacing:

Inhaling – Exhaling

Believing in – Giving up

Wanting – Having

Protected – Exposed

Something like a phenomena. Like the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s song, my work is grounded in a bodily experience – a phenomenon that is indescribable that slides into the divine. In a interview Shirazeh Houshiary describes the sublime in her work:

“The object and the images which the artist creates have their place in the external world, but their essence and meaning are conceived in an inner world, and this internal world is an intermediate space between body and soul… So that the finished work is a real experience of continual becoming. Art making is subject to movement and ascension and descension, it it not born of the body, it becomes it.”

This becoming is how I make my way through the world. The way I experience making and seeing art is through my body. When I love a piece of art, I become physically stirred by it. I have a feeling in the pit of my stomach or an expansion in my chest, and it’s hard to put it into words.

Later in the book in a text called PLUS AND MINUS  Sara Krajewski describes Baxter’s practice as an ‘additive process’,  a process that sees ‘adding’ as suggesting wanting – the desire to have and hold something or someone.  An acquisitive moment. Krajewski then describes ‘subtracting’  as a realization of  ‘the fear of having, once you hold something, the thought of losing it haunts you.’ I think this PLUS AND MINUS or ‘additive’ process relates to Alice’s post about gathering/stickiness/persistence and how noticing not only moves forwards, but also backwards, sideways and around.

noticing haunting

Avery Gordon looked at a photograph taken at an early meeting of pioneer psychoanalysts. She noticed that someone was absent – a young woman who had been Jung’s lover and then a patient of Freud’s. Sabina Spielrein was listed as being at the gathering, yet she was missing from the official portrait. Why was this so, Gordon wondered. Her book Ghostly Matters investigates the missing Sabina and other ‘hauntings’.

Gordon  sees the recognition – the noticing – of ghosts as a profoundly political matter :

I used the term haunting to describe those singular and yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what‟s been in your blind field comes into view. Haunting raises specters, and it alters the experience of being in linear time, alters the way we normally separate and sequence the past, the present and the future. These specters or ghosts appear when the trouble they represent and symptomize is no longer being contained or repressed or blocked from view. As I understand it, the ghost is not the invisible or the unknown or the constitutively unknowable, in the Derridean sense. To my mind, the whole essence, if you can use that word, of a ghost is that it has a real presence and demands its due, demands your attention. Haunting and the appearance of specters or ghosts is one way, I tried to suggest, we‟re notified that what‟s been suppressed or concealed is very much alive and present, messing or interfering precisely with those always incomplete forms of containment and repression ceaselessly directed towards us. 

Gordon’s concern is with the ghosts of trauma, exploitation and genocide and how they haunt everyday life, events, conversations. She sees the noticing of these ghosts as a call to action, not a reason to lament or  memorialise.

Gordon, A (2011) Some notes on haunting and futurity. Borderlands 10(2) p. 4

Listen to the Gateposts

Patrick Keiller's London from 1994, narrated by Paul Scofield
Patrick Keiller’s London from 1994, narrated by Paul Scofield

I remember going to see Patrick Keillor’s London at the ICA back in 1994. I’d only been a year in London and I’d just moved in to a flat in Battersea. I loved the film and Scofield’s telling of a London flaneur Robinson. But one short scene near the beginning is the thing that resonated with my own wonderings. Pat has mentioned noticing with your body and there is nothing like being new to a city to heighten this.   The depiction of the gateposts (5’57” – 6’34″) is by a brief verbal introduction, followed by the laying of the sounds of the park over the locked off shot of the Victorian sandstone columns. I remember enjoying the simple device and the implication that the post absorbs and emits the sounds of the events in its range.