Perhaps because I have been thinking about gathering as an active process that holds within it a history and particular genealogy I increasingly ‘picture’ the relationship between things visually, as a web (Meshwork – Ingold) that recognises where ideas hail from as well as what they are. A person (or thing – the Noticer) might be the reason that things find their way together and in a particular order but might not that responsibility also necessarily rest with the objects/ideas themselves and the very many connections and recommendations that led to their discovery? What and who is the driver for our desire to make connections and is it (when is it) a social, connected impulse as it is here on this blog?

I recently gave Leanne a book, The Company She Keeps, Celine Condorelli, that I haven’t read yet (see Leanne’s comment on Co-operation) but which I believe talks about friendship, perhaps in relation to making, talking, working:

‘Perhaps one of my favourite definitions of cultural production is of “making things public”: the process of connecting things, establishing relationships, which in many ways means befriending issues, people, contexts. Friendship in this sense is both a set-up for working and a dimension of production.’

My picture of the things I’m thinking about and am interested in always comes with a picture of and interest in the person from whom it arrived.

A new discovery. These artists take architectural, literary and visual sources and construct and depict absurd proposals for new constructions/cities.

Bandstand Library Service Station…(Auge)

A short time spent in the collection …

We’ve talked about how the Noticer might hold and record the information it draws towards it. We’ve talked about furniture.

Trevelyan talked about ‘a sort of mythology of cities, of fragile structures’

The structure of a sleepless night…

Beuy’s production and storage of energy: the energy of clay.

‘taking a walk with a friend, who stops on occasion and points to a scene, saying “Take a look at that”‘ – Noticing with others…

I noticed this unfinished monument in Bethnal Green, London, in the park next to the tube. It is awaiting funds for completion. It commemorates the 173 people who died in a crush of people entering the tube in 1943 to take shelter from German bombing.

It’s unfinishedness, with the front of the concrete pillar being muffled (muzzled) by a wooden box echoes the cover up of the incident during the war and in the intervening 60 odd years it has taken the local people to get something erected.

I noticed it because it reminded me of conversations I have had with Jo about her work. It also reminds me of ‘Peach’ by Jackson Sprague shown at Cole gallery East London in his solo show: A House the Size of A Head (2014). Something Pat posts (below) – about noticing not just with your eyes, but with your senses and your body. I often notice through my eyes as if they hurt with the feeling of something – its weight, touch, absence, tilt …. ‘Peach’ (below) has hanging ‘arms’, that are slightly prevented from hanging vertically by the based which just catches their ends and makes them bend.

It’s easy to think that noticing must be done with the eyes. But when we notice in everyday life, we often use our full sensory palette – we are struck by a sound, a smell, a taste, the feel of something.

Sensory noticing generally involves more than one sense at the same time. It also quite often means that we imagine beyond the immediate thing/event/action/person. So when we watch a film, we might notice an image or a sound or both as movement or a moment – but we  might also imagine at the same time what this smells like. We might also imagine an emotional state accompanying this noticing.

Sometimes of course we notice an  absence or we just sense something we can’t put our finger on.

Ethnographers like me want to notice and to interpret actions and events using all of our senses. This is a film used in research training; it was made as an exercise in sensory noticing, interpreting and imagining into the action/events.

In her book Vibrant Matter: A political ecology of things (2009) Jane Bennett investigates “thingness” – the way in which objects can make us notice them.  She suggests that thingness is an idea which “stretches concepts of  agency, action, and freedom” and “dissipates  binaries of life/matter, human/animal, will/determination and organic/inorganic” (p. x). Bennett has looked particularly at trash and hoarders to help her make sense of ‘the call’ of things.

How do resources about art and artists call to those who use them?

‘to extract pictures from the flow of constant changes and from their perennial possibilities of movement…Stagnation, fixation, death should provoke change and life’

This reminded me of Spoerri’s book An Anecdoted Topography of Chance…
Fluxus artist Daniel Spoerri analyses the 80 objects on his blue table, recording stories and anecdotes that arise. The book is a seemingly exhaustive catalogue / itinerary / archive of the objects found on the table on October 17, 1961 at 3.47pm. There is a drawn map of the position of the objects on the table at the back of the book.

“The procedure of the Topography, its modus operandi, is beautifully simple: a selection of objects and associations they evoke are described, and these in turn give rise to further associations in the form of anecdotes. An apparently infinite process is unleashed, like a walk taken in every direction at once’

“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had time to make it shorter” Blaise Pascale (Letter 16, 1657) “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Marc Twain I don’t know what Twain’s awareness of Pascale was when he wrote the first quote, in fact I got confused trying to find the owner of this sentiment but it seems they were connected across centuries by their thoughts. We’ve invited Tony Grisoni, film maker to come and discuss editing with us, and the implications of the choice to edit or not to edit.