SOME NOTES FROM FOREST STUDY
Clouds, NH Pritchard, Deep Listening...
New Phone
The other day Google told me I couldn’t create, edit or upload anymore due to lack of storage. I had a cell phone up until recently that used Google photos as its backup cloud, and it filled my account up to the brim. This phone took the worst photos imaginable (if you know you know). It was a downgrade on purpose. I got it so that I would spend less time scrolling, another one of my attempts to reclaim my attention–it only kind of worked. But throughout my year-long relationship with this device (I hesitate to call it subpar, because I don’t believe that par should equal the utter sublime, but it was definitely less capable and tantalizing than an Apple phone), I still found myself compelled to use its camera to document on occasion—and apparently still ended up accumulating more than my allotted cost-free storage threshold.
When I Googled the net worth for Google, the hybrid AI demon at the top of the page yielded results in the trillions for Alphabet, the parent company (I didn’t know that Google had a parent, but I guess we all do). If I want more than 15 gb of space, I have to start making monthly payments. Just a few dollars at a time, a Token of Thanks, all praise be to the son of the Parent Company and the holy spirit.
I am more inclined to sift through and erase my data instead. What would I do with more storage space, except for fill it with junk? The thought makes me claustrophobic. I click “clean up space” and it takes me to my largest files:
A video of Stella and Fleur eating hummus at a jazz club; a tiny puppy getting tangled in the feet of a stranger at Coney Island; steam emerging from a steel plated opening on the street in Midtown and my voice in the background: “THE CITY IS BREATHINGGGGG!” Most recently, a video with overblown audio of Confidence Man b2b Fcukers performing at Rash Bar. My tiny phone had been on five percent and I still needed to take the bus home, but it felt important to capture… The light is red and at one point after the beat drops, I am filming the mirror behind the DJs so that you can see the entire crowd as a shadowy amoeba, bouncing in pixelated waves. I am swallowed in the moving shadows, a ghost lens hidden in the mix of eyes.
Clouds
9/28/24 journal entry
Last night in the car, driving under purple skies which in each successive moment were both perfect and also changing (a developing perfection, throwing into question its own condition of being) we discussed cloud formation. First the different kinds of clouds–I admitted to knowing very little. K knew Seras–the wispy ones, they said–and for me it was Cumulus that rang a bell (those archetypal, fluffy ones). Then we learned of Stratus, lateral layered ones which happened to be the type in front of us. But the complexity comes with all the different hybrid sorts. The conversation ended when K started reaching their nausea threshold for reading cloud wiki in the car and I turned up the volume on the Belle and Sebastian song which came on shuffle.
Now [morning] I have opened to the front pages of the Audubon Field Guide to the Night Sky, which starts out talking about what we can see and what we can’t, or the limitations to what it is possible to perceive with the unaided eye. This is followed by a foray into standards for observation. For some reason, this sticks out to me. To operationalize wonder. Is that not how systems of knowledge begin?
The intro culminates with a brief description of what the universe is. In one short page, it is summed up: everything with which we are physically connected; constantly in motion, expanding; cosmic debris and the “empty” space between.
This was the song playing on the boombox when I arrived to Forest Study. Second track on “Angelic House - Ambient Love Collection,” 1993.
Forest Study
This post is a disjointed jotting of thoughts surrounding a gathering I went to last month in Western Mass. This Forest Study was a spin on the typical artists’ “retreat.” It still involved a small group of people going into the woods and intentionally unplugging as a way to engage with certain prompts and questions, but it deviated from the tradition of doing so specifically in order to refine and increase production.
Instead, no goals were set and no project was strictly defined. We set out to explore the question: how do we know what we know? And specifically, we meditated on this question in the context of war: how have we come to know what we know about war? And, how does this “education” affect what we can imagine doing, making, destroying, right now, as a group of people loosely defined as artists, a year into an ongoing genocide?
Revolutionary Letter #27 by Diane Di Prima
How much
can we afford to lose, before we win, can we
cut hair, or give up drugs, take
job, join Minute Men, marry, wear their clothes
play bingo, what
can we stomach, how soon
does it leave its mark, can we
living straight in a straight part of town still see
our people, can we live
if we don’t see our people? “It is better
to lose & win, than win & be
defeated” sd Gertrude Stein, which wd you
choose?On the first night, after cooking dinner together still as half-strangers, we sat in a circle in the living room, eating an herbaceous salad, tofu, greens and coconut rice (courtesy of Kaur’s kitchen genius), and introduced ourselves, along with whatever items we had brought to contribute to the collective library. As part of introductions, we shared our aspirations for the weekend.
I realized that I had been in the recent habit of treating my body like a machine, or rather like a well-oiled subpart of the city-as-machine. In New York, I often time everything (down to my 25 min power-nap before getting in the car to leave for Forest Study) to the exact minute. I forecast when I might get hungry and for what, how much food I need to pack in order to not have to spend money while out of the house. I sometimes feel paralyzed by a sense of scarcity–scarce time, energy, resources.
Battery life percentage, number of pages left in a chapter, grams of protein, price of entry. These numbers form the axes and dimensions of my highly measured world. Sometimes it feels good, and I am enamored with my own seamless performance. But despite a rushing mind, I often feel frustrated by the lack of usefulness in the circling thoughts. Why not use these precious moments of in between time to at least produce some valuable observations? Or to curate a playlist? Or to compose responses to text messages I can send once I am back in service-range? (What do you make, or refuse to make, during your commute?)
When the go-round got to me, I expressed this hope: the speed of the city drives me and my cadences, not the other way around… I hope I can change that, even if temporarily, while here.
It seemed that most people arrived with a similar experience and desire. It might be obvious that by abiding by hostile levels of speed in our day to day routine we might also be allowing ourselves to tolerate higher levels of violence in general—in the world, in our lives.
The idea of “unplugging” is misleading, though. While we all agreed to abandon our phones, watches and other timepieces, and to use electricity sparingly (turning on the noisy generator once a day to refill water and use the photocopier—which kept me up on the first night, but was worth it because it meant we got hardcopy readers the following morning), I quickly realized that we are always “plugged in” to some system larger than ourselves. There is no way to be fully “unplugged” and also regulated–if it is not clock-time that one is moving in accordance with, then other measures of rhythm take precedent–one’s body attunes to the sun, the sound of birds, cues of desire, and of course other bodies.
But to try to remain isolate in a “timeless” state would be to deny the interconnectedness that is always lying underneath the concrete layer of managerial time that we submit ourselves to under the conventions of urban capitalism. The goal is not to become more erratic, it is to recalibrate ourselves to a desired pattern, one generated by organic (relational), deep (unbounded) time, and to allow that calibration to guide the body to a more attentive mode of being.
9/29/24 journal entry
“Alienated man is nostalgic man, never truly committed to his world. To appear to be rather than to be is one of his alienated wishes.” - Paulo Freire
Interesting, to posit that to become committed to the world–to reality–we must dismantle the conditions of our alienation. This may seem at first like an insurmountable endeavor–if one’s alienation stems from conditions which would require revolution to overhaul, and revolutionary commitment requires a destruction of alienating conditions… we find ourselves in quite a stubborn loop. But I think there is a revelation in this idea that we can resist the “alienated wish” to appear to be rather than to be.
What happens when we decide together to enact this sort of commitment—to move in a certain way for a given period. Re-place nostalgia with a consciousness of memory, taken up through the lens of a sensitive and critical researcher (artist) obsessed with the process of knowing itself…
In the morning, I delved into the zines, books, newspapers, and photocopies that comprised some objects of knowing that people brought along. There was also a lap harp sitting on the mostly broken piano. And I made a note to bring in my shoebox of CDs and tapes later to make available for the boombox. (People imagined the boombox as needing electricity to work, and even though I had been told it was battery powered, the false perception people held around its power source created a funny imagined boundary over when and how the device could be used. So I decided not to share this information and instead allow us to make a world with our shared/multiple truths).
NH Pritchard - The Matrix - epigraph: “Words are ancillary to content.”
As I read Pritchard’s concrete poetry, I was reminded that language can be used to call attention to the emptiness between debris (all of it cosmic).
On the back cover of Matrix, Fred Moten writes of Pritchard: “[he] loves that non-Euclidean neighborhood… [where] words and content get together.”
I am amazed, imagining Pritchard back in the 60’s and 70s, ensuring that the printers would take seriously his demand of the page as landscape–type sometimes falling off the edge, titles thrice repeated, spacing (kerning, I guess, is its technical term) irregular but absolutely deliberate, nothing standardized about it, no inkling of surrender of the art to conventional parameters. Each poem is a construction project with a particular architectural design and execution. At the breakfast table, Gerardo (who put us all onto Pritchard in the first place) reminds me that Pritchard’s poems are meant to be read out loud, making me think about how words and space are triangulated through sound.
[Here is a recording of Pritchard reading 8 poems, most of which I believe are in Matrix].
From“Metagnomy:” “to seek to find a lance to pierce the possible”
I later searched the word “metagnomy” and found that it comes from French–meaning divination. Whereas “metempsychosis,” the title of another poem, is the belief that a soul travels on to a new body after death. When I searched the term metempsychosis, a 1923 painting by Yokoyama Taikan came up. Taiken’s painting is a scroll which follows a droplet of water along its route of transformation into a stream, a river, then into the sea, then back to mist.
Scrolling
At Forest Study, we discussed scrolls as mediums for knowledge keeping. We kept a scroll of receipt paper tacked to the wall so that we could jot down questions which came up that we did not know the answers to–sometimes intended for the Internet, when we would later have access; other times, they would be responded to by the next person to come along, who would realize they did have some information to add. (At one point, I became curious about the source of salt. Where do people get salt if they do not live on the coast or nearby a salt mine? Are there more sources of salt that I do not know about, or is it an element of existence that requires social exchange? Later, Irene tells me they don’t know the etymology of salt, but they have heard that every word comes from a body).
We also worked on a large scroll together which attempted to map, in different ways, the traces of our collective knowledge around war. What were the sources of our inherited knowledge? What are places of encounter where we found war, or where war found us? How might we index the interpersonal, the brief moments of contact, the sharp elisions or vague redactions, that together shape our narrative(s) around war?
We struggled figuring out how to arrange our monster/master assemblage. It was hard not to strive towards completion, and thereby fall into the trap of trying to create a system of knowledge whose purpose was to collect everything just for the sake of possessing totality, whose tendency would be to force things into a certain order (at the expense of other potential arrangements which might allow new or different connections to come into view). What would it look like to approach our collective knowing differently, as contingent, as infinitely shuffling and incomplete?
In its complexity, our unified map-scroll assumed its own organic encryption. It made sense in process, as we discussed the stories and analyses and flows that we had created, but would not have made an easy tool for navigation. Perhaps there is some advantage to keeping a tool coded only for certain users, to shielding its meaning from untrustworthy eyes. On the other hand, I think we need to take seriously the task of being keepers of memory during a time when so much is being off-loaded by default to Clouds owned by Parent Companies whose terms of use and access are premised upon giving up certain rights. What would we know/remember without the Internet? How might we choose to disseminate knowledge and messages to one another across space and time? Especially in an increasingly sick world, what practices are we developing to support our waning memories as bio-technology? How are we uniquely positioned to pass these techniques down to younger generations?
Pauline Oliveros - Deep Listening
Our first meditation was down the hill around the fire pit. The air was cool but I could feel the sun’s warmth on my face. Every time the wind blew, acorns could be heard falling en masse from the high branches, sometimes landing with loud cracks on the roof of the cabin or onto rocky ground below. My head was surprisingly clear of thoughts, not at all like my rushing commutes–but I noticed a poem swirling in and then out, something like:
To be caught in the crossfire
of acorns
plummeting from
the quivering branch
What random fortune
to be still
during war
To fear only
the oblivion of
others
and
the rustling of
trees In the evening, I finally was able to sit down and read Deep Listening by Pauline Oliveros front to back. I only recently discovered Oliveros’ work but ever since then it has been coming up on an almost daily basis, so when I saw this book in the library I figured it was required reading. I appreciate how Oliveros blends the science of sound with social philosophy: “compassion and understanding are generated through listening to the whole space/time continuum.”
The following day, while meditating again, we laid on the ground and spread our scope of focus as wide as we could. Like in an Oliveros exercise, we searched for the farthest-away sound we could hear. I drifted in and out of sleep under the overcast sky, but not before I noticed the screeching of a bird which must have been coming from all the way across the valley, and not before I realized that my own body was vibrating, pulsing in time with my heartbeat, and also sensing some kind of minute radial movement in the ground below me. I felt as though I’d be able to notice an individual blade of grass twitching. As if my ear were over there, and also over here. The center and the periphery swapped, skipped, blurred.
Later, Rissa described the “body as a tuning fork,” which I wrote down immediately. (Remember to regard it as such more often!!!) We discussed how there are several cadences/intervals of rhythm nested in the landscape. You can keep time by the frequency at which the wind blows, the call and response of the birds, the passing of aircrafts overhead, the dog barking.
Palimpsestic metronomes click at every scale.
