Resonance. How do we find it, how do we create it, and how do we maintain it? These were the questions I struggled with in conceptualizing my project. However, in Everything Sings by Dennis Wood, I caught just the tiniest whisper of something that might have contained the answer. Before, if someone were to mention a map to me, I would’ve thought it only as a functional object. There was no narrative, no poetry in its body. It was just a tool that people used in orienting themselves for their next destination. However, I started taking these associations out of the traditional cartographic context (the necessity for orientation, for detailing locations, for delineating space), I saw that there is actually a rich field of meaning that can be created through maps. When Dennis Wood described his process for creating his map of lamp lights, I finally began to understand this. The traditional notions we have for objects and conventions are really just in our heads. Similarly, in a TED Talk I saw recently by Jay Silver, when we step back and reevaluate common objects for their basic properties, it is then that we can begin to construct our own ways of interacting with and understanding the world.
But of course, this is all easier said than done. While On Looking by Alexandra Horowitz, did help me reconnect with my inner child somewhat, it is harder to often do consciously. A lot of System 2 has to come into play, introduced in the reading Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, which needs conscious, concentrated effort to call into action. However, due to our conditioned responses from the fast thinking System 1, it is easy to see that often times we don’t even realize we are missing an opportunity for reevaluation. That is what I fear. What if my intuitive trust in my own System 1 overrides the chance for my System 2 to kick in? Thus, the question then turns to the structure of the process, or even the environment, that can foster active looking and re-looking, for if we are realistic, this kind of heavy-lifting in thinking, this forced second-guessing, can’t be on all the time. However, that is still something I’m trying to figure out myself. Is the structure something I put aside time for allowing System 2 to come in and wrestle with? How about working in an environment with like-minded individuals? These are just a few of the questions I’ll be testing out in the GISP, figuring out the best combination of System 1 and System 2, or working beside others or completely alone.
In the reading Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, the concept of a strange loop was perfect for how I am feeling at this stage of the GISP. Because I am trying to approach and understand something very new (like many of the GISPers), my level of rules to handle certain processes is changed: to use Arduino, a new material, but also maintain characteristics of a “living being” for my concept, the way I approach the material glass is altered. This continues again, with the higher level (with the alteration, my previous notions of “living” is questioned), feeding a cycle of revisions and confusions until I feel like I’m running nowhere. This tangling is unavoidable, as this is part of the painful (but also somewhat delightful) process. I hope that in this mess, something will untangle soon.
As for my personal readings, I only focused on The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell for this week. He weaves a powerful account of the meaning of myths, how they arise from the realization that suffering stems from mortality. Thus, myths are “clues to spiritual potentialities of human life,” how they activate the energy of the “stuff” that line our interior system of belief. I thus realized how rites of passages are such monumental landmarks in the lives of people with such cultures, and it is through the creation of these systems of meaning that such events can even lead to changes in thought or behavior. That is what the culture of myths can create, leading to a sense of community. Although, what really excited me was the saying that mythology was the song of the universe, “music we dance to even when we cannot name the tune.” This captured exactly my feelings and motivations for my project: an inexplicable yearning to sing something I didn’t know the words to, to create resonance. The way to do so, I believe, will have to count on the specificity of my song. Much like what Dennis Wood had said in Everything Sings, a neighborhood, the transformer, takes what is public, common, and everyday, and turns it into something personal, something real for those living inside it. As an artist, the concept is very much the same. Everything sings. I just have to figure out how to listen.
Bridging the Gap 