16: Epistemological crisis

It seems, from this juncture, like there are any number of alternate realities I might be and may have been codetermining. That trip to Lisboa was followed by another one, not long after, in which Lisboa both refined its pleasures and compounded its concerns.

Like a great film, repeat viewings and return trips can triangulate a position—for those inclined to carefully consider and record the impressions of their lives, or for those with exceptional memories not reconditioned by the prevailing technologies—that can be measured very unscientifically by its present-past to observe the drift of a mind in a drifting world.

To put it another way, I’ve lost the moments that seared with significance through the haze of everything and now I’ll endeavor a psycho-technical inventory.

or as Ben Lerner shapes it:

We got a place near our favorite garden where mornings were shared watching the shimmer of greens and birds, class trips and warm conversations. Could this be the home we wonder. A not insignificant intuition worries this could be like hitting rewind through the last decade of violent gentrification in the Bay Area, which now appears to be expanding latitudinally. Do we have the stomach for it?

We get stuck in a district where all the restaurants look like sets, the bland and colorful food arranged into perfect photographs and the people all rushing to store time.

Cat paws, monkey hands, chestnuts. Social life, developers, cryptocurrency.

A small fleet of Teslas and electronic scooters with viking warriors dressed in athleisure.

Ellie Ga gave a nice talk at ZDB and the small group was lively and social afterwards. Hospitable spaces for gathering thoughtfully are truly something to be treasured.

Something like the provincial aspiration towards a cartoon version of the cartoon version of a global art world began to reveal itself as we got further into the establishment. The steady puncture of our good faith projections, power players and weaponized sociality.

From my journals:

I find myself in the garden, this could be habitable. I feel like I always say these things from afar. Without really knowing them. There are certainly moments of respite here and I believe every place people live should have something like this nearby. And also the planes fly over head often and the man who’s been hired to blow leaves comes by when your deep in thought and there’s a never ending ring of traffic surrounding the garden.

I saw myself in the future, in the garden, walking a small commuter bicycle. I didn’t look bad, fit with grey in my short curly hair. I had big smile on my face that irritated me a little bit. I glared at my future as he disappeared into or under the symphony hall.

Every time I begin to get comfortable, a person who I imagine would rather be doing anything else, walks by with a leaf blower. What does this suggest about the container of this utopia?

A class of adolescents writhes at the the museum door minutes before opening. A father and young daughter sit together on the edge of a fountain. She’s overflowing, rolling around, extending in every direction. He sits, neatly folded, watching her adoringly. A bus fires a shot of compressed air and I seize in terror. A burst of fear chemicals shoots through my exhausted system.

The birds in the cafe come by to ask for food. I’ve been instructed by posted notices and my companion not give them crusts of savory pastries. They have what they need in the garden, and I’ve been told and our food is not good for them. The first part of this sentiment feels a bit austere and incommensurate with the extent of imposition we’ve had as a species on their environment, and the second part raises a number of open questions about health generally, and pleasure specifically. I resolve to get some more healthy seeds to offer as inadequate restitution and give even more thought to what it is I’m consuming and how it effects my being. My thoughts turn towards an event for a recent publication about sugar production in Eastern Europe. It compiled a number of texts and artworks towards this subject and held, in my understanding, an allegorical use of sugar to stand in for the foreclosed promises of a sweet life possible under socialism after ‘89. More than anything else that evening I focused on how impoverished a notion of the good life socialized sugar production is. After the talk I met a new friend and we began a conversation that led to a train station where we stood for an hour, bracing ourselves against the currents of London time. We talked about a host of concerns and affinities and the possible differences between chronos and kairos. The savory pastries dissolve in me and I’m left with a tired feeling. There was little substance and my body feels depleted. The day loses is allure and I settle into a contemplative palliation. The book I was reading turns into cryptotime, abyssal.

How unsettling, this pawn shop, sanitized and fluorescent, with bubbly corporate letters.

Music sounds in the azulejo museum courtyard. Dripping hose, the closing down of a workshop, the beating wings of pigeons, children in a nearby school, the tile restorers…

G: I don’t want to go that way, it’s only going to be more cherubs...

The oldest bookstore in the world. Harari in the window. Dostoyevsky 10% off.

I take an evening constitutional with a wool sweater I found at a charity shop. It had a few holes and I wanted to have them mended. I asked my phone, as one does, for a nearby tailor and set off towards one of the little red dots that appeared on the map. The first place turned out to be closed but nearby a cultural center that I was curious to visit. The second place was quite a distance in an undesireable direction and so I put away my phone as started walking towards attractive light and inviting streets. In a few minutes I walked around a corner and saw a a pair of tailors working in a basement studio. I tapped on the window, gave them my sweater and they asked me to return the next day, same time.

These applications are not trying to help me. They are trying to manipulate me based on whoever pays them the most. These technologies are constantly working against me and the things I actually care about. Their goodness are almost always incidental or hard won. I walk by a Tesla and it flashes menacingly. I went into a store where a young man is saying in English that he works for Google Ads and the shopkeepers should definitely get them so that when people from another country try to find a shop they will see theirs. When he leaves I ask the clerks if he was trying to sell them advertising and they told me he’s a regular customer who works for Google. We talked for a while about how the tech gentrification of Lisbon has been a disaster for the locals. Their quiet and calm resilience surrounded by wellness elixirs and superfoods for their new expensive neighbors.

The symphony hall is extremely beautiful. Warm, comfortable, intimately sized and overlooking the illuminated gardens through a massive wall of glass behind the orchestra. I arrived a couple hours before the performance and the ticket seller provided me a perfectly located seat beside a man who sounded like he was on a ventilator and a pair of excitable young women unwrapping hard candy while responding to text messuages. The program was Schubert’s unfinished symphony, a Bach cantata, I have enough, and some funeral music from Hindemith. I can’t bear conductors, especially this one. Their grandiosity, pompousness and vainglory. They distract so much from the gifted musicians. At some point in the proceedings I find myself absorbed by hands, wind in the trees, birds careening. In moments between performances I think I might experience music (Bonnet).

A week prior on a bus in Dalston I thought I might have experienced music, with and against the staccato urban churn, densely layered, saturating, with a twinkling shimmer of conversations, proximate and remote, coalescing into a beautiful fleeting music, english re-enchanted, inflections, chimeras, momentarily attended to; an awareness or tuning.

A moment nearby, a man spoke towards a friend in a delightfully lilting arc of humorous explication, reverberating on a narrow cobblestone street, and as we passed I thought was that music?

Bonnet has so many great insights, though I believe he’s mistaken about the strict utility of birdsong.

I collected my thoughts for a tutorial with the director of the art and ecology program. Since our meeting last week I’ve already shifted my thoughts on the work and presentation. What I shared is as follows:

I would like to organize my show around these three themes and spacial arrangements

1. Hospitality, the most important thing in the world

A few comfortable chairs punctuated by a small table 
A bookshelf with the texts I’m thinking with
An electric kettle and lemon verbena leaves
My desk with a laptop open to rituals in time 
An another tab for browsing 
A playlist playing softly 

2. Passerines  - an animist shrine to the quotidian

As a matter of preference and habit I go to outdoor markets where there’s a lively sociality and people find new uses for preexisting things. These spaces exist as alternatives to corporate capitalism, provide subsistence for many people, rehearse practices of redistribution and reconfigure paradigms about work. Since moving to London I’ve become interested in the porcelain fetishes that have gone out of fashion and accumulate in the markets and charity shops. I’m interested in the quotidian, popular and kitsch forms that animism may take. They appear to me, like the popular animal videos of social media, as a cultural articulation of latent needs and pressing urgencies. The collective unconscious giving shape to its grief about mass extinction.

I’m interested in the unnamed and unbounded thrall of objects I feel connections with. I’m interested in the forces and meanings that exist beyond the confines of neoliberalism, data science and platform capitalism. Many of the decisions I acquiesce with come from a place beyond an ability to articulate and rationalize. I’m content with that uncertainty. The feeling of loved ones sharing their care for me as intuited and articulated in the worlds of animals, plants, objects, people, dreams, and strangers. I find myself talking to people on the street or picking up a book and encountering something timely and intimately resonant. And I find myself feeling like a host or channel for these thralls and resonances with other relations.

Using the gathered objects I will make assemblages for contemplation. I’m inspired by Cecilia Vicuña and her precarious sculptures as well as Gabriel Orozco’s early quotidian interventions. I will call these passerines and their disposition is often open, friendly and provisional (after Han’s deconstruction of the passion narrative in western art). 

Sketches for Passerines:

1: Better than everything
(named after a spice based on the proletarian herb blend of my youth that catalyzes memories, after Proust)

A windscreen cellphone mount from the ceiling playing a looping video of Agnes in a 500 year old remote buckeye. 

It forces a looking up, a religious feeling gesture, too far away to see clearly, cloudy, bringing a feeling of frustration and painful want, false promise. 

2: Learning with AI’s about nuance, beauty and uncertainty
(When I try to write resacralize the algorithm changes it to desacralize )

A sheer textile of screen captures of facial recognition 
laid out like falling grains of rice and 
animated with small a solar fan 

3: Untitled, life

Life bottle with dried flowers
(A peace offering) 

4: Alebrijes loaded with pirated songs from the mercado along with selection of theory on the pluriverse and mondialité,
umbilically linked to a small usb speaker and playing softly

5: Untitled, self portrait
Pear burl

6: Gullible’s Travels (Counterfeit iPhone laser etched with a fox illustration, lilliputian allegory and materials list after Bruno Latour, Vladen Joler and Kate Crawford)

3. Archives and Performance

RitualsInTime.space is a disseminable archive from an indiscrete a r t

I see the passerines as performance in space to be realized relationally according to sites and times

I would like to also do different durational performances of the archive with image, sound and performers