Week two of the Masters and interestingly I am seeing ants and ant like behaviour everywhere - perhaps I am going mad.
Henri Lefebvre in his book The Production of Space, talks about space as an abstract notion which is open to government - therefore to control and containment. Who's space is it ? Who owns space ? Can you own space ?
This line of questioning took me to a conversation I have been having with a friend who is doing his Masters in Literature at Bristol. He is considering doing his dissertation on Aboriginal literature and in particular looking at the stories they passed down from generation to generation establishing and strengthening their connection with the landscape. 'Settlers' stopped their free movement across the landscape by 'claiming' the land fencing it in and 'owning' it -which is absurd as the aboriginal peoples had lived there for thousands of years and knew the landscape intimately as a place to find food and shelter.
We are to a large extent controlled in our movements within the landscape through the concept of ownership. We are also controlled in other ways by prohibition on movement by road - mainly for our safety as there are so many of us on a relatively small landmass. Has progress really brought freedom ?
More thoughts on the thought experiment - we dabbled in metaphysical poetry.
We listed 5 physical properties of the moon and 5 metaphysical properties - then a group of 10 people threw their words on the floor and we selected words that spoke to us randomly - creating a poem and an image to illustrate it - very quickly !
The 'poem' reads:
Full mysterious light
Changing love to cold
No oxygen
A lifeless mood ritual
A bumpy wisdom
Sing your dreams
The madness of soul
Howl curl and embrace bright mystery
Scream the harvest.
After putting these words together to make some sense of them - they seemed to me like a good description of snoring/apnoea and its consequences. I may use this method to create a poem about ants.
Incidentally whilst doing this exercise my mobile phone which was residing in my pocket decided to heat up to the point where I thought it might explode - I've been howling at Tesco Mobile today because they will not replace it unless they are sure they can't repair it - it is beyond repair it is dead like the Monty Python parrot. I explained that I have saved notes on my lectures to it, and use it for work but to no avail - they have to follow procedures like the rest of us ants.
My argument against this ant like behaviour is that as humans we have independence of thought. An exampleof this is cited by Mika Rottenburg in Art Monthly Oct 18 " In the space of an eight-hour workday, not everything has a purpose- things also have their own kind of logic and people do things in different ways". This divergence and diversity from ' norms - or not fitting easily into tick boxes', means that we may find collaborating in certain circumstances difficult - unless we agree with the terms and the aims of the collaboration. Then we have to decide whether the aims have a moral dimension -are they 'good' or 'bad' and who gets to decide which is which ? Perhaps there are subtle ways used by companies who make money out of us to control our movements and choices in the digital and real world - eg political choices - purchasing choices ? In regards to purchasing - we were reminded in the first lecture on the thought experiment that what we are told are sustainable purchasing choices may not on further investigation truly be sustainable.
I am thinking of making an ant mask and having my hair dyed red by a colleague - then making a short film where I get stamped on by a large doctor marten.
Paul
Henri Lefebvre in his book The Production of Space, talks about space as an abstract notion which is open to government - therefore to control and containment. Who's space is it ? Who owns space ? Can you own space ?
This line of questioning took me to a conversation I have been having with a friend who is doing his Masters in Literature at Bristol. He is considering doing his dissertation on Aboriginal literature and in particular looking at the stories they passed down from generation to generation establishing and strengthening their connection with the landscape. 'Settlers' stopped their free movement across the landscape by 'claiming' the land fencing it in and 'owning' it -which is absurd as the aboriginal peoples had lived there for thousands of years and knew the landscape intimately as a place to find food and shelter.
We are to a large extent controlled in our movements within the landscape through the concept of ownership. We are also controlled in other ways by prohibition on movement by road - mainly for our safety as there are so many of us on a relatively small landmass. Has progress really brought freedom ?
More thoughts on the thought experiment - we dabbled in metaphysical poetry.
We listed 5 physical properties of the moon and 5 metaphysical properties - then a group of 10 people threw their words on the floor and we selected words that spoke to us randomly - creating a poem and an image to illustrate it - very quickly !
The 'poem' reads:
Full mysterious light
Changing love to cold
No oxygen
A lifeless mood ritual
A bumpy wisdom
Sing your dreams
The madness of soul
Howl curl and embrace bright mystery
Scream the harvest.
After putting these words together to make some sense of them - they seemed to me like a good description of snoring/apnoea and its consequences. I may use this method to create a poem about ants.
Incidentally whilst doing this exercise my mobile phone which was residing in my pocket decided to heat up to the point where I thought it might explode - I've been howling at Tesco Mobile today because they will not replace it unless they are sure they can't repair it - it is beyond repair it is dead like the Monty Python parrot. I explained that I have saved notes on my lectures to it, and use it for work but to no avail - they have to follow procedures like the rest of us ants.
My argument against this ant like behaviour is that as humans we have independence of thought. An exampleof this is cited by Mika Rottenburg in Art Monthly Oct 18 " In the space of an eight-hour workday, not everything has a purpose- things also have their own kind of logic and people do things in different ways". This divergence and diversity from ' norms - or not fitting easily into tick boxes', means that we may find collaborating in certain circumstances difficult - unless we agree with the terms and the aims of the collaboration. Then we have to decide whether the aims have a moral dimension -are they 'good' or 'bad' and who gets to decide which is which ? Perhaps there are subtle ways used by companies who make money out of us to control our movements and choices in the digital and real world - eg political choices - purchasing choices ? In regards to purchasing - we were reminded in the first lecture on the thought experiment that what we are told are sustainable purchasing choices may not on further investigation truly be sustainable.
I am thinking of making an ant mask and having my hair dyed red by a colleague - then making a short film where I get stamped on by a large doctor marten.
Paul
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