EPS - Ways of Seeing in the Chocolate Factory

Throughout Part I of our project, I was reminded of John Berger's 'Ways of Seeing' - a short BBC documentary that focuses on the reproduction and relocation of art.  While Berger's focus rests in the classical art forms often institutionalized by museums, his evaluation of change and the 'mystification' of art reverberate with our project.  As we cut apart, reduce, and reproduce in the industrial and post-industrial age, we lose some of our connection with the community, with the past, and with ourselves.  We break apart some of the beauty and mystery and refocus on one aspect or element in order to commodify aesthetics, in order to simplify work.  Yet the senses are not necessarily about 'work' - they are about pleasure.  Attraction/Repulsion - finding Satisfaction and connecting to a past memory through a simple smell or a taste.

As we move towards re-connection and community, Berger serves as a re-minder...

Also, for Part II, we are using the films that were mentioned in previous blog posts - charting the quest narrative and attempting to figure out the role of the characters and plot lines - the lessons these visual texts can teach us.  As we move forward in an attempt to re-invision and re-interpret texts, images, memories, and meanings, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory re-minds me that not all is as it seems.  There is much more behind the gates and under the soil than we know - a (w)hole system and interconnected environment.  Our Konsult is an experiment.  We have to be willing to imagine/image meanings that will help instigate awareness.  

Our actions have affects - greed and desire can lead you astray... 

(up the river/pipe without a paddle - entropy in action)

 Yet, a good deed can shine in a weary world.

We have to know our role in the system - We are the theorists, the thinkers, the dreamers working to activate the literacy of electracy through aesthetics

Make Good Choices

Part II of our Ubiquitous Imaging seminar moves to focus on "The Accident" - Cabot Koppers Superfund in Alachua County Florida.  For almost 100 years, Cabot Koppers has been making pine tar - the same stuff used to coat Columbus' ships in his voyage to 'The New World' of spices and shiny silks (whoops, wrong turn).  Yet the process of making Pine Tar produces Creosote, a deadly poison that has been seeping into the soil and groundwater of Gainesville Florida.  Our desire of spices, a sensory experience, has inadvertently poisoned one of the most beautiful areas in the world - a place Coleridge called 'Xanadu.' 

While the first section of our course emphasized individual perspective, defining our approach, shifting perspective, capturing our Moments and defining our Einstellung - we now move to incorporate the community - moving from individual to collective, part to whole - and try to figure out how that happens!  How can we use our aesthetic 'sense-abilities' to connect to the community - to challenge the Accident and learn more about it?  How can we learn from Cabot Koppers and incorporate the community in recognizing our participation?  How can we use and define Prudence in our community?  What part do we all play?

When I was in college, I had a friend named Vivian.  Vivy was the most beautiful, graceful, sassy, Southern belle who actually got her hands dirty.  She could use the right fork at a delicate garden party and then go out to the woods and camp for days.  Her balance aways struck me as a bit miraculous.  Regardless of where you were going or what you were doing, when Vivy parted ways with you, she would always say "Make good choices!" with a bright smile and a wave.  Her way was not necessarily to judge, but to joke - be it somewhat instructional.  For a long while I adopted her farewell, albeit with a bit of sarcasm, and reminded myself, as well as others, to have a great time by 'making good choices.' Regardless of how the day or night went, there was an echo of perspective, of reverberation, and mostly of balance - knowing that we are constantly making choices and that those actions have affects and effects beyond my personal scope.


 

Vivian's words come back to me now as we attempt to refocus our ideas towards the community.  Our work in Part II emphasizes Wellbeing - Dr. Ulmer calls it 'Konsulting the Community" - looking to figure out how we as electrate scholars can use smart technologies, smart environments, and the smart people within them to 'make good choices' for the Environment and the People within in it.  The Konsult idea uses a heuretic to experiment with re-connecting and re-articulating ourselves in relation to the community, using 'aesthetic reasoning' to employ the senses in the cause of Wellbeing.  We want to understand how to use our aesthetic attitude - Einstellung - to konsult with Prudence/Limit - and 'make good choices' - to feel our capacity and possibility while understanding our impact and limit.  As we build a kind of aesthetic knowledge/reasoning we hope to reconnect the micro-causm to the macro-causm - to bridge the individual and the community while fostering an awareness of our own impact in the world of Wellbeing.

An investigation into awareness and balance...

Positioning the Past - Moment

Stellenbosch University

I first went abroad in 2003.  Stellenbosch, South Africa was a gorgeous wine town on the Western Cape that had beaches, vineyards, and mountains beside townships, poverty and remnants of Apartheid.  I had come to participate - to attend Stellenbosch University while teaching in the Kayamundi Township and wandering around town amidst thatched roofs and an endless array of flowers and people.

 I wanted to learn and help, to experience a new culture and try to contribute to the community building initiatives ushered forth in the wake of reconciliations.  And I did!  I traveled and taught, read and drank, played with children and adults, and vastly expanded my previous world-view.  I stepped outside the knowledge of the page and lived and listened to what was happening around me.

Yet, as much as I came to understand the world around me (or tried), I also experienced moment, limit, and through that, freedom.

I had been struggling with my own type of reconciliation, piecing together my past to try and make sense of a possible future - - a little compulsively.  I was book ended by potentialities and positioned in the between, partially unable to fully ‘be’ in the present while hounded by the past.

But in a moment of epiphany, on a beach ‘between’ an ocean and a mountain – I recognized my limit and was reaquainted to my Location and Time. 

On vacation with friends, I woke up one morning and went for a run while the house was still sleeping.  Storm clouds were rolling in and the sky was dim and fractured with sporadic rays of light as I walked down to the crescent beach – determined to run the whole of it before the encroaching downpour.  Of course, I was right at the halfway point when the rain started to fall – at first, fat, warm, heavy, drops every few seconds, but quickly the intervals shortened and I was soon running through waves of water from both above and below.   

It was the best run of my life.  Euphoric.

The previous day a friend and I had climbed Table Mountain, wandering through ravines and crevasses as we discussed the past and future.  The entire run I had been reflecting on our conversation, but as the rain started to intrude upon my rhythm, 'little and large drop,' I just started running.  Through the sand, through the rain, fully in that moment aware of my surroundings – in the NOW.

When I finally returned to my starting point I was drenched and reconciled – reflective but repositioned.

And ready.

I sat on the beach in the rain knew where I needed to go and what I needed to do.

In that moment I encountered my ‘being’ and began to become, initiating a GPS and EPS sequence that has brought me to today.

Present

EPS

The Electron Cloud of my 'Sense-sational' Time and Being, Narrated by Whitman

From what I call the ‘Kafka moment’ – when I realized that we would need a ‘tutor text’ – I have been thinking back on the intellectual figures that have shaped my epiphanies and guided my ‘moments.’ While there certainly are a few, Walt Whitman immediately came to the fore.  In my youth (like’ awkward phase’ youth) I read through several transcendentalist authors and waffled between loving their all-encompassing interpretations of community and spirituality, and mocking the trite overtures and elitism.  Yet, Whitman seemed to embrace the contradictions, quite literally, and run with them – exploring the world in meter and verse with a simplicity and eagerness that prompted my own enthusiasm.   Whitman fostered connections with the world and people around him, ‘encountering’ satisfaction and repulsion without judgment to prioritize the experience, the process and reflection, over the conscriptions of society - and I wanted that kind of attitude, that kind of exploratory and participatory mind.

While my intellectual mentors have expanded and altered, I still consider Whitman a part of my attitude, a reminder to embrace the contradictions of life and participate – to curb overanalyzing and ‘be where you are’ - to consistently become – to move and change and to enjoy that change – to consider and hope, but not to allow the past or future to fully rule the present.  I joked about being attracted to aesthetics, the ‘shiny objects’ of sight and sound that interest me first and then prompt reflection, my ‘sense-sationalism.’  Yet, like most academics, there is a steady hummmmmmmmm of contemplation that frames my experiences.  Even while turning to respond to the ‘shiny stuff’ of the world, I am configuring its place, my relationship to it, the purpose or position, my reactions and associations, etc.  For me, Whitman is not only about participation and experience, but balanced reflection – an open view of the world that considers the multiplicity of experience, the aesthetic and rational environment, as well as my place within it.  Whitman acknowledges it all, the electron cloud of attraction and repulsion that navigates our being and becoming, the dromosphere reason of our NOW.

Once,

in South Africa

I was entangled with my past -

living between two continents somewhere in the ocean

instead of fully embracing my present experience.

My Worldview, the Past a Retrospection altered by Personal Memory, Positioning in Reflection.

Yet my physical displacement from home and known acknowledged a limit 
that fostered a freedom,

A moment of being on a beach that began my becoming.

Whitman had traveled with me,

His Leaves of Grass marked by movement and contemplation.

As I marked a moment of self, His 'Songs' situated my sense,
And crafted a Literary Pastiche of Remixed Time:

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself…

I loafe and invite my soul…

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,

But I do not talk of beginning or end…

My Present, an intersection and overlap of knowledge and experience.

Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders,

I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait…

I am satisfied – I see, dance, laugh, sing…

I believe in those wing’ed purposes,

And acknowledge red, yellow, white, playing within me,

And consider green and violet and the tufted crown intentional…

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,

And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing…

My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,

With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds…

And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,

And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,

And of these one and all I weave the song of myself…

The Potentiality of Experience, Past, Present, Future

I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,

Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,

Stuff’d with the stuff that is coarse and stuff’d with the stuff that is fine,

One of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the largest the same,

A Southerner soon as Northerner…

I resist any thing better than my own diversity,

Breathe the air but leave plenty after me,

And am not stuck up, and am in my place…

Conventional Time Image
Where I have walked in the Past, Growing, and Reflecting to Fuel My Present
The Participation of the Now, the People and Places that mark my Position - Fingerpainting Sense-sationalism
The Unknown and Unwritten Hopes for the Future

I know I am solid and sound,

To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,

All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means…

I find one side a balance and the antipodal side a balance,

Soft doctrine as steady help as stable doctrine…

At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,

And that we call Being…

Time Image II
The Way I see Time and Experience the World
My EPS

Space and Time! now I see it is true, what I guess’d at,

What I guess’d when I loaf’d on the grass,

What I guess’d while I lay alone in my bed,

And again as I walk’d the beach under the paling stars of the morning…

I take part, I see and hear the whole…

It is time to explain myself – let us stand up…

I am an acme of things accomplish’d, and I an encloser of things to be…

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,           

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

** The quoted section taken from Whitman’s “Song of Myself” but certainly ‘remixed’ in order to tell the story of my becoming, my time image.