some thinking and thoughts after reading some Hannah Arendt literature and criticism:
'In other words, if we are onlt the same in being different, if we have access to ourselves only through others within the public space of appearing, then the more we encounter difference as Arendt describes it, the more we have ourselves.'
lots of interesting stuff in relation to Arendt's interest in time (which i think is useful to bring to the fore in your work), this is quite long sorry, but interesting:
'The first thing to be noticed is that not only the future - 'the wave of the future' - but also the past is seen as a force, and not, as in nearly all our metaphors, as a burden man has to shoulder and of whose dead weight the loving can or even must get rid in their march into the future. In the words of Faulkner, 'the past is never dead, it is nor even past.' This past, moreover, reaching all the way back into the origin, does not pull back but presses forwards, and it is, contrary to what one would expect, the future which drives us back into the past. Seen from the viewpoint of man, who always lives in the interval between past and future, time is not a continuum, a flow of uninterrupted succession; it is broken in the middle, at the point where 'he' stands; and 'his' standpoint is not the present as we usually understand itbut rather a gap in time which 'his' constand fighting, 'his' making a stand against past and future, keep in existence.'
hope you are well xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
2 comments:
Here stands the reduction of human hope into three waves of romantic faith:
1600 AD
Here stands hope for science of the mind - 1st wave romantic faith
1800 AD
Here stands hope for science of the imagination - 2nd wave romantic faith
2000 AD
Here stands hope for science of time - 3rd wave romantic faith
I believe this will be difficult so I'm adhering to our policy of form through unlikely-sense. That is, a sense of form is hereby my chosen mode of organisation, the hope for communication left standing.
John Cage would make music from notes traveling faster than the speed of sound. He quotes Duchamp - "Its the person who pays attention who finishes the work of art". Mr Cage makes the bridge between past and future an attention span.
But first a real experience:
The scientist said of the particle accelerator:
"It's like banging together two grand pianos - you get all sorts of complicated stuff flying out".
I'd like to use the layer, a coral reef say, to participate in the ocean. Yet the ocean is left standing. But I must keep on.
Here I present three poetic turns of phrase which in turn rebound from two experience I've had in the last few days:
-- Pressure from the future as form in the present - that's Arendt again
-- Agitation as the experience of time - to take a standpoint
-- The instinct of the imagination as a concept of the forward-looking past
I have in previous work explored 1st wave and 3rd wave romantic faith (reason and time) and would like to draw out further 2nd wave romantic faith (imagination) in the show at High Street Project.
The shows starting point begins with the rather controversial, though not particularly contemporary proposition that the imagination is no longer as useful to the laying bare of perception and/or nature as it was once thought by science and other areas of occupation.
Earlier this week I watched the second tape from the Art Meets Science & Spirituality series (1993) The Chaotic Universe in a Changing Economy. The two most resounding of the panelists were John Cage and Ilya Prigogine (Thermodynamic Physicist).
Not only is the rational mind of the renaissance no longer capable of conceiving of nature, that is understanding perception, but so too contemporary science has not only disturbed itself through objective misadventure it has also found the imagination wanting - can we picture matter that is both a particle and wave?
RenIlya Prigogine was very keen on re-awakening Time - dormant since the reign of Eternity (absence of time) in Renaissance philosophy and science.
For this Thermodynamic physicist Time is the bridge over spirituality and matter.
-- Does the imagination put pressure on the human condition, much like we might consider the future to impress us into existence through the form of the past? In what ways does the imagination allow form and insight? If time and space are explored as bounded plains, is the imagination to be considered in this way also?
Is freedom, the partial assertion?
At which points, and what standpoints, do we assert that "all the answers are good"?
This is the where I arrive:
I was at a gig listening to some great lyrics in a voice that wasn't too concerned with being bounded my one genre - but bounded non the less by an arrangement and series of chaotic habits.
I believe the process I work with at times is this:
To learn things and then attentively let them go. To establish a ground of knowledge and experience in which to generate a collision or soft heart attack that might not lead the note back to the instrument;
To agitate imagined conditions with imaginable conditions.
Thanks for your great posts Tom - 'the past is not a burden' - That's sensational!
Can't wait to talk again soon!
R
Hi Tom,
I think we should call the show 'Continuous memory', a feature described, often in italic font, on early model personal calculators.
What so you think?
I will email you a selection of the photographs I have been working with which are proving to be a key starting point for thinking about the elements of imagination, time and the impression of the future we have been talking about.
I'm really excited about the radio broadcast of the sound works that will be part of the performance. This will offer viewers an alternative way of navigating the event and the show too. Perhaps there could be portable headphone's to pick up the transmission as well as pre-recorded options?
Will look forward to talking to you soon!
xx R
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