on my mind

Hejduk. Vladivostok, 1989


Turrell. Afrum-Proto, 1996


Eliasson. Mirror door (visitor), 2008

300 words

This is more like 400 words... apparently I can really spit it out when it's about me, my insecurities and lack of confidence. How frustrating for everyone. For a refresher on what I'm talking about, thesis-structure-wise, check out this post.

I've been feeling pretty out of sorts this past while and I want things to change. Or is it more active for me to say, I want to change...? Because I do...

Other thoughts: I go back and forth in my mind and in conversations with people about the role of scent in my thesis. Another thing that comes up now and then when I think about it is design... it's not that I think this should be a "DESIGN" thesis but I feel that there's something missing. Could that thing be design? I don't even know what I'm talking about. In any case, it is kind of nice to be posting again. Here are we go.


300 words on the danger of my thesis stand, July 21st, 2009- eclipse!

I think I’ve already complained that I’ve been seeing everything in nothing these days- how I’m concerned that this whole thesis endeavour has been smoke and mirrors of my own doing... (undoing, desire, delusion?) The danger of seeing everything in nothing is that it inevitably turns to the worry or realisation that perhaps there is nothing to see when looking at everything. Is it possible to see the void that connects matter without addressing the matter at hand? (Where is the substance? Is this like a figure ground thing? Can everything be made architectural-sounding? Why am I resistant to this?)

Or is the danger actually that I hope to look at ‘everything’ (or at least a lot- a diverse lot) but say nothing? If I were to present a book with no thesis- that is, a thesis book with no overarching statement or intent, would it still be a thesis? I imagine a book of short essays- writing on topics loosely filed under the physical constraints of curiosity cabinet, garden, and places of worship.

Perhaps the real danger of my thesis resides in its passivity- not only my listlessness in doing (trying to do) it, but the emptiness of a thesis without an explicit statement; will there be anything to grasp or hold onto? (defend?) Is there magic in a cabinet waiting to be filled, a plot of soil to be seeded, a wonderful place with no inhabitants? Even when these spaces are filled and subsequently described, it will still be up to the viewer to overcome the inertia of only seeing in order to be touched. Does the premise of my thesis rely too much on the reader to make sense of it, to see the point of it?

Sure, a book in itself is a passive object, waiting for someone to open its covers and give its existence purpose. But what to make of a book that only kind of shows (hopefully revealing something unknown/unacknowledged?) but remains largely mute? Is it too much to ask the reader to feel, think, remember, and look beyond the words to make/find their own meaning in the work? Because as the creator of this work I’m already confused before I’ve really begun. I feel too lost to begin. While it’s not necessarily dangerous (and perhaps even good sometimes) for a reader to be confused, it’s dangerous if it leads to boredom. (indifference, paralysis.)

after today

The following is the 14th chapter of a terrific story called Crippled Detectives by Lee Tandy Schwartzman (age 7, Seattle, Washington, in 1978). The story first came to my attention a few years ago and every now and then I find myself thinking about it, usually triggered by the oddest things. I still haven't read it in its entirety, but it definitely remains a place of constant wonder for me.

The whole novel can be found here at the website of its publisher, Stone Soup.

Chapter Fourteen
After Today

Lee: I feel like singing a song.

Sylvia: O.K., okey dokey.

And this is how the song goes:

After today the world’s gonna spin incorrect
and the sun’s gonna turn to cheddar cheese

and the stars gonna turn to lemon drops
and the bigger ones to lollypops

and so I keep this song in my heart.
After today I’ll get a head start.

After today and so it’s like tomorrow
I’m gonna fly through the air.

It’s like evil was only yesterday.
After today I’m gonna walk on thin air
and so I’m gonna be there.

After today I’ll swim like a fish
and tomorrow fly like a bird.

Nothing is gonna keep me from being there at tomorrow
and where are the words for tomorrow?

After the song Sylvia began to cry, whispering, “Lee, Ben’s gonna die tomorrow, oh Ben’s dying, Lee, tomorrow he’ll die.” Sylvia lay her head on Lee’s apron. “And,” cried Sylvia, “I’m gonna cry forever. Our parents went on a airplane, the airplane crashed, and it has not been found.” Lee cried too. Suddenly Sylvia stopped crying. “Lee, it means we have to take care of the youngsters, even Ben if he is still alive. It means we’re women, we have to fight the villains and take care of our family at the same time. We’re four or five alone.” But the day after Ben died and the girls wept upon his grave, but only the elders held back their tears, but black clouds came and they ran for cover for it would rain.

-from Crippled Detectives by Lee Tandy Schwartzman

olfactory context

watch:
Sissel Tolaas, smell/scent artist, lecture at the GSD, April 01, 2009
"SMELL = information at tool of communication and navigation"

also read:
article in Wired about her 2006 exhibit (see above image)
the FEAR of Smell — the Smell of FEAR at MIT's List Visual Arts Center
"The Odor Artist"

see also:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=516332
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=14&click_id=116&art_id=qw1165472463755S312
http://www.article.no/en/content/kunstnere/sissel-tolaas-no
http://www.showstudio.com/project/violence

and more:
archived lectures at the GSD here, an excellent resource- just like my pal, Tammy

Thanks Tammy, for showing me this crazy woman!

***

I find Tolaas' work incredibly exciting. It reeks of what drew me to the subject of smell and scent in the first place- mystery, simplicity/complexity, invisible workings, boundless scale and intimate reach, possibility and playfulness, and so on. And all of it grounded in the hard science of chemistry, craziness of neuroscience, case studies of psychology... I'm fascinated how "this all"/scent/smell? can be explored in art, how it translates into (an) experience, how this exp. can be structured and how that then feeds back into how we approach/perceive/move through (our lives??the world? space?). I'm so dramatic, it's kind of sickening. And inarticulate, scattered.

I want to learn more about her work with smell and language... oh language, I could think all day about language, how one word relates and folds into another, exists in several states and meanings at once... and don't even get me started on sentences. On a sort of sidenote, I'm having very bad communication problems these days. This ranges from being unable to write coherently or speak properly (can one be orally dyslexic?). Even this video of that lecture cannot stream on my computer without glitchy blankspots every 2 seconds... maybe someone can fill in the gaps for me?

It just occured to me that maybe I'm only into that which is associated with smell, like ideas and things peripheral to it (but also central?)... but maybe not so much smell/scent itself? Is this the only way to engage with smell though? or is this just me? I'm not a big scent/perfume freak- (scenthorse?). While I enjoy it sometimes on other people, I can't handle more than a little ladies deoderent on myself... or else I feel queasy and lost. I should interview people soon.

past, present, future

A couple of paragraphs from this article, Enlightenment Therapy, by Chip Brown:

" What darkness is to psychoanalysis, light is to Zen. In pursuit of mystic illumination, “the vast ocean of dazzling light,” Zen is cheerfully unconcerned with the manufacture and distribution of personal meaning. It tends to discount the authority of the unconscious and to ignore the significance of dreams. Students are discouraged from delving into the content of emotions. Where psychoanalysis is keen to unpack a patient’s past — especially those aspects of the past that distort perception in the present — Zen dwells on awareness in the present. This! Here! Now! Zen masters have been known to whack students with a stick.

It’s no surprise that such an unlikely pair got off to a rocky start. For decades the feeling of being “one” with the universe, prized in Zen as an attribute of enlightenment, was belittled by many psychoanalysts as an “infantile regression.” By the same token, the injunction “know thyself,” the ultimate chocolate-cherry in the candy box of Western wisdom, was brushed off by Zen adherents as a delusion. What’s to know about a conceit that has no fixed reality and more often than not is an impediment to experiencing Buddha nature? The self, as one Rinzai teacher put it bluntly, “is a malignant growth which is to be surgically removed.” "

-Chip Brown for New York Times Magazine, April 23, 2009
(again, full article here)

finding Riga

John Hejduk's Riga would be worth finding. Imagine yourself walking home from work, down the same streets, under the same lights. It would sneak up on you, abrupt. Maybe as if hitting a wall and bursting through.

Today is my first day with my new computer and I'm happy. What is it about newness? Novelty? I am going through the mass of files on my old computer and loving what I find.

decisions, decisions

"Fig.2 - A taxonomy of uncertainties and decisions"

This diagram is from this strange article, The ethics of uncertainty: in the light of possible dangers, research becomes a moral duty, published by EMBO, the European Molecular Biology Organization, found on the web through Nature Magazine.

“Any scientist knows that knowledge is never complete and that research can do no more than produce estimates of what we think is happening. Science, at least in part, is not about facts but about odds. Yet accepting and realizing this principal uncertainty is a conceptual challenge, and it is within this framework that we must make decisions of a moral nature…Uncertainty itself has no ethical quality—it is an inherent attribute of a situation. However, in a potentially dangerous situation, uncertainty can trigger ethically adjusted behavior that aims to avoid dangers and diminishes risks." (from article above)

Also check out Figure 1, The Igloo of Uncertainty. The igloo schematically “distinguishes between open and closed forms of both ignorance and knowledge.”

I’m not sure why I’m so fascinated (and puzzled) by this article. I think I’m drawn to the language and its terms, even if they are used to discuss an unfamiliar topic in a way that is very different from what I’m used to.

The allure resides in the promise of clarifying certain ideas and relationships I’ve found difficult to define for myself: ethics, morality, danger, risk, certainty, uncertainty, research, facts, knowledge, and ignorance. The more I read it, the less I want to understand it word for word; and at the same time, I feel there must be another layer of comprehension or parallel reading to be distilled from it. But I’m not getting it.

The End of Philosophy, (no, not the Heidegger but this op-ed piece in, what else?, the New York Times), on moral emotions, or is it emotional morality?, is more of my grade level. It’s not especially good or compelling but I liked the concluding lines: "Finally, it should also challenge the very scientists who study morality. They’re good at explaining how people make judgments about harm and fairness, but they still struggle to explain the feelings of awe, transcendence, patriotism, joy and self-sacrifice, which are not ancillary to most people’s moral experiences, but central." (moral allusions and associations in scent?)

I was given a book I like very much for my birthday last fall from a friend I was feeling very uncertain about at the time. It is called The Principles of Uncertainty, by Maira Kalman. (small review here.) He knew I felt uncertain about a lot of things, especially my thesis. We both wondered without saying, how can such a hesitant and doubtful person ever find a way into this profession of ideals, decisions, solutions, permanence?

swimming to ship

images from 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Stanley Kubrick
with thanks to surfling.org

yeah, i'm feeling a little lost...

death drive

On Monday I went to Macondo Books, this terrific used bookstore I used to go to all of the time as a teenager. I bought three books:

Envisioning Information, by Edward Tufte
(nice images - I figure one day I will deal in images again)

The Volcano Lover, by Susan Sontag
(hot eruptions? historical romance?? susan sontag??? need I imagine more?)

13 Stories & 13 Epitaphs, by William T. Vollmann
(interesting sounding author mentioned by Donald at 1st rehab, so I had my eyes out. Finding one with a first chapter entitled The Ghost of Magnetism, and a last chapter called The Grave of Lost Stories, I felt very lucky)

* * *

I started M1 in May of 2007. I was happy to be in Montreal, feeling weightless after eight months of Toronto winter and soul-killing office work. In love and seeing everything with bright eyes, I had no idea what to do for my thesis – the goal was to escape. (Yes, it’s funny that I find myself now desperately trying to escape my escape. Is this all we do, run in circles?) In class, forced to say something, anything, to my peers and professor, I improvised vague interest in doing a national archive for Vietnam, the country of my origin. It feels strange to write that – the country of my origin. But it also feels too distant to say, Vietnam, the country of my parents’ origin. One feels like a lie, or at least a fiction; and the other, a cold hard fact with no friction.

Either way, it didn’t fit. I suppose I thought that by delving into the past of this faraway country, this idea across the world, I’d kill two birds with one stone. What was it that I wanted to probe? The meaning and fallibility of origins? The strengths and weaknesses of cultural identity? What is an archive anyway, how does it work? What does it mean, to archive? What roles do memory and objects (and the memory held in objects) have in the construction of cultural history? In the construction of the self, of personal identity? How does this culture pass itself on, procreate, recreate itself generation to generation? How did this even relate to architecture? I had no clue. I won’t go into the superficial reasons why this plan fell apart. I'll just say that in the end, I was not reborn. There was no deeper connection to my amputated cultural past. (I had imagined roots surpassing myself, growing towards Vietnamese soil!) I did not finally feel whole. My parents did not love me more. And I still didn’t have a thesis, or even a passable proposition for one.

Along the way I did learn a bit (not enough) about Vietnam. It seems like a beautiful country with a completely fucked up history. But that’s sort of like describing someone as “complex,” as if that’s worth noting – aren’t we all complicated messy people with dirt in our pasts? The origins of most nations were bloody and cruel, their survival filled with death, lies, and violence. As far as recent history goes though, and of course this means history that America has had its hand in, it is a particularly interesting and devastating story. A story that I’m sure would touch anyone who knew of it, not only the children of Vietnamese refugees and immigrants.

In researching in my typical free-form, grab anything, sort of way, I came across Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. I liked the title and impressiveness of its author enough to buy the book. Archive. Fever. It was much too difficult for me to understand – I knew that. But I found its difficulty seductive and I still believe that, one day, I might be ready to tread past the Preamble.

An excerpt:
“It follows, certainly, that Freudian psychoanalysis proposes a new theory of the archive; it takes into account a topic and a death drive without which there would not in effect be any desire or any possibility for the archive. But at the same time, at once for strategic reasons and because the conditions of archivation implicate all the tensions, contradictions, or aporias we are trying to formalize here, notably those which make it into a movement of the promise and of the future no less than of recording the past, the concept of the archive must inevitably carry in itself, as does every concept, an unknowable weight. The presupposition of this weight also takes on the figures of “repression” and “suppression,” even if it cannot necessarily be reduced to these. This double presupposition leaves an imprint. It inscribes an impression in language and in discourse. The unknowable weight that imprints itself thus does not weigh only as a negative charge. It involves the history of the concept, it inflects archive desire or fever, their opening on the future, their dependency with respect to what will come, in short, all that ties knowledge and memory to the promise.” (Derrida, Archive Fever, p29)

To be continued.

new tactics

From today's New York Times:

"It took us a couple of days because I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak."

PRESIDENT OBAMA, defending his decision to wait a few days before expressing anger over bonuses paid to executives of the insurance giant A.I.G.

see it in context here

Today's meeting was helpful and interesting. I have to admit I arrived very tired- I will try to stop doing that. Still, it was exciting for me to see everyone's work take shape, to be let in on the conversations and incremental developments. The concern and hope I heard in their voices as they talked about their babies was inspiring. I thought to myself, I want that, what they have. I want that light in my eyes.

When it was my turn to divulge I talked about my blockage in writing more words. That's all they are right now, just words. I tried to touch on my anxiety and dread, my fear and love of not knowing, the worries of indulging, without really confronting, the aimless and formless in myself. I wish I could will away the feeling of emptiness in me when I try to see into the future of my thesis. I wish I could stop trying to see into the future of my thesis. How do I revel in the void? Chase the ether? Maybe I'm just no fun. Maybe I'm incapable of playing.

The opening quotation seems appropriate for me... For my situation now, and for me as I've always been- and perhaps as I'm doomed to always be. It's definitely something I struggle with in many ways. I should write on my fridge - You are not the President of the United States. You really don't have to pretend to know what you're talking about.

I mean, even if I think I like to know what I'm talking about, it's not getting me anywhere. And I need to go somewhere, anywhere, fast. My undercover task for the next two weeks: enjoy freedom of not knowing. Admitting to it is one thing, enjoying it is a whole other animal. (Wow, this last bit sounds too much like Free Will Astrology... could this just be my horoscope from last week? I'm checking now.)

trapped in a blazing house

from What to do in an Emergency

my father's books

This shelf of books caught my eye at my parents' house this weekend.

Some interesting titles:

How Things Work
Book of Facts
Back to Basics
How to Use Tools
How to Fix Almost Everything
What To Do In An Emergency

The last one spoke to me most that night, the night after our first group meeting.

I love the definitive and authoritative tone of the titles. They are so sure of themselves. It is reassuring to think that everything can be fixed. Comforting to believe there is truth in facts.

I also like how they reflect my father's persona, his ideals and values, so well. Without a doubt they were all bought used, rescued from garage sales all over Guelph... I might have even been with him when some of these books were bought. It's hard to tell. I stopped going with him on his Saturday morning treasure hunts years and years ago. I almost miss them, in a way.