What is embodiment?

 'Our bodies are not mere vessels for the containment of our personalities, our agencies or our disembodied souls. Our embodiment is the very manner of our co-activity with, emplacement in and experience of the world. ... We are entangled, we are processes of becoming, we are products of resistance to the conditions in which we find ourselves.' (Noë, 2023, p.139)

In his book 'The Entanglement', philosopher Alva Noë explores the inseparability of life, art, and philosophy. The book has helped me to see how I can move between one mode of visualising things and another. For instance I might spend time trying to visualise a pain, either my own or someone else's, this interoceptual or somatic experience can appear to be totally unrelated to a creature that seems to emerge from my subconscious, or an image I might have made of a cornfield on a sunny day; but they are all part of my experience of the world. At one moment I might be in conversation with someone about their state of mind, an hour later I might be walking through a rain storm and be wondering if the Gods of nature are all against me and then as I take shelter in a local museum, might find myself gazing at Egyptian artefacts from 5,000 years ago. 

Whether I am experienced by others as a soaked escapee from the storm, or a serious historical researcher, as an artist or as an old man, will also effect how I feel about my experiences. But the architecture of the museum, the layout of the streets I walk through and the geological features of the land I walk over will also be shaping and influencing both my body and the thoughts it contains. 

I am inseparable from my body and my body is inseparable from the world. As Jacob Von Uexküll pointed out in his text, 'A Stroll through the worlds of animals and men', each creature has its own 'unwelten' or phenomenal world. Living beings therefore perceive their worlds in terms of species-specific, spatio-temporal, "self-in-world" subjective reference frames. He called these framings, the 'umwelt'. The structure of the world view of each creature is therefore determined by the nature of each individual species; by its physiology, its behaviour, and its interactions with its environment. For myself as an artist, I thought the most important thing was the fact that Von Uexküll when pointing these things out, also stated that he firmly believed that these world views could only be disclosed through individual subjectivity.

This is how Jacob Von Uexküll introduced his idea;

'The place, a flower-strewn meadow, humming with insects, fluttering with butterflies. Here we may glimpse the worlds of the lowly dwellers of the meadow. To do so, we must first blow, in fancy, a soap bubble around each creature to represent its own world, filled with the perceptions which it alone knows. When we ourselves then step into one of these bubbles, the familiar meadow is transformed. Many of its colourful features disappear, others no longer belong together but appear in new relationships. A new world comes into being. Through the bubble we see the world of the burrowing worm, of the butterfly, or of the field mouse; the world as it appears to the animals themselves, not as it appears to us. This we may call the phenomenal world or the self-world of the animal.'

However the physiology of the individuals of each species, is a product of a particular type of memory. Raymond Ruyer who developed the concept of embryogenesis stated, 'Memory is not the property of bodies. Bodies, or what appear as "bodies", are the property of memory'. He also wrote that consciousness begins with a material idea. A forming principle being at work, right from the beginning that directs the actions of bodies. Every cell forms itself out of the 'memory' of the principles adhered to by the sub-atomic forces that control the behaviour of materials. Therefore both the form of each creature and even what we think of as consciousness, are the products of the movement of relationships between atomic forces. How they can move and in what possible variations being dependent on the structural principles inherited from all the previous embodied generations of electrons and protons, neutrons and / or electromagnetic or other forces that underpin everything. These rules then determine the possibilities of events coming together in different arrangements, such as a finger in a human ending up being something that can be used to help hold a pencil, but in a bat being something to help tauten a membrane so that it can fly. 

Ruyler uses diagrams to illustrate his ideas.

In 'The Genesis of Living Forms', the folding of the earth to form the Alps is compared with the folding of a flat sheet to form a tube, which is in turn compared to the folding of cells during the process of embryogenesis, in particular during cell division and differentiation. 

I'm sure Gilles Deleuze must have been reading Ruyler or had come across his ideas when he wrote 'The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque'. Leibniz had developed a concept of the monad, which was that the universe is made up of an infinite number of basic, immaterial, and indestructible substances, that in his Fold text, Deleuze interpreted as folds of space, time and movement, going on to describe the world itself as a body of infinite folds that twist and weave through space and time.

So 'embodiment' when considering this framework, could be a sort of enfolding of things. 

From a series of images trying to visualise a moment/event in the life of a fish

A fragment of a body/emotional landscape

The body folds into its environment, at the same time the body's internal events are folding into and are the body's interior, which itself is contiguous with its exterior.  

The body as a landscape with inhabitants (fragment of an animation)

As you make an animation it is as if you 'fold' something into life. Beginning with just a few marks, gradually you add more and more material until you have enough to create movement. For the animator the background and the figures that act upon it are equally important, as the one defines the other.

References:

Deleuze, G. (1992) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque Univ Of Minnesota Press

Noë, A. (2023) The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press

Ruyer, R., (2019) The Genesis of Living Forms. Rowman & Littlefield

Von Uexküll, J. (1992) A stroll through the worlds of animals and men: A picture book of invisible worlds. Semiotica, Vol. 89 (Issue 4), pp. 319-391. https://doi.org/10.1515/semi.1992.89.4.319

See also: 

Invisible worlds

Connecting the singularity

Interoceptual textures and surface flow

Drawing and quantum theory

The Emotional Line

I have written about lines as boundaries, as direction, as diagrammatic form and as metaphors such as life lines and knots in string but it is the emotional line that I'm more interested in at the moment. This is very closely associated with the expressive line, the line that appears to come naturally from an artist's feelings or emotions. However it is slightly different in that it is a type of line engineered to communicate a feeling. This feeling might be someone else's rather than something that is inherently within and part of the artist's way of drawing or making things and it is rooted in synaesthetic experiences. For instance if I say the words "kiki" and "bouba" and then show you two images, such as the ones below, I'm pretty sure you will know which one is which.

But can we go further than this? This area of thinking is one whereby artists such as Klee and Kandinsky were supposed to be the original thinkers and even earlier researchers such as Besant and Leadbeater had written extensively about the relationship between colour, shape and what they called "thought forms". However there is always room for one more attempt to get to grips with something that is endlessly fascinating. 

I'm going to start with some examples of 'embodied lines', ones drawn by myself in relation to the way our bodies hold within themselves emotional events and then see where these can be tweaked to vary feeling tone. The first issue anyone familiar with the history of these things is that in the ground initially covered by Klee and Kandinsky, they attempted to strip the language down into its basic elements, point, line, plane etc. For many reasons there is therefore no real reason to go back that far. I'm also by now aware that communication is complex and that in reality we cant experience an isolated line, it will always have colour, texture, direction and all sorts of associations with the interconnected and entangled world around it. I have therefore tended to talk about 'events' rather than 'things'. My attempt to get my head around this is also more to do with poetry than science, each 'line' looked at is part of an experienced event and an attempt to capture that in some way. They are I suppose 'impossible objects', things of the imagination, but in being so, I think they are no more 'real' or 'fictitious' than any of the other things I perceive, whether these be of outer or inner experiences. 

A feeling of anxiety coupled with a tinge of the thrill of the unknown

The line image above was made in response to 'feeling tension in the backbone and how it arcs around and out of a clenched stomach', an awareness of which came via a conversation with someone about how their body was involved in their emotional world. A little like a wave, but a thin one that is more like a lightning strike. This could, I then decided, also be a line that responds to the feeling induced by a 'sublime' experience. 

Anxiety turns to jealousy

As an anxiety is triggered it can open the door to other emotions, such as jealousy. A line's colour only begins to make emotional sense when it is embedded within another colour, and in this case, its energy if grounded at both ends, becomes tautened. 

Confidence through achievement

The pride of a well muscled body that can stand tall lies at the heart of this line. Its verticality being its most powerful formal component. Bone gives this line its strength, off centred muscles suggest possible resistance to being pushed over. It is though still fragile. 

Tired of life

The colour becomes muted and the horizontal of death and things being cut down, replaces the vertical. 

Feeling broken, fragile

Now the line is broken, its former 'rightness' about to be snapped. 

Becoming sad

Colour is required to get closer to a feeling tone for sadness. This line feels like a fallen branch, or a flower, its stem snapped and ready to be thrown out. The line's position within a frame is also vital, sadness is often associated with an awareness of death, which stripped down to its essentials could be simply _______________________________

Holbein: Dead Christ

It's interesting to compare this with Van Gogh's attempts to visualise sadness. 

Drawing for Worn Out

I read that the direction and form the line takes that follows the person’s back in this Van Gogh drawing is called a 'grief line'. However I can't substantiate this particular usage of the emotional line, but I can isolate it and present it as something to be tested. 

 The grief line abstracted

The sorrow line abstracted

Floral grief

A line that began within a body and that was thought of as belonging to a series of muscle and bone associations, has gradually been changed to one more associated with plant forms that are beginning to wilt. 

Umbrella handle / bowed head

I used this emotive line when I was making a piece of work for Patching. The lily inspired ceramic flower had a bell clapper hanging inside, so that when the wind blew the flower chimed. 

Memorial ceramic flower / bell

The line of sadness, is as a formal element, very close to the line of grief. However without colour, variation in associated shapes and textures, it might as well be the handle of an umbrella. 

The inverted hemisphere line is another example of an emotive linear form. Not to be mistaken for the smile line, as in an emoticon, this line when used as part of an image's compositional structure can carry another type of emotion similar to sadness, as sort of heartache or sense of things coming to an end.

If you look at Watteau's wonderful painting of a pierrot in the Louvre, it has several inverted hemisphere lines dividing up the image.

Even the creases in the trousers take the form of inverted hemisphere lines

The vertical of the figure feels as if it is dropping down into a pool, colour kept desaturated, makes for an emotional register that feels something like how the world would be experienced if seen from under water. 

An energised line falls 

A basic children's art exercise is to make different line directions – horizontal, vertical, diagonal, and curved, especially when trying to help them to think about differences in emotions, like sad/happy, excited/bored and calm/worried, in particular when autism is suspected. But as students get older the exercise is rarely returned to as something to work on as a way of developing a more sophisticated basis for visual communication. There is a children's book 'The Way I Feel' by Janan Cain that uses colour and composition very effectively to support a growing awareness of an emotional life and I sometimes feel we need an adult version of this. 

From: 'The Way I Feel' by Janan Cain

Cain's book has already been used as a primer to help youngsters think about abstract language and the example above compares a sad line with a silly line. As we get older our emotional lives are though not so easily categorised. 

So I have decided that one of my projects will be to return to these basics and to develop a set of cards that can be used to test out whether or not there are any universal visual language forms that can be used effectively, as well as to provide a starting point for new emotional mixes by the simple expedient of shuffling the card deck once it is made.

Trying to regain balance after frenzied activity

In the meantime I'm off to Porto next week to deliver a workshop looking at issues very closely related to the concepts I have been thinking about in this post.

The workshop, 'Drawing the somatic body: Visual problem solving and imagineering' is introduced by the following abstract:

The fact that human experience is subjective and as much an emotional reality as a logical one, is something that drawing takes in its stride. Constable’s cloud studies are as much scientific observation, as they are an understanding of the impact that the weather has on our emotions. Buckminster Fuller’s drawings of geodesic domes illustrate his architectural philosophy, as well as being plans for buildings.

Drawing can be at its most powerful when visualising the invisible. When words fail us, drawings can provide the space for ideas to become externalised and therefore available to communal perusal.

The research objective is to explore how our bodies become measuring sticks when we come to assess responses to perception, and it is based on an understanding that it is our interoceptive network that is used to enable prediction loops to work; a network that therefore is central to our ability to survive.

Our interoceptual network is linked to an invisible but intuitively well understood neurological map of the body, a map that is the ontological bedrock on which we build images; from diagrams of electrical circuits, to maps of war zones, via how to build it illustrations used to construct the latest purchase from a home furnishing store. However, people often regard photography as the only authentic depicter of reality, which is why when trying to convince people of the power of drawing to depict thought, it is useful to focus on things that we cant photograph. Drawings of invisible but clearly felt interoceptual experiences can not only be used to foster cross disciplinary imagination and invention, the emotional range that drawing also encompasses, allows us entry into a visual engagement with the emotive processes that underlie many of our embodied mind’s conceptual models.

This workshop uses a drawing led methodology that has emerged from attempts to visualise interoception; it will ask participants to make their own drawn explorations of somatic feelings; drawings that will then be used as entry points into ways to understand drawing as a cross disciplinary practice. By using gestural mark and image making techniques, diagrams and mapping, this workshop will demonstrate that drawing is one of the most powerful forms of communication and that it can be used to make us more aware of the inner neurological maps of our own bodies. It will highlight how inner body mapping becomes the basis on which we build other drawn visualisations, as well as being the basis on which we build conceptually embodied concepts, such as the visualisation of justice.

Certain aspects of this work have already contributed to the i2ADS Drawing Across Disciplines seed project, ‘The Observation of Perception, considered through Drawing’ and associated workshop practices have been documented and written up as part of the forthcoming publication SKETCHING STEM: A Hands-On Guide on Drawing-to-Learn Approaches, for the Porto University led initiative, Drawing Across University Borders.

See: 

Workshop abstract

Drawing Across x Along x Between University Borders to have access to the full conference programme.

See also:

Angles, vision and sound

Eye Music

Stitched, dotted or dashed lines 

The straight line

Knots

Reptiles of the mind

From: Zenodo.org/ 

William Blake wrote that if a person had a fixed point of view or never developed new thoughts, their brain would begin operating as if it had been for too long standing in stale waters and it would begin to breed 'reptiles of the mind'.  

I have been feeling rather stuck lately, and have found it hard to tap into my feelings, especially when it comes to engaging with the people I'm meant to love. I find myself not knowing what to say, realising it is my body that is talking, finding internal sensations churning me around, including a heart beating too quickly or irregularly, my chest feels tight, I'm breathing more quickly than normal and my stomach is clenched, all signs that there are powerful feelings swirling about, but I struggle to find words to name them. I also seek reassurance by seeking physical contact, when touch is probably the last thing someone else wants to give. I retreat into my comfort zone of drawing and making; I lose myself in image making and try to visualise these feelings but to what purpose, I'm not sure. As I draw I can begin to calm my inner churn, but then, out of the recesses of my subconscious, creatures emerge, these are I presume what Blake meant by 'reptiles of the mind'. So should I or shouldn't I let them free? 

I've also begun a process of scanning in some of my sketchbooks in order to support my role as a researcher. As most of my thinking takes place on the drawn page, it seemed to make sense to make them available as part of the research process. 

I have now scanned in two of them and have annotated them, so that my thinking process is more transparent and available to others, but now when I look at them, I begin to wonder if I have a thinking process, perhaps these images are simply traces of a troubled mind.

The sketchbooks 

An observational drawing sketchbook

An ideas development and tap into the subconscious sketchbook 

In the ideas development sketchbook are several 'reptiles of the mind', and I worry that they are a sign of an inability to deal with a proper emotional life, being products of a state of 'stuckness', rather than a record of the imaginative interrogation of an interior life. 

More sample sketchbook pages from: Zenodo.org/ 

So much of art making is maintaining a confidence that what you are doing is worthwhile, and lately my levels of anxiety have been rising to a point where doubts are starting to creep in and I'm questioning what it's all about. 

Perhaps it's just autumn settling in with its associated melancholia. 

See also:

SKETCH exhibition submission

Sketchbooks

Using sketchbooks to think with

Richard Diebenkorn's sketchbooks

Interoceptual textures and surface flow

Nathalie Doyen

Nathalie Doyen is a ceramicist who is very interested in colour and surface and who I have been looking at because I wanted to develop some surfaces of my own ceramics that supported the way I had been treating the surface textures of recent drawings. I have been looking at exterior events, such as fallen trees, whereby 'inner' workings are revealed, just as much as drawing ideas emerging from inside my head about what bodies might feel like inside, so I'm looking for something that suggests moss as much as bone, a clump of dirt as much as muscle.

Sketchbook drawing of ceramic idea

Textural drawing of a fallen tree

The surfaces that evolve over Doyen's ceramics are made by texturing small pieces of coloured clay that she has tinted with oxides and pigments. Her palette is developed from colour studies made from her surroundings and is carefully controlled so that the pigments sit together harmoniously.  The surface that is constructed, feels as if the ceramic object has had a perfectly fitted cardigan knitted for itself, and it visually sucks you in, in the same way that any organic surface in nature does. These thoughts are now what I want to apply to ideas that came out of drawing.

I have been making images based on interoceptual imaginings and have been wanting to turn these into coloured ceramics, but have not as yet developed the right type of surface quality. Doyen's work has however helped me to think about either staining my clay or changing its chemical composition before applying it. 

Nathalie Doyen

Nathalie Doyen

Max Brodel: Illustration of the musculature of bladder and urethra

Bringing back the blood

Ceramic organs with blue and red glaze mixes

I had been using the 'wet' look of Max Brodel's illustrations as a reference point, but I now think the glazes are too slick, so I will have to return to making a series a tests that will enable me to make better choices. 

Doyen is a meticulous surface maker. She must spend hours developing these textures, obviously pricking the clay surface, but with a regularity that is very hard to control. This is why her surfaces feel as if they are woven, knitted or cross stitched, as they have been through a similar repetitive process, whereby a surface area gradually grows because of tiny repetitive actions. For myself, the link between the textures of woven or knitted clothing and energy flows, seems somehow intuitively important, as does the idea of a surface texture feeling as if it has emerged from inside the form, as opposed to being applied on top of it.

An idea for externalising interoceptual feelings

Body energy: A mood swing

I have been drawing images about closely woven topologies of inner feelings, such as those we might have if we were able to sense the world, like an animal, via the hair covering our body. This approach is one of my attempts to develop a more animist way into making, as well as being a recognition of various 19th century visualisations of invisible forces. 

Interoceptual feeling might, I thought to myself be not unlike Foucault currents, those electromagnetic eddy currents that occur when a magnet is moved towards a conductor loop. They are called 'eddy currents' because they are very like the eddies we see in flowing water, and I was therefore sucked into trying to get to grips with my poor grasp of physics again because I wanted to tie together my feelings about the flow of liquids inside the body, with a sense of electro-magnetic energy flow, something in my mind like the chakras that you find in tantric healing traditions.The chakras are often described as energy stations that correspond to special places within our bodies where bundles of nerves and/or organs or joints are focused on the proper flowing movement of energy, this being essential to both our physical and emotional well-being. Perhaps these energy flows are also like eddy currents.

Lenz's law states that a voltage induced by the change of a magnetic flux through a conductor loop generates a current in such a direction that the current running through the loop opposes the change of the magnetic flux causing the voltage. How does this work in the body in relation to my thoughts about flow and currents? Could we be like magnets passing through conductors? As we pass through for instance a forest, how does this change our internal energy in relation to walking through a room? What are the invisible energies surrounding us in the street? How do they enter and work with the forces already at work within the body? This is again not science but a sort of poetry, the mixture of the two being perhaps where I will find what I am looking for. 

If you have a ring shaped conductor it can be moved towards or away from a permanent magnet. In the drawing below the magnet lies on the x axis and the ring is situated on the plane that sits between the y and z axes. If the ring is moved in the direction of the x axis, it will eventually sit around the magnet, forming a ring that the magnet will pass through. Think of a human being about to walk through a door, as they approach it, they can see into a new room and already the incoming perceptions are changing the internal dynamics of the body and mind. 

The field lines of a permanent magnet run from the north to the south pole. The lines are continuous, forming closed loops without a beginning or end. In a diagram the field lines have arrowheads to show the direction of the force exerted by a magnetic north pole and the closer the lines are together, the stronger the magnetic field. The field lines never cross each other, meaning that the field is unique at any point in space. Because of the movement of the conductor in relation to the magnet, more and more field lines enter the loop at the right and leave it at the left side. Based on Lenz's law a magnetic field is created, whose field lines are trying to lessen the number of field lines entering the loop. The field lines of a current through a conductor run in concentric circles around the conductor. To lessen the field of the permanent magnet, the field lines of the induced current must run from the left to the right (contrary to those of the permanent magnet) inside of the conductor loop. In the case of the diagram below, the current has to exit at y and the current enters at x. As percepts enter the body, they are translated into electrical and chemical flows, which in turn effect changes in the way the body is responding to the environment surrounding it. 

Body energy

If you move the magnet to the right, away from the circular coil along axis x, the induced voltage then causes a current to flow. I.e. you will get a circulating current being induced as soon as the magnetic flux running through it varies. Actions made by changes in the electrical/chemical flow of information within the body will result in flowing movements, as muscles begin to contract and relax.

Circulating currents

The body begins to twist from the thigh

The shape of the conductor material doesn't matter - induced currents are always running through the material. However, a completely homogeneous magnetic field is more a statistical idea than a reality, in a normal case there are always inhomogeneous flux density allocations, which means that there won't be well defined areas with or without currents running. The pattern is more like a swirling water surface. That's why the induced current inside of three-dimensional conductors is called an eddy current. What's interesting is that diagrams can be used to separate out the current distribution from the magnetic field. 

Electric and magnetic field around a coil of rectangular cross section. Figure 1 shows the geometry of the coil, figure 2 the distribution of current (red) and figure 3 magnetic field (blue).

The distribution of the magnetic field in various sections, shows how as you move away from the centre, the lines of the electric field become circular.

The magnetic field, as you pull away, in cross section is seen to be more circular

The dynamics of muscle and bone

The various energy flows that our bodies are part of, are I believe subtly interconnected, and some scientists have stated that there are signs of humans having a subconscious magnetic sense. Many animals, from pigeons to turtles, use a magnetic sense to navigate and it has come to the attention of researchers that humans might also have the power of magnetoreception. As reported in the Guardian, Prof Joseph Kirschvink has stated he believes that, “We have not as a species lost the magnetic sensory system that our ancestors [millions of years ago] had,” he then goes on to state that, “We are part of Earth’s magnetic biosphere.”

The Earth’s magnetic biosphere

It is early days yet for any provable data to emerge from this type of research, but it suggests that in the past humans could tell directional difference in a similar way to certain other animals, perhaps due to a mechanism involving special cells containing iron-based crystals that could rotate rather like the needle of a compass, opening or closing openings in cells. Whether or not this is true, doesn't effect the imaginative possibilities that it induces, and for myself it gives me a way of fusing together possibilities for the intermingling of various other forms of flowing energy.  

The flow of leg muscles around bones

Can be compared with the flow of water in a stream around rocks

The flow of water in a stream

Oceanic currents and gyres

We emerged out of the sea and we are still psychically connected with it. The composition of our blood, shows a 98% match between it and sea water. Our bodies have been shaped and formed by water and in effect, we have an ocean inside us. In 1897 French physician Rene Quinton discovered a 98% match between our blood plasma and sea water, or what has been called 'ocean plasma'. The sea's energy flows have their own terminology. Ocean currents are coherent streams of water moving through the ocean and include both long, permanent features such as the Gulf Stream, as well as smaller, episodic flows in both coastal waters and the open ocean. They are formed primarily by wind blowing across the surface of the ocean and by differences in the temperature, density and pressure of water and are steered by Earth's rotation as well as the location of the continents and topography of the ocean bottom. Gyres are spiralling circulations thousands of miles in diameter and rimmed by large, permanent ocean currents, and eddies are smaller, temporary loops of swirling water that can travel long distances before dissipating.

All of these images seem to have something to do with what I'm searching for in relation to the surfaces of the objects I need to make. Knitted, flowing totalities that reference the wider interconnectedness of inner and outer realities, the fitting together of the body and the cosmos. All that stuff that old religions used to do, alongside a growing awareness of the fact that ancient Chinese thinkers viewed the cosmos as a complete and complex “organism.”

Daina Taimina

A while ago I posted some thoughts about Daina Taimina and her crocheted forms of hyperbolic geometry. Seeing Doyen's work reminded me of Taimina's surfaces, which must have been lying around in my subconscious for a while, waiting for an opportunity to be used in my ceramics. Taimina realised that we need to touch things in order to really grasp what they actually are. She understood how a line, generated by a fold, could operate in hyperbolic space. Drawing, as in geometry is vital to this understanding, but in this case it becomes clear that without the type of drawing we associate with drawing threads, she would not have been able to develop the idea. Perhaps I also need to look at how clay can be made into threads and how surfaces can be woven?

See also:

Texture: Between drawing and sculpture

Patternings, ties, entanglements and knots

Tauba Auerbach: Craft and drawing

Body cartography

Other thoughts on how materials carry ideas