I've also been reading two texts at the same time, as an attempt to support a more holistic understanding of what I'm trying to get at. One is exploring the 'molecules of emotion', an examination of how for instance neuropeptides are secreted by immune system cells, demonstrating therefore that communication with the brain and stomach is via a network and is not one way. The peptides integrate the immune system, (spleen, bone marrow, lymph nodes and white blood cells), with for example areas of the skin, in order for the body to react when we are wounded. In the defence of the realm, (the body) good communications are therefore maintained, and as with all communication networks, you can use communication theory to help think about what is going on.
An act of communication is the transferring of information from one thing to another thing. Every communication involves (at least) a sender, a message and a recipient, or a starting point, a movement between and an end point. Communication includes the medium used to communicate and the location of the communication. There are several communication theories that are available to help us understand how and why a system might work, and each theoretical lens allows us to think about the effects of the communication in slightly different ways. See this Handout that describes the main communication theories, the cybernetic transmission theory being the one that most clearly fits this situation, but other theories that stress the very human nature of communication can also be used.
The other text is a history of Chinese medicine and it explores the mythic relationship between the human body and the cosmos, and it focuses on ways of thinking that were developed over 2,000 years ago. I am revisiting this text because it allows me to think visually about the body as an image that can hold an inner and outer reality together and at the same time conjoin two vastly different scales, the size of a body and the size of the universe. The images above are entitled 'neijing tu' a term that translates as 'internal view, inner landscape, inscape' and as images they were intended
for people who practised the inward visualisation of the internal
organs. The images in their original form, were accompanied by a text about inward
contemplation.
.jpg)
The Neijing tu depicts a human body as a microcosm of nature; an "inner landscape" with mountains, rivers, paths, forests, and stars.
In my visual research, I've been looking at how some things that we think of as beginning with perceptual external experiences, eventually become physical, inner body realities, such as an experience that becomes embodied as a chemically induced feeling. For instance I was knocked down by a car before Christmas and since then, every time I need to cross a road, I have a heightened sense of anxiety and I feel this within my stomach.
I was taken to hospital and had to have a full body scan and the whole experience left me with an embodied set of feelings that are now part of me. I have had a steep learning experience and as I therefore approach a road to cross it, my body issues a chemical warning and in order to do this, my body is secreting extra neurotransmitters such as epinephrine and norepinephrine. This has led me to develop a series of drawings centred on images of whirlpools, in particular tales of the Moskstraumen or Moske-stroom that sits adjacent to the Lofoten Islands off the Norwegian coast. As a teenager I had read 'A Descent Into The Maelstrom' by Edgar Allan Poe and this illustrated imaginary experience, even though 60 years ago, is also an embodied memory, something that still causes me to have a slight anxiety, especially when I bring to mind Poe's written description, alongside Harry Clarke's illustration. Going into the scanner, felt as if it was something akin to entering a whirlpool. My body scan print above, structurally echoing the idea of being sucked into a vortex.
This for myself is proof of art's ability of affect us deeply and that various threads of experience (both of external realities and the imagination) can be woven together in ways, that even though they don't seem logical, can still be effective.
So perhaps I need to further integrate a narrative that has been floating around this new body of work. It began several years ago when I was making images in response to a story told to me while I was drawing blocks of flats in Leeds. At the time I made an animation of a boat at sea, the boat hit troubled waters and eventually sank, re-emerging in calmer waters only to fall prey to the same storm, over and over again. Other static drawings also included tiny boats, filled with tiny people, always engaged in some sort of tragic event. This boat has returned to my image bank, very much in response to the government cry of 'Stop the Boats'. I inwardly shudder as I think of the harsh trials that people have had to survive to get as far as the English Channel, only to find at the last hurdle, one more virtually insurmountable hurdle, the toxic myth of migration and immigration. The boats are now being sucked down by maelstroms, but these maelstroms are also digestive tracts, as if by setting out to legislate against these people, we in effect try to swallow them whole, we are now the monsters that swallow the boats.
This is also a sign of our collective health. We treat immigration as if it is some sort of infection. However if we are to collectively heal ourselves, we will need to be far more in tune with the environment and focus on issues such as pollution and global warming, two of the very things that cause populations to destabilise. The Earth warms and fishing grounds become sterile, crops die because of drought and it becomes just too hot to live where you are. When it gets too hot to live, you need to move and as you do you come across artificial boundaries, invisible lines that were drawn across maps at some time, often in the 19th century by Europeans; lines that never took into account the invisible reality of the industrial revolution and its dire consequences for the planet.
The Chinese system saw the human body as a model of the cosmos and the cosmos as a model for the human body. A new cosmic model would include all of our recent tragedies, and would embrace polluted rivers as models of the body's blood flow, but now including micro plastics and chemicals found in our food, due to over investment in pesticides. Gut bacteria would be faced with strange foods that are blighted with antibiotics, preservatives and high levels of artificial sugars, the gut in turn becoming an embodied model for the Earth itself.
The body's cells have long memories, these memories determine strange things, such as the fact that during the early development of the spinal chord, the heart is at one point above the head. Cells are programmed to divide and undertake various types of metamorphosis as they evolve into the forms that will be needed to maintain the particular life type they have an encoded DNA for. But tiny changes in the environment can affect their programming.
So what am I getting at here? Can communication theory deal with how a cell communicates with other cells? Is noise or interference an issue? What would this be in the life of a body cell? Does the body inhabit a form of rhetoric? Is it all just about energy flow? Is the relationship between the scale of a cell and the human body, similar to the scale of a human body shown in relation to the scale of the solar system?
There is a story here, a tale of two selves, one a body and another of a mind, fused together and in the flux of fusion something else is glimpsed; a spirit, a vital charge, soul or just life itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment