Thinkfeel

In a post I wrote a while ago I referred to Timothy Morton's use of the term 'thinkfeel', which I took to be about 'grasping the ungraspability of a thing'. A few years later after getting involved with attempts to visualise things that are invisible, I'm even more impressed with Morton's ability to put words together in order to explain the unexplainably difficult nature of our reality. Morton told us that reality was populated by 'strange strangers', by which they (they use the 'they' pronoun) meant that the things around us, books, chairs, houses, soil, plastics, sunshine, water, trees and whatever you might encounter, are all weird. So how is the world weird? Perhaps its because we use language as a sort of screen behind which we hide from reality, we use words to single things out, 'books, chairs, houses' etc. which makes it seem as if there are nicely separate objects out there, but in reality everything is interconnected; a state that in Buddhism is termed 'dependent arising'. I have in the past when considering organic objects such as trees or humans, looked at the Markov Blanket effect, which explains how nothing living can ever in reality be an isolated fixed thing. This time, as I return to thinking about the issue, I'm more aware of animist approaches to the world, and that there is a long history of understanding everything we encounter as a fluid arrangement of energies. This both allows us to inhabit non living things mentally, (as in animist cultures as well as in the extended mind theory), and enables us to think about a life force energy, as something that gives agency to all things, not just organic forms. 

Starbucks cup

If we take a basic plastic cup, something we often use when travelling, we find that the cup is involved in a complex journey too, one that involves vast time periods and which is often interwoven with our own path through life. The primary component of plastic cups is polypropylene and the main reason you are given the cup you have been given, is its affordable price. Polypropylene is made from chains of the monomer (a small, reactive molecule, that can be joined with other similar molecules) propylene, which is a hydrocarbon obtained from natural gas and crude oil. The monomer propylene is subjected to a polymerisation process, where it bonds with other propylene molecules to create polypropylene. One journey is back into deep history and the conversion over millions of years of organic matter into natural gas and oil. Another is into the anthropocene, our current geological age and is associated with the greenhouse gas emissions released during oil extraction, plastic processing, and consumption. We also journey into the world of material properties, where we find that polypropylene's structure provides good insulation, allowing a disposable cup to contain hot coffee without you being burnt. A journey into economics, might lead some people to believe that its use is cost-effective. It has a structure that allows for both crystalline and amorphous regions, therefore it can be strong and resilient, as well as flexible and pliant. This gives it as a material great versatility, helping to make it quite straightforward to produce, which drives costs down, because there are a lot of manufacturers who can afford and know how to use the technologies of its production; which leads to significant competition, that further drives down prices. It also has a very low density compared to other plastics and less weight means less cost in terms of transportation. We can now begin to see the cup as an aspect of a series of wider economic processes, which are themselves driven by material properties. The cup is now in my hand and I'm drinking from it, so it is now totally interwoven with my biological processes and my ecological network. I have already observed how the boundaries of biological systems, from individual cells to people, can be thought of as places where one energy meets another form of energy. These systems are also where interactions take place that help to stabilise them. This being a situation that is operating alongside our perceptual awareness of the particular biological entity we are considering. A Markov blanket concept can be used to define the boundaries of this situation in a statistical sense. I.e. instead of a solid entity you have a series of probabilities whereby something is and isn't at the same time, something that can also be thought of as an active inference scheme. As you infer something is in existence, when you look at it directly it hardens up and becomes a fixed probability, called in this case a plastic cup.

Thinkfeel meditation on a plastic cup

Timothy Morton was at one time a Buddhist and therefore would have been very aware of the concept of 'dependent arising'. This awareness has I'm sure helped them to move away from the Western ideal of humans always attempting to master the world and its objects and to have more respect for the complexity of interconnected processes. What we might feel is a disturbing and difficult compaction, is perhaps a new 'beauty'. When we confront reality it is far too complex to experience, but encounters with objects always reveal something, even though they also make you aware that other things are not available to our experience. Everything and everywhere is real in its own way, and it is constantly interacting with everything else, including you.

There are diagrams that have been drawn to help us get to grips with the Buddhist concept of dependent arising and as I'm always fascinated by how diagrams help us rethink the world, it's perhaps time to look at some. 

Dependent arising three lives model

The diagram above uses a circular format based on the Tibetan “Wheel of Life”, with twelve links on the rim of the wheel. The circular format clearly illustrates the concept of “rebirth linking” connecting kamma (action) and consciousness. It also graphically displays the central role played by unwholesome roots (kilesa) of attachment (lobha), aversion (dosa) and delusion (moha). It uses the “three lives” elaboration. Links one and two are in a “past life” whereby ignorance or false knowledge sets the conditions for formations or pre-dispositions to arise. Links three to ten are said to be in the “present-life”, commencing with the arising of consciousness and the mind-body, which in turn condition further links to “becoming” (link ten). Links eleven and twelve are “future lives” linked to re-birth, old-age, death and inevitable suffering. Woven into an understanding of the diagram is both a macrocosmic viewpoint, encompassing “physical” rebirth and life in general; and a microcosmic viewpoint emphasising “moment-to-moment” phenomena of the mind and consciousness. Both perspectives are relevant to how kamma and rebirth relate to dependent arising. Kamma is associated with the idea that all actions (no matter how big or small) have consequences. However, for Buddhists it is more specific than that, as they believe that there are skilful and unskilful actions. A skilful action is one that produces happiness, whereas an unskilful action is one that produces suffering. It is this final point that has helped me to rethink my role as an artist within all this. The concept of 'skilful' action is I believe very important as it allows 'agency' into the framework. It allows for some sort of moral compass and helps us to think about the types of agreements that could be drawn up between humans and the Earth. It would be useful to have a contract on being born into this world, that states our responsibilities to it, as well as to each other. Well that's what I 'thinkfeel' at the moment, a time when I'm unsure about so many things and which finds me trying to 'thinkfeel' my way through a fog of uncertainty, any clarity or firm intellectual framework being blown away by current world events.

I see it more like this

Circular forms are useful when thinking about stuff of this sort as they imply never ending returns, suggesting wheels that rotate through themselves but also the axes that they turn around may lead to holes into which things can fall. I once thought of the lasso as something like this, perhaps more akin to a whirlpool or spiral galaxy, which was also a thing that could be tightened up until it had closed tightly upon the object that had been lassoed.

The lasso: Another of life's circles.

I produced these Western World cards at a time when an earlier US president was engaging in a Gulf War, a war that exposed a gap between world views, that seemed at the time to be a product of lies and wishful thinking, rather than a response to reality. Give us enough rope and we will repeat our mistakes over and over again.

Spike Milligan understood how 'thinkfeel' worked, he wrote as if he knew that poetry would one day leave science behind.

There are holes in the sky
Where the rain gets in
But they're ever so small
That's why the rain is thin.

The 'thinkfeel' answer to why rain comes in very small thin drops.

See also:

Art, eco-awareness and OOO

Object orientated ontology and drawing

Paul Klee and Markov blankets

Uncertain certainty 

The influence of the Tarot

To be absorbed in drawing

Fiona Hingston: Furrow

To be absorbed in what you are doing is a wonderful thing. To be absorbed into something else is another wonderful thing and they are related. When you are lost in the process of making a drawing, you are both absorbed in your own thoughts and absorbed in the drawing. It is as if your physical presence merges with that of the paper and pencils and charcoal and inks and moving hands and applicators. One thing can absorb another, and in doing so it takes in as part of itself some of the qualities and attributes of the other thing. It could be argued that absorption is key to life itself. Bacteria in particular are vital to the absorption of light energy and its conversion into chemical energy. They also help us absorb the food we eat, as well as converting the energy of the sun into a useable resource.  My absorption in drawing is when I am nearest to what Buddhist's would call a state of mindfulness. When we are absorbed we do not worry about what we look like, we have no other needs, our desires are forgotten in the activity of being in the now of doing. This is perhaps the real secret of drawing. It can allow you to become absorbed into the world. By looking intensely at the environment you exist in, you can gradually sink into your perception of it and as you do a new experience takes over, one that is being made as much as it is being perceived. Eventually you cannot separate yourself out from what is being drawn. Frederick Franck had this to say about this process: 'The meaning of life is to see, it is the flash of realisation, of not-twoness, that is both the centre and the endpoint of our human experience'. The not-twoness is important here and it goes to the root of the problem. When we think about ourselves and what is not ourselves we invent 'the other'. The 'other' is though when a product of inductive reason, a stranger to us and we fear strangers. Our fear of 'the other' has led us to forget that we are all connected in a vast web of being and that anything we do has an impact on others, not just on other people, but also on the complex world of both animate and inanimate things. 

However in academic terms to become absorbed in something is often described as being lost. You are recommended to be able to stand outside of your actions in order to become more objective and to watch what you do as if you are capable of turning on some sort of internal CTV camera, so that you can record footage of the process of being engaged. This type of observation is though not one of absorption, which means that you don't actually 'see' anything. It's similar to taking a photograph, you don't 'make' the photograph, so you can't in its development 'absorb' the world that it comes from. The less we see, especially that type of seeing that means that we become absorbed in what we see, the more numbed we become. But there are some very straightforward ways to engage, and one of the best is simply to draw in response to an experience. 

Durer: Large piece of turf

Fiona Hingston's 'Furrow', like Durer's 'large piece of turf' is a drawing of something we pass over every day. Both artists remind us of how exciting it is to just look at what is there. 

Renato Orara draws stuff we often overlook, an old sponge or bit of wire. I like the fact he does his drawings using a biro, a tool so common that we often overlook it. The drawings below are from a series of on-going drawings, '10,000 things that breath', a title that for myself suggests that Orara has an almost animist connection with the objects he draws. It could also be a title chosen to reflect upon that importance of breath control in the meditation process. Each drawing then being for Orara also a meditation on life.

Renato Orara: Untitled biro drawing

Renato Orara: Sponge biro drawing

These drawings respect the things that have been looked at, and if this is all they do, I think that is worthwhile. There are issues related to mimesis in these drawings and it could also be argued that in working so hard to make these drawings so 'realistic' the natural form of the materials used has been ignored, but there can also be what I would call 'an honest response' to a simple situation, and in this we have an alternative approach to some of the issues raised in the post on Object Orientated Ontology. 

Michael Landy: Buttercup

After the conceptually rigorous processes of 'Breakdown', Michael Landy produced a series of etchings of weeds, it was as if he needed to do something very straightforward in order to purge himself of the dense theoretical framework that had been built around his deep critique of consumerism. 

You can of course be absorbed in a drawing in a very different way. Robert Morris in his 'Blind Time Drawings' is totally absorbed in the physical making of the drawings. In some ways he is meditating on the act of drawing itself. How far can he stretch in order to make a mark? How many marks can he make within a certain time period? By drawing in the dark, he is able to focus on the importance of touch when making drawings and he reminds us that all drawings are in some ways a record of the movements made by a body in time.

Robert Morris: Blind time drawing

The important issue here is that when you immerse yourself in what you are doing, when in your thinking you accept that you are inseparable from everything else, you begin to build a very different relationship with the world. If it is part of you then you might consider ‘Life as a Work of Art’, the ‘giving attention’ to one’s experience being all you need to understand. Of course this simplicity is in many ways beyond simplicity, because it embraces everything. As a starting point try to focus on how it feels to hold your pencil or pen. Then focus on how it feels to move your hand, your arm and the rest of your body. As you become more aware of ankles, hips and shoulder movements and the way these translate into your pencil or pen's movement, try to fuse in your awareness both your body sensations and the quality of marks being made. Then begin to focus on your breathing, become one with your body and your breath, let controlled breaths come from the abdomen and then forget about the control and be in it as opposed to outside it and eventually you can reach a state of calmness, of acceptance and absorption in the doing.   

One of my own drawings that emerged out of being absorbed in just making it. 

See also:

To be absorbed by a bicycle is something all the daily bicycle riding policemen in Flann O'Brien's 'The Third Policeman' had to endure and of course their bicycles also endured the same fate, slowly absorbing the atoms and molecules of their riders. There is an extract from this book in my post on Pouring Water, which is always an excellent read, (the extract that is) and it will perhaps induce you to read the full novel, the philosophy of which is perhaps one of the biggest influences on my entire work. 

Drawing and mindfulness 

See also posts on absorption at a subatomic level 

Drawing and quantum theory part one

Drawing and quantum theory part two

Drawing sound: Spectrograms, vibration and religion

A visualisation of the word 'heard' spoken by an Australian English speaking male.

Everyone remembers that moment when the teacher's chalk made an awful screech as it was drawn across the blackboard. It just for a moment resonated with the board and produced a sound that went up under your fingernails and hit some spot in the back of your head and hurt you. Those moments are important to recall because they remind us of how sound and the body are inseparable, just as light directly affects us, sound and its vibrations tune us into the rest of the world. Sometimes a sound will cause the hairs to stand up on the back of your neck, the latin word 'horreo', from which we derive the word 'horror', used to mean to dread, shudder or bristle. Adorno states in his Aesthetic Theory, that the first sign of the world having an emotional effect upon us is goosebumps and it could be added when the hair stands up on the back of your neck. I.e. aesthetics begins in bodily responses. 

Visualisation of OM

Eastern religious cultures have understood this for thousands of years, and so has Western Christianity, but because Eastern religions have seen great value in a body/mind interconnection they have tended to celebrate and use this understanding to deepen a connection with the world, whilst within certain areas of Christian thought the deep sensual links made by sound were seen to be so transformative that they could distract attention away from thinking about the suffering of Christ, therefore in Church music certain sounds were forbidden. (Pope Gregory banned the use of the augmented fourth, "diabolus in musica") However because of its vibratory possibilities this particular sound was often used in Hindu musical structures and is essential to the sound structure of certain chants. For instance, the resonant chanting of 'OM' it was believed, attuned its chanters into the deep rhythm of the world itself. Timothy Morton recognises this experience as being that of 'the hyper-object', something that can 'only be detected as a ghostly spectrality that comes in and out of phase with normalised human spacetime.' (Morton, 2013, p. 169). 

Think of your breath as the air of the world being pulled into your body and then it being pushed out in such a way that your body shapes it into a vibrating pattern. This sound pattern mirrors the shape of your chest-throat-mouth and as it goes out into the world it sets up resonating vibrating patterns with all of the other objects it encounters. Like a blind man riding a bicycle and whistling, this sound locates you in the world, but also dissolves you back into it. 

Robert Morris: Box with the sound of its own making: 1961

Within the art world it was John Cage that opened out for us the importance of these things. His pupil, La Monte Young seeing the implication of Cage's teaching realised that if all things had their own resonant patterns, perhaps instead of seeing musical instruments as things humans played, they could be seen as objects that humans could interact with, and in doing so help release the possibilities inherent in their physical construction. Robert Morris had already intuited this type of idea with 'A box with the sound of its own making', but La Monte Young took this even further with 'The well tuned piano' a piece he began in 1964 and first performed 10 years later. 

La Monte Young: 'The well tuned piano' 

Marian Zazeela often worked in collaboration with La Monte Young, she used slides of still images and coloured gels that were blended in very slow dissolves from one to the next in order to create optical effects that were designed to mirror the effects being made by La Monte's sounds. 

Marian Zazeela: Untitled 1967

Dream House: Young and Zazeela

Young and Zazeela were key figures in that hippy movement that sought to liberate us from the world of post war realities and at the time in the 1960s they seemed to offer a much more spiritual response to the growing spectre of consumerism than 'Pop Art' and the mirroring of consumerist products that it was offering. However, unfortunately, (in my mind) it was 'Pop Art', Andy Warhol and his progeny Jeff Koons, that went on to dominate the future concerns of the art world. Warhol was easy to 'get' and spiritual concerns worked directly against the might of the capitalist project.

Consumerism has by now become the dominant factor in society and I believe it is time to revisit work such as that done by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, especially now that digital technology is reshaping our vision of what things are and could be. In many ways new technology opens doors into areas of thinking that were not available in the 1960s, especially the way that it allows us to see sound and hear vision. We are also living in a time whereby we need to think more about how humans interact with the world and if we are to release the possibilities inherent in more sensitive interactions, we also need to remind ourselves that we ought not to be to profit from these things, but to establish our interconnectedness with the world and the wider web of life. 

In a previous post on Eye Music I looked at historical examples of artists trying to visualise sound and the book 'Thought-Forms', by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater was introduced as a key text. However since the advent of digital technologies everything that enters the digital world is convertible into anything else. After all for the computer it's all a matter of switches being in a particular pattern of ons and offs.  Translation, something we have also looked at before, is done all the time because of the nature of the medium, everything becoming a pattern of ons or offs and in the case of a visual representation of a sound we now have a wide range of differing software packages that can generate spectrograms. A spectrogram is a visual representation of the spectrum of frequencies of sound signals as they vary with time. Spectrograms are sometimes called sonographs, voiceprints, or voicegrams. When the data is represented in 3D plotted graphs they are sometimes called waterfalls and in that simile we have a connection that reminds us that everything is interdependent and that all is movement and vibration. A form, like a waterfall when looked at closely becoming empty, emptiness when explored becoming simply gaps in the pattern. I'm told that this situation is dealt with in Buddhism by the Heart Sutra. In this sutra we are reminded that any philosophies or expositions as to the nature of the world are mere statements about reality, they are not reality itself, and that the ultimate truth is beyond mental understanding.

The Heart Sutra

Avalokiteshvara
while practicing deeply with
the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore,
suddenly discovered that
all of the five Skandhas are equally empty,
and with this realisation
he overcame all Ill-being.

“Listen Sariputra,
this Body itself is Emptiness
and Emptiness itself is this Body.
This Body is not other than Emptiness
and Emptiness is not other than this Body.
The same is true of Feelings,
Perceptions, Mental Formations,
and Consciousness.

“Listen Sariputra,
all phenomena bear the mark of Emptiness;
their true nature is the nature of
no Birth no Death,
no Being no Non-being,
no Defilement no Purity,
no Increasing no Decreasing.

“That is why in Emptiness,
Body, Feelings, Perceptions,
Mental Formations and Consciousness
are not separate self entities.

The Eighteen Realms of Phenomena
which are the six Sense Organs,
the six Sense Objects,
and the six Consciousnesses
are also not separate self entities.

The Twelve Links of Interdependent Arising
and their Extinction
are also not separate self entities.
Ill-being, the Causes of Ill-being,
the End of Ill-being, the Path,
insight and attainment,
are also not separate self entities.

Whoever can see this
no longer needs anything to attain.

Bodhisattvas who practice
the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore
see no more obstacles in their mind,
and because there
are no more obstacles in their mind,
they can overcome all fear,
destroy all wrong perceptions
and realize Perfect Nirvana.

“All Buddhas in the past, present and future
by practicing
the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore
are all capable of attaining
Authentic and Perfect Enlightenment.

“Therefore Sariputra,
it should be known that
the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore
is a Great Mantra,
the most illuminating mantra,
the highest mantra,
a mantra beyond compare,
the True Wisdom that has the power
to put an end to all kinds of suffering.
Therefore let us proclaim
a mantra to praise
the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore.

Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha!
Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha!
Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha!”

But we still suffer. In The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T S Elliot writes; 'But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen', images of this sort remind us of how patterns can be found in everything and that life itself can be visualised as the woven thread that follows our passage through time. Prufrock was however still suffering, his nerves jangled as he he saw their pattern. As we can see, poems can be visualised, but in this translation some things are lost and others gained.

Herr von Ribbeck auf Ribbeck im Havelland' by Theodor Fontane: re-visualised

Theodor Fontane's poem becomes a new object, its internal links revealed to suggest a new organic reality, still dependent on the original poem but a new thing in its own right that reveals a totally different series of associations never apparent in the linear narrative of the poem. Gradually text becomes vibration pattern, like the sound of many voices mixing, a hum of sound that is an essential part of being both sender and receiver. 

Words in space are now part of the data stream and the data stream threatens to reshape us as its algorithms respond to our needs and desires and begin to both feed us and shape us at the same time. If both digital and analogical drawing is seen as vibration patterning it can be seen as an area to fuse together thinking about our interconnectedness with everything, we just need to find better ways of understanding how to use both old and new drawing technologies.

Heike Weber

The work of Heike Weber in many ways harks back to the images Bridget Riley and Marian Zazeela developed during the 1960s, working in an immersive installation direction, her drawings cover floors, ceilings and walls. You can see a connection in her work with the surfaces of geometric patterns developed in Islamic art and you get a feeling that work of this sort has many more possibilities for reflecting on ideas concerning pattern and space. 

Islamic tile pattern

The sound/art genre Black Midi so called because there are so many notes in each piece that a score would look nearly black if it was set out as traditional sheet music, is an area where you can find contemporary approaches to sound/vision mixes and interestingly a lot of these results are collective, like the Islamic tile pattern a product of many minds rather than an individual. 

Black Midi selection

The internet itself can be seen as a pattern and as we enter into cyberspace, this post being one tiny vibration in this digital pattern, perhaps this is a glimpse of how in future artists may begin to visualise both electronic and spiritual realities.  

A visualisation of the Internet

Some technical information that might be useful if you are thinking of using sound visualisation techniques.

A sonic visualiser is a program that is used visualize the sound spectrum (a more detailed explanation can be found here). Additionally, there are also programs (such as Coagula and Metasynth) that allow users to easily convert any image into an audio file (you can even find a video tutorial on YouTube).

Oscilloscopes have long been used to turn sound wavelengths into graphical images and they are the precursors of spectrographs. 

Oscilloscopes used to called oscillographs because of the way they were used to visually represent varying signal voltages, they operated by providing a two-dimensional plot of one or more signals as a function of time set of against a graph.  Signals (such as sound or vibration) are converted to voltages and then displayed. 

Oscilloscope

Oscilloscopes are used to observe the change of an electrical signal over time, which can be described by a shape that is continuously graphed against a calibrated scale. The oscilloscope can be adjusted so that repetitive signals can be observed as a continuous shape on the screen. A storage oscilloscope allows single events to be captured by the instrument and displayed for a relatively long time, allowing observation of events too fast to be directly perceptible.

Special-purpose oscilloscopes may be used for such purposes as displaying the waveform of your heartbeat as an electrocardiogram, a reminder that the body is controlled by a pumping heart and that a messy wet sticky thing lies at the centre of all this technological information. 

An electrocardiogram

https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/pgwbnb/a-brief-history-of-artists-turning-pictures-into-music-and-vice-versa

A link to an article on sound and healing

References


Adorno, T (2013) Aesthetic Theory London: Bloomsbury p.331

Morton, T (2013) Hyperobjects London: Minnesota Press



Sound is materially invisible but very visceral and emotive. It can define a space at the same time as it triggers a memory -Susan Philipsz


See also:

Eye Music
Jorinde Voigt Drawing as notation
Drawing and quantum theory
Drawing as translation