Category: Noticing

“… for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” – Genesis 3:19

I think I did this wrong. I described related things instead of finding relations. But I got into it in the end.

How much agency do you have in regard to the agency of all these other things? (Agency: the capacity of things to do – considering ‘doing’ as an action.)

I have the agency to buy the plastic L plate sign. I used my agency to apply for my L’s and because I passed, I now need an L plate sign. And because the suppliers know there is a demand – a need – they will use their agency to supply. So in a way, their agency is being affected by mine as well?

Q: Do we even get to decide when to stop? 
Euthanasia comes to mind first. Is that an event where we choose to end things? And yet, is death really an end? I guess you end your heartbeat, but you don’t end biology – our body keeps going, decaying, transforming, melting, changing, and then at long last, starting again! Baby maggots, worms, bacteria, soil – growth. So there is no end? We could keep going if we wanted to. Is that it? “Not wanting to” is where we come to a stop? What is a “want”? Is it a choice? Or is it, again, biology…

 

thoughts: Steve Jobs and I

All this talk of relations leads me to think of this TV series I used to love – Fox cancelled it after 2 seasons 🙁

Everything and everyone is connected in someway by a thing. I am connected to my MacBook. My MacBook was made by someone and they have a connection to it Does that mean I am connected to that person through this MacBook? Steve Jobs invented and founded Apple and it’s softwares. Does that mean I am connected to him too?

 

 

Big thoughts on tiny things.

Many thoughts from today’s class:

technological determinist – being controlled by technology//what we do is determined by technology. We can choose if it controls us though, but it takes effort? i.e. controlling ourselves from not answering the phone.

Cinema’s definition of “a story”. Having a resolution. La La Land – how it didn’t end in the typical Hollywood way where “boy meets girl, they get together and stay together” they go their own paths and they have successes, and some failures, their lives do not “end” in the movie but they move on, they had that moment in both character’s lives, but it was just “that one time”. Much like how in life we meet different people at a time in our life, this class for example, and we become friends and work together and have shared goals and dreams, but because the semester ends, our relations end. (cinema’s attempt at breaking out of the narrative.) <– is this way of trying to relate/understand things in terms of ‘life’ no good? too general? 

Teleology and death. Is death the great inevitable ending; the specific conclusion for where we end up? Some might argue yes, but do we actually live like death is the end of our story? Do we see every event in our life as one that helps us progress towards our end, that is death? Yikes, what a thought!

zooming out vs zooming in – how far can we go? How deep can we go? How do we come to a stop? Do we even get to decide when we stop? – constraints on number of pages you print, how much time you have to write, how much information is available to you. You can’t have a book that doesn’t have a last page, it cannot not end. The media we put it on is finite, and has to have an end. (what about the internet cloud? – I guess, the amount of terabyte space that it needs?)
What about our brains? The amount that our brains can contain seems to be infinite – or is it constrained by memory? though memory itself is but information recall; the process of bringing it up from the depths of stored knowledge to the “viewing platform”. How do you keep knowledge? how is it entered in? Does it grow over time? Does it need to be fed? Are there compartments, or are they all in a big heap? Is a memory different from knowledge?

keeping up

Been struggling with keeping up with the readings. They go on for so long and everything is something I want/need to google just to understand and learn about. Even when Bogost described the peppercorn chile, how fascinating! This aspect of participation is yet to be fully utilised, it will happen when we start discussing the readings – hopefully as I share my thoughts, my understanding of the text will become clearer to me.

Something I love doing is to explain (it’s more like a verbal dump) to my husband what I’ve learnt in classes, or what I’ve noticed. He has become quite good at it too, challenging me with questions that push my thinking. I feel like I have not yet got into the habit of noticing and thinking of relations – it seems to be too huge to even begin thinking about. Where do I start? Where do I go? I can begin at any intersection of the web of relations, and end up anywhere…

 

talking to myself helps me think

I love how young and fresh the research is in the reading! It’s current and up to date as it uses examples shown in popular TV shows and films of this generation – unlike the film books I’m reading for other classes that are rather ancient in their sources and evidence cited… I got excited because Rushkoff talked about Community. (It’s one of my favourites!) It really helps that I’ve watched the shows he’s bringing up because it helps me understand his argument and the overall concept better.

“Characters must learn how their universes work. Narrativity is replaced by something more like putting together a puzzle by making connections and recognising patterns.” – Douglas Rushkoff

Now I can intelligibly explain why I like Community in the first place. I love the randomness of it. Everyday at Greendale is different and wacky; you can’t predict what the producers are going to come up with next. Unlike in Hollywood films where there are the basic narrative arcs and “main character immunities” that we’ve come to expect.

Characters are well defined, but a few seasons later, the members in the group begin to analyse each other and use their set characteristic traits against them – so much like life! It’s not uncommon that people form impressions and judgements of others and then use what they’ve learnt about them to manipulate or use them.

Perhaps cinema is an enjoyment to us because it simplifies life for us; makes it seem like a narrative and that because we’re the main character, we will turn out okay in the end. Is that why as humans, we inherently want the film to have a neatly tied up ending because we hope that will be so for us? Using the film’s screen time to escape our complex lives to enter a world where we wish we could belong…

“thoughts have to become actions in the world”

I love how we have to write down everything that stands out to us – anything that we have particularly noticed. There’s a saying that goes “an unwritten goal is merely a wish”; there is power in that. It seems to compel us to do something more with it because it has been physically manifested in some way.

Seems. We talked about this word today. We use this word to mean that we don’t actually know for sure, but other sources help us infer what is happening. (eg. the dog seems to like being petted because it wags it’s tail when we do it. Tail wagging is it’s sign of happiness.)

Did a really eye opening exercise today about relations and anthropocentrism (or the lack of it). Here are my masterpieces:


First off, yes, I am married. (not sure if many have noticed..) I found it a bit tricky to do this with my husband, Elijah, in mind because we do so many things together, and for each other. For example, I cook for him at times, and he does the same for me. However, he is also my protector, because he is so much stronger and bigger than I am and I am unsure as to what physical danger I could protect him from that he couldn’t do himself. Perhaps I could protect him from being heart broken…

The second one we did was with an object. The first thing that came to mind was my apartment. It seemed so much easier because it was easier to measure and identify what each was doing for the other. I was “feeding” the home with electricity and water by paying the bills, and it was in turn allowing me to use electricity and water because it has a connection to the mains and powerpoint wall sockets and pipes. I wonder, since a house’s purpose is to house a person (or two), am I allowing it to fulfil it’s purpose by occupying it? Do I give the home a sense of purpose? If it was left unoccupied will it “feel” worthless and like it has failed?

I think it was easier to trace this web of relations in terms of “things” but with human emotions and relationships (huh, is a relation different from a relationship?)* it’s so much harder and more difficult – and yet can it be enough just to use the word “love”?

“Love” is a “Black box” – I like to see it as a general mystery. Something that you notice but can never really truly explain unless you look inside it and pick out what makes it so. You have to unravel all the little bits and tie down the “relation strings” (meaning to relate it to other things) to open it up and then you can see the big picture that was hiding in the black box. How can we quantify feelings and emotions? Do we use the little moments that contribute to the development and sustenance of such feelings or do we measure it using scientific markers such as increased heart rate, dilation of the pupils and the human version of the mating call?

How can we notice the micro and the macro? Perhaps not all at once, but is it better to go outside in? Or inside out like the ripple effect? Or is it more like psychology’s butterfly effect? I think it is both altogether, which shows how life is amazing and very non-linear. But does that make me feel like I shouldn’t do anything at all so there will be a calm, or that I should do lots and stir up the water? I do not know.

Adrian said “agency is controlled by the relations that make it possible.” If we can think this way and master the technique of mapping out the web of relations, does that mean that we can then predict ones agency? Can we find out, based on all the relations he has to others and to things like his job, what he will choose? Is the Minority Report technology possible?

*Update:
Relation = a thing’s effect on or relevance to another
Relationship = the way or state of being connected

 

“Done well, do differently”

Since Tuesday, I’ve done about half of the reading and made a few notes about my thoughts on what kind of jumped out at me. As I read, one of the main ideas that the author was aiming sounded like a concept I had learnt about in art called realism. I googled that to see if there was a literary sense of the same concept and there was, so I did a bit of reading on it. It seems like a pretty good way to understand the concept of the reading about narrative collapse, for now. But it might be discussed in class and then I can just to make sure that it’s about the same..

Day 1 of ‘Noticing’

Really interesting start to the studio where we all got up and shared something we wouldn’t normally share with everyone; I talked about fishing for the first time. Adrian talked about agency and gave the example of not having the agency to say what we want (even though we like to think we do) because there are laws and rules that confine what we can and how we say things. For example, the alphabet, phonetics and grammatical rules.

True, that it restricts our agency but I think that these rules help make our choices mean more. In his example, he said a made up nonsensical word and said that you don’t have the agency to say because it’s just nonsense. With the rules of language, it guides the extent of the choice of what we want to say so that it can be understood by others and in that way allows us more choices (eg. if I had said “can I have some ice cream?” instead of “asdkcnaoien”)

Another interesting thing I got from today was “story telling” versus “communicating”. In essence, Adrian wants to help us learn how to tell a story without using a story – which he said is a “species specific” mode of communication. It just helps us humans understand things better I guess, but it’s not exactly the only way we can tell others about something. I think it’ll be hard to get out of the comfortable and easy habit of story telling, to force ourselves to change the way we think about, relay, interpret and understand information. I’m looking forward to seeing how my perspective and understanding of the world will change from this.

why would you click on this?Did an exercise of how we predict our learning will be for this semester. I drew a line that went up in a gradual slope – I think I’ll learn and understand more and more as the semester progresses. And if not, I’ll ask questions so hopefully I won’t have bouts of not knowing what’s going on at all. My “recipe” for participation and learning is to read the assigned reading, read news and current affair articles so that I am updated and “noticing” things about the world and it’s people. I want to be able to find a ‘passion point’ before the mid semester break; it’s something that I’m interested in and passionate about that I will always want to learn more about. Because learning things in itself is interesting, but I want to choose something that will keep me focused. I also want to take notes of what I’ve learnt in class and throughout the week to practice the art of noticing what’s going on around me and see if I can find trends and explanations – perhaps to keep me accountable in actually doing this, I could share something every week of something I have learnt/noticed/am intrigued with from the past week.

And to end it all off, I set up this blog.