A speculative realist METHODOLOGY
T. Mortons ideas of AESTHETICS as the tool
- relating to distant/slow forms of violence and therefore attempting to ‘coexist with non humans more effectively’ through an aesthetic experience
- ‘Cosmological Confusion’ of living in the anthropocene of inherited devisions of knowledge
- Bruno Latours idea of SENSITISATION mentioned by Kodwo Eshun from the Otolith Group and the example of this becoming embodied more spiritual as Charlotte King had taken to thinking her body was able to predict seismic activity (ideas of spiritualism have also been mentioned along the way – Lo-TEK indigenous design Julia Watson and human AS nature thoughts)
- I am interested in this idea of ‘confusion’ (referenced by Eshun and in the Digital Earth article ‘Searching the Planetary in every grain of sand’) ….
- The fact that ‘rights of nature’ were being counted for in 2007 by Ecuadorians filing a law suit against the Chevron oil field drilling and a decade later the rights of AI are being considered by Estonian AI Task Force in their jurisdictional proposal, the Kratt laws, which would grant AI algorithms a legal personhood, allowing them to order groceries or services on your behalf, for example
AUTOGRAPHIC VISUALISATIONS as a tool for this aesthetic experience
- harnessing material traces
- making this experience embodied and SENSORIAL (or wearable)
- Data Cuisine and indexical design possibilities that can be encoded into objects.
ORNAMENTATION as way to connect and embody these aesthetic experiences
- we insert, drape, paint, wrap, squeeze and hang ornaments
- these ornaments have the potential to make sound, to be textural, to taste, to smell, to visually grow/form marks.
- The choice of sense must be interrogates as ‘eating something’ has quite different connotations to ‘hearing’ something… – as seen with Cooking Sections ‘Empire remains Christmas Pudding’
- they have the potential to hold and express visual time frames – TEMPORALITY STRUCTURES – to express a coded implication when FRAMED
- D. Haraway and companion species (from manifestly haraway)… instead of viewing the pet as a commodity, view ecology as a companion species
- embodiment is also a way to critique the gallery as space for aesthetic interaction…
Issue of CONCERN
Haven’t quite committed to a subject matter, moment or sliver of research that I intend to follow the trail to a form of violence I would like to express more sensorially / aesthetically…
Silver became one of the starting points as its representative of materials so readily consumed for ornamentation now (and historically – Incan) and so distantly extracted (like most extraction practices). I guess so far I’ve only really read about the social issues it flags up and not the ecological…
Silver extraction practices in Potosi, Bolivia
- the voyerstic mining tours for tourists, how they-re life expectancy is mid 40’s. They produce Silver and tourism for the westerners
- The engrained violence of extraction practices… unmovable industry turned mindlessly into a tourist attracting
- The post-colonial remnants of dangerous mining practices
- indigenous practices and its histories – furnaces that harnessed wind – HUAYRA, that burned high altitude mosses – Yareta
- the temporality structure of a bag a coca leaves – due to the darkness the minors chew a whole bag to know when the night has come above ground and their day of labour is over
- the weird over lapping existences of the minors in the dark for a whole day of labour, the tourists that visit for an hour, the 2010 Copiapó mining accident in the San José copper-gold mine in the Atacama Desert (a country that shares the same salt flats) that were trapped for 69 days… what do all these look like in coca leaves
CERCUMSTANCES
As I don’t want these designs to be commodified I must think about where they exists.
- objects of dress risk being ‘fashionable’ and therefore commodified
- what circumstances allow for dress to exist in isolation from fashion
- what space to speculative objects exist in?
What is dress beyond capitalism?
- is it worth thinking about these objects in the context of a future / multiple futures
- there are many options within the hard and soft science fictions realms / post capitalist speculative writers.. but maybe its too hard to suss out what for and if dress has been been made functional in these ways…
TESTS TO PROVOKE THOUGHT
- chewing time…. the performance of chewing is very different to the objects pre-chew
- chewing is very different to swallowing
- look into types of moss as material traces? rates of growth of certain materials? fastest growing materials? water hyacinth …… (maybe can’t go back there… but seems relevant as it absorbs heavy metals…)
- different types of CHEWING GUM – gum comes from trees… we wouldn’t have gum without bats!! corona virus?
- thinking about temporality structures – what are equivalents to melting ice? reference a sand timer
- ways to make sound… bells and small flute like openings that react to wind…
- you can’t wear jewellery in a gold factory…. is there anything interesting here?
- using Peter Frase and Erik Olin Write and their use of four futures… find a combination of four scenarios and explore within these four overlapping circumstances?
QUESTIONS / QUARMS
- feel like I need to question my reason for using embodiment practices more – read more of Joanne Entwistle – Fashion and the Fleshy Body: Dress as Embodied Practice – also maybe think of being more specific about ornamentation? from what period am I thinking about and what form of jewellery am I thinking about?
- Am Still in search of a more potent (to me) subject matter….
THINKING RESEARCH 