'The Power of Now' - Eckhart Tolle
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment is a book by Eckhart Tolle, which draws from a variety of 'spiritual traditions', buddhism, mysticism, christianity and new age re-workings of Zen. I read it over January and identified with a lot of the issues raised such as peoples emotional problems are rooted in their identification with their minds. Tolle writes that an individual should be aware of the 'present moment' instead of losing themselves in worry and anxiety about the past or future. This got me thinking about how much I have let my mind control my emotions which has led to anxiety. It has reminded me to be in the present moment. Tolle speaks of the ego and the pain-body 'which consists of trapped life-energy that has split off from your total energy field and has temporarily become autonomous through the unnatrual process of mind identification'. Various chapters make clear the importance of a philosophy of destroying the destructive dominance of the mind and ego in an effort to overcome the pain body. The whole book got me inspired into thinking about the "Now" and how I can put this into my practice somehow. Using video and editing techniques.
An article by Priya Khanchandani, discussing how the pandemic has caused human interaction and communication to be forced online and how that has affected self image and it being forced into a more professional setting. How certain senses have become less relevant when socially or professionally interacting and how sight and audio are now the only senses we use for interaction. We are faced with ourselves on a regular basis which means we are more concerned about the way we look than how other people are. Editing tools and digital tools are making it possible to hide our humanness. How this is taking away our emotions and we are becoming more like robots removed from reality.
Khanchandani speaks about how if Lacan had been alive to see how the pandemic had affected our self-representation in a different way rather than a mirror, but by a digital self representation he may well have had something to say about it. Are we can losing ourselves and who we are due to being digital and designing ourselves to be a representation on a screen?
There are many layers to our visual representation other than our clothes but also our backgrounds and how it all comes down to what is fitting in a tiny screen. These are our way of trying to
replicate real-world interactions. Khanchandani speaks about how in the real world there are people still working with design to help during the pandemic, such as re designing hospitals to fit more people or to chose which places would be suitable for medical equipment and sterilization.
The real world matters still as ultimately this is where will end up after this is all over. She ends with this line "In the longer term, it will also be where we once again find genuine joy".
David Attenborough's "Life on our Planet"
Watching this documentary of David Attonborough's 'Life on our planet', inspired and recalled my interest in the Anthropocene. Looking back through my work from the last unit I can see a correlation in my practice, it's all relevant to nature somehow.
These scenes I chose in particular because they related to de-forestation which was relevant to the video I made in the last unit using sound from inside my house and playing outside which resulted in sounding like trees being cut down. This interests me, how we perceive sounds and relate them to experiences we have seen or heard.
Choosing these scenes due to it reminding me of the wax sculptures I made last unit and how I want to portray this further possibly using wax again.
An insight from a review of the documentary by David Ehrlich :
"He declares from the start that this film is his “witness testimony,” and what follows is a familiar documentary about “humanity’s blind assault on our planet” wrapped in an unusually emotional plea for us to look at the natural world through the eyes of someone who’s cherished it for almost 100 years, and wants us to care for it after he’s gone. “A Life on Our Planet” is as much a love story, a requiem, and a final request as it is a film about deforestation, overfishing, exponential population grown, and the various other culprits that have led to the crisis we all live in today. If you’ve been numbed by the scale and hopelessness of other documentaries about the various horrors we’ve inflicted upon the Holocene, perhaps the personal touch of this one will shake you into action before it’s too late."
"The Expanse"
"The Expanse" is a TV show I have been watching recently which I feel has influenced my practice. It is an American science fiction TV series developed by Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, based on the series of novels of the same name by James S. A. Corey. The series is set in a future where humanity has colonized the Solar System. The part that most intrigued me the "protomolecule". The protomolecule is an infectious agent of extra-terrestrial origin. It has the ability to radically alter infected life forms and utilize their biomass in various ways.
Fandom gave me more insight into what is actually is:
"Not a life-form in itself, the protomolecule is described by Antony Dresden as "a set of free-floating instructions designed to adapt to and guide other replicating systems". It is able to maintain and adapt its primary structure in a wide variety of conditions, and it has an affinity for carbon and silicon structures, but is likely anaerobic and will not degrade upon exposure to oxygen. As a purely molecular machinery, uses ionizing radiation as an energy source, its growth significantly accelerates if it is exposed to high doses and depends only on the abundance of such energy."
My wax pieces and the video I have made for the exhibition is clearly linked and inspired by the protomolecule with it being extra-terrestrial and how it alters life forms and utilizes their biomass in various ways. The narrative behind my video is about an alien being (wax) coming to earth (nature) and looking around its surroundings and slowly integrating with it.
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