which is the practice of doing nothing, but also the architecture of nothing, the importance of public space, and an ethics of care and maintenance. And: birds.
sentence structure is important here: there is variation in order to emphasize the role of birds in her explanation of "doing nothing" (?)
who would like to use technology to escape their own mortality.
is this their own way of doing nothing? is this the space they're privatizing?
The life force is concerned with cyclicality, care, and regeneration; the death force sounds a whole lot like “disrupt.” Of course some amount of both are necessary, but one is routinely valorized, not to mention masculinized, while the other goes unrecognized because it has no part in “progress.”
masculinity vs femininity work vs home
maintenance
is maintenance productive?
productivity
can productivity be measured by nothingness? is doing nothing still considered being productive? yes
So connectivity is a share or, conversely, a trigger; sensitivity is an in person conversation, whether pleasant or difficult, or both.
which is more advantageous if any?
Sensitivity, in contrast, involves a difficult, awkward, ambiguous encounter between two differently shaped bodies that are themselves ambiguous — and this meeting, this sensing, requires and takes place in time.
sensitivity can morph and change shape
a helpful distinction between connectivity and sensitivity. Connectivity is the rapid circulation of information
connectivity is one or the other
They encourage shouting, or having a “take” after having read a single headline.
doesn't have to be immediate
self preservation as an act of political warfare – and not what it means when it’s been appropriated for commercial ends.
connotes the idea of self startership—american dream is at the heart of nothingness, something must be produced out of nothing
I want to be clear that I’m not actually encouraging anyone to “do nothing” in the larger sense. There is so much racial, environmental, and economic injustice to be angry about and to be acted upon right now. There is also so much to be mourned. In Oakland, we are still mourning the 36 victims of the Ghost Ship Fire, many of them artists and community-minded people.
nothingness should be momentary and only taken when something has to be done
David Abram, asks in Becoming Animal: “Do we really believe that the human imagination can sustain itself without being startled by other shapes of sentience?”
what is human imagination without the presence/influence of others? this seems like a contradiction—we need others in the space of our nothingness to make something/make sense of things
they just see recurrence
patterns/familiarity enforcing connection
But again, like the night herons, I found their company comforting, somehow extremely so given the circumstances. It’s comforting that these essentially wild animals recognize me, that I have some place in their universe, and that even though I have no idea what they do the rest of the day, that they stop by my place every day — that sometimes I can even wave them over from a faraway tree.
breeding connection
It is this financially incentivized proliferation of chatter, and the utter speed at which waves of hysteria now happen online, that has so deeply horrified me and offended my senses and cognition as a human who dwells in human, bodily time.
thoughts are immediately released into twittersphere rather than being private for a certain amount of time
assault
wc
If you can have your time and work and live and be a person, then the question you’re faced with every day isn’t, Do I really have to go to work today? but, How do I contribute to this thing called life? What can I do today to benefit my family, my company, myself?
if you privatize your time and space are you contributing to the public? can you do both? do you have to do both?
Home is work; work is home.
time and space are colonized by the public, it's intrusive and leads to an absence of nothing
t’s a cruel confluence of time and space: just as we lose noncommercial spaces, we also see all of our own time and our actions as potentially commercial. Just as public space gives way to faux-public retail spaces or weird corporate privatized parks, so we are sold the idea of compromised leisure, a freemium leisure that is a very far cry from
time can't become privatized in a digital world
Currently, I see a similar battle playing out for our time, a colonization of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency. One might say the parks and libraries of the self are always about to be turned into condos.
how can time be privatized? is it a public item? what does the privitization of time mean in comparison to space
like thinking about this when I go there, that this rose garden, an incredible public good, came out of a program that itself was also a public good.
public can morph to become private
hey enclose the mass that remains, directing its circulation with behaviorist ferocity.
familiarity vs conformity, where does one draw the line? how can one draw the line?
the most obvious difference between public space and other spaces is that you don’t have to buy anything, or pretend to want to buy something, to be there.
public requires an entry ticket, private solely requires the self
ecline in the demarcation of public space. True public spaces, the most obvious examples being parks and libraries, are places for — and thus the spatial underpinnings of — “what we will.”
public vs private... community vs self
“It wants the earth and the fullness thereof.” And to me it seems significant that it’s not 8 hours of, say, “leisure” or “education,” but “8 hours of what we will.” Although leisure or education might be involved, what seems most humane is the refusal to define that period.
connection back to self but also community
ut here I come back to Deleuze’s “right to say nothing,” and although we can definitely say that this right is variously accessible or even inaccessible for some, I believe that it is indeed a right. For example, the push for an 8-hour workday in 1886 called for “8 hours of work, 8 hours of rest, and 8 hours of what we will.
from lanor union strikes when the 8 hours of "what we will" was used for scientific enlightenment and family time
so that as the perceptual details of our environment unfold in surprising ways, so too do our own intricacies and contradictions.
removal means reconnection
it’s just you with yourself and your own crap, so you have to deal with it.”
introspection
“life was too brief and uncertain, and time too precious, to waste upon belts and saws; that while he was pottering in a wagon factory, God was making a world; and he determined that, if his eyesight was spared, he would devote the remainder of his life to a study of the process.” Muir himself said, “This affliction has driven me to the sweet fields.”
this is the resolution of removal, the resolution with life's conflicts is finding bliss in circumstance
y. (One of his weirder inventions was a study desk that was also an alarm clock and timer, which would open up books for an allotted amount of time, close them, and then open the next book.)
certain amount of time... whatever you don't read is left unfinished, freedom taken away but also granted with this
most of us have, or know someone who has, gone through some period of “removal” that fundamentally changed their attitude to the world they returned to. Sometimes that’s occasioned by something terrible, like illness or loss, and sometimes it’s voluntary, but regardless that pause in time is sometimes the only thing that can precipitate change on a certain scale.
what causes removal? can removal from the world and the anxiety of the world only come from the sad moments? can it come from feeling accomplished or proud or is it just when we retreat to a negative state of mind?
Wanderlust
wanderers, pilgrimage, freedom
nitially enact some kind of removal from the sphere of familiarity.
shapes referring to familiarity/unknown—how does the spherical architecture make us feel more comfortable/womb imagery versus cold and unknown/rectangular
This type of embarrassing discovery, in which something you thought was one thing is actually two things, and each of those two things is actually ten things, seems not only naturally cumulative but also a simple function of the duration and quality of one’s attention.
we don't notice the complexities until we are forced to acknowledge them
into discrete sounds that carry meaning is something I can only compare to the moment that I realized that my mom spoke three languages, not two.
takes "nothing" for her to adapt to the information and the ability to identify each bird
. You can’t really look for birds. You can’t make a bird come out and identify itself to you. All you can do is walk and wait until you hear something, and then stand motionless under a tree trying to use your animal senses to figure out where and what it is.
just like flatworms
is actually birdlistening. I personally think they should just rename it birdnoticing
both visual and aural components contribute to "deep listening"
“listening in every possible way to every thing possible to hear no matter what you are doing.
how to concentrate on everything but nothing at the same time, the intensity of the experience leads to blankness
Deep Listening as a way of working with sound that could bring some inner peace amidst the violence and unrest of the Vietnam War.³
blank mind/freedom of space from within as a space to escape from tumult
ntended for contemplative walking.
if the space is constructed for ppl to get lost and therefore be contemplative/ live in the space of nothingness, this is a positibe
It’s also wonderfully easy to get lost in this place.
what is the downside of getting lost.... what does being lost actually mean
Some of those containers are also annotated with cards, letters, photographs, and personal belongings, allowing you to attempt to consider someone’s entire life from beginning to end, and by extension your own life, from beginning to end.
life and death in a space of freedom—ordinarily freedom would allow us to think of solely the positive/reflect on the good parts of life/the happy moments, here, it is a culmination of everything and finally our own demise
Everyone moves very slowly, and yes, people do quite literally stop and smell the roses. There are probably a hundred possible ways to make your way through the space, and just as many places to sit. Architecturally, the rose garden wants you to stay a while.
how are spaces constructed in order to allow us to do nothing
this generous architectural invitation to look skyward for as long as one could afford to stay.
the art presents freedom and leisure
And here in Minneapolis, at the Walker,
structure
where it is found, without being altered or removed to a gallery situation.”
what makes up "something"— location, in details, in the way it looks, the process in which it's made, etc.
ms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water.
theme of freedom and agency again—the worms must come naturally rather than being forced out of their environment—how is this a symbol for her own life and her own desire to be free in the rose garden/ in relation to doing nothing, but having the freedom to make ur own conscious decisions
Steinbeck’s Cannery Row,
Steinbeck as symbol for American reference— interesting to think about switch from French philosopher to American novelist
The observational eros is an emotional fascination with one’s subject that is so strong it overpowers the desire to make anything new.
referring back to the earlier section— if one truly loves something and adjusts/modifies it, they are changing it to create something new, this isn't nothing. even if it's slight, it's still diff. to original
I am not doing anything to these images except removing the text and cropping them. Even in the cases where that removal is more technically challenging, it feels more akin to some kind of historical restoration.
is she creating something new by removing and "restoring", or is she truly doing nothing to these objects... if they naturally age, can the objects themselves claim agency or are they being enacted upon, and what does her purpose/intervention signify here
so did you actually make anything
anything vs something vs nothing... wc=important here
I presented them as browsable archive in which people could scan the objects’ tags and learn about the manufacturing, material, and corporate histories of the objects.
is the creation of "something", "nothing" (?) large emphasis on taking away the grounds/basis of things in order to focus on the details and the process of how things are actually created
making nothing
can nothing be artificial or made? if it's "nothing" how can it be something? how do we know how to make it?
The function of nothing here, of saying nothing, is that it’s a precursor to something, to having something to say. “Nothing” is neither a luxury nor a waste of time, but rather a necessary part of meaningful thought and speech.
we need nothingness to produce something. nothing is the catalyst of something and gives space to create (in the most obvious way) yet this becomes complex when "something" always fills the gap of nothingness
but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say.
the silence, the "gaps of solitude" might lead to what ppl are REALLY thinking, what if the words that come from within are the words that we have never said due to the constant buzz of what comes to mind first
Negotiations
-french philosopher who discusses liberation and freedom
for her, is there freedom in doing "nothing" (?) what does nothing REALLY mean given the context of the hectic world around her?
And although I felt a bit guilty about how incongruous it seemed — beautiful garden versus terrifying world — it really did feel necessary, like a survival tactic.
her description of feeling guilty— she's indicating that she has a certain privilege to escape, even if it's momentary privilege. the rest of the world can't just escape the nightmare which is the "real world"—what is her world in this garden then...
It was innate.
the feeling of suffocation and being stuck results in immediately resorting to the rose garden
s been my default place to go to get away from my computer, where I make much
rose garden is an escape/place of freedom and release—how does doing nothing relate to release/freedom if it's a "survival tactic"