Tag: process

We Make Art

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Journallings9 Comments

We Make Art: A Query toward Perceptive Extension

paper snowflakes by Holly & children
paper snowflakes by Holly & children

Waking reminded –

I’ve been working over things in my sleep.  Parenting issues, marriage.  Vocation deadlines, assignments.  Logistics and payments and scheduling.  Improbable care of the self.

– that overwhelm is inevitable, inherent.

Everything we know (or surmise) about anything indicates vast beyonds unknown and ignored.  In order to see, to breathe, to speak, to hear, to feel, to think, to live.  We filter and avoid.  Press the vast majority of the world’s availability into a void.  So of course we can’t manage our world, or comprehend, even minimally control.  We can barely deal with even a relatively microscopic set of variables, and those only enough to survive.

Reminded, awake then, that overwhelm is constant and inevitable.  Inherent to the systems of which we are and are a part.  Living is processing vastness.  Essentially unscalable.  And we thought bacteria were small!

            So it comes as no surprise that at times we feel oppressed, drowned, immersed – helpless, confused and at loss.  Pretend for a moment that we have to-dos that seem important + unforeseen and substantial grief + illness + snow days (which = a house full of ecstatic children, active and noisy and eager to be entertained) + inclement weather shuffling schedules and doctors, activities and possibilities around + limitations of time, energy and internal resources + anxiety or mood ‘disorders’ + love and high hopes + responsibilities and intentions + fears and deep hurts + a body (bodies) mind (minds) to feed and nourish +…

Too Much Information, a saturated context for the human organism.  The black box crashes.  The connections run slow.  The screen jerky and fuzzy.  Head aches, breath thickens or shallows, noise is incommensurate – the signals scramble…

At first breach, first sign of imperturb…we check in, acknowledge – perhaps argue or fight or make love (i.e. signify our overwhelm and our intensity), sit still, register what we can…

and wake up, reminded:

WE MAKE ART.

            Once ground is touched, we go in (or out) – “seventh direction perception” – we begin to consciously process/perceive.

 

 

The query that sprouted is as follows: might the activity of art-a creative dialogic relation of index-sign-symbol, signifier-signifiant-and interpreter, i.e. “becoming-forth” – expand our perceptive capacities/processing?

In other words, in enacting the relationship of making, creatively, holistically, might we draw on more of the world’s availability – perceived and “dismissed” – a fuller context of experience less limited by intentional activities of categorical aims and constraints, thereby opening more of us to more of it in an open reciprocal dynamic interrelation, thereby sort of processing in “lump sums” – a gulping digestion of overwhelm?

We set aside prescribed roles, beliefs and opinions and work out, work into, an arbitrary generalized conventional (safe) medium…we fog our normalized paradigms and strictures of interpretive alertness – mores, values, expectations and censorship – we reach out gathering in.  Interact.  It seems something larger is carried, is moved – more than the medium, more than ourselves, more of a context, a world.

Does art extend our perceptive capacities?  Our scope of perception – to process, to be?  A kind of open-boundaried passage of experiencing between organism and world?

works in progress by Holly Suzanne
works in progress by Holly Suzanne

Charting Change

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings5 Comments

“the rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.”

-Szolem Mandelbrot-

After 12 nomadic years of self-study, retail labor, marriages and parenting, I am now in my second semester of graduate studies in Library & Information Sciences.  As my coursework progresses and evolves toward more specified researching, the organization of my passions and values, interests and desires do as well.  Over the past year my blog manoftheword and the other blogs I participate in have primarily been creative instigations and outlets.  Places where my ongoing work in art and literature can find some audience and I can process and work through ideas and conceptions as they fumble their way toward something more finished, hopefully one day publishable, perhaps useful to others.  Most of my poetic efforts I have exposed through Spoondeep along with the work of a dear friend of mine.  The works my wife and I set out to do and continue (not nearly as often as we desire) can be witnessed at Combinatory Art in Motion, where we attempt a contemporary and relational ekphrasis as an open and intimate artistic endeavor.  

As the demands of schooling, parenting and marriage bundle and thicken, my focuses also need to sharpen and grow more efficient.  In accord with this, I have changed the title and some of the goals of keeping this blog active and vital.  The discipline of Library & Information Sciences is proving to be a wonderful practical theoretical grounding of the majority of those aspects I love most about our world:  language, art, relationships and learning, and I am focusing my investigative work in the program on semiotics, human-information-behavior, Information Retrieval systems and tools and design, and the function of language in our acquisition of knowledge and interpretation of the world and its data.  This is nothing new for me, and I have attempted and practiced many of these same methods throughout my life – reading, writing, and communicating with others.

All this to say that The Whole Hurly Burly will become a place for me to work out my creative life in language and symbols (or images) as it has been, but will probably have fewer posts and hopefully entries that are more fully developed.  Research takes time, and so many hours of reading and interpretation, and as elements arise that I can only work out for myself poetically or in imaginative prose, if they seem to have some merit or I need feedback I will post them here.  There may also be more theoretical hypotheses as I struggle to make sense of the many lines of thought rubber-band-balling my brain.  I will keep up with Friday Fictioneers so that there will be at least one fiction exercise a week and will continue to pass on crucial inspirational quotes/music/arts/ideas as they flood my desk.

It has become very clear to me that I want whatever I do to be drawn up from the whole messy complex background texture and tangle of being a living human being among other humans and the larger matrices of the world – it is this untangleable complex and network of social and natural, individual and corporate, intimate and estranged, abstracted and imaginative realities that I take Wittgenstein to be referring to when he refers to it as “the whole hurly-burly” of our goings-on.  And the sinewy, grueling and challenging process of attempting to refer to our experience semantically, in language, in symbols, in sounds and shapes is the most rewarding activity I experience – and when we come close to our desire it feels in me to be what David Foster Wallace signifies “making the head throb heart-like.”  

These, then are the goals of this blog moving forward.  To engage and investigate the “whole hurly burly” and to offer it to you  in hopes it might cause your “heads to throb heart-like.”  I cannot thank you enough for whatever time you give my process and work, your kindness in engaging and insightful comments.  Here’s to development and change —

and what is currently infusing me:  Currently Reading

Processing Change

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, TracesLeave a comment

‘How could human behavior be described? Surely only by sketching the actions of a variety of humans, as they are all mixed up together. What determines our judgment, our concepts and reactions, is not what one man is doing now, an individual action, but the whole hurly-burly of human actions, the background against which we see any action’

– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel –

“CERTAIN NOVELS NOT ONLY cry out for critical interpretations but actually try to direct them . This is probably analogous to a piece of music that both demands and defines the listener’s movements , say like a waltz. Frequently, too, those novels that direct their own critical reading concern themselves thematically with what we might consider high brow or intellectual issues — stuff proper to art, engineering, antique lit., philosophy, etc. These novels carve out for themselves an interstice between flat-out fiction and a sort of weird cerebral roman à clef. When they fail, as my own first long thing did, they’re pretty dreadful. But when they succeed, as I claim David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress does , they serve the vital & vanishing function of reminding us of fiction’s limitless possibilities for reach & grasp, for making heads throb heartlike , & for sanctifying the marriages of cerebration & emotion, abstraction & lived life , transcendent truth -seeking & daily schlepping, marriages that in our happy epoch of technical occlusion & entertainment-marketing seem increasing consummatable only in the imagination”

-David Foster Wallace, The Empty Plenum-

IN THE PROCESS OF CHANGE

more soon….

The Violation in Art

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Philosophy, Writing4 Comments

The Violation in Art

 

The trouble with artists, as I see it, is that they’re always breaking things.  Breaking out, breaking in.

As if their experience of the world (and in my opinion anyone might be an artist at any given time)…well, look at it like this…a human person develops perceptions and accumulates.  Artistry consists in these experiences transmuting, transforming and breaking out in alternate forms.

The world seeps, floods, sifts or bursts its way into the artist’s mechanisms of being, and their processing of said worlding breaks its way out, somewhere, somehow.  Often anywhere, anyhow!

Breaking in to us.

A person combined with their experience breaks out in a form through their hands or their vision, movements or mouth…the artifact then enters our perception, experience, breaking in to our own operations and proceedings…entering us.

Now you’ve a mingling of persons going on via artifact, motion or sound.

If you think about this, it’s threatening.  It’s criminal!  It’s viral.  And it can happen at great distances, even invisible, even in your sleep.  It may appear at first benign, even pleasurable, might mirror some part of ourselves (or so it seems) – because of its careless remove from identity toward object it feels safe and external…but how we take it in!

With anger or lusting or joy.  Voyeuristically, “privately,” or in a well-guarded institution.  Through literature, youtube, mp3s.  In deep thought or with staid attention, and passing glances or air-gathering ears.  No matter, there’s infusion, con-fusion, an intimate entwining going on.

And it is without-which-not on either side: construction/reception, speaker/hearer, writer/reader, dancer/audience.  We all become necessary and involved, creating ubiquitous perpetration.  And no one to accuse once it’s part of our experience, our (perhaps unwitting) invitation.

Like cancer or nutrients, an other-marked entity joins with our own joining to theirs in apprehension, a collusion of worlds and of persons.  An act in which all are responsible: reciprocal engagement of voyeuristic and combinatory intimacy, breaking open, breaking in,

breaking out

breaking through

a delicious and permissive crime.