CosmiKnot

  Be more Organismed   Whilst walking with my two sons to ward off depression, anxiety and in my case fibromyalgia, the eldest turned to me and asked, do you think you could build a nest with your mouth? I thought for a bit and was understandably taken aback. How do they know how to make the structure in triangles he went on? I’m not sure they know how we consider knowing to be. They don’t have an instruction manual to follow. It’s more a case of the knowledge being part of their body. My son started to say something about them being programmed. But who is controlling them he asked? At this point I felt that this idea of control is perhaps the greatest stumbling block to expanded empathetic thought that there is. God used to be the controller so who or what is in control now that he is dead?    After being thrown in at the deep end with affect theory during my doctorate in fine art I have become more and more interested in the idea of embodied understanding and the a...

In making a doctoral proposal there is a certain amount of casting forwards. There is a required intuition that what you chose to research will be compatible with the practical process of researching. This is not a problem for an artist who works outside of linear time but in the realm of academic research the framework is still outwardly representational. The representational world is one of cause and effect i.e. I decide to research this and I make work with the theme of my research. Art has its origins in magical thinking and doesn’t really work as an illustration of ideas. Even as an illustrator I realised that illustration works better when you don’t just illustrate the meaning of the words on the page. Perhaps this is why I am aware of the pitfalls of art becoming illustration. An artwork can have an outwardly illustrative form but this is not where the meaning resides even if the artist themselves declares that it is.  This is my first performance of Blackberries - Blood ...

The Fungus Foray and Rhizomatic Being Full Fungus Foray images Before setting off on today’s fungus foray I’d been thinking about memory. About how memory is perhaps not simply within the brain waiting to be picked up off the shelf but rather is in the objects around us. I was standing in the back garden looking at my neighbour from hell’s ladder. I found it hard to look at the ladder without relieving the various kinds of abuse we have suffered at his hands. (Thanks to a police visit he seems to have gotten the message that everyone has a right to live without fear of abuse). Still I was ok and it seemed to demonstrate how objects in the outside world don’t just trigger memory they help embody it. Ever since attending a lecture about consciousness by Marcus du Sautoy (Professor for public understanding of science at Oxford University) at The Barbican I’ve had a sense of unease about the way we conceive of our consciousness from a machine-like perspective. It’s similar to visual...

Stay here a while Don't just get up and go Be with me here In the soft morning light Listen with me now Hold onto this moment A moment or two longer That's it you're doing great Its easy once you hang BE not afraid I'm not going to bite your arm off My toilet door is always open Now see what you made me do Staying here with you Settle back down And let you thoughts drift past On the bank to the east you're a natural oarsman I've got the rudder Being cartel not to oversteer Private land no mooring. Sign it says We'll disembark here then If that's alright you with Certainly 'll tie it up carefully Seaman might like to use as day bed the boat Good daylight sleep tight Wake me up when I'm pinching Sweet dreams my Prince Peace don't you want to kiss Kismet Hardy Don you feel paralysed I'm not sure I could spell it even. Smell that again I could hardly see what you were saying ...

We continue to ask how does it work? Is this not like a white imperialist receiving a beautifully carved shrine then sending it for analysis instead of trusting. Ah faith is the dunces hat of rational Britain. Did we learn nothing from TV episodes of Star Trek about the limits of rational thought? Placebo is the placebo escape hatch of the enlightened. We are still stuck on Freud - analysing away the monster under the bed. How about befriending the monster under the bed? Artists on telly are psychopaths - cue close up of overly slick facsimile of mad elaborately filled leather bound sketchbook. We still want to stare ourselves into oblivion. Analysing your own consciousness puts me in mind of a table rapper unable to hear the dead spirit screaming in his ear but still giving a very convincing performance of channeling. A teddy is not a real creature but we don't tell the child that because that would be idiotic. A child understands different levels of consciousness in a way that as...

Marcus du Sautoy's interactive lecture at the Barbican started with a brief and playful conjecture illustrating the absurdity of the search for consciousness. He joked about the idea of cutting off his hand and whether consciousness might be found residing therein. In terms of "self" exploration it seemed clear that we seem to have remained in flat earth territory since Kant posited that consciousness was located in the pituitary gland. I have written several times (I think) about the obsession with dissecting as path to knowledge that the artists and scholars of the Renaissance rapidly developed and once more I find my self thinking that expecting to find the self by physically chopping up and analyzing the brain in smaller and smaller pieces will not lead to a deeper understanding. We need to make a leap of faith in order to cross disciplines or like children at a party in celebration of our own intelligence we will be left having unwrapped the pass the parcel...