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Contextual Journal: 
Ecology and Embodiment
MUCH OF WHAT WE FIND TO BE BEAUTIFUL HAS EVOLVED OVER TIME, INTERACTING WITH THE ENVIRONMENT.

the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea, whose songs echo nearby birds, insects, tree frogs, waterfalls and rain. The music, as one anthropologist put it, uses the wider landscape as a tuning fork.

how architecture and design can interact – even play – more creatively with our wider environment. 

Lance Hosey, The Shape of Green
Ecology = knowing home, the study of  interrelations between living organisms and the environments in which they live.

​Ecosystems involve:

//living organisms
//physical environment
//a source of energy




​Embodied Ecologies:
 A conceptual framework for describing a fluidity between bodies and worlds that focuses on relations instead of bounded entities.


What are the implications of imagining porous and receptive bodies that are intimately influenced by their surroundings both material and immaterial?

Fusebox XR Residency
VR Lab
Reframed @ Lighthouse
Making Ground
Blast Theory Residency
Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park
Mass Observation Archive
Box Hill Flickers Film
Box Hill Flickers
Flickers Under the Water
Residency at Fabrica
Flickers: Undercurrent
Greenwich Fair Flickers
Flickers Up the Wall
Flickers Off the Path
Flickers Anti
 Desire Lines: An informal path that allows a direct journey...


Exercise
I walked an unnatural line, a direct line on the map, from Higher Close to find a place to mark a desire line where I would not trample anyone, (not anyone I could see): under the redwoods. 

There was a constant dialogue between following hedgerows or cutting across fields, a which I ended up not doing, a mixture of conflict avoidance and an instinct not to stand out too much in the landscape.

I followed rabbit and badger desire lines, to rabbit and badger holes and felt bed for trampling the bluebells and wild garlic.

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Walking


“Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart, a balance between working and idling, being and doing.” Solnit


“Walking ideally is a state in which the mind, the body and the world are aligned, three characters finally ....?together, three notes suddenly making a chord.


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​"The unpredictable and incalculable give life value. What cannot be quantified cannot be valued.”​










 
"Moving on foot seems to make it easier to move in time.”


"Both movement as well as the sights going by seem to make things happen in the mind. One lives in the whole world instead of the interiors built up against it."

The edges are where things change (old carpentry tools versus precision cutting/vinyl over digital)
 





​...often describing the most energy efficient route and giving clues to our desires as a species and as individuals. (Paul Graham, Professor of Neuroethology taught me this.)

​The way we "go on," is an interplay between the shape of our bodies, our physiology, and how we touch the world all around. A desire line manifests this interrelation.
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​Through my walking practice I have found a way into "flow," into "forgetting that one is," into  
protosemiotic sensing, a way of getting "to the things themselves" (Pavel)

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While walking we are becoming not being; (Nail?)as we move, the world spools past. 

Snufkin and his tune.


​My walking practice in essence has been a practical induction to movement as "a fundamental organizing mechanism of perception and understanding." (O'Gorman)

ILLUSTRATE!!!!!!!!
SPEIL

I have discovered what walking is and come up with some movement based ecological thinking.
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I have found it immensly difficult to articulate the things I have discovered through my walking practice. It is important to find the language, to get articulate, but also to change what is valued as articulate. (Satish: the difference between knowledge and wisdom)

Movement and a world in motion to think with.



Dan and partners App that shows a walking you on a map as it catches up with where you have travelled to by plane. It took me until Thursday morning to feel as though I had landed, 72 hours later. (According to Google it would take 64 hours to walk here from home.)

a story is a tool to see things in a particular way

​Roisin O'Gorman

If I read David Abram, I am wary that his  descriptions of sensing will replace my own. They are too close to my bone. As someone who is most porous, I need to guard my boundaries.
 
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"To the things themselves"
​Pavel

Semiotics "Whom and what do I touch when I touch my dog?" Anticipation and expectancy

Biosemiotics
Ecosemiotics
Protosemitics

























Can you ever get to the thing?
The experiencial moment when one forgets what one is.



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What is the role of nature writing? Minimise the distance between representation and the thing






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​From the point of view of the thing. A tick knows three things:
=acid
=heat
=light



To Know What Life Knows

Does biology know what life knows?

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​Exercise:

I sat with cowslips and vetch

Eco signs = soil good for cowslips who have not morphed into primroses

= diverse birdsong (5 species heard in 5 minutes)

Bio signs = blackbird with a worm, ladybird on vetch

Proto signs = wind in the trees like a release of breath, pleasure, eurphoria

= how my feet led me to somewhere hidden and scruffy

Shimmer spoolers as a way of getting to the thing.

Shimmer as a way of reading biodiversity and noticing life systems in action




Perhaps not so much translation as delight in side along play with the rest of life

Veronica said an artist friend tells himself to call the tree a cake while he draws it in order not to draw what he expects is a tree

​Being with, following, playful mirroring, Oogly Boogly - a way of being with preverbal humans

Effective writers: Tokarchuk
Tove
Baker, like My Octopus Teacher lives and breaths peregrine falcon, and works his own stuff out at the same time! ;)




All of life experiments, moves to find out how to grow from the cell to lightning. It doesn't think first. 

Dance first, think later. Movement is faster than thought processes. Catherine Hales 'feasible strategems'?

Katey Bently
The Cellular Adaptive Behaviour lab.
"Just like humans, cells continually sense their local environment and adapt their behaviour accordingly, either as individuals or as a group. They communicate and ‘decide’ whether to cooperate or compete with each other and they can dramatically change their shape or arrangement. Dr. Bentley’s research work attempts to create a deeper understanding of how this complex dance unfolds across time and space, from molecules, cells to tissues."
​Ways of knowing
Specific/constellation.....reductionism//generalism....reciprical//extractionist
Indigenous//exile/settler....antibiotic //probiotic....direct//peripheral
defensive//accepting...holding on//moving through...diverse//monocultural
scorn//humour
Gut Buddies: 

Jamie Lorimer: 

Micro rewilding, Old friend microbes
parasitic worms, helminths, are like a keystone species for gut ecosystems
foecal transplants effective and licenced, we need contact with animals and soil, different reactions to covid are to do with resiliant guts, evolutionary role of the virus to exchange genetic material across species, which gives rise to more sophisticated species
we are warm fleshy vehicles for the furtherance of microbial projects! 
Need a nuanced understanding of which microbial exposure desireable, 
vaccines are probiotics

intensively farmed animals, globalised food system, dense urban living, monocultures of everything, make everything less resiliant, counter pathogens with diverse crops and farming

How to combine a progressive political agenda with a progressive ecological vision. learn from indigenous people about reciprocity

we prioritise charismatic species over unseen ones, the idealised countryside over the built environment wildlife

antibiotic triumphs to optimise life for humans had gone too far, with unintended consequences, We simplify river systems and they flood, 
Monoculture forest systems cause fire
Sarah Grey Body Mind Centering

Hollow gut
We are one long gut
second brain

I felt very vulnerable in this session and had to hide behind a curtain upstairs. Others in the group had to walk away. Perhaps we needed to have done lots of physical work together first before this session.

This kind of work gets to the protosemiotics!!

I was able to come into the circle for the second half and enjoyed the belly to belly with Frederika
​I wanted to eat far less after it
https://www.tsoel.org.uk/one-to-one




​Diversity is key to resiliance




Ecology and Embodiment
Dr Marie Hale

Protosemiotic responses in migration and bacteria

The role of movement in ecological systems

Embodiment: somatic microscales
animal teachers

Movement ecology: scale of movement
from how do they move to how do they travel

from micro organisms to macro, earth as organisms

Embodiment also in terms of being with the other, looking with their eyes, empathy

different scales of time and space

=why move
=how to move
=when and where to move

Moving /change is fundemental to life
Dynamism of populations

animism

David Abrams: the more than human world (The centre for wild ethics)

human 
non human (plants, animals)
more than human (plants, animals, everything else)

Bacteria tumbling
Situation movement

foraging = diet, habitat, food, safety

dispersal = across home range to avoid competition/promote genetic diversity

migration: 60% of birds migrate
or soial, geographical contexts, climate change, war

Human threats to ecosystems cause migration. 



























​Dr Katie Bentley
Dance first think later



​Shimmer as an indicator of life systems

A way of noticing things that move in a landscape. 

Wind, light, life, my own locomotion






Situationists, derive, and the walking movement

Can your jellyfish sing?

​ the weave of the tactile intelligence and movement inherent in the practices of the tentacular

DANCE FIRST, THINK LATER

oogly boogly
cell growth
  • Home
  • Work
  • Blog
    • How to make your own tools @ Blast Theory
    • Do biodiverse landscapes shimmer?
    • Raw nature being awesome
    • Green equals equigenic
    • XR Residency @ Fusebox
    • Residency @ Fabrica
  • About
  • Contact