The first thing I want to mention is that I took part in a week long course a couple of weeks ago, and the tutelage of Fraser Taylor, entitled ‘develop your studio practice’, I wanted to spend some dedicated time trying to see if I could pull together some of the strands I’ve been following over the last few months, grappling with ideas for making art related to my experiences of being involved in a serious accident which resulted in sight loss. The sense of being in a liminal state pervaded my life afterwards, and one of the only ways I could feel my way through it was to try and express it through making art in various forms. But how to pull together something which was by its essence broken, fragmented, full of blanks (like my eyesight, and memory) and without a visible end? The course was excellent and Fraser immediately grasped what I was saying and understood that the liminal happens also on the verges of different forms of art, which was also something I was drawn to. The sense of feeling my way (blindly) isn’t something I need to resist, in itself this mirrors the experience. I pull together as best I can, but the gaps keep opening, resisting any attempts to be controlled. This is, surely a creative process in itself. The end result can only be an exhibition, or perhaps a small scale exhibition in the form of a book, or a few books…..

Saying that, next week I am putting some work of mine up together in one space for an open studios event and following exhibition. This is for the ‘outward me’ to put some work into public and see what happens.  

“I am from peasant stock with a shit degree in art – I’m a nothing,” she says. “But it doesn’t take an expert to diagnose the whole stinking system. I talk to a taxi driver from Pakistan and they’re saying the same thing as me. Everyone’s feeling it. David Attenborough’s feeling it; all the people we trust are feeling it. Can we address it? Can we inhale it? Can we withstand it?” https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/apr/09/trans-singer-anohni-new-album-hopelessness

“Real culture happens in communities, not galleries.” – Partisan, Manchester, article by Kate Hardy & Tom Gillespie, Guardian 4th August 2017

“Consciousness is not a thing but a process of inference’

Complex systems are self-organising because they possess attractors. These are cycles of mutually reinforcing states that allow processes to achieve a point of stability, not by losing energy until they stop, but through what’s known as dynamic equilibrium. An intuitive example is homeostasis. If you’re startled by a predator, your heartbeat and breathing will speed up, but you’ll automatically do something to restore your cardiovascular system to a calmer state (following the so-called ‘fight or flight’ response). Any time there’s a deviation from the attractor, this triggers flows of thoughts, feelings and movements that eventually take you back to your cycle of attracting, familiar states. In humans, all the excitations of our body and brain can be described as moving towards our attractors, that is, towards our most probable states.

On this view, humans are little more than ‘strange loops’, as the philosopher Douglas Hofstadter puts it. We all flow through an enormous, high-dimensional state-space of manifold possibilities, but are forced by our attractors to move around in confined circles. We are like an autumn leaf; tracing out a never-ending trajectory in the turbulent eddies of a stream, thinking our little track is the whole world. This description of ourselves as playful loops might sound teleologically barren – but it has profound implications for the nature of any complex system with a set of attracting states, such as you or me.

….we can talk about inference, the process of figuring out the best principle or hypothesis that explains the observed states of that system we call ‘the world’. Technically, inference entails maximising the evidence for a model of the world. Because we are obliged to maximise evidence, we are – effectively – making inferences about the world using ourselves as a model. That’s why every time you have a new experience, you engage in some kind of inference to try to fit what’s happening into a familiar pattern, or to revise your internal states so as to take account of this new fact. This is just the kind of process a statistician goes through in trying to decide whether she needs new rules to account for the spread of a disease, or whether the collapse of a bank ought to affect the way she models the economy.

Now we can see why attractors are so crucial. An attracting state has a low surprise and high evidence. Complex systems therefore fall into familiar, reliable cycles because these processes are necessarily engaged in validating the principle that underpins their own existence. Attractors push systems to fall into predictable states and thereby reinforce the model that the system has generated of its world. A failure of this surprise minimising, self-evidencing, inferential behaviour means the system will decay into surprising, unfamiliar states – until it no longer exists in any meaningful way. Attractors are the product of processes engaging in inference to summon themselves into being. In other words, attractors are the foundation of what it means to be alive. The Mathematics of Time Aeon Magazine

“We need to understand that living in a democracy is work. It’s hard work. It’s just part of our daily routine.” – video of TED talk 2015