Territories

This is an extract from my note book, i've been reading Capitalism and schizophrenia, it sounds stupid but it is life changing stuff. i'm not sleeping.

Territorialisation



The above picture is by Agnes Martin, who described her paintings as being beyond form and void, i got slightly obsessed by them in first year. I think attracted me to them was VOID though, they made me feel somewhat protected by their regularity and repetition (Habit, Habitat). Like i was getting at with territories, territorialised in the chaos of the world, but it gets to a point where this becomes limiting abit like the images superstudio used to produce: THIS IS A VOID




The structure of language (anyone interested i have some links), culture, society, religion and the physical city controls the amount possibilities and type of (statistically i guess is a good way of putting it)of self identity we offer ourselves and to the rest of the world... physical movement... (i remember our first project in the first year and see much more relevence to it now, what clothes we wear, the watch, the shoes, the colours, the music the tv programs; they all props to help fictionalise ourselves) things are not interelated but categorised, easily quantified/ falsified and graded according to the orders needs. its an implicit relationship with a man made machine (there is no alternative...).

De-territorialisation



The above picture is by Brice Marden and as with the other pictures i am using it as a tool to explain my point.
Interrelating territories (Chaos); physical space (parkour, flash mobs, journey as destination) and conceptual space (death of god, virtual realms, mobile communication). Ungrammatical Language (something William Burroughs used to harp on about intend to BLOG on that later), maybe if technology could become conscious we could approach this type of structure... i know it is romantic to think about communicating with plants... but actually why not? this is what this type of structure alludes to? would man made conscious machines only achive human consciousness? (that would be abit pointless?)

VIDEO pt2

I had intended to post another video based around the idea if Immanence, but it started feeling like slow progress and so decided to post this video of John Cage performing: Water Walk, in this video there is no destination; only experience.



I guess the contrast between the two shows a cultural difference in how people experience everyday life and refer to my favourite john cage quote taken from his essay, Experimental Music:

“This play, however, is an affirmation of life-not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we are living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord”

But can we do this? Without rules? Without habit? Without common sense? (I know every time i approach this my life turns into chaos...) you should see my room after two weeks of letting things act of their own accord. Without habit, preconceptions, language, values etc we have no tools to fictionalise ourselves... we’d be no one and exist nowhere; then where do we begin a journey?

So maybe in creating the world in our image (Churches based on human proportions..) and out of our abstract sensibilities and theories we create a type of space which allows us to exist (in a conscious way)? (i know this is a flippant thing to say, but this is a BLOG)

We cannot have any experience of the objective world except in the light of socially derived periods of duration which constitute the category ‘time’ and ditto for space, cause and the other categories (Alfred Bell, Anthropology of time)

By bringing order out of chaos.

There is a scene in the film Sixth Sense, where; Hayley Joel Osmond, runs into his bedroom (from the ghost girl), and into his improvised tent. Here he begins reciting some type of personal mantra (not sure if it has religious meaning) and surrounded himself with figures stolen from a church, it is as if he is desperately trying to reorder the chaos he had just ran from (the dead girl undermines his sense of the world and the type of space he exists within) he was establishing a territory. Physically (with the tent and symbols) and conceptually (religion).

Territories is where i’m going i think, movement between them, although i still can’t separate things into physical, virtual, social, political? They are all the same?

Thinking about Charlie's post maybe territories are ‘Spaces of anticipation?’

Each in intersecting "mobility" presupposes a "system". These systems make possible movement: they provide "spaces of anticipation" that the journey can be made, that the message will get through, that the parcel will arrive.- john urry mobility

Have any of you seen Videodrome?