hail is different to rain at least this one landing on me now it was pale, translucent, semi-soft the size of small peppercorns but white in puddles it made ripples or circular waves the same in form as ocean waves smaller than ocean waves but bigger than rain waves some small surfing creature a millipede or flee would be on the phone ‘It’s up’ they would say to fellow surfers but this lasted not long enough for wetsuits it landed briefly on my face on my tongue on my hand it pattered on my jacket announcing it’s presence then gone on the wet floor it melted returned to water it’s adventure in phase transition over moving downhill eventually to rejoin the ocean waves and prompt further phone calls far away on another day
This is the story of a journey and arrival at the making of a logo, a small and simple graphic representation of a much bigger and more complex thing. I can see the value in a logo to represent Moving Space. I use one already. WordPress lets you put up a small site icon to help give your site an identity. It appear where the url movingspace.art is displayed at the header of your browser. I use the Copyleft symbol. C Gnu.org, the home of free open source software says..
Copyrights exist in order to protect authors of documentation or software from unauthorised copying or selling of their work. A Copyleft, on the other hand, provides a method for software or documentation to be modified, and distributed back to the community, provided it remains Libre.
I like the idea that I put stuff up on my website, some my own and some other peoples, and you are free to use it but don’t claim it as your own. Credit the author, me or a. n. other. But more importantly make it part of a dialogue or joint venture. The image of an inverted copyright symbol expresses this better than a thousand words, but the words make it more explicit.
Part by design and part by chance I found a simple form which could become a logo without copyright infringements, which could function as textual and imaginal representation and connect art and science, mythos and logos, experiential learning and the arts therapies, and capture in essence what I am trying to do with Moving Space. I see what I do as a thing in process, an adventure, a thing in a state of constant self making, ouroborus, the snake eating its own tail. Recent research on the idea of recursion seemed to capture this and led to me seeing an idea I had already explored in a new light. To me this is the point of the exercise.
The image that emerged is this… i/i and represents the idea of the image of the image. I want to go on to more detail about the ideas that i/i connects together in another post but first I want to talk about the journey.
Long ago I read an article about an article about people and television. It stuck with me. The original article was from the 1990’s and in Christian Science Monitor and called ‘Behind the Glass’. It suggested that people were increasingly seeing a world behind the glass of their TV that some TV viewers judged to be better than life in front of the glass, in the living room, in their life. Thus they sought to emulate life ‘behind the glass’ so as to make their real life on their side of the glass more like the pretend life they saw behind the glass of the TV. The original article suggested this was problematic on the basis that much of the stuff they saw behind the glass was not real, it was manufactured in a TV studio or movie lot. The article about this article, that I read in the 2000’s suggested it had all got worse since the arrival of the internet on our computers. We could have seen this coming it said. Today the influence of life behind the glass of the mobile phone or tablet is similarly critiqued. Some say it is a grave problem, some that it is not a problem at all. I figure it is both. Images, like the imagination, can become a source of good and bad.
Imagination comes from the verb imaginari ‘picture to oneself’, from imago, imagin- ‘image’. This is central to what I am trying to do. To make art as a form of personal research. To make art and pay attention to what you make and what happens what you make it. This connects the arts therapies with experiential learning. In this an image, as a concrete object, a word, a poem, a painting, a dance move, your own or someone else’s can be used to make another image and thus act as a form of re-viewing or reflection or development of the preceding image. This is recursive or iterative. In this is also the idea of a mental image, in one’s imagination. This is the source of the thing you make as art, and the making, the embodiment, has a hand in this as well, literally.
I like working with projects and will usually have several overlapping projects on the go at any one time. I started work on a project I called ‘The Image of the Image’, connected to the idea started above, but ending with a person preferring their online image to their offline image. What struck me was the idea that the image people make of themselves online can, in some cases, become more attractive to them than the image they have offline. The politician sees the TV soundbite as more important than the thing the soundbite was meant to be about. But it became too generalised and unfocused.
It struck me that this idea, the image of the image of the self, was a problematic thing. For example it could be seen in an identification with the subjective projected image of self as opposed to identification with the body, the inhabited lived object that is the self. I became aware of concerns that there is a rising level of body dysmorphia in adolescents. Here and here. It seemed it could at some level to be connected to a relationship between the life lived in the embodied world of the here and now and the disembodied world of the internet going on forever. The suggestion was that it was a new thing.
It got me thinking about the myth of Narcissus. In one of a number of versions Ovid tells of a boy seeing his image in a pool, and fell in love with the boy he saw there but on this love being unreciprocated, turned into a gold and white flower, remaining rooted to the spot. In an earlier version, Narcissus spurns a boy, who curses him to fall in love with his self image in a pool and, because the image is unobtainable, Narcissus kills himself. This story is old, suggesting that it is nothing new. The Narcissus myth is a story of youth.
This appeared to me to be the story of the dangers of the image of the image, the disembodied image on the digital world being preferred over the embodied image in the analogue world. But in art making one is always working with an image of an image. The photographer Garry Winogrand, here said ‘I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.’ He sees an image on the street and photographs it. He is interested more in the image of the image than the image. Galleries are full of paintings, images of an image the painter had of the real world or in their mind’s eye. All images of images. I read a lot and the thing that is written is an idea about an idea the writer had. Be it an idea in a book about an idea about how a future world, set in 1984, could display the qualities of totalitarianism. Then I read Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, in which ideas were developed based on the ideas in Orwell’s book, the aforementioned 1984. Hockney painted ‘A Bigger Splash’ here expressing his delight at living in the California sun after living in Bradford. It is an exuberant image of the image of exuberant poolside life.
But is not just art. For a performance piece I did here I developed this Faux Maths formula to describe the algorithm for a walk.
Where P is the path of the walk, as an iteration or repeat of p, which is each leg as a straight line a-b until this is changed by meeting a person (the m is an aboriginal sign for a person, basically, the bottom mark left in the sand where a person was sitting) in which case the path p changes (the triangle) by n degrees. Although entirely fake as maths, I wanted this to be a symbolic representation of a walk. In my walk on January the 1st I also used a very simple version of this, an algorithm sending me LLLR and ultimately into a closed loop. Maths contains symbolic forms called numbers and formulae. Maths, language, art, all are symbolic. All contain elements of repetition, images of images, ideas about ideas, things referring to other things or nesting within things.
At the end of the last post I encountered contact with the capacity for crows to engage in recursive reasoning. This piqued my interest and I wrote about recursivity in experiential learning and commented on it’s occurrence in a wide variety of settings. In maths recursion featured in a maths controversy. A book was written called Principia Mathematica attempted to prove all arithmetic from basic principles. But a mathematician called Goedel proved using maths that there are mathematical statements that are incomplete ‘that are true but unprovable, and perhaps even more surprising, that said the system of axioms will lead to a proof of its own consistency (lack of contradictions) if and only if it is itself inconsistent.’ Here. So a form of recursion was used by Godel in his ‘Incompleteness Theorum’ which could prove itself true by proving itself false through an act of recursion by referring to itself, a thing considered heretical to maths. And you thought modern art was weird.
The research on recursion proved very fruitful. Some of it was quite demanding intellectually. I reconnected with maths and came to see it as a language I could understand. I started to see recursion everywhere. In accounts of consciousness. In accounts of creativity and imagination. In accounts of human and animal evolution. In the simplest and most grand acts of art making, in the works of great literature and music and Fine Art, in performance and theatre. It was intrinsic to experiential learning. It was central to infant development and attachment. I came to believe it was central to human evolution through attachment and teaching and toolmaking as an inseparable trinity of familiality, sociability and teamwork. It is a way of seeing things as being simultaneously both single entities and things in process, naturally developing hierarchies of complexity providing simultaneously a global and a granular perspective. I think it can spin tales of fascination, creation myths and literature, create mathematic formulas that allow us mastery over the material world, enable music that will make you weep, it can move matter.
But it was also to be seen in ideas about echo-chambers on the internet and in conspiracy theories and in accounts of totalitarian systems. It could be seen to feed into the inter-generationality of abuse. The easiest way to become an abuser is to have been abused. But it can spin tales of deceit, make men and women dance on tables in the Capitol on January the 6th, and send people to the gas chambers. Recursivity can produce infinite loops from which there appears to be no escape. Cancer could be seen as a form of recursive growth. Unending. Extinguished by death of the organism. The climate emergency a form of cultural cancer. The myth of unlimited economic growth. Extinguished by the extinction of the human line.
I saw this on YouTube. By William Burroughs…
And that line ‘…evolution did not come to a reverent halt with the arrival of homo sapiens…’ stopped me in my tracks. So very funny. So very true. I became interested how this idea might work through a serialised story at a poetry night I attend and started writing and through developing the story I came to see this fictional scenario was actually worryingly realistic and that this may be the inevitable outcome. The story remains unfinished. It frightened me. Maybe the Earth wants rid of us. The Goddess in the story is driving global warming to rid the world of man. There are some interesting ideas about that suggest fiction is a way of working through ideas about the big issues that facts and figure fail to achieve. Wagner is good for gender issues, Orwell for the politics of totalitarianism, Marquez for the crossover between magic and realism.
In the story I worked with the goddess as the one facilitating the end. The Goddess says to Eva the human protagonist…
“I am not who you think I am. I am not lightness and sunshine. I was once but I am no longer. I am Eumenides, I am Athena, I am Banshee, I am the Furies. I am the Maniae, I am black Kali the destroyer. I am Ran the Giantess of the ocean. I am Hel the Queen of Death.
I am the perpetrator and purveyor of global warming. It is my act of homeostasis. I bring global genocide, infanticide, regicide, patricide, sapiocide. I want the end of man. I want man cooled and comatose. I want man unevolved and extinct. I want man dead.”
And creativity and imagination is, I think, behind it all. It is our curse and our blessing. We can imagine unlimited growth but not how to prevent it becoming cancerous. Recursivity is many things, but I have come to believe it is central to our imagination. Our imagination is limitless, unbounded by the material objective world. This makes it at once liberating and dangerous. I came to see i/i as a symbol of imagination. The ability to make an image of an image, make an idea from an idea. But unbounded imagination is problematic. We can get lost in such a vast world, believe the world is flat, or that Trump won the election or that we can ‘Take back control’ or that nobody will notice if people put vast numbers of people into camps to be ‘re-educated’ again. I can get lost in thinking about thinking, writing endless blog posts that nobody reads.
Through my discursion around recursion, prompted by an article about how crows are a clever as people, I have found a way that makes all my wanderings make sense. But that sensibility is subjective. It works for me. Recursion is a form that cannot be expressed as one word. At heart I am a nominalist. I have come to realise that all we experience are symbols of some deeper reality. Words point the way but are never the destination. The path is made in the walking of it. The map is not the territory.
A favourite quote of mine is from Orson Welles who said “The absence of limitations is the enemy of art.” My hiatus filled with reading and art making related to recursion has acted to put some brackets around the overly open and discursive path of the last few years. Like my self-imposed and entirely amateur and anti-academic PhD has ended. Oddly on my 65th birthday. My plan, stated at the end of my last post, to work with artform to explore the experience of exploring recursion has taken longer, and generated more words than I expected, but has been fascinating. All I have to show is a new logo of bracketed imagination, but getting there has been fruitful, and instructive. The symbol, the image, the imagination, is everything. One picture is worth a thousand words, but without the words there would be no symbol. The symbol emerged from a long journey. So it could also be a symbol for adventure, the thing that happens before you arrive. Art is a journey, a thing in process, made material momentarily by the flash of an image, a painting or a poem left on the trail to show the traveller where they have been. So i/i may change but for now it works. I will ramble on.
Not all those who wander are lost…
Tolkien
Header image courtesy of thisisnthappiness.com – ‘art. photography, design, dissapointment’
Anyone around Carlisle and the borders UK want to meet and drum…
Drop me a line, I have drums for group drumming…
Let’s alter states…
“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.”
In my work in the USA I became aware of and interested in archetypal ‘Trickster Stories’ of Coyote, Rabbit and particularly Raven and used them in my Adventure Therapy work. Tricksters are seen as wise fools who can both cause trouble and be foolish but also bring great wisdom and change. They do this by being clever, not strong. In my dramatherapy training, we often used myths, and the oxymoronic power of the trickster was seen as an important aspect of dramatherapy practice, in that seemingly simple or even foolish actions can be very therapeutic. I also found that my work could be undermined by being too clever.
Recursion is taken to be a sign of high intelligence, particularly in relation to being able to have mindsight, the ability to perceive in your mind, some thing in another persons mind. This is an extension of the idea of embedding one thing in another. It struck me that this is a quality of the trickster. Raven is a trickster in North America, in Australia, Crow is a trickster. Another trickster in America is Coyote. I have a great memory of a story by Mark Twain in … about coyote, (or cayote as Swift writes) about his trickster qualities. It goes thus…
‘But if you start a swift-footed dog after him, you will enjoy it ever so much—especially if it is a dog that has a good opinion of himself, and has been brought up to think he knows something about speed.The cayote will go swinging gently off on that deceitful trot of his, and every little while he will smile a fraudful smile over his shoulder that will fill that dog entirely full of encouragement and worldly ambition, and make him lay his head still lower to the ground, and stretch his neck further to the front, and pant more fiercely, and stick his tail out straighter behind, and move his furious legs with a yet wilder frenzy, and leave a broader and broader, and higher and denser cloud of desert sand smoking behind, and marking his long wake across the level plain! And all this time the dog is only a short twenty feet behind the cayote, and to save the soul of him he cannot understand why it is that he cannot get perceptibly closer; and he begins to get aggravated, and it makes him madder and madder to see how gently the cayote glides along and never pants or sweats or ceases to smile; and he grows still more and more incensed to see how shamefully he has been taken in by an entire stranger, and what an ignoble swindle that long, calm, soft-footed trot is; and next he notices that he is getting fagged, and that the cayote actually has to slacken speed a little to keep from running away from him—and then that town-dog is mad in earnest, and he begins to strain and weep and swear, and paw the sand higher than ever, and reach for the cayote with concentrated and desperate energy. This “spurt” finds him six feet behind the gliding enemy, and two miles from his friends. And then, in the instant that a wild new hope is lighting up his face, the cayote turns and smiles blandly upon him once more, and with a something about it which seems to say: “Well, I shall have to tear myself away from you, bub – business is business, and it will not do for me to be fooling along this way all day” — and forthwith there is a rushing sound, and the sudden splitting of a long crack through the atmosphere, and behold that dog is solitary and alone in the midst of a vast solitude!’
In this act I think coyote shows mindsight. He can con the dog. To get the dog alone and humiliated in his domain, coyote has to know how the dog will think. He embeds himself in the dogs head, thus coyotes could be seen to display the power of recursive thinking, with no language in sight. What’s more, is the domain of this Trickster is the wild outdoors, the land uninhabitable by man and dog, dog being a domesticated beast. Same as rabbit and raven. Trickster is an experiential learner. Mark Twain also said, on being asked to reflect on things in his long life he was grateful for replied “I am glad my schoolin’ never got in the way of my learnin’.” Twain is suggesting experience was his teacher, that school teaching may be an impediment.
But the Trickster appears in many places. The wise fool appears the fool to learned or people who think themselves clever but the Trickster uses this to trick them. Even as I write this I am watching Colombo the cop casually con an oh-so-clever murderer (in this case an ambitious politician) into making a mistake that will have him show himself as a fool, by himself appearing to be a fool. Columbo is even scruffy and scrawny and dishevelled like coyote. Columbo is the wise fool, he is coyote transposed into contemporary culture. In the UK this could be Reynardine the Fox.
Columbo leads this smart city guy out into the desert and makes a fool of him.
In Mind of the Raven here Bernd Heinrich talks about how in any bit of forest or mountain there live ravens who have a pecking order and an established network of intimate, kinship and social relationships. But when young ravens fledge, they do not understand them, or more specifically tend not to adhere to them. Young ravens are trouble. They meet fledglings from other family groups and form gangs. In an established settled feeding site, the gang of young tearaways will turn up, steal the food and take off with it. Our local rooks work as a small group to turn over the turf on traffic islands, leaving all the moss pulled out, often over periods of days. Rooks are very well organised which means unorganised or uncooperative birds are disruptive.
I see this too locally, after fledging, when our young rooks are kicked out of the family nest we have found them sitting in disconsolate gangs at the bottom of our garden, looking sorry for themselves in the rain. Literally, they are teenagers hanging at the bus stop. Troubled teens. Tricksters all. The band Elbow also observe this trickster. In their song ‘Lippy Kids’ Guy Garvey writes in his wonderful poetic way about lippy kids settling like crows. Watch the keyboard player do the trickster thing and use insulation tape to make the old keyboard arpeggiate without an arpeggiator latch.
Lippy Kids on the corner again Lippy Kids on the corner begin Settling like crows Though I never perfected the simian stroll The cigarette scent it was everything then
Do they know those days are golden? Build a rocket boys Build a rocket boys!
One long June I came down from the trees And kerbstone cool You were a freshly painted angel Walking on walls Stealing booze and hour-long hungry kisses And nobody knew me at home anymore
Bernd Heinrich talks about he is unable to categorically say what happens to these young birds in the long term. For our local rooks who have a much larger social set, they form crowns in the move from spring to summer. A tower of circulating birds will appear over the roost. Clearly, there are more birds that inhabit the roost. My belief is that this is a way of rooks from different roosts, particularly fledglings, mixing and meeting birds from other roosts. The gangs at the bus stop seem to dissipate around this time. Given a need for the mixing of the gene pool, this would make sense. Also if older birds move over to a new social set, then it could be knowledge and culture is transferred, but this is pure speculation and wishful thinking.
A Crown of Rooks
If the trickster does display recursive features, even down to the circulating crown of rooks, then the trickster and thus recursion at a social level may have the following archetypal qualities. The trickster is young, it is an outsider, a thing of the wild, it is a troublemaker but a source of new ideas and new life, it brings risk but in the long term diversity, in the short term it appears elusive and contrary, but in the long term it settles into a perceptible pattern. If Columbo is the trickster archetype coyote then he is also socially inept, scruffy, impoverished, appears inept and a bit of a clown, but fully ten steps ahead of everybody all the time, he is a bit of a con man, he leads you on to your own demise, in the short term his actions seem strange, foolish, incomprehensible, but in the long term the pattern emerges and he gets his man, or rather he facilitates the means by which his man get himself. Tricksters are facilitators. As con artist the trickster facilitates their own interests, and as the hero, they facilitate the interests of other people. Either way the Trickster is never neutral, always brings change, for good or bad.
Red Reynardine the Fox the UK Trickster- Photo by Erik Mclean on Pexels.com
At the end of my last post I wrote about how I saw an article here crows titled ‘Recursive sequence generation in crows’, what it stated next piqued my interest ‘Recursion, the process of embedding structures within similar structures, is often considered a foundation of symbolic competence and a uniquely human capability.’ Other articles had more clickbait in their headlines, one stating ‘Crows Perform Yet Another Skill Once Thought Distinctively Human’, here and whilst this claim is not fully endorsed by all scientists I got to thinking about what I know of the Corvids and how this recursivity might be linked to their capacity for learning from experience. I wondered, given the frustration expressed in my last post about the difficulty in describing doing, and the proposal that experiential learning could be recursive, and the proposal that recursive thinking is based on language, and the observation that crows don’t talk, I wondered what it was in the experience of the crow that could produce recursive thinking.
So this post and some following posts will explore this through applied research and art as research with a view to applying ideas of recursivity to art making and experiential learning. The intention is to engage in subjective research, to use my own and other people’s observations along with art making to help me develop ideas through the action of making stuff and attending to what I make and what happens when I make it. This does not render an objective outcome in a scientific or empirical sense but it does render objects which provide opportunities for reflection and thus render personal insight and subjective knowledge. Outcomes are subjective, situational, experiential, embodied, emergent and multi-modal. As research, this will be generative and performative1. I hope it will make something happen.
Observing Doing
As part of my current outdoor as art practice, I walk a lot locally, I like the outdoors outside my front door and enjoy making art there. In my walking and my art making I have become quite attached to a local rookery. Through observation and reading, I came to realise the local rooks had culture. They had a form of collective knowledge learned from experience and shared. For example, in the winter I observed that they all left at dawn to feed remotely. They settled in a tree then set off en-masse to some remote destination. Normally they fed locally. I suspect they left for the Solway when the fields nearby were frozen solid. As a maritime environment, the ground freezes by the sea last. On my travels, driving as part of my day job, on frozen days I saw rooks feeding by the Solway in large numbers, but they were not there on warmer, unfrozen days. My hypothesis was that the local flock probably had birds with memories of feeding remotely on frozen days and these birds led the whole flock to feed. Memories of past events are seen as an aspect of recursive thinking enabling planning for future events or enacting plans for alternative actions in the present.
Describing Doing
In the aforementioned research, crows are shown to possess the power of recursive thinking. This is proposed to be a skill previously only seen in humans by virtue of being expressed through language. The implication being that crows don’t talk so how can they possess recursion as a skill. Central to the research was the act of bracketing, of seeing one pattern within another pattern. Crows were shown to be able to see the pattern within the pattern below with brackets within brackets.
This is said to relate to recursion emerging through our capacity to use language to embed one idea within or express one idea as another. Much of this relates to the work of Noam Chomsky. Chomsky explains linguistic recursion as something that occurs when a grammatical sentence, which includes a noun or noun phrase and a verb, might or might not contain another sentence. Again at its core recursion is the idea of perceiving one thing within or through another thing. Extended, this leads to ideas of language, empathy, imagination, planning, art, memory, culture, science and maths. The idea of symbolic thought, thinking beyond the here and now of animals. So crows thinking recursively intrigued me and delighted me.
I got to thinking about how my observation of my local rooks and crows suggests they are very familiar with one thing within another thing. I believed they could have a form of embodied recursivity. As a dramatherapist and experiential educator this interests me.
Crow Talk
When I walk locally I often see a crow and when she calls I hear other crows nearby which I cannot see. My supposition is that individual birds use calls to locate where other crows are. Thus they are aware of themselves as a thing within another thing, the bigger thing being them as a group or flock. They are social birds, specially the rooks, and their experience of their vocalisations will almost always be of themselves vocalising in relation to other birds’ vocalisations. One could imagine the call of one crow as a word within a bigger sentence uttered by the flock, but this is spatial and embodied not sequential and spoken like we speak.
In my initial research relating to me checking if I was understanding recursion correctly, I found that the idea of recursion cropped up in a broad range of settings. It recurred within maths, logic, biology, ecology, linguistics, philosophy, media studies, code and programming, art, literacy and creative writing, psychology and neuroscience including studies of consciousness, evolution and ontogeny, aesthetics, fractals and chaos theory, and that was in just one google search.
My interest is in experiential learning and art making as a form of experiential learning. So whilst in all this I could find no direct references to experiential learning and recursion, there was enough to provide material to connect recursion to experiential learning and art making. The range of references suggested a phenomenon that could connect many different things, which interests me as this suggests a phenomenon which could be at the root of many other phenomena. A key to art as research to explore and express personal experience is its multimodal use, exploring one thing through many artforms to see patterns, connections and exclusions. Art making is seeing one thing through another thing which suggests a core recursive function.
A Plan For a Direction of Travel
So my plan is to use basic research approaches, document searches and reading alongside art making as personal subjective research to explore and develop my understanding of recursion. This will be posted on my blog, but because a blog has the most recent post first, and this journey may be useful to be seen as going from it’s departure to it’s destination and not the reverse, I will put up pages showing the journey in it natural order. Because it is my belief that art making and/as experiential learning is intrinsically adventure, there will be no fixed destination. From the little I had read, I could immediately see that recursive processes are the same. A mathematical sequence has a fixed formula, often with an end point. But the recursivity exists as a process, moreover, it exists ‘in process.’ The formula makes some thing change. The recursive formula in maths could seem to be as far as you can get from art making and experiential learning, but each iteration of the formula derives its outcome from the previous iteration. It is cyclic like it learns from experience. Like art making it is a difficult thing to describe in words.
One definition of recursion (of many) is that recursion is a thing that defines itself by it’s own definition. here It is described as exhibiting self-similarity. In programming languages, if a program allows you to call a function inside the same function, then it is called a recursive call of the function. One example of recursivity brought together the aesthetics of art and geometry and a philosophical ideal for ancient Greece, the golden mean. In my training as a dramatherapist we put great emphasis on the archetype and the symbol in myth and storytelling. But with a background in science, I could see that the emergence of Euclid and Pythagoras also relied on the archetype and the symbol but through maths and geometry. Euclid worked out basic geometry and expressed it through his book Elements which was used as a core text until the 19th C. It is plausible that the work was done with nothing more than a compass and line in the sand on the floor, like at a campsite or like on a blank canvas. It was plain that the golden mean made itself from scratch. You start with a straight line, divide it into three, use a compass to make a right angle and define the section so AB/AS = AS/SB = 1.618… Yet the golden mean is found in nature, art, science, music theory, architecture, on and on. It is deeply self-similar and seems to recur in many diverse settings.
Doing Doing
What struck me was that recursion is a thing made in the making, it is a doing thing that remains elusive for words, it is as the saying goes, a path made in the walking of it, the principle of Dao as stated by Zhuangzi. So for my starting point I embarked on a path of making some thing, or numbers of things and work multi-modally. I want to also use poetry and story as if crow could inhabit recursivity, to show how crows subjective experience may include recursivity. I want to see if I could make the golden mean with a compass and a ruler, or more specifically, have the golden mean make itself facilitated by me. I want to do this through art making but also dig through more formal research descriptors. I want to see where this intended path will take me. I start with direction not destination.
Given that my initial interest was captured by the nature of crows I decided to work with language, but through poetry and imaginative writing to better express my ideas about recursion and how crows could experience and embody recursion without using words. This would be an experiment to see if a creative process could be used to explore and express the embodied experience of crows as recursion. This would, like I said, not be an alternative to scientific research, but an adjunct, an act of performative research to describe in a creative form what the science expressed in quantitative form. A subjective re-viewing of the thing the science showed us. The subjective object.
Barrett and Bolt; Practice as Research – Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry – Introduction. ↩
This post comes three weeks after a walk on New Year’s Day 2023. On the walk, I wanted to use a walking algorithm of turning LLLR at path intersections to reconnect with my local walking range after a hiatus. The walking algorithm helps me attend to the experience rather than concentrating on navigation. After the walk, I wanted to make some thing that said something about the experience. I made a string of words describing the experience of the walk along with a slideshow of images and put up a post.
I wanted to use the words in a way that showed the experience of the walk, the form showing just one thing after another to indicate the experience of walking a linear path, and the content indicating what I saw and thought. A long string of unpunctuated lowercase words describing the thinking and sensing seemed to do this. It was not prose nor was it a poem, it was an impression of the walk in words. I called it LLLR prosepoemwalk. here
On the page, the string of words became a word block, a physical form, something I have worked with before. The words represented a series of encounters with the place I walked through. Each one occurred as the here-and-now experience, but which added up to a sense of time passing as I physically passed through the outdoor space.
One of the things that interests me is the way showing or describing doing, the words and pictures of the experience, never fully express the fullness or completeness or singularity of the experience. This is specially the case if you are intentionally attending in a state of flow.
This post has been worked on for three weeks. I made the object shown above and below to try and express the experience frustration of describing doing, and translating experience into words. What writing the post revealed surprised me. I want to bring what it revealed into the post, but first I want to describe the wandering path I took to get to what it showed me.
Looking at the words, in unpunctuated lowercase text as a block, I was interested in what would happen if I made the words take on a linear form, rather than the block imposed by the page. A memory of ticker tape experiments in physics came to mind. Then I saw a big string of words describing doing extending way beyond a tight space of a small circle, showing only 2–3 words. I wanted to make this image or idea as a material object, to express the difficulties in using words for describing doing. This was my original sketch, in MS OneNote. I saw the inner circle as my experience within the bigger circle, the space I was walking in. I saw the words as just a little bit of the experience, not really fully describing my experience. They went on and on at length about some shorter succinct experiences. The experience, like the artform, could speak for itself simply without verbosity and verbiage.
In my dramatherapy training and practice and my reading about art as research, the idea of art as a form of material thinking was developed and was very compelling. Can we think, through the experience of making material objects? Can the materiality of art making be research without needing words? I work on this a lot. Some arts practitioners have explored ideas and experiences of material thinking.
Some Ideas about Material Thinking
Two interesting arts practitioners who have worked with theories and practices about material thinking, the capacity for arts materials and practices to act as a way of thinking through doing are Barbara Bolt and Augusto Boal. Each uses different words to describe the experience, but the core phenomena is similar.
In a great piece of writing by Bolt here she says ‘Theorising out of practice, I would argue, involves a very different way of thinking than applying theory to practice. It offers a very specific way of understanding the world, one that is grounded in (to borrow Paul Carter’s term) “material thinking” rather than merely conceptual thinking. Material thinking offers us a way of considering the relations that take place within the very process or tissue of making. In this conception the materials are not just passive objects to be used instrumentally by the artist, but rather the materials and processes of production have their own intelligence that come into play in interaction with the artist’s creative intelligence.’
In ‘Rainbow of Desires’ Boal writes in a different way about ‘Concretisation’ in the experience of artistic or therapeutic performance. He says ‘Concretisation is the putting of ideas or thoughts into concrete form, concretisation being the act of materialisation of these desires’. He uses the word desire as an amalgam of idea and intention. He goes on to say ‘The desire becomes a thing. The verb becomes a palpable noun.’ Then of the artist/performer through the experience of doing, of acting, of action he goes on to say ‘In living the scene, she is trying to concretise a desire, in reliving it, she is reifying it. Her desire… transforms itself into an object which is observable, by herself and others. The desire, having become a thing, can be better be studied, analysed, and (who knows) transformed… Not only what one wants to reify is reified, but sometimes also things that are there but hidden.’ (pg 24 Rainbow of Desires).
Both Bolt and Boal advocate for material thinking. The materiality can be through a physical object, or through performance, an engagement with space. In both cases we make some thing come into existence that previously did not exist. This was called poiesis by the greeks and included art objects and theatre. My proposal is that this is experiential at it’s core and making art as an object or as a performance is a form of experiential learning. We make art and attend to what we make and what happens when we make it. So I did this and am telling you about what happened now. This is what I made as an act of material thinking. The inner circle is the experience. The words, taken from my writing about the experience, take up much more space than the experience.
So what does this object have to say?
The Object – A Subjective Reflection
I could find no name for it at the time and still cannot. That it has no name interests me seeing as it is mostly words. The original image I had in my head was of a circular object made of stiff paper with cuts to allow a tape with words on it to pass through it, like a line of text. This was my idea. My intention was to make it and see what it had to say. My preparation was to fiddle about making prototypes and find a form that worked for me. Then I made it.
In my mind was a way that the circular bit would be the singularity of the experience, present in the landscape, and the words would be utterly unable to fit into this. The words in the prosepoem were also made the way they were to represent the line made by walking. So I printed out the whole thing as large text as vertical lines going top to bottom of an A4 sheet. My intention was to do the whole prosepoem and cut it into strips and stick them end to end but it would have been 36m long which would have taken too long to make. I have to go to work some time. This only served to reinforce the idea of the difficulty of describing doing.
In my prototypes I experimented with circles of card with smaller circles drawn inside them but it did not work for me. So I used some cutting dies used in crafting to make the form which worked nicely for me. The words were constructed as a loop, so I got circles within circles within circles which was pleasing. I played with it, moving the strip back and forth and found the way that it only showed a few words at a time was also pleasing.
An important part of art making is the act of reflection. This is a core element of experiential learning. But the great thing about an object, a material manifestation of your subjective experience is that it persists after the experience. It is like you hold the the experience in your hand to aid reflection. In the action phase of art making there are three elements. Action, the doing, Reflection, the thinking and Incubation, the not doing or thinking. The object helps with this. You can forget it completely, let it sit and come back to it. Some thing happens at an unconscious level. Like when you cannot remember the name of something and then 10 minutes later it pops into your head. Some thing incubates like an egg or a seed, then pops open or sprouts little leaves. The Celts start their day at sunset and their year at the end of autumn on what we call Halloween or All Saints Day. Growth starts in darkness.
In my previous post, King Crimson sings a song about his experience of art making here. The writer Adrian Belew talks about the art object he made.
‘I do remember one thing
It took hours and hours but
By the time I was done with it
I was so involved, I didn’t know what to think
I carried it around with me for days and days
Playing little games
Like not looking at it for a whole day
And then, looking at it to see if I still liked it
I did!
The more I look at it, the more I like it
I do think it’s good
The fact is…
No matter how closely I study it
No matter how I take it apart
No matter how I break it down
It remains consistent
I wish you were here to see it!
I like it!
This is what my unnamed object did. It remained consistent. In contemplating it it became a material objective form expressing my experience, my ideas and words could roll around. The object and the experience of making it became a form of material thinking. And as Barbara Bolt says ‘Material thinking offers us a way of considering the relations that take place within the very process or tissue of making.’ I made the thing out of a desire to better understand describing doing. Of this Boal says ‘The desire, having become a thing, can be better be studied, analysed, and (who knows) transformed… Not only what one wants to reify is reified, but sometimes also things that are there but hidden.’ The last bit is important and links to the image on my home page. Here Art lets you see things from another point of view.
Part of my research surrounding the making of the object was writing. I have a journal and used this and wrote various forms of this blog post. John Baldesarri, here one of the elders of modern art talks about writing thus, ‘Writing helped me understand what I was thinking about.’
I suggest we see writing as performance or a form of material thinking. You have an idea or a desire and in writing it down you see it as words on a page or screen. Your thoughts are materialised. You see them dance onto the screen and deliver the content of your own script. You see your ideas perform like actors on the silver screen like a movie, but on the screen of your PC or Mac.
Rachel Lois Clapham says ‘To call something a performance is to separate it from the world and then present it back to the world as something distinct. This double movement of separation and re-presentation is the writing of the performance, and it is in this writing that performing exceeds doing. Being written gives the performed thing the simultaneous immediacy and distance of language, by which its separation from the world permits the fullness of its expression.’ here.
That ‘..double movement of separation and representation..’ she talks about, is the cyclic form of experiential learning. It is what Performance Studies progenitor Michael Schechner calls ‘Restored Behaviour’. here Viewed through the lens of performance, writing can be seen as experiential learning. In writing I can experience my thoughts as material(ised) thinking about experience. This is writing as doing, a verb, as performance, as well as a noun, the thing I have written, my writing, the thing you read.
In writing this post I cycled through different titles, but like the object I made, I could never settle on a title as a fixed thing. I could not name it. The noun, the linguistic act of fixing a thing with a name eluded me. The act of the noun to name a thing, as opposed to the act of a verb, to denote an action seemed to me to be in opposition. The words on a page describing doing seemed to take the action of the noun and thus seemed to fix the verb, the action of doing the thing, thus rendering it inaccessible to the reader. ‘You had to be there’ you might say when a description of an experience falls short of the experience. One title I tried was ‘The Subjective Object’. On reflection, this seemed to work very well. It has an intrinsically oxymoronic nature, which seemed to express the intrinsically oxymoronic quest to describe doing. An objective description is intrinsically incapable of being congruous with the subjective experience of doing.
My proposal is that we can make art as experiential learning to conduct subjective research to explore and express personal experience, including outdoor experiences. I see this as an adventure, which taken from the Latin adventurus ‘about to happen’, which also makes this an oxymoron. The thing about to happen does not currently exist, and when it comes into existence it is no longer about to happen, so it cannot be what it’s name claims it is. It feels like trying to explain things by giving an explanation of the thing.
I lived with my object for three weeks. I had made it in the form I imagined which fixed it. But I wanted it to move me on. I wanted it to propose a new form and meaning for itself. So I ignored it. I let it incubate. I tried writing about it but the words would not organise themselves, they just circled back round and returned to themselves. I put up this post to express this experience. here
My experience is that all made things will change form and meaning over time. I had to bide my time. I once went to a lecture by an artist and psychotherapist, called Patricia Townsend who wrote ‘Creative States of Mind’ here in part because there were lots of books about the skills needed to make art and about the psychology of named artists and named artworks, but few about the experience or psychology of making art. Lots about art as a noun, but little about art as a verb. Where art as doing was described it was presented as the skills of the oil painter or the jazz pianist or the method actor. Patricia talked about her journey to becoming a skilled artist, exhibiting and selling work and working as an arts therapist. She talked about how she had found her unique way of working after a long journey. She talked with pride about eventually finding her unique artistic vision. But in writing the book she had looked back at her undergraduate work, having ignored it for years. She described her shock at seeing her unique artistic vision in her earliest work, in plain sight. What had changed was not her work, but her capacity to see how she saw. My experience is similar. I look back at my early work and see things there that in my mind are new exciting and current developments in my work. Not looking at things can help you see better the things you are looking at.
Like the man in the King Crimson track, I played games with my subjective object, ‘Not looking at it then looking at it to see if I still liked it…’ and the way I saw it changed. In the original image I only saw the circle with words going through it. In making it, I cut it joined the ends together. The making of it made me make the prosepoem into a shortened edited loop. But the loop moved through the opening. This offered new ways of understanding the object. I played with the materiality of the object and new ways of thinking about the describing the doing became apparent. The material thinking capacity of the object offered new ideas that were there all along, like Patricia’s undergraduate work and my earlier work. What the period of not looking had changed was not the object, but my capacity to see how I saw it.
I photographed the object just after I made it but missed the way the words formed and endless loop. Later I could see that. So I photographed it again to show the word loop.
So I started with a stream of consciousness on the walk, I turned it into a string of unpunctuated lowercase words, I wrote them down on a page and the string became a block, I took them to a ribbon to recreate the linear experience of the walk, then I looped them to make them fit in the object. But the object I made remained physically consistent. On reflection the making of the object both explored and expressed the experience, not only of the walk, but the experience of making the object as well. I still find finding the words to describe this lived experience difficult.
In my training as a therapist and later in the reading I did on post-grad arts research the capacity to use research to show efficacy of the art therapies and arts education in a quantitative form through and through the written thesis was questioned. The argument was that the art making was research. Words describing doing were of a second order to the direct first order expression through art making. The words became a discursive adjunct to the non-discursive artform and it’s making. That art can be research is still contested and modes explanation and discourse still abound. But for me the object I made shows a first order expression of the experience. The materiality of it’s construction made it’s own intelligence apparent. It showed me what I could not see. But in part, that it became seen was in part because of the act of performative writing. I saw my confused thoughts on the screen and, in conjuction with the object, worked with them to see some thing hidden from me. Like Boal says of reification of desires above ‘Not only what one wants to reify is reified, but sometimes also things that are there but hidden.’
In the end the elusive experience of the circularity of language in the making of this post was oddly made more fully known through a totally unconnected encounter. I have a newsfeed about art and the outdoors. I found and posted a news item about the intelligence of crows. I adore the whole Corvid family. I have encountered them in the Alps and the Atlas Mountains, in rural Wales and Cumbria, and in the middle of London. Crow is a trickster. Ted Hughes wrote a book of poetry about Crow. Here On the linked site Paul Radin says of the Trickster, ‘s/he became and remained everything to every wo/man—god, animal, human being, hero, buffoon, he who was before good and evil, denier, affirmer, destroyer and creator.’ The trickster is a god and an idiot. The news item is about the intelligence of crows.
In reading the article here I was taken with the central finding of research which showed crows can engage in recursive reasoning, a form of intelligence assumed to be singularly human, and a product of language. It derives from Latin recurs-, stem of recurrere “run back”. Wiki succinctly describes recursion as ‘the process a procedure goes through when one of the steps of the procedure involves invoking the procedure itself.’ here
Experiential Learning as Recursion
There are many descriptors of experiential learning, but in all there is a big element of recursion. What we do informs what we do next. We have an experience which when attended to, informs our next experience. It is a loop. Our next action is informed by a looping back to previous actions. But sometimes we need to go round the loop many times to be able to see how we can get out of a loop.
Examples of recursion are many. It is well used in language, mathematics and logic, but also occurs in art and biology, so descriptions of recursion will vary. But the act of recursion seemed very apt on reflection of the experience of taking my walk, making my art object and trying to write about the experience. The experience of writing, going round and round in a seemingly endless loop was moved on by changing the way I saw my object to be an endless loop.
So to me recursion would seem to be a way of seeing patterns in patterns. To see patterns in patterns needs you to see a lot of patterns. But once you see the pattern, you cannot unsee it. If recursion is based in language, then how come Crows can do it. Pattern recognition comes from the experience of patterns. Recursive learning can be experiential. It may well occur in the natural world, as well as in the world of mathematics, and some mathematicians say the world is mathematical in essence. It does occur in language. It does occur in art making as the story of Patricia Townsend shows, and my story of making the endless language loop in my art and not seeing it also attests.
The thing within recursion is that it has a naturally closed element whereby you can only say something about a thing by saying something about the thing you are saying something about. But going round that loop allows you to see a pattern and in seeing the pattern you are able to move on, to another loop, but through seeing another pattern. My proposal is that in making art, the experience of making becomes concretised, materialised through materials which have their own intelligence, (their intrinsic form) so it enables you to see the pattern of your experience, and move on to seeing another pattern. You literally have an object that is the experience. It is recursive.
A symbol that was given in my dramatherapy training was Orobouros, and this is a symbol of recursion.
Coming from experiential learning I took this to mean the experiential learning cycle and glibly failed to pay attention to it in detail. But looking again I realise the snake is feeding itself by eating itself. That what I learn by doing informs what I do still stands as a model for experiential learning, irrespective of what a snake eats for dinner. But what I wanted to show here was an example of how one can learn from the experience of making art. And as an example, it shows both the pitfalls and the productive paths. I have learned something through art making, but it’s description in words took longer than I thought.
My plan now is to work with artform to explore the experience of exploring recursion. This will go up in a series of posts rather than one long one.
Moving Space 