1. Here is a pdf of the lecture:

http://njtransect.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/thinking-in-times.pdf

People/Things Mentioned (slide number in brackets and the more obvious not linked etc.):

Thomas Harriot (9, moon images, plus sunspots 83), School of Athens (Rapheal)(20), Plato, Aristotle, Books used for images: Apian (45 and similar), Fludd (46 and similar), Kircher (66 and similar); Tycho Brahae (99), Kepler (117),  Scheiner (84 and similar), Bramante, Bernini, Andrea Pozo (134), Guarini (132), Juan Carumel DeLobkowitz (166), Leibniz (170), Spinoza (182), Re: Emergence from “How the Leopard Changed its Spots” Brian Goodwind (190), Soldier Lichen (200), Robert Smithson (201)

Please email if anything is missing or unclear etc.

We (Cole, Jess, Petia and I) spent the weekend sleuthing the perfect research walk. And we think we have found one that has a bit of everything. Cole, Jess, and Petia have developed a package of maps and information as well as a methodology. They will introduce you to the ideas and practices as well as lead you through some of the most astonishing parts of our transect. This will be a modern research walk in the spirit of Lewis and Clark or Alexander von Humbolt or … (I have added some links to contemporary walking practices here).

LOCATION:

We will meet at 10am at the Richard DeKorte Park. The address is:

2 De Korte Park Plz

Lyndhurst, NJ 07071

Here is a link to google maps showing the location. You will need to drive there. There are no other forms of transportation. If you need a ride let us co-ordinate via email as a group. Please research directions carefully! And let us be on time. This is important. My cell # 207.332.6097

WHAT TO BRING:

Key Items: dress warm. Good Winter boots (no mud! but lots of snow!). Bring pack with sketch book, pens pencils, Lunch + warm drink/thermos.

Other Items: Guide books to geology, history, biology etc. Maps, binoculars etc.

The Artists will be supplying equipment from their tool kit for this research walk (GPS, various cameras, maps, guides, pedometers etc.).

DURATION:

We will be done at 3:30pm.

Can people check out a number of different guides? Animal, Plant, Bird, Rock etc. from the library or bring from home. I have a couple that I will bring.

Also print out maps of the meadowlands, historic and present, plus map of transect etc.

And books on the Meadowlands….

If people have things can they post what they have?

Wonderful

Iain

1. Imagine that you could be dropped down anywhere along our line. What equipment do you need to make sense of place? Binoculars, Guide Books, Maps, Clothes, Boots, Pack? What else — interventions? Ways to perturbating systems (works of art)? Come really prepared. We will spend the whole class in the field (bring lunch, thermos etc.). Also consider the logics of our Parameters — how should they inflect how you prepare?

2. We will be led by these three artists/urbanists/researchers: Cole Caswell & Jessica George (The Geographic Observatory), Petia Morozov. They will be sending out some notes later in the week.

3.  We will publish our work via Lulu books. Take a look. We will make something quite straight forward. But this is a great resource for direct publishing.

4. I will post more as I hear more. Please do not hesitate to email.

Best of regards

Iain

1. I have published parameters on the page Class parameters. Please take a look. This should be the beginning and really evolve both collectively and individually. That was a good discussion on a very complex matter — it is most exciting how we are pushing and evolving these questions.

2. Where we were: See Meadowland Page.

3. I will add a post covering next week. Look out for this.

1. There is no van despite the great efforts of Michael. We will car pool. We need three cars. Just say if you have a good car for this. You can drive up to the loading dock. We can meet in the building lobby and try to leave at 10:05am sharp.

2. Here is where we are going:

Dragonfly

directions from MSU

3. Re waking in the meadowlands. It will be cold. Please dress warmly so that you will be comfortable working outside for a bit. We will also be inside.

4. Make sure you have done the prepatory exercise work. In regards to developing a position re reality + art + nature here is a short polemic by Smithson. Here is a good interview that covers a lot of critical ground. Please read both. And remember that your responses should not begin with your current medium/art practice (your comfort zone). Dig deeply into how reality + art + nature could be re-envisioned. One further note: In the discussion about understanding reality various versions of: “reality is what I make it” had come up. Here is an interesting interview that address such a position. I think that this form of criticism puts to rest such ideas on a general level.

5. We will be having lunch/class discussion at dragonfly after walking etc. We will be discussing the more conceptual part of the assignment in detail. And from this we will develop collective operating parameters for the class. Should be an exciting day!

Best of regards to all and please do not hesitate to email with any questions.

Iain

We will be going out into the Meadowlands next monday. Please dress for the weather and wear boots that are good for the mud.

Please purchase a map that covers MSU to Central Park and mark on it a line from the quarry to the Met. This will be the geographic scope of the class.

I would like to return to our first exercise and expand on what you have begun:

Assignment #2:

1. Revise and redraw/transfer your concept into your new work book. If this takes a couple of pages and involves clearly written notes on ideas, components and materials — that is great. If you push your ideas towards having someone sense something about this massive time frame — that is even better.

2. Analysis: Carefully consider your project. What are the core assumptions about reality that you are working with? I know this sounds EXCEPTIONALLY vague. But for example, how are you imagining change? Or: How are you imagining communication? What is the status of the Basalt? Who is the work intended for? Are you expressing something? Is art a distinct realm? Etc. Etc. Take on the big, vague, general questions that are at the actual (if unrecognized ) core of your work.

3. Once you have a short list of these put aside your original work. Just using the list, without reference to your work, figure out what it is to observe, to move, to record, to interact. Make a list of claims about how one should move, observe, interact etc. From this list — what techniques and what tools are needed? Think of differing professions from anthropology, to paleogeology, to ecology and how they give very differing answers to this question. Gather or make the necessary tools and learn/invent the necessary techniques. Bring these to next mondays class.

Notes:

Note 1: One can see all of this quite clearly in the work of Smithson. How he tries to ask very basic questions and develop new tools and procedures to get at these. Take a look at the Smithson page on this site for some helpful links.

Note 2: Really take seriously the question from the first exercise of “what does the basalt have to say?” and “what is the view point of 200 million years?”.

Ok — so it is quite easy to laugh at the idea that “basalt speaks” — clearly that is just plain stupid! But perhaps there is another way to frame “speaking” — that is not based on human ideas of “speech” — but rather on the idea of how something both can make and register a difference. Here is an excerpt from a good essay by the philosopher Steven Shaviro on how this might work:

The most crucial way in which Whitehead revises the panpsychist argument is that, for him, mentality — or what William James calls “experience” — is not equated (as it is in the work of most panpsychists) with consciousness. Photons and quarks, and stones and thermostats, all have “experiences,” which means that they do possess some sort of incipient mentality; but for Whitehead, they are probably not conscious. Even in human beings, Whitehead says, most mental processes occur unconsciously, or below the threshold of consciousness. What makes them “mental,” then? Whitehead’s notion of unconscius thought is related to, but also quite different from, both the psychoanalytic sense of the unconscious, and from cognitive science’s recognition that most cognitive processes are unacompanied by, and often irreducible to, consciousness. Like psychoanalysis, Whitehead sees unconscious experience as having to do with “feelings” and “appetitions”, processes of action and reaction that are not merely automatic responses to stimuli; but in contrast to psychoanalysis, for Whitehead these feelings and appetitions do not necessarily involve any sort of representational activity.

For Whitehead, mentality is characterised by what he calls “conceptual feelings,” or “valuations.” These are processes in which potentialities are in some sense contrasted or weighed against one another. There is not just the perception (and perhaps the recognition) of what is. For Whitehead, such a perception and recognition is exactly identical to physical causality; to say that B physically perceives or prehends A is exactly the same thing as to say that A physically affects B, or that A is the cause of which B is the effect, e.g. in the way that one billiard ball transmits energy and motion to another billiard ball by hitting it, and causing it to move in turn. In addition to all this, Whitehead says, B also has a mental or conceptual experience of A: the experience, let’s say, of being-caused-to-move. I doubt that the billard ball is in any sense conscious; but the event of energy-transfer is a mental experience for Whitehead, because it involves the activation of a potential (precisely of a potential for movement). Mentality consists in the comparison of moving and not-moving; this comparison is the “mental pole” of the “occasion” in which billiard ball B is hit by billiard ball A and propelled into motion.

Now, the role of mentality, or experience, in the case of the billiard ball is vanishingly small, or (as Whitehead tends to put it) negligeable. Nonetheless, it exists — it is at least present structurally, you might say. Experience is present potentially, but almost not at all actually. But if this is so, it is because experience is in itself the impress of potentiality. The energetic shock of being hit by another billiard ball is precisely a prehension, or an apprehension, of possiblity. Possibilities, or conceptual prehensions according to Whitehead, are always perceptions of what he calls “eternal objects,” or “pure potentials” — and these, in turn, are equivalent to what other philosophers call “qualia.” The apprehension of qualia — of the red glow of the sunset, for instance — is intrinsic and irreducible, because it is felt, pleasantly or unpleasantly as the case may be, and because, insofar as it is thus felt, it implies potential and contrast. Redness-as-a-potentiality is in excess of merely being a quality or an aspect of this particular moment, this particular sunset. My sense of redness implies that this scene could perhaps change, so as not to be red after all; and also that something else could be imbued by redness as well. And my affective response to the sunset has to do with my liking or disliking of this redness, a reaction that extends into the prospect of other things being red, or of this redness itself disappearing (as it does, once the sun has entirely set).

Experience, or conceptual feeling, thus always involves a certain process of “valuation,” or evaluation. Whitehead agrees with the cognitivists in seeing that these evaluative processes are most of the time non-conscious. But he does not see evaluation as itself a “cognitive” process — it has much more to do with “appetition,” which “includ[es] in itself a principle of unrest, involving realization of what is not, and may be… All physical experience is accompanied by an appetite for, or against, its continuance.” In this way, mentality (or experience) is not just the calculation and representation of what is, but also involves a striving towards some potential novelty. As a result of this, experience always issues in some sort of decision; and for Whitehead, such decision “constitutes the very meaning of actuality.”

Experience is, as Whitehead says, irreducibly private; which means that I cannot observe anyone else’s experience aside from my own. (There may very well even be a limit as to the extent of my ability to observe my own experience — as Harman also suggests from another angle). The privacy of experience has fueled the skepticism found throughout modern Western philosophy, from Descartes to Hume, and beyond into the twentieth century. (I include, under this head, the answers to skepticism, or dissolution of its paradoxes, given by thinkers such as Wittgenstein and Cavell). But for Whitehead, thedecision in which private experience culminates is also what makes it public and potentially conscious. Decision is not grounded in consciousness or cognition; rather, decision is what makes consciousness, cognition, and public relationality possible in the first place. “Feelings,” or movements of “appetition,” are the basic elements of mentality (or “inwardness,” or “qualitative experience”). Cognition, consciousness, and responsibility are consequences of this basic mentality, rather than preconditions for it. An aesthetic of decision precedes and grounds cognition and consciousness — rather than either of these being the grounds or preconditions for any process of decision. I say an “aesthetics” of decision, because it is a non-cognitive, and non-generalizable process; the problem of how decision leads from privacy to publicity, in Whitehead’s account, is a transformation of Kant’s problematic of how a singular, non-cognitive, non-conceptual aesthetic judgment can nonetheless lay claim to universality, through the process (precisely) of being made public.

I will stop here; instead of explicating this in more detail (which certainly needs to be done) I will conclude by simply juxtaposing Whitehead’s notion of experience-as-decision with some recent speculation in the physical and biological sciences. This is a continuation and expansion of some of the speculation that is already in my book.

The biologist Martin Heisenberg, in a recent article called “Is Free Will An Illusion?” makes a similar point about the “decisions” made by biological organisms. Arguing from experiments on bacteria, fruit flies, and other organisms, Heisenberg states that such organisms exhibit “behavioral output” that is independent of “sensory input”; that is to say, these organisms “actively initiate behavior” that is “self-determined,” rather than being “determined by something or someone else.” Studies of plants and slime molds, as well as bacteria and fruit flies, have isolated instances of “decision” that are not causally determined by the circumstances in which they occur, or the conditions to which they are a response.

Recognizing decision in all living organisms might seem to point to a kind of vitalism. But it would be considerably different from traditional vitalism, because it would not claim that some sort of intrinsic vital force would make living beings radically distinct from non-living things. Rather, as Whitehead says, the line between life and non-life of fuzzy, and the mentality or decisionality of life is something that is essential to life, but not exclusive to life: it extends all the way down.

Along these lines, the physicists John H. Conway and Simon Kochen propose what they call the Strong Free Will Theorem. According to Conway and Kochen, under certain conditions that arise as a result of quantum entanglement, subatomic particles respond “freely,” that is to say, non-deterministically, unconstrained by any prior physical events. If experimenters may be said to be acting “freely” when they collapse a quantum-indeterminate state by choosing which of several possible parameters they will measure, then to the same extent the particle thus measured is acting “freely” when it “chooses” which value to give this parameter. If this is correct, then even photons may be said to have a certain sort of inner “experience,” and to make a kind of “decision.”