On Stillness and Motion

Scurry from Jonny Gray on Vimeo.

[Elements of this video come from here and here.]

A tree has movement.  It grows.  But it does so slowly, in ways that are almost impossible to see with the naked eye.  Meanwhile, around the tree, things scurry and run, fly and fall.  The tree, itself, marks this continuum of motion with a grounded trunk and branches that must not be too rigid, that must wave in the wind: stillness at one end and movement at the other.  But even that rigid trunk has a little flex to it.  And in some cases, trees have been known to walk.  I am not talking about J.R.R. Tolkein's Ents (although they are very cool); I am talking about the walking palm trees of Costa Rica.  What a wonderful and strange world we live in!

So, if we view stillness from some frames of reference as a kind of motion, can we also see motion as a kind of stillness?  Perhaps when the motion is contained within a stable frame?  Is that stable frame the space around the motion?  Or is it the way we interpret the motion -- as cyclical or goalless or imperceptible if you observe it from far enough away?  Perhaps we most transform our sense of motion and stillness through interaction, through the work of working together even when we are alone.

This week I have been working with collaborative art on-line and the metaphor of a tree.  I've been thinking a lot about things that change states and our resistance (sometimes) to that movement, even when it is unavoidable.  I've been interested in the desire and dread to fix things (art, people, work, etc.) in place, to own them, to not let them go.  And I have been thinking about the remix, the ways in which things are constantly made into other things and how that is both a violent and a creative act.

The two pieces I borrowed in my video above resonate for me with this tension.  Craig's sound piece is generated from a program that translated the data of a still photograph (the "Anarchy Tree" of the original @Platea trunk post) into a MIDI sound file, which he then processed and mixed with other sounds (including the woodpecker soundfile from the trunk post).  In other words, the stillness of image literally becomes the temporal movement of music.  Similarly, Deborah's  "Green Man" video series plays with the idea of the fixed camera focused on the fixed tree in dynamic relation to the movement that goes on around the tree and a medium meant to capture images in motion.  I wanted to put these two pieces into dialogue, adding a bit of my own video work in keeping with the Tree-Blog aesthetic. 

Even documenting the Tree-Blog event has had its own dialogue of stillness and motion. The map is, in some ways, an attempt to fix the ephemeral, or at least provide a guide to its murky trajectories through a variety of internet terrains.  As I have made the map of the Tree-Blog project each day, I have constantly had to adjust it -- shifting branches to accommodate other branches, re-clustering nodes as they begin to interact, adding in posts I missed from the days before.  In other words, the growth of this tree (even as map) has not been a simple linear path, but a constant shifting and reworking.  Growth, like evolution, is not precisely linear.  Seemingly fixed positions have to shift.  "Permanence" is a fiction, a concept created by fantasizing humans that doesn't really have a corollary in nature.

@Platea is a collective of artists who explore what it means to make art on/with/through social networks of digital information exchange.  We tend to favor Twitter as the location of most interest (as revealed by the "@" and our catchy subtitle, "tales from the stweets").  But if Twitter is the medium of choice, then we truly do embrace the digital scurry -- the frenetic motion of short messages, streaming information, and posts with rapid expiration dates. 

Even so, we also concern ourselves with documentation of our projects.  We take care to make clear attributions for borrowed works and illustrations.  Some of us make clear statements that our contributions are copyright protected and are not available for others' use.  Others are interested in using social media to "crowdsource" work that will appear in gallery installations and/or be sold.  That is, there are elements to this work that don't want to be ephemeral or lost in some undifferentiated network of exchange.  

All of which is simply to say, we constantly negotiate this tension of permanence and flow, the lasting and the ephemeral, the individually owned and the collectively enmeshed.  I hope this Tree-Blog experiment will not disappear too quickly into the ether of the net; we have certainly tried to document it.  But all trees -- even the old giants -- one day fall.  And I have a suspicion that our Tree-Blog may prove to be more a mimosa than a sequoia.  But hey, out on the "Alkaloid of the Month" branch, Jason tells me dried mimosa root is a moderate hallucinogen -- so at least there's something in there to help keep the visions coming.

Thanks to all who have checked in at my blog this week and taken a chance to participate in @Platea's Tree-Blog project.  

Rethinking This Blog

I know, it's been a while since I've posted here.  Sometimes it is easier to read than to write.  Reallly, though, I am struggling with what I want this blog to be: Outlet for my political views?  Resource for sharing art?  Professional musings of an academic?  A public version of a personal diary?  Maybe.

I guess I am finding it difficult to keep my focus on the purpose of this sort of project.  After spending much of the month of July "off the grid" and almost entirely away from electronic communication in McCarthy, Alaska, I return to a more mediated homeplace intimately aware of the different mindset all this connectivity allows.  Hell, psychologists are even studying the effect of so much electronic communication  -- I know because somebody linked this NYT piece about it to my Facebook page.  Ain't irony cool?

I think I also liked the self-imposed news vacuum while I was away.  Sure, I came back to Judge Walker's 136 page rebuke of the Prop H8ers.  But even that moment of celebration was followed all too quickly by the 9th Circuit's decision to keep a stay on same sex marriage in California until the legal appeals process has a chance to work itself out, no doubt years from now.

Mostly, it is the latest furor over the Islamic Cultural Center at 51 Park Place that has me shaking my head these days.  To me it is such a no-brainer; this is what freedom of religion is for.  I would actually support a mosque at Ground Zero if one were seriously being proposed, but that is not what this non-issue is about.  It's really about pundits and political operatives taking advantage of a hot button issue.  It doesn't help when President Obama wades into the fray (exacerbating it) with a confusing for-the-First-Amendment-but-cautious-about-the-wisdom-of-the-location stance.  It also doesn't help that Sen. Harry Reid decides it is better for his campaign to agree with his Tea Party opponent that it is a bad idea.  These folks (Reid and Obama and even the Anti-Defamation League in NYC) trouble me more on this issue than the screaming heads on the Right, so ready to whip their base into a lather with the usual tactics of xenophobia and fear and scapegoats.

And then this: today I perused a blog that I generally like, Christopher di Spirito's From the Left.  His queer and progressive news blog is a constant source of information and useful discussion.  Sure, he's a bit more critical of the Obama Administration than I think I am, but it's not like they haven't given him a reason.  Still, it is today's post that hit me like a gut punch, where Chris criticizes Obama's Afghanistan policy by reporting on the Taliban's stoning of an adulterous couple.  He writes:

I don’t understand President Obama’s arrogant thinking that a surge of U.S. combat troops will somehow reverse the tide of radical Islam in Afghanistan? This is a deeply theocratic nation, mired in the 9th century, with absolutely no interest in joining the greater community of modern nations.

I share his doubts about the effectiveness of our military actions in Afghanistan, despite General Petraeus's recent junket to support the idea that there is a way to "win" there.  But it is the totalizing sweep of Chris's anti-Islamic analysis, replete with the following header image for the post that so bothers me: 

Really?  Chris too?  Even the Left is now joining in the Al Qaeda and Christian Right meme that this has always been about the West vs. Islam.  Even if we get the hell out of Afghanistan, how is that meme going to help us negotiate the volatile global politics of the 21st Century?  Do we "win" if we're only stuck in a 1950s mindset while "they" (all of 'em!) are trapped in the 9th Century?  A bevy of polls over the last few years shows that Chris is hardly in the minority in the US in being suspicious of Muslims.  Nor is he alone in equating Islam with anti-American ideology, despite considerable evidence of Muslim support of the US and firm criticism of terrorism. But then, as most queer folk are painfully aware, there is a huge disconnect between popular opinion and what is right, between polls and justice.

I considered writing a comment expressing my concern on his blog, and I still might.  But I think the issue for me is bigger than just a comment.  I considered dropping his blog from my reader.  But what does that really accomplish?  Better to hide from the Internet as a whole, I suppose.  And besides, I still find From the Left to be a pretty good blog, perhaps all the moreso because I sometimes disagree with it.

In the end, I think I share Chris's frustration (rage?), but I am cautious about where to direct it.  Does that caution make me, like Obama, "spineless"?  Maybe.  If, in our frustration with Obama's (liberals'?  Democrats'?) spinelessness, we turn to sweeping generalizations and graphics more frequently found on the vitriolic Right, aren't we compromising our message and ideals?  Is it really gaining a spine just to start sounding like your opposition, to start using their tactics? 

Which is why I find myself reconsidering what a blog is for or if I should even be blogging in the first place.  It was a conservative blog, after all, that fanned the flames of the "Ground Zero Mosque" controversy.  It is blogs that fuel the Birthers and the Oath Takers and a host of radical groups from across the political spectrum.  And it is in blogs where self-proclaimed (professional?) Leftists rehearse rhetoric that can compete with (i.e. out shout?) the screaming "dittoheads" on the Right.  But to give up on blogging in general is, well, like dissing all of Islam because of the behaviors of the Taliban. Or, if you prefer, it is like ignoring the inevitable; it's like trying to "take your country back" by selectively deciding what the founding patriarchs wanted it to be.

So I take this all into consideration as I consider what is to become of Bungy Notes.  I don't want (or plan) to give up blogging just yet.  I want to do my best to exemplify the discourse and practice I want this electronically interconnected world to be.  I don't want to whine or just bash on other people's sites.  I want it to be a place for art, politics, and the personal.  And yes, I want it to be an open place for disagreement, by all means.  I share much with Chris, from sexual orientation to political leanings, but for all of that similarity we are still very different people.  Let us celebrate that difference, and let us look for such diversity in others even when they seem to be part of a group, particularly a reviled group.

(Anticipate a redesign of the site with maybe a little more clarification of my focus here.  Or maybe it will just have a different color scheme.)