SESSION material

Rogoff, Irit. “Becoming Research.” edited by Choi Jina and Helen Jungyeon Ku, 39–52. Seoul, Republic of Korea: National Museum  of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, 2018.

Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening (Video)

Pauline Oliveros, The difference between hearing and listening (Video)

Federici, Silvia. Re-Enchanting The World, 2018.

HARNEY, Stefano, and Fred MOTEN. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Minor Compositions, 2013.

Mobbs, Dean, Cindy C. Hagan, Tim Dalgleish, Brian Silston, and Charlotte Prévost. “The Ecology of Human Fear: Survival Optimization and the Nervous System.” Frontiers in Neuroscience 9 (2015): 55.

Moten, Fred, and Stefano Harney. “The University and the Undercommons.” Social Text 22, no. 2 (2004): 101–15.

Nelson, Maggie. On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint. McClelland & Stewart, 2021.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. Landscapes of Fear. Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Zanette, Liana Y., and Michael Clinchy. “Ecology of Fear.” Current Biology 29, no. 9 (May 6, 2019): R309–13.

Material to prepare for the workshop:

1) bring pen or pencil / and paper to write and draw

2) consider some everyday items to use for sound making exercises.

GROUP REFLECTION

The paradox of fear – it is something communities may want to eliminate but it may be an essential factor related to collectivity.  In this workshop  we first consider fears we are feeling in and around us. These given environments of fear are then unpacked to reveal  r how fear influences the nature of collectivity.  We engage in collective learning, mapping and sound exercises to uncover core concerns related to our fears, which then inform imagination about new world building and systemic change. We focus on what is legible, messing with ratios of noise and meaning, semantics and affects, chaos and rhythm. We play with cultural meaning-making to unlock the possibility of arriving to a place outside of the conditions we are conditioned to by the dominant fears that shape society. Can we arrive at new beginnings through collective study and research ? Here, we play out that dream and fear. 

…

Refrains from a disparate collective (or, some ideas that emerged during the workshop):

When do we choose to mark when it started?

What does that “origin point” do to action/response?

It is invited

 needed to be present in the body, but we have options how to cultivate it

 how we listen to it and react to it

Fear is an invitation for embrace as an ongoing emotion and companion - as we mistakenly are thought or enforced to learn that emotions are something to fix [or] remove and [we are taught] that [emotions]  are situational vs expansive and integral to our humanity. 

Fear as a shapeshifter is helping us understand our common struggles and omnipresent change. 

Fear as information instead of noise?

What kind of information is in “noise?”

Noise as parasite - like the one that gets sent by some kind of satellites to disturb other channels or signals. 

So, in that case, noise as anti-information, noise against any clear or understandable information; absent of any programs (to be consumed). 

Sometimes “noise” is coming to the senses, as an invitation for openness and loosing boundaries of inside and outside world - grounding in non-limiting ways, invitation for interconnectedness.

Merging of material and nonmaterial worlds.

Noise allows for context at times.

When the mind thinks ‘information’ it has only internal noises, but when that info is shared it occupies a shared space with another set of background alien info (aka noise).

Exploring the space in-between these standards creates an opening for a deeper grounding to take place. Noise can be disruptive, but sometimes essential for an information to arrive in a more meaningful way. 

Noise is the world as a whole. There are attempts at legibility through signal readouts, but the whole still remains in background.

Calling something sense or nonsense comes from a place of standard, and it’s interesting to consider the idea of ‘common sense’ in relation to this proposed binary. Common sense can also evoke notions of class, everyday happenings... ‘street sense’, the sense that is in relation to sensing dangerous situations, or conducting oneself in relation to the other, or to the stranger, that is classified as safe or risky. Nonsense may refer to sense-making that does not follow a line, or a clear conclusion…maybe the text from Moten could be considered nonsense if we try to read it as an expository. But it is a text which is reflexive, noting self in relation to others, making sense of self in relation to the environment, and vice versa. It is also reflecting the way that timeline intersect to make sense.

Sense and nonsense in a constant relationship / binary? Are there other forms in this category (if it’s a category), as in, is non-sense the absence of sense or against/in contradiction/conflict to ‘sense’... Does the presence of one mean the lack of the other, or do / can they cross / be interchangeable? Maybe this is being limited and trying to focus on specific wording without consideration of the thinker / perceiver of the sense/nonsense (and therefore through their cognition/ interpretation transform nonsense to sense) 

Can my noise be someone else’s info?
Noise is porous / it does not dictate a strict limit to what is and to what is possible. 
Nonlinearity as an ongoing tribute and sustaining of ecologies of togetherness. 

Do we get rid of fear?

HOSTS

Sonja Blum is a neurologist and an artist. She explores a space between intuition, memory, and social politics, and contemplates how collective identity and modes of knowledge production are intertwined, and how modes of knowledge production are legitimized. The work takes form through multiple media including video, installation, writing and performance, and collective experiments stretching the imagination of knowledge production and collective study. 

Maggie Wong is an artist, educator, and writer. She studies by playing with objects' affective edges in order to create social and sculptural forms of collective world-building amidst conditions of sentimentality. She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she now works as a lecturer. Additionally, she is the Associate Director of Iceberg Projects in Rogers Park, Chicago.