#concresence

[adriancornejo]

Tower Hill Botanical Garden 2018 - Adrian Cornejo - 2018

[adriancornejo]

Concresence 07 - Adrian Cornejo - 2018

[adriancornejo]

My work is part of an exhibit at the Cowell Family Cancer Center in Michigan. My piece is that small pink one on the left. 

Every Single Day is a visual art exhibition on display at the Cowell Family Cancer Center in the Spring of 2018. This complex, contemporary, and empathic exhibition was curated by students enrolled in the Aesthetics of Health Course at Interlochen Arts Academy. The student curators selected art works with the intention of deepening the conversation around illness narrative, and how artists working visually might broaden our understanding of illness, health and the body. They chose work that is genuine, and rooted in personal experience (whether as the patient, caretaker, doctor or clinical staff member). Exhibited works do not only address cancer, but examine a myriad of other health experiences.

Adrian Cornejo Tucson AZ This painting comes from my series “Concrescence”, a body of work conceptually driven by my experiences in how relationships and bonds are made. This painting in particular is about trauma, both emotional and physical, and how trauma contributes to (or even becomes a catalyst for) bonding. The illustration depicts two planes floating parallel to one another connected by what appears to be a tube formed by the hole in the upper plane. The imagery here is in part inspired by illustrations of black holes and the notion that a rupture in spacetime can connect two universes; a black hole doesn’t just crush matter into infinite density but that the matter gets expelled elsewhere. In this painting, the black is the metaphor for trauma and the planes themselves represent people. This demonstrates that during extreme duress equally great bonds can be made; through love and compassion, two can become one and serve as stabilizing entities for one another. Personally, the experiences I draw from this painting come from instances from both my childhood and more recently wherein shared trauma specifically about depression, abuse, and familial chaos have allowed me to befriend and gain a support structure from people who were once complete strangers. Much like the two planes in the painting, our common experiences and the resulted empathy were the things that were capable of bringing together two discrete worlds.

[jesseturri]

But The Parts of Our Bodies Are Not Just Connected Through Physical Mechanisms: Panpsychism and the Combination Problem

“…the elements or constituents of organisms are related to each other in two basic ways—through external (physical) relations and internal (nonphysical) relations. The external relations are studied in physics, and involve the four forces of electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear, and gravity. These forces bind physical components together. But the parts of our bodies (cells, molecules, atoms, etc.) are not just connected through physical mechanisms. Every sentient being (whether atom, molecule, or cell) also connects through sharing experiences and meaning—through consciousness.

All the experiences and meaning in a collection of molecules that make up a cell are available to that cell to also experience; and in the same way, the experiences of a cell are available to its host organism (e.g., when you stub your toe the cells in your toe experience pain, and that experience is available to you, the dominant organism—unless some anesthetic is involved).

The dominant monad of consciousness in the higher-level organism literally feels the experiences of all its constituents. It feels their consciousness as part and parcel of its own dominant consciousness. This explains why, for instance, when the cells of your stomach or nervous system experience hunger, you (the dominant monad) experience their hunger as your hunger. Or when the cells of your eyes experience specific colors and shapes, those experiences are unified into a single moment of your vision.

The same process applies as cells grow, divide, and die in our bodies. The experiences of the dying cells are passed on to the newly forming cells as memory (memory is, literally, the experience of a past experience), and so the organism as a whole continues to have access to the experiences of cells that no longer exist—because the experiences of those cells live on in the new cells.”

The above passage comes from an introduction of an essay written by philosopher Christian de Quincey on the Combination Problem (or Binding Problem) that is associated with theories of panpsychism. de Quincey comes from a Whiteheadian perspective and does a great job describing how Whitehead deals with the problem (How can many consciousnesses be at the same time one consciousness?) originally posed by another famous panpsychist, William James.

…

Painting above: “The Many Become One and are Thus Increased by One” by Michael Childress

But The Parts of Our Bodies Are Not Just Connected Through Physical Mechanisms: Panpsychism and the Combination Problem was originally published on TURRI