#minsoob

[in-the-blue-notebook]

FINAL CRIT

Key words:

The creative act that is translation

The distance between our subjectivities // How we still manage to meet each other

More-than-human

Attention as a devotional act <--> Foraging

Things in my head:

This work feels very process-based. It's about me, foraging, in new york. getting to know the plants here, looking particularly for familiar plants from Korea. researching about the sensory organs of a plant; the ways it communicates; and also about different mythologies and legends about herbalist knowledge. Thinking about what it means to belong in a new land.

it's a ritual of devotional attention. one that's in communication with foragers before me: my uncle, who was a ginseng forager, who passed away a year ago, leaving behind a room full of foraged herbs and plants submerged in alcohol // my ancestors, who decoded our relationships to plants in nation-building mythologies and traditional medicine // my maternal side, who had a lived knowledge of the sea, the edible seaweed, how the seas speak //

Things I want to work on:

Carving out a text to be interweaved with the images; suggestive, less descriptive. I want to give vignettes of the different experiences and stories I was thinking about.

More explorations based on the sensory capacity of plants. Electric signals.... mycellium networks....

Paring down the conceptual part of the work to what's really important. Too many branches right now.

Questions for crit:

Which images detract? What works?

How does the flow feel?

What information would be helpful, vs. detract?

[in-the-blue-notebook]

CRIT 4

"Through interventions upon foraged materials (thinking about photography, also, as a kind of foraging), I consider more-than-human encounters as an act of generative translation." 

Foraging feels important because it implies the affectively/phenomenologically transformative qualities of attention. In foraging, a blur of a landscape sharpen to reveal individual plants as you attune and devote to noticing its particularities. 

Then: the kinds of knowledge of another being you form through patient seeing, across time. An interrelational, attentional knowledge. Where the herbs grow, when they’ll start dying. Which seaweed is edible. What makes the crows in the neighborhood croak. A life in accordance, in symphony, with rhythms all around me, bigger than me.

Through foraging, I witness and collect traces of the lives I have held in my devotion. 

"Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer." - Attention and Will, Simone Weil

—

“And there are things that are hard to talk about — you’ll rub off their marvellous pollen at the touch of a word… They write me from home about mysterious flowers.” - Kafka, letters to Milena Jesenská

How to express oneself. How delicate that feels. Like pollen fleeting – to be fruited or disintegrated.

Umwelt is a specific way in which particular organisms perceive and experience the world, shaped by their sensory organs and perceptual systems. To me, it denotes the distance between our subjectivities, human or non-human. The chasm that will never be bridged. We are constantly translating; we are never not translating. Gestures may land on fertile soil, or on concrete. 

—-

What creativity and generativity (which I interpret as a new life force) occurs in our re-interpretations of one another? Shifting the focus away from the chasm, and into the new possibilities enabled in our translations. 

Through presenting distorted – intervened – perspectives of mostly plants, I try to invite a longer attention and curiosity to these beings, and disrupt existing ways of looking. 

In my interventions, I attempt to translate my experience of my encounters with them: how I experience their motion, their rhythm; the ways I’ve understood them through mythologies, herbalism, and Korean traditional medicine; and blend the different cultural contexts and lenses I’ve met them in. 

I’m interested in all the ways we still manage to meet each other.

Books I'm reading:

How Forests Think, Eduardo Kohn

Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence, James Bridle

Meandering: Art, Ecology, and Metaphysics, Edited by Sofia Lemos

Photobooks:

Fruiting Bodies, Ying Ang

Artists I'm referencing (/ Exhibitions):

<Ne'er Such A Thing>, Exhibition at Secret Riso Press, Rada Nastai and Freya Brooke Verona Copeland:

Juyon Lee

Motohiro Takeda

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++ previous version of the twig sculpture (tumblr only allows one video per post) that had to be abandoned due to structural integrity... I've been very humbled by physics this week

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thinking about the translations inherent within our encounter.

attention as a devotional act, and one that phenomenologically changes our encounter; words as pollen fleeting, to land on concrete or fertile soil; curiosities and ruptures and violence and play within it all.

the sequencing starts out with curiosity and wonder: half open, half closed. then, opaqueness but still in a playful way. with the twig-sculpture, a beginning of a rupture. then with the triad of the bodies, a more embodied expression of a violent rupture // a painful exertion // contortion.

then, a possibility for a sort of freedom within that.

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chapter 2

thoughts that stay with me from the reading this week -

stasis as the equilibrium of two pushing forces. tensions as communicated through the form: the medium, the body, the self-fashionings that peek out against the constraints of the structure. the quiet hums that can be read to a curious eye, or an eye that knows what to look for.

methods for refusing in place. the forms of agencies exercised in the realm of compromised, squeezed possibilities. it got me thinking more generally about forms of agencies beyond refusal... regeneration, refueling, reorienting. spaces within oneself that seep out, peep out.

i thought about things that sprout where they shouldn't be able to.

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A close cousin of oblivion is ecstasy, I think. The roots of the word -- ekstasis -- means to stand outside oneself, a removal to elsewhere. Ways to claw out of the claustrophobia of the self.

Could another close cousin be communion? In some ways, the opposite: oblivion as that which annihilates; communion as that which witnesses and buoys down a weightless body. Within both, a sense of dissolution.

-

The other day, a friend and I have a conversation about our shared goals to be more open in the ways we approach the world.

I say, I've been thinking how much I flit, and how to linger more. I get this sense that I need to go often.

Go where? Why?

-

In my mind, there's a dark room with the curtains drawn. I watch my loves cycle through addiction, cloaked from the world and themselves. I wait for you at the stadium of the band we've loved for years, and you never come. I watch you, the ulcers and the nausea and the oblivion in all its forms you welcome each day.

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What lies at the end of seeking far-off blue places? Catharsis? A sabbatical? Stalling? More of the same?