From Sense Perceptions > to > Language

From Right Brain > to > Left Brain functioning

This goes directly to what I do as a visual artist.

Thought Experiments:

1. Psychology:
   Attuning to one’s sense perceptions and thusly emotional state > & > Naming your emotional state.
   .
2. Western Political Economy:
   And let’s say the Himba tribe are western leaders willing to lie to skew outcomes (for that is what They are attached to). And let’s say they are talking about religion, education, economy or the environment.

   Can you see how without an earnest attachment to what we see, western leaders are capable of creating a “War on Terror”, “Privatization of the Commons” including the “Failure of Public Education”, “Trillion Dollar Bailouts for Capital”, the “Tar Sands”, “Climate Change” and the “Depletion of the Environment?

   I think we need to adopt more earnest subjects to be our leaders.

Thomas Art, Ways of Seeing

via the [ Washington Note ]

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people…

- President Eisenhower, Chance for Peace Speech
April 16,1953

Thomas Adaptive Reuse, Infrastructure, International, Misc, National, Ways of Seeing, What I am Looking at

Anthropologist Wade Davis, author of “The Wayfinders,” makes the case that the traditional cultures which are being crushed and annihilated by modernity are in fact repositories of human knowledge that we’re fools to discard.

Thomas Ways of Seeing

via [ OurWorld 2.0 ] “Mapping critical politics: a land use expert talks tar sands” By Max Ritts

The late geographer Bernard Nietschmann once observed that “more indigenous territory has been claimed by maps than by guns”. Whether or not you agree that more can be taken back with maps, it is hard to overestimate the role of representations in the shaping of collective understandings and modes of possible intervention in political struggle.

Land use maps can have a number of applications. In many countries, they are prepared by government agencies, for a variety of reasons, or by individual groups and organizations. Often, land use maps are made publicly available for the benefit of those interested in land use trends. These maps can also become important in zoning and property disputes. Read more…

Thomas Case Studies, Tar Sands, Ways of Seeing

UNDER THE PLUME OF PERMITTING

Thomas East Chicago, Environment, Information Graphics, Ways of Seeing

[ Skafish ]

Another by-product of East Chicago.

Thomas The Air I Breath, Ways of Seeing

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The art making practice of many artists keeps them squarely in the realm of “Art.” In-so-doing, they continue to function in society as the Artist with that identity intact, but for me that has not always been the case. With every foray that I’ve made into other disciplines I’ve found myself landing smack dab in the middle of the edge of that culture. The confidence that allowed me to make this foray very quickly dissipates into fear when I realize the commitment necessary to gain awareness threatens my ability to find my way back to the studio. It doesn’t matter whether I am studying philosophy, traveling, developing online learning communities, working in urban planning, advocating for my fenseline industrial community, raising children, or trying to maintain a relationship with my wife, at a certain point I’ve shifted my thinking so significantly that I threaten someone else’s identity of the artist and the reason for my foray. To be effective, the challenge is to find my way back through the narratives that control their perceptions of my identity. Ouch! or I can just keep doing what I do without the capitalization to do it.

Although I don’t know this to be really the case, each time I attempt to re-enter the art world I feel a little more distant and a little less accepted by it. I feel like the cameraperson or reporter who put down the camera or microphone and just started helping-out with whatever means necessary at that particular moment. Usually that has meant that I relied on some other aspect of our visual culture, but sometimes that has meant that I write a post in my blog, a position paper, a plan, or engaged in politics. And because I can’t remain steady or I wobble too much for those observing me from some distant art world, I must not be really contributing. I know, I know I have to market myself in manner that the art world recognizes. all I have to do is read Joanne Mattera’s Marketing Monday blog posts to understand that.

It is much easier to receive a thumping on the chest than to be ignored.

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“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” By Walter Benjamin (1936)

Preface

When Marx undertook his critique of the capitalistic mode of production, this mode was in its infancy. Marx directed his efforts in such a way as to give them prognostic value. He went back to the basic conditions underlying capitalistic production and through his presentation showed what could be expected of capitalism in the future. The result was that one could expect it not only to exploit the proletariat with increasing intensity, but ultimately to create conditions which would make it possible to abolish capitalism itself.

The transformation of the superstructure, which takes place far more slowly than that of the substructure, has taken more than half a century to manifest in all areas of culture the change in the conditions of production. Only today can it be indicated what form this has taken. Certain prognostic requirements should be met by these statements. However, theses about the art of the proletariat after its assumption of power or about the art of a classless society would have less bearing on these demands than theses about the developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production. Their dialectic is no less noticeable in the superstructure than in the economy. It would therefore be wrong to underestimate the value of such theses as a weapon. They brush aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery – concepts whose uncontrolled (and at present almost uncontrollable) application would lead to a processing of data in the Fascist sense. The concepts which are introduced into the theory of art in what follows differ from the more familiar terms in that they are completely useless for the purposes of Fascism. They are, on the other hand, useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.

Read more…

Thomas Ways of Seeing