Freewriting 5/29/21
by: Dave Gorum
- type: Freewrite Journal
There’s some role that’s visionary but not overbearing. Guiding, mentoring, teaching, learning, peering. Sniffing out patterns, helping people see and hear and develop their sensibilities. To shine brilliant in their own relation to the work. To tangle with and tease out the material of project. The art of being an influential node. Or communicating a decentralized center. Not solely, not alone.
Ownership has something to do with this. Of the work, of the output. The current relationship of art and its works is being reconfigured. The ideas of property and the entities that cordon off that property. The detached notion of responsibility in relation to ownership. Here the ideas of stewardship reappear. The craft of stewardship. Where does the stewarding act begin? How does it play into the creative process? The birthing, the midwifery of idea.
There is a responsibility in the parenting of these concepts. A right orientation to their care and nurturing. A balance of exposure and nurture. A commitment to the care of the parent as well. All a practice. An opportunity for understanding, for growth, for working with pain, for loving wholly, for firming in the crucial effort of responsibility, for play, for doing all these in collaboration.
I find myself drifting and bobbing and weaving here. The idea of elegant constraint reappears. Narrowing the field of play to induce action. Funneling reality toward choice. Binding, bonding.
Back to ownership, stewardship. You don’t own your children. There’s something in the creative act that’s related here. The art of parenting is bringing into the world nurtured adults. This is aspiration if nothing else and doesn’t always work. I’m out of my depth on this front. Thoughts of the educational process arise. The types of people the culture wishes to bring forth. Who our mimetic templates are and what their composition is. Of what stuff should those we look to be made of. Beyond this, what people help us grow into our bespoke selves. Aware, conscious, interdependent, and overflowing. The gift of practice in these arts shared as necessary engine in development.
A lot of squawking in the neighborhood this morning. Parrots nearby making a terrible racket. Someone in an alley calling for Patrick, the sound reverberating oddly off the buildings. The birds cheeping intently. Sleepy otherwise. Kristen and I feeling the coming anxiety of leaving LA. I’m becoming more aware of this. An odd sensation. The uprooting. The physical disentangle. New friends, a new understanding of place, a setting aside for comparison’s sake, for a larger view. Something inside that wishes to be settled, to be enmeshed. Movement and enmeshment are not mutually exclusive.
“Patrick, Patrick. C’mon baby. Hurry up. C’mon Patrick. Paaatrick.”
The awareness of the nomadic approach is coming online some. Probably room to do a McLuhan tetrad: Enhances, Reverses, Retrieves, Obsolesces. Perhaps later. Requires sitting with.
Can talk around the idea for now. Nomading seems to necessitate new methods of relating. Leaving impression in different ways. Sharing space and time takes on a relaxed preciousness. When moving through a place, the potential interaction can be more potent, perhaps in its aspirational form more vulnerable, open. An opportunity to see through new eyes in each locale. A foregoing of the full comforts of a fixed home to privilege alternate orientations to place and community. This necessitates a malleable self. It’s easy to become overwhelmed with the difference, the strangeness, the familiar but alternate. Each place affording a niche, each person in the niche environmentally shaped in ways subtle and instructive. Each a medium with something to tell. Finding a new home in this. A new comfort. The skill of deep passing through. Of touching and being touched. Our niche is the in-between. At least for now.
Thoughts on interface: Thinnest possible interaction layer. Distributed amongst. Connective tissue. Navigable. Spaces between. Portal frontends. Portal constructor
Navigation thru annotation
Context-aware wormholing. Queries somewhere in here. Surf the entanglements
A Cooperative vs a Collaborative