[-empyre-] whose "our systems" & body weather

[Johannes Birringer]

thanks to all who joined in the past few days, the first week will soon be over and
we have perhaps not have time to come back to all the posts that were offered,
thanks also to Sean and Chris who joined in - and I'll come back to my promised 
stories and religion and the abject, as I sense I am well aware of the larger
issues of pain and atrocity (not just in our memories) that Alan Sondheim asked about,
and my stories will thus already be less interesting as they concern performance art.

but as some or many of us are working, that also cuts close to the bones; Chris simply
noting that some the visual artists in Whyalla feel isolated and that there were
primarily also some technical obstacles, real obstacles (poor dispositif?)  that prevented
amplification and flow, connection and exchange and thus also understanding (never even
mind the language issue, which is, naturally, never addressed here either, on empyre) -

thus although I probably understand where Simon Biggs wants to take us technical beings (yes),
I still hang on to my memories inscribed in my particular body and my assumption of differentiated,
indeed if you were to imagine globally,  ecologically and economically, vastly differentiared subjective experiences of people, 
experiences of arrangements that have to arrange themselves with even as they may become aware that they are complicit/implicit. 
Complicity, in my book, is a political action.

Susan's take on somatic materialism -- I would love to hear you come back to the question about sensorial experience
and affect and what you make of granular distinctions if there are any between one or the other and whether/how you can know
or read affect?

thus, I wish to ask Sue (after reading the fascinating description of the movement, breath, and body-weather work),. how do you know?

>>
The device of imposing a metronomic discipline on the breath pattern emphasised the physicality of the present moment, and it required distinct attentional efforts to concentrate awareness either toward present bodily sensation and environment, or toward the "virtual" space of imagination/memory, nothing novel there. But what was curious was how the timing constraint added an unexpected affective layer. We found we did things like pausing action in the pauses, even though imaginatively we were travelling 'somewhere else', or of moving faster to try and fit more in to the time, like sped-up old movies. It was also a condition that we try not to predetermine 'where' we would go in the two-second breath pause, so each time we suspended the 'now' there was the possibility to find ourselves anywhere that exists in our somatic/memory archive, and not necessarily where we were in the previous two-second window, so each virtual transition was full of not-knowing. This then brought to awareness another element - fear - which further complicates the somatic material, and a coping mechanism of adopting an objective-subjective standpoint kicks in, altering the field of awareness again. And this was all before dealing with others, language, technological interfaces etc.,  let alone cosmic dimensions!>>.


How do you know what the others felt or feared?  how to you share (reflect? articulate) awareness after the presence/present and virtual moments  (and Simon must then not understand your work at all, does he?)?

respectfully

Johannes Birringer