a hint of watermelon

 

 

After all, objectivity does not consist in
suppressing an unavoidable subjectivity, but in so acknowledging its intrusion

-Denis Wood

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nosaj Thing’s “Eclipse/Blue” official video. Simply beautiful.

 

 

 

 

Spanish artist Luis Toledo, aka La Prisa Mata, blends images of environment and culture to facilitate an interaction between objects and our subjective understanding of them. These interpretively complex pieces at once juxtapose and relate man and nature in aesthetically pleasing, unified compositions.

 

 

 

 

 

real

construction

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Recently I had a nightmare in which I was lost in a grocery store, unable to find what I was looking for. The aisles were a maze, complete with dead ends and misleading characters who “worked” for the store but ultimately sent me in the wrong direction, always. The shelves were tall, packed with items that overloaded my mind with labels screaming jibberish. Some of these items would deceive me, take the form of what I wanted (I want to say it was beer) until I brought them to the cash register, and looked down, and realized that what I had held onto was not the right thing. This cycle repeated itself as I searched that grocery store for hours, scared, frustrated and lost, wondering if it was too big for me to know, or if what I was looking for wasn’t there at all. But I couldn’t, wouldn’t let myself walk out of those big motion-sensor doors without what I came for. I woke up and felt like I was still looking. Now I feel very anxious in grocery stores.

http://www.staggeringbeauty.com/

At what point does the world unfold?

This song.

Where do feelings originate?
The immediate response is, well, the interior of course. The emotional center. The agency of the subject. “The eye of the beholder”.
But what if I was to say that feelings aren’t our own at all,
that they actually surround us, and move us, like water?
And we swim in them, and they saturate us?

Engravings & paintings by Albin Brunovsky, 1935-1997

Like waves, feelings— desires, anxieties, fears-- bring us together and pull us apart. We can only control so much of the current’s direction and its effect on us. Simply put, even the most private of feelings, and what they mean to us, are created by multiple people.
Sara Ahmed eloquently describes this phenomenon of “Collective Feelings” by showing how affect, or the “motion” part of “emotion”, blurs the line between interior and exterior, subjectivity and objectivity, you and I.

“Feelings are not about the inside getting out or the outside getting in, but that they ‘affect’ the very distinction of inside and outside in the first place. Clearly, to say that feelings are crucial to the forming of surfaces and borders is to suggest that what ‘makes’ those borders also unmakes them. In other words, what separates us from others also connects us to others. This paradox is clear if we think of the skin surface not only as that which appears to contain us, but as where others impress upon us.”

”For example, Durkheim considers the rise of emotion in crowds, suggesting that the ‘great movements’ of feeling, ‘do not originate in any of the particular individual consciousnesses’, but come from ‘without’ (1966: 4). Here the
individual is no longer the origin of feeling; feeling itself comes from without, from the thickness of sociality itself. As Durkheim’s later work on religion suggests, such feelings do not remain ‘without’; ‘this force must also penetrate us and organize itself within us; it becomes an integral part of our being and by that very fact this is elevated and magnified’”

In essence, emotion is brought about by motion, by the fluid exchange between two bodies, two minds. While friends, lovers, strangers may come and go abruptly, each one has made an impression on us, an impression that will be transferred onto the next. The only defense we have against an increasingly individualized, mechanized world is to remember to move and be moved-
“Movement does not cut the body off from the ‘where’ of its
inhabitance, but connects bodies to other bodies – indeed, attachment takes place through movement, through being moved by the proximity of others.”
Collective Feelings, Sara Ahmed

In case you needed a smile-
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mattbellassai/the-most-wtf-pictures-of-people-posing-with-animals

In case you were wondering-
http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/09/27/and-the-worlds-most-educated-country-is/