"Nature is wiggly - everything wiggles!" - A.W.
How's that for an intro to Drawing 101?
I am reading "Psychotherapy East and West" by Alan Watts. Masked as a straightforward investigation into the parallels between Psychotherapy and Zen Buddhism, it is a very personal and free ranging meditation on the self, empiricism, and the limits of knowledge, with some beautiful writing at times.
For the past year or so I have been working on a project in which I am using images appropriated from the sciences, mostly animations, to question how it is we know things and how we share what we know. Er... big topic, I know.
I have been using the experience of reading this book to help myself understand the reasons I am interested in this subject before I move on to THE NEXT STAGE, as will be reported in a forthcoming post. I mean, other than the fact that the images LOOK COOL, which is probably most important...
"Natural science is concerned only with the observer's experience of things. Never with the way things experience us."
R.D. Laing, "The Politics of Experience" p.9
"Truths of the physical order may possess much external significance, but internal significance they have none."
Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Human Nature" p.1
"The more we understand of particular things, the more we understand of God" - Baruch Spinoza, "Ethics" Part 5, Prop. 24
I don't intend to go too deeply into the subject right now; the reason I chose to be an artist instead of a writer is that I prefer to allow images to do the communicating for me - they don't force me to put everything in a line. Whenever I get to the end of a sentence I always want to go in a dozen different directions, but I have to chose just one. What a frustration language can be! In some ways writing this blog represents an effort to participate in this game, to use language more precisely, but I don't intend to fully submit to the restrictions of linguistic form!
"We understand everything in terms of words or numbers, and they're stretched out in rows and lines. And our eyes have to scan those lines in order to understand them. But when I scan this view I don't do it line by line by line. I see the whole thing at once.... We have lamentably one-tracked minds in an infinitely tracked universe." -A.W.
In any case - I would have liked to meet Alan Watts, but this video is kind of the next best thing.
Too bad - Blogger won't let me display animated gifs. Although I guess the fact that they are going out of style is part of what attracted me to them in the first place. I guess you'll have to wait for the project to move forward.
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