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recent bookmarks from robertogrecohow to do nothing – Jenny Odell – Medium2017-07-01T07:34:33+00:00
https://medium.com/@the_jennitaur/how-to-do-nothing-57e100f59bbb
robertogreco…we’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; what a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying. (emphasis mine)
He wrote that in 1985, but the sentiment is something I think we can all identify with right now, almost to a degree that’s painful. The function of nothing here, of saying nothing, is that it’s a precursor to something, to having something to say. “Nothing” is neither a luxury nor a waste of time, but rather a necessary part of meaningful thought and speech."
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"In The Bureau of Suspended Objects, a project I did while in residence at Recology SF (otherwise known as the dump), I spent three months photographing, cataloguing and researching the origins of 200 objects. I presented them as browsable archive in which people could scan the objects’ tags and learn about the manufacturing, material, and corporate histories of the objects.
One woman at the Recology opening was very confused and said, “Wait… so did you actually make anything? Or did you just put things on shelves?” (Yes, I just put things on shelves.)"
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"That’s an intellectual reason for making nothing, but I think that in my cases, it’s something simpler than that. Yes, the BYTE images speak in interesting and inadvertent ways about some of the more sinister aspects of technology, but I also just really love them.
This love of one’s subject is something I’m provisionally calling the observational eros. The observational eros is an emotional fascination with one’s subject that is so strong it overpowers the desire to make anything new. It’s pretty well summed up in the introduction of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, where he describes the patience and care involved in close observation of one’s specimens:
When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book — to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves.
The subject of observation is so precious and fragile that it risks breaking under even the weight of observation. As an artist, I fear the breaking and tattering of my specimens under my touch, and so with everything I’ve ever “made,” without even thinking about it, I’ve tried to keep a very light touch.
It may not surprise you to know, then, that my favorite movies tend to be documentaries, and that one of my favorite public art pieces was done by the documentary filmmaker, Eleanor Coppola. In 1973, she carried out a public art project called Windows, which materially speaking consisted only of a map with a list of locations in San Francisco.
The map reads, “Eleanor Coppola has designated a number of windows in all parts of San Francisco as visual landmarks. Her purpose in this project is to bring to the attention of the whole community, art that exists in its own context, where it is found, without being altered or removed to a gallery situation.” I like to consider this piece in contrast with how we normally experience public art, which is some giant steel thing that looks like it landed in a corporate plaza from outer space.
Coppola instead casts a subtle frame over the whole of the city itself as a work of art, a light but meaningful touch that recognizes art that exists where it already is."
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"What amazed me about birdwatching was the way it changed the granularity of my perception, which was pretty “low res” to begin with. At first, I just noticed birdsong more. Of course it had been there all along, but now that I was paying attention to it, I realized that it was almost everywhere, all day, all the time. In particular I can’t imagine how I went most of my life so far without noticing scrub jays, which are incredibly loud and sound like this:
[video]
And then, one by one, I started learning other songs and being able to associate each of them with a bird, so that now when I walk into the the rose garden, I inadvertently acknowledge them in my head as though they were people: hi raven, robin, song sparrow, chickadee, goldfinch, towhee, hawk, nuthatch, and so on. The diversification (in my attention) of what was previously “bird sounds” into discrete sounds that carry meaning is something I can only compare to the moment that I realized that my mom spoke three languages, not two.
My mom has only ever spoken English to me, and for a very long time, I assumed that whenever my mom was speaking to another Filipino person, that she was speaking Tagalog. I didn’t really have a good reason for thinking this other than that I knew she did speak Tagalog and it sort of all sounded like Tagalog to me. But my mom was actually only sometimes speaking Tagalog, and other times speaking Ilonggo, which is a completely different language that is specific to where she’s from in the Philippines.
The languages are not the same, i.e. one is not simply a dialect of the other; in fact, the Philippines is full of language groups that, according to my mom, have so little in common that speakers would not be able to understand each other, and Tagalog is only one.
This type of embarrassing discovery, in which something you thought was one thing is actually two things, and each of those two things is actually ten things, seems not only naturally cumulative but also a simple function of the duration and quality of one’s attention. With effort, we can become attuned to things, able to pick up and then hopefully differentiate finer and finer frequencies each time.
What these moments of stopping to listen have in common with those labyrinthine spaces is that they all initially enact some kind of removal from the sphere of familiarity. Even if brief or momentary, they are retreats, and like longer retreats, they affect the way we see everyday life when we do come back to it."
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"Even the labyrinths I mentioned, by their very shape, collect our attention into these small circular spaces. When Rebecca Solnit, in her book Wanderlust, wrote about walking in the labyrinth inside the Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, she said, “The circuit was so absorbing I lost sight of the people nearby and hardly heard the sound of the traffic and the bells for six o’clock.”
In the case of Deep Listening, although in theory it can be practiced anywhere at any time, it’s telling that there have also been Deep Listening retreats. And Turrell’s Sky Pesher not only removes the context from around the sky, but removes you from your surroundings (and in some ways, from the context of your life — given its underground, tomblike quality)."
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"My dad said that leaving the confined context of a job made him understand himself not in relation to that world, but just to the world, and forever after that, things that happened at work only seemed like one small part of something much larger. It reminds me of how John Muir described himself not as a naturalist but as a “poetico-trampo-geologist-botanist and ornithologist-naturalist etc. etc.”, or of how Pauline Oliveros described herself in 1974: “Pauline Oliveros is a two legged human being, female, lesbian, musician, and composer among other things which contribute to her identity. She is herself and lives with her partner, along with assorted poultry, dogs, cats, rabbits and tropical hermit crabs.” Incidentally, this has encouraged me to maybe change my bio to: “Jenny Odell is an artist, professor, thinker, walker, sleeper, eater, and amateur birdnoticer.”
3. the precarity of nothing
There’s an obvious critique of all of this, and that’s that it comes from a place of privilege. I can go to the rose garden, or stare into trees all day, because I have a teaching job that only requires me to be somewhere two days a week, not to mention a whole set of other privileges. Part of the reason my dad could take that time off was that on some level, he had enough reason to think he could get another job. It’s possible to understand the practice of doing nothing solely as a self-indulgent luxury, the equivalent of taking a mental health day if you’re lucky enough to work at a place that has those.
But here I come back to Deleuze’s “right to say nothing,” and although we can definitely say that this right is variously accessible or even inaccessible for some, I believe that it is indeed a right. For example, the push for an 8-hour workday in 1886 called for “8 hours of work, 8 hours of rest, and 8 hours of what we will.” I’m struck by the quality of things that associated with the category “What we Will”: rest, thought, flowers, sunshine.
These are bodily, human things, and this bodily-ness is something I will come back to. When Samuel Gompers, who led the labor group that organized this particular iteration of the 8-hour movement, was asked, “What does labor want?” he responded, “It wants the earth and the fullness thereof.” And to me it seems significant that it’s not 8 hours of, say, “leisure” or “education,” but “8 hours of what we will.” Although leisure or education might be involved, what seems most humane is the refusal to define that period.
That campaign was about a demarcation of time. So it’s interesting, and certainly troubling, to read the decline in labor unions in the last several decades alongside a similar decline in the demarcation of public space. True public spaces, the most obvious examples being parks and libraries, are places for — and thus the spatial underpinnings of — “what we will.”"
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"The way that Berardi describes labor will sound as familiar to anyone concerned with their personal brand as it will to any Uber driver, content moderator, hard-up freelancer, aspiring YouTube star, or adjunct professor who drives to three campuses in one week:
In the global digital network, labor is transformed into small parcels of nervous energy picked up by the recombining machine. … The workers are deprived of every individual consistency. Strictly speaking, the workers no longer exist. Their time exists, their time is there, permanently available to connect, to produce in exchange for a temporary salary. (emphasis mine)
The removal of economic security for working people — 8 hours for work, 8 hours for rest, 8 hours for what we will — dissolves those boundaries so that we are left with 24 potentially monetizable hours that are sometimes not even restricted to our time zones or our sleep cycles."
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"I also started noticing some crows in my neighborhood. At the time I had just read The Genius of Birds, and I’d learned the crows are incredibly intelligent and can recognize and remember human faces. They can in fact teach their children which are the good and the bad humans, good being ones who feed them and bad being ones who try to catch them or do something else weird. I have a balcony, so I started leaving a few peanuts out for the crows."
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"This isn’t only about me watching birds. I think a lot about what these birds see when they look at me — and I’m sure anyone who has a pet is familiar with this feeling. I assume they just see a female human who for some reason seems to pay attention to them.⁵ They don’t know what my work is, they don’t see progress — they just see recurrence, day after day, week after week.
And through them, I am able to inhabit that perspective, to see myself as the human animal that I am, and when they fly off, to some extent, I can inhabit that perspective too, noticing the shape of the hill that I live on and where all of the tall trees and good landing spots are.
There are ravens that I noticed live half in and half out of the rose garden, until I realized that there is no “rose garden” to them. These alien animal perspectives on me and our shared world have provided me not only with an escape hatch from contemporary anxiety but also a reminder of my own animality and the animateness of the world I live in.
Their flights enable my own literal flights of fancy, recalling a question that one of my favorite authors, David Abram, asks in Becoming Animal: “Do we really believe that the human imagination can sustain itself without being startled by other shapes of sentience?”⁶"
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"But beyond strategic / activist self preservation, there’s something else to be gained here: Doing nothing teaches us how to listen. I’ve already mentioned literal listening, or Deep Listening, but this time I mean it in a broader sense. To do nothing is to hold yourself still so that you can perceive what is actually there. As Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist who records natural soundscapes, put it: “Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.”
There are a lot of us, and I’m certainly not immune to this, who could stand to learn how to listen better, and I mean listen to other people. As a lover of weird internet things, I definitely do not want to write off the amazing culture and also activism that happens online. But even with the problem of the filter bubble aside, the platforms that we use to communicate with each other about very important things do not encourage listening. They encourage shouting, or having a “take” after having read a single headline.
I alluded earlier to the problem of speed, but this is also a problem of listening, and of bodies. There is in fact a connection between listening in the Deep Listening, bodily sense, and listening, as in me understanding your perspective. Writing about the circulation of information, Berardi makes a helpful distinction between connectivity and sensitivity. Connectivity is the rapid circulation of information among compatible units — an example is something getting a bunch of shares very quickly and unthinkingly by likeminded people on Facebook. With connectivity, you either are or are not compatible. Red or blue; check the box. In this transmission of information, the units don’t change, nor does the information.
Sensitivity, in contrast, involves a difficult, awkward, ambiguous encounter between two differently shaped bodies that are themselves ambiguous — and this meeting, this sensing, requires and takes place in time. Not only that, due to the effort of sensing, the two entities might come away from the encounter a bit differently than they went in.
This always brings to mind a month-long artist residency I once attended with two other artists in an extremely remote location in the Sierra Nevada. There wasn’t much to do at night, so one of the artists and I would sometimes sit on the roof and watch the sunset. She was Catholic and from the Midwest; I’m sort of the quintessential California atheist. I have really fond memories of the languid, meandering conversations we had up there about science and religion. And what strikes me is that neither of us ever convinced the other — that wasn’t the point — but we listened to each other, and we did each come away differently, with a more nuanced understanding of the other person’s position."
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"Ukeles’ interest in maintenance was partly occasioned by her becoming a mother in the 1960s. In an interview she explained, “Being a mother entails an enormous amount of repetitive tasks. I became a maintenance worker. I felt completely abandoned by my culture because it didn’t have a way to incorporate sustaining work.” Her 1969 Maintenance Manifesto is actually an exhibition proposal in which she considers her own maintenance work as the art. She says, “I will live in the museum and I customarily do at home with my husband and my baby, for the duration of the exhibition … My work is the work.”"
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"I think of the hours and hours that I have now spent in the rose garden, putting off returning to my work on a glowing two-dimensional screen an arm’s length from my face; or the days on which I’ll leave just to get coffee and wind up almost involuntarily on top of a hill four hours later, regardless of the shoes I’m wearing; or the fact that the last five or six books I’ve read have had to do with animal intelligence and the importance of landscape in memory and cognition. I don’t know where any of this, where I, will end up."]]>jennyodell idleness nothing art eyeo2017 photoshop specimens care richardprince gillesdeleuze recology internetarchive sanfrancisco eleanorcoppola 2017 1973 maps mapping scottpolach jamesturrell architecture design structure labyrinths oakland juliamorgan chapelofthechimes paulineoliveros ucsd 1970s deeplisening listening birds birdwatching birding noticing classideas observation perception time gracecathedral deeplistening johncage gordonhempton silence maintenance conviviality technology bodies landscape ordinary everyday cyclicality cycles 1969 mierleladermanukeles sensitivity senses multispecies canon productivity presence connectivity conversation audrelorde gabriellemoss fomo nomo nosmo davidabram becominganimal animals nature ravens corvids crows bluejays pets human-animalrelations human-animalelationships herons dissent rowe caliressler jodythompson francoberardi fiverr popos publicspace blackmirror anthonyantonellis facebook socialmedia email wpa history bayarea crowdcontrol mikedavis cityofquartz erhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:eb75f2831428/