from Turning into the Night, Fowler dune shack, Provincelands, MA, September, 002018TURNING INTO THE NIGHT We experiment with our daily lives, using practices we invent to enable us to project our imaginations into the cosmic scales of the material realities of life on Earth. Arguably, this is the only scale of materiality that human activity cannot alter. We inhabit specific aspects of everyday life from within our understandings of 2500+ year old Daoist mindsets. Our intention is to explore their contemporary relevance and test out possibilities of translating and exapting them for living the Anthropocene.From May 21-September 23, 002018, we performatively inhabited the time between sunset and sunrise without use of artificial light of any kind. During daylight hours, we reduced our time on digital screens. As evening approached, we observed our local landscape transition from dusk into night and darkness. We had planned to end the project on summer solstice, June 22, 002018. Instead, from the midst of the process, we decided to continue until autumn solstice (120+Earth spins), and then adapt the project responsively to lengthening winter nights.We arrived at the conviction that this act of making ourselves aware of the transition-hinges of day becoming night, night becoming day, and intentionally dwelling within the monumental change of light into dark, dark into light, is a form of environmental practice. It is a practice that, as Clark Strand puts it, adjusts our eyes to the “strange light of this world,” and allows us “to experience what our minds have never known but what our bodies still remember,” namely, ancestral timescapes and the modes of land inhabitation that they made possible. Strand calls this an attempt to “reach around the Anthropocene” and back in time and human cultures in an effort to “catch glimpses of what might have existed before the Anthropocene.” He sees “dark night” practices as ways to recognize self (human being) as part of the landscape of the world. We humans are neither things onto ourselves, nor figures against the ground of nature. smudge studio's experimental visual/textual response, Turning into the Night: Embodied, Expansive Practices for Inhabiting Earth’s SpinTilt was published in 002021 as part of Œ Case Files Vol.1 (punctum books).

from Turning into the Night, Fowler dune shack, Provincelands, MA, September, 002018

TURNING INTO THE NIGHT

We experiment with our daily lives, using practices we invent to enable us to project our imaginations into the cosmic scales of the material realities of life on Earth. Arguably, this is the only scale of materiality that human activity cannot alter.

We inhabit specific aspects of everyday life from within our understandings of 2500+ year old Daoist mindsets. Our intention is to explore their contemporary relevance and test out possibilities of translating and exapting them for living the Anthropocene.

From May 21-September 23, 002018, we performatively inhabited the time between sunset and sunrise without use of artificial light of any kind. During daylight hours, we reduced our time on digital screens. As evening approached, we observed our local landscape transition from dusk into night and darkness. We had planned to end the project on summer solstice, June 22, 002018. Instead, from the midst of the process, we decided to continue until autumn solstice (120+Earth spins), and then adapt the project responsively to lengthening winter nights.

We arrived at the conviction that this act of making ourselves aware of the transition-hinges of day becoming night, night becoming day, and intentionally dwelling within the monumental change of light into dark, dark into light, is a form of environmental practice. It is a practice that, as Clark Strand puts it, adjusts our eyes to the “strange light of this world,” and allows us “to experience what our minds have never known but what our bodies still remember,” namely, ancestral timescapes and the modes of land inhabitation that they made possible. Strand calls this an attempt to “reach around the Anthropocene” and back in time and human cultures in an effort to “catch glimpses of what might have existed before the Anthropocene.” He sees “dark night” practices as ways to recognize self (human being) as part of the landscape of the world. We humans are neither things onto ourselves, nor figures against the ground of nature.

smudge studio's experimental visual/textual response, Turning into the Night: Embodied, Expansive Practices for Inhabiting Earth’s SpinTilt was published in 002021 as part of Œ Case Files Vol.1 (punctum books).

transition_spin.jpg

East is a Circle

What does it take for two artists|humans to continuously sense and attune to the spin of their Planet?

What creative, spiritual, philosophical and material consequences might result from living this awareness?

As artists living the Anthropocene, we attempt to hold the thought of, pay close attention to, and track Earth-magnitude change as it plays out on local, daily-life scales. We reshape everyday actions with the intent of developing and honing new capacities of perception and attention at scales that are beyond our usual habits of mind.

Conventional languages of “sunset,” “sunrise” and “east” change meaning for us. We change the stories we tell of them. We multiply our perspectives on Earth in creative response to its ceaseless changes in direction. And we cultivate ways of "knowing" and "seeing" ourselves in relation to the planet that are, likewise, in-motion.

Making such shifts in scale, language/concepts, and perspectives—we use aesthetic practice to address and live the Anthropocene.   

EAST IS A CIRCLE is a set of experimental practices for rescaling our daily live practices and ways of knowing to evolving parameters of life on Earth.

Tea ceremony staged while in residency at the Kugel-Gips house (Wellfleet, MA) and aligned to 23.5º (Earth’s axial tilt). Performed on the occasion of the Spring Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere on March 20, 002018, approx. 12:12 EST in Wellfleet, MA, while at an eastward Earth spin of 772 mph.

*special thanks to Cape Cod Modern House Trust

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Work resulting from the EAST IS A CIRCLE project has been screened or exhibited at:

Being Alone, Sharing: Conversations on Survival, Leubsdorf Gallery at Hunter College, April 002018

Field Re-Mediations, after Mel Chin, Karolina Sobecka and The Cybernetics Library, Queens Museum of Art, May 002018

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Related FOP posts:

DRINK FROM THE TILT OF THE EARTH, 23.5º TEACUP

CONVERSATIONS ON SURVIVAL FROM THE HINGE OF THE EARTH (23.5º)

EAST IS A CIRCLE

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