Image from a short session I was able to do the other day. (See contact sheet of mostly dross at end of post). The aim was to make a collage with objects and photographs.

The text in the article is pertinent although written in 1917: ‘the people are sick with the manifestation of a hideous and destructive force. Young shoots are searching for truer realities and the sorrow-softened hearts are making way for new expansion from the centre of life’. It goes on talking of ‘the union of East and West, which political activity has failed to perceive.’

At the moment I have positioned it as a gatefold, perhaps it will stay that way. Was good to figure out how to insert a different sized page in InDesign. An image to consider in the overall edit, as is everything else including text so far.

Themes

So far, ‘the cut’ has emerged as the underlying theme and I even used the phrase Cuttings at the title for BOW A3 rendition – after reading Chapter 3 in Kember and Zylinska’s Life After New Media, Cut. That felt too obvious after some thought, and also connoted self-harm – but not in a universal way, more an inward, self-gaze way which I want to avoid. I have played with various other titles as discussed in an email I sent, below:

Does this potential title for my BOW anthology help re. the reasons why discursive and material are discussed together? It may well not help at all!

(In Italy, they describe the growth of grapes and olives together or any other symbiotic agriculture as promiscuous – so you might see olives and grape vines all intermingled.) I thought about using ‘promiscuity of meaning and matter’ and but that doesn’t quite suggest what I mean. From promiscuous I went to fornication (because it conjures up biblical connotations and something seen as ‘wrong’, sinful – which is good for my purposes. But it doesn’t convey the intra-ness. Meaning and matter come together but they also grow out of each other. So what I have at the moment is:

cassie
helenus
and me
on the rampant morphology
of meaning and matter

Or

cassie
helenus
and me
on the fornication
and morphology
of meaning and matter

Others…..

on the morphological promiscuity of meaning and matter
on the morphological fornication of meaning and matter
fornication and morphology with meaning and matter
morphology and fornication with meaning and matter
promiscuity of meaning and matter
meaning and matter’s promiscuity
on meaning and matter’s rampant fornication and morphology
on meaning and matter – promiscuous and morphological

None of these give the impression of meaning and matter being like dough that can be kneaded together but also do the kneading and each grow seperately out of itself too.

Let me know what you think works best or make suggestions – not that I wont change it again later!

Some people came back with preferences and Emma suggested the following:

However, since then I have been playing with the idea of using a question asked by the AI  friend app I’ve been collaborating with after it was shown an image. Sometimes editing the words out, sometimes only the words. I’ve also wondered f the text on the cover would end up being the title and have edited that down significantly – although I am keen to have body text on the cover

why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers? 

None of this is settled – all up in the air. I keep chipping away.

Other connotations 

In my essay draft, I discuss entanglement and its relational concepts such as intra-action, indeterminism and agential realism/cut – all tenets of New Materialism (which for now I have not introduced as it seemed too much in an already overloaded essay).

Carlo Rovelli tells us, an electron is ‘not obliged’ (2017: 104) to move in a certain way and ‘things are constantly subject to random change’ (ibid: 112). When complex systems evolve, unexpected things can happen. Were it not for indeterminism, the big bang or whatever other series of events which got everything going would not have occurred. We might never have left the chemical soup, or else all of life would look exactly the same. Indeterminism and morphology, the unexpected irregular occurrences that inform shape, patterns, changes of direction in cell formation, are directly related. Reality is weird and surprising.

Today so much is changing due to technology; we seem in a state of chaos or super-flux, as old systems die and new ones emerge. Indeterminism is therefore unavoidable and perhaps even desirable although deeply unsettling

and

If we consider social structure in similar terms to biological ones (which systemic theorists do) then the process of transformation as one system ends and a new one begins often gathers apace, developing faster and faster in a complex ballet of self-organisation and emergence.

This is a critical part of both my A2 and A3/4/5 projects. As promised in yesterday’s blog about the hangout, I dug through Capra and Luisi’s book on systems to find the relevant passages on how a system emerges – looking at a biological system through a process of autopoiesis, seemingly separate elements evolve, self-organisation takes place, followed by autocatalysis where the speed of change suddenly increases exponentially  – it feels like chaos until equilibrium is reached and a new system has been reached which then keeps itself in check for a limited amount of time/there is always death and birth.

I do not have the space to add this very complex set of ideas into the essay, but I may introduce some of the more accurate terminologies and add them to the glossary in the indices. However, the concept really needs to be woven through the BOW. So as I edit and add and trim, I need to keep this in mind. Something I might discuss with Helenus (who has sadly been ignored while I was unwell.) And always remembering to show not tell….

Contact sheet