James Wyness has invited Jan Hogarth, John Wallace and me to join him for If we did something at The Stove in Dumfries on 14 Feb 10.00-16.00. This is part of his project If we do nothing. You are invited too.
An open gathering, a meeting of minds from the artistic, scientific, academic, engineering and civic communities, to design and plan a series of future symposiums on eco-art, the aesthetics of sustainability, resilience and emergence.
We seek your input in designing future symposiums for the mid to long term, developing new research and artistic production, addressing the fragmentation of human understanding across ecosystems thinking, climate change, adaptation and sustainability.
All welcome.
Questions can be directed to James here.
Tim Ingold, the noted anthropologist, recently said,
But while mainstream science continues to think of art as a medium for the communication of its own findings, it is now art, rather than science, that is leading the way in promoting radical ecological awareness. This awareness rests on an acknowledgement of what we owe, for our very existence, to the world we seek to know and of which we are necessarily part. As such, it should come in before science rather than after it. The purpose of art, then, is not to communication science but to investigate its conditions of possibility.
Jan, John, James and I have been having a conversation by email in preparation for the event.
In particular we have been talking about the fragmentation of understanding and whether some forms of knowledge are ‘incommensurable’ (a word James introduced) with others. For example, is knowledge in the form of data, which dominates the sciences, translatable or relatable to storytelling and lived experience on the land? Is this important? John’s work with Prof Pete Smith including the film installation The Same Hillside (discussed here) is storytelling in response to scientific modelling.
Read more of James’ thinking on complexity here.
Jan has been asking us to think more carefully about ‘permission’ and how we behave in the world. If we accept that everything is living and we give the same respect to non-human living things that we give to humans, what does that mean? Jan says we should ask permission of the spring to take water. You can find out more about Jan’s Quests and Retreats here.
I recently gave a presentation on transdisciplinarity and have begun to get to grips with Basarab Nicolescu’s concept of ‘different levels of reality’. He says, “I maintain that two levels of Reality are different if the passage from one to the other involves a breakdown of laws and a breakdown of fundamental concepts.” which sounds like incommensurability to me.
