Jenny Odell – How to do nothing | The Conference 2017

so yeah I'm here to talk to you about nothing as silly as that sounds I really hope that this talk is useful to you sincerely so I'm gonna start off by just mentioning that this talk is is grounded in a specific place and that's the Morecambe amphitheater of roses in Oakland California which is where I'm from and that's partly because I wrote a lot of this talk in the garden but also as I was writing it I realized that certain things about the garden encompass all of the things that I'm going to talk about which are the architecture of nothing the practice of doing nothing but also the importance of public space and also an ethics of care and maintenance and birds so what was I doing in the Rose Garden in the first place I live five minutes away from it so the Rose Garden had already been my default place to go to get away from my computer which is where I do a lot of my work as a teacher and as an artist but after the election I started going there every single day and this wasn't really a voluntary decision it felt very innate kind of like a goat going to the top of a hill it's just somethings instinctual and I would just sit there and do nothing I wouldn't even read a book I would just sit there and do nothing and I felt a little bit guilty about it it was sort of a incongruous it's really beautiful garden terrifying world but it really did feel like a survival tactic like it was very necessary and this necessity or something that I found really beautifully articulated in this quote by Deleuze which kind of shows that the the function of nothing is that it is a precursor to something that in order to be able to say something to have the means to do that you need to first do nothing or have the privilege to do nothing so nothing is not a luxury it's actually the grounds for meaningful thought and speech so I want to backtrack by just saying that as an artist I've had a long-running relationship with nothing in particular making nothing so I'm not lazy but the the only thing I can ever be said to have made or constructed it's something in a new context then it than it was before so this is from my series satellite landscapes so this is photo merged screenshots from Google satellite imagery with the ground removed and the sole purpose of this was just so that people would consider these things more carefully or at all I also did a project called the Bureau of suspended objects as an artist-in-residence at a dump just an actual dump in San Francisco and I spent three months photographing cataloguing and researching the origins manufacturing origins of 200 objects and this was presented as a book and browsable archive where people could scan the tags of things and then learn all about their material histories corporate histories and when I showed this at the the opening at the dump there was a woman who was really confused and asked me she said wait do you actually make anything or did you just put things on shelves and I put things on shelves that's what I do and then what my most recent residency was at the internet archive's Oh archive.org maybe some of you have used it before and I was collecting specimens from 1980s byte magazines and specimens are things that I found that were intentionally or unintentionally surrealist in the ads in these byte magazines I'm not doing anything to these images I'm just taking out the text and sometimes dropping in the background back in or cropping them but you know didn't put that guy in there that's that is just what was there and I had to add this one into like rep California it's the gold gold miner finding some computer ships and even in the cases where it was a little bit more labor intensive like removing this stuff from this guy who's getting lost in various computer terms it just felt more like historical restoration than anything versus like making something and these are interesting on some level because they seem to inadvertently predict some of the more sinister aspects that technology came to embody but I also just more importantly I just love them and a friend pointed out to me that that is a riding crop on the right so it's implying that the computer is not only a cop but a horse mounted cop which I really love and this project really brought home for me that I really like finding better than making I like finding better than making so much I can't even be bothered to make things sometimes and this love of finding things and the things that one finds is something that I provisionally called the observational eros so the observational eros is an emotional fascination with your subject that's so strong that it overpowers the desire to make anything new and I remember coming across this introduction to cannery roads that Steinbeck novel I'm in high school and it's stuck with me because it describes the patience and the care needed to closely studied specimens that are so precious and fragile that they actually risk breaking under the weight of observation so it probably wouldn't surprise you to know that my favorite movies are documentaries and one of my favorite pieces of public art was made by a documentary filmmaker eleanor coppola so in 1973 she carried out this public art project where she made a map with 54 locations in San Francisco it took place on us on a specific day and you can see from the map text that she wanted to portray or sort of cast the city as art that exists already where it is that doesn't need to be removed to a gallery and I think that this is a really beautiful so it's basically the windows the windows are the art in this in this case and this is really interesting to contrast with how what we normally experience publicar does which is like a giant steel thing that landed in a corporate plaza from outer space and in in this case instead yeah the art the art exists where it is it is found made and then more recently this is kind of a similar project by a friend of mine Scott Pollock it's called applause encouraged and so it's took place in San Diego and so there were only eight attendees they were ushered to their seats five minutes before the Sun set they were reminded not to take photos and when the sun's that finished they clapped and refreshments were served um and I recently got to see this piece at the Walker in Minneapolis it's a room by James Turrell where you can kind of just didn't contemplate this square hole in the ceiling perhaps some of you have seen this in other places and I went in there out of four days in a row and the sky obviously was different every single day so I felt like I saw you four different skies but what I want to point out about this is the slant in the wall so when you sit in there it's kind of architectural II an invitation to look upward for as long as you want you know without straightening your neck you can just be in there for you know an hour so that brings me to the architecture of nothing those last few projects that I mentioned the artist creates some kind of structure like a map or a room that holds open a contemplative space against the habits of familiarity that are trying to close back in on that so this is something that I think about at the Rose Garden because it's not a your typical square Rose Garden in California there's a lot of just kind of boring square rose gardens with rows of roses but this one has a lot of branching paths kind of different levels different places to sit and view the garden from people move very slowly there for Americans and there's just a lot of ways to inhabit this space a lot of ways to stay there for a long time so sometimes I try to leave and I just end up sitting somewhere else so and then not far from there somewhere that I often walk afterwards is the Chapel of the chimes and this is a columbarium so it's designed by Julia Morgan and each room has hundreds of containers of ashes that are engraved with the person's name and then a lot of them are sort of annotated with photos and tchotchkes and personal belongings of that person so not only architectural is it really easily easy to get lost in there but it's also very easy to contemplate some the idea of life from beginning to end and I really am serious about getting lost in there this is one of my favorite parts of the Chapel of the times which is the map that has no you are here working so you're like wow it's really complicated I have no idea where I am I guess I'll just keep walking and labyrinths in general I find really interesting just because they are they are design two-dimensional designs that manipulate your sense of space and time and how you move through them they're kind of like a dense infolding of attention and so you're not standing in one one spot and you're not moving through it but you're kind of doing something in between and yesterday so as I don't have an actual photo of it but I ended up in this Botanical Garden and I noticed that even though it seems like it's this very kind of regular square thing there's all these other like small paths in there and people were again moving very slowly smelling things touching things talk pointing at plans and talking about them and it's just striking to me how much that is that that's an architectural it's a design thing that allows that to happen but it doesn't have to be a spatial thing there one of my favorite examples of this and sound is the idea of deep listening which was part of the legacy of Paulino laverra's so when she came up with this idea she was teaching experimental music at UC San Diego in the 70s and she developed it as a way of working with sound that could bring as she said some peace amidst the the violence and the unrest of the Vietnam War so this is how she described deep listening in her own words basically listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing and she distinguished between hearing mirror hearing and listening which is active and the goal and the reward of deep listening for her were a general heightened sense of receptivity to everything which she noted was a reversal of the norm which prefers kind of judgment over observation and intuition and reading about this I realized that I have practice deep listening before I'm just in the context of bird-watching and I actually think that it's really weird that it's called bird-watching because if anyone here is a bird watcher you know that a half if not more of that as bird listening so I think they should just change the name to bird noticing that's my opinion but whatever you want to call it it requires you to literally physically do nothing well you can't like make a bird come out and identify itself to you you have to just walk until you hear something and then when you do stand under a tree motionless for like up to 15 minutes trying to figure out what what and where it is and in my experience this makes time kind of stop it makes me late to things all the time I'm very serious it's like a problem so so something that bird bird noticing did for me was that it changed the granularity of my perception so at first I just started being aware of just the presence of birdsong and then I specifically started noticing scrub jays which are really loud and I don't know how I didn't notice them before and they sound like this so and then I started noticing other songs like Ravens Robins song sparrows chickadees gold finches cows hawks and nuthatches woodpeckers and when I walk into the Rose Garden I would sort of acknowledge them one by one as I heard them and this diversification of bird sounds and two discreet meaningful sounds it's something that actually really reminded me of the moment that I realized my mom speaks three languages not two she's only ever spoken English to me and I I assumed that when she was talking to other Filipino people she was speaking Tagalog and I don't really have a good reason for it other than I knew that she does speak to garlic and it all sounded like - golly and it turns out that she was speaking three languages that are not and the third one is not a dialect of Tagalog it's a completely different language that has to do with where she's from in the Philippines and it turns out that the Philippines is full of languages that according to my mom are so different that speakers of them would not be able to understand each other and this kind of like embarrassing discovery that's something you thought was one thing is actually two things and those two things are actually ten things it's kind of naturally cumulative and also just seems like a simple function of like the quality and duration of your attention and your receptivity so something that those moments of stopping to listen and those kind of branching labyrinthine spaces that I mentioned have in common is that they enact some kind of removal from the habitual every day so for instance the Rose Garden when its location was chosen in the 30s it had to do with the natural bowl shape in the hill so it kind of sits in the hill and when you're there you feel very acoustically and spatially enclosed the Chapel of the chimes even though it has a lot of skylights that or sometimes there's not even a roof you can just see this guy doesn't have a whole lot of windows to the outside world so it also feels very enclosed labyrinths just by their very shape collect your attention into this small space Rebecca Solnit who's a Californian writer wrote about being in the labyrinth in the Grace Cathedral as being so absorbing that she almost couldn't even hear sounds outside of it the James Terrell room this is kind of morbid but I wasn't when I was sitting and I was thinking about how it removes you from almost the context of your life because if you're in the ground it almost feels like a tomb but also just perceptually the square like the holding constant of the square allows you to see how fast the clouds are moving in just like a very literal way and this idea of removal can apply to longer of time as well so I think most of us have or know someone who has gone through some kind of removal period of removal in their life that could have been occasioned by something terrible like a loss or is just voluntary but at one of our most famous observers in the u.s. John Muir had an experience like this so before he was a naturalist and he was a supervisor and a sometimes inventor a wagon wheel factory so these are some of his inventions one of his scarier inventions was this mechanized desk that would you could put your books into and it would show you the books for specified periods of time and then closed them and then open up the textbook he was really serious about studying clearly and like you see the kind of idea the idea of the kind of person he was and as a young man he was already very into botany but it was kind of a side thing and when he was 29 he had an eye accident at the wagon wheel factory that temporarily blinded him for six weeks and he was confined to a darkened room unsure if he was ever gonna be able to see again and the writings of John Muir is actually divided into two sections by the editor one before and one after the accident and in the second introduction to the second section he describes how newer decided that life was too brief and uncertain and time too precious to waste upon belts and saws and my my dad actually went through his own period of removal when he was about my age he was working as a technician in the Bay Area got extremely fed up with his job figured he had enough savings to just not work for a while and so he quit he didn't do anything he moved to Sausalito and I asked him what he did this ended up being two years I have some what he did during those two years and he said that he rode his bike studied math went fishing had long chats with his roommate and sat in the spot where he taught himself the flute and he said that after two years he realized a lot of his outwardly directed anger had more to do with him than his job or outside circumstances then he realized and the way he put it was it's just you with your own crap so you have to deal with it but it also taught him about creativity he had a lot of time to think about that and the the state of openness and even boredom that it might require and I'm sure a lot of you have thought about this a lot already but it it's a lot of it's just time the importance of time so knowing this he went he actually went back to the same job but he ended up becoming an engineer and racking up a bunch of patents because he was a lot more in tune with what he requires to be creative he and I are also very similar so this is a typical text from my dad who also loves closely observing things we also really like blobs some blobs I this um this kind of got me thinking that that granularity of attention that we achieve outward might also extend inward at the same time so as the details of your environment and fold to you in surprising ways maybe the same thing is sort of happening inward in your own intricacies and contradictions my dad said that doing or having that time made him understand himself in relationship to just the world not that world of his job and everything that happened at work was just one small part of a larger thing this reminds me of how John Muir described himself not as a botanist but as a poetic Otranto geologist botanist and ornithologist naturalist etc etc or pauline Oliveros is bio autobiographical statement from 1974 in which she is all of these things among the other things that contribute to her identity and this has inspired me to maybe and changed my bio to include the many things that constitute my identity so um there's an obvious critique of all of this and that's that it comes from a place of privilege I can go and sit in the Rose Garden all the time because I have a teaching gig where I only have to be somewhere twice a week not to mention a whole host of other more general privileges my dad could do what he did because he had a reasonable expectation of getting another job so it's possible to understand doing nothing is just a self-indulgent luxury the equivalent of taking a Mental Health Day at your job if you're lucky enough to have it I'm have that but I want to come back to the the right to say nothing as articulated by Deleuze I do think that this is indeed not a luxury and it is a right so one really inspiring example is the the movement for the eight-hour workday in 1886 eight hours for work eight hours for rest a hours for what we will and I'll just point out that it's not eight hours of leisure or eight hours of Education it's what we will that seems like a very humane refusal to define that period I've also really struck by the quality of things that are associated with what we will rest thought flowers sunshine these are all very bodily human things and that bottle enos is something that i'm going to come back to you when Samuel Gompers was asked what does labor want he answered it wants the earth and the fullness thereof so that movement to me seems like very much a demarcation of time so it's very troubling to me to read that alongside a similar coincident a decline in public space which serves a very similar function so true public spaces like obvious examples being parks and libraries are literally the underpinnings of in the space for doing nothing they don't demand anything for you to be there or free to stay obvious difference from private spaces that you don't have to buy anything you don't have to pay to be there and you don't have to be pretending that you're gonna buy something so compare something like a city park to City Walk which is a something that you encounter upon leaving Universal Studios and couple of different locations in the US and it's sort of a faux faux urban space it's the it's Universal Studios interfacing with the actual outside world so it's somewhere in between and this space besides being basically a giant outdoor mall functions more like a movie set in which the people are actors and also consumers who consume products and also consume a safe sterilized version of a city and Eric holding in Sarah Chaplin have described this as a scripted space it excludes direct supervised supervisors constructs and orchestrates use sort of the opposite of a public space in that way and anyone who's tried anything weird and such a space knows that they don't just direct uses they police them so in a public space you are a citizen with agency in a Pho public space you are a consumer or you're a threat to the space itself so the Rose Garden is a public space it's also Works Progress Administration project from the 30s so it was built by people put to work by the federal government during the Depression and that's something that I really like thinking about when I go there that it's this immense public good that itself came from a public good but it's still really not surprising to me to find out that it almost got turned into condos in the 70s and that it took a very concerted effort on on behalf of local residents to prevent that from happening and the reason that that doesn't surprise me is that that kind of thing is always happening those spaces that we don't see as commercially productive are always under threat since what they produce can't be defined or exploited in an obvious way despite the fact that anyone who lives in this neighborhood can tell you how how much value this garden provides and I see a similar bottle playing out for our time right now a kind of colonization of the self by capitalist ideas of efficiency and productivity you could say that the parks in the libraries of self the self are always about to be turned into condos and Franco Berardi in book after the future ties the defeat of the labor movement labor movements in the 80s to this idea that we should all individually be entrepreneurs so in the past economic risk was sort of the business of the of the capitalists of the investor but today we are all capitalists we all therefore have to take risks and in this formulation life itself before anything else is already an economic venture and this description of labor will sound very familiar to anyone concerned with personal branding it would sound familiar - ooh BRR drivers Content moderators freelancers aspiring YouTube stars or adjunct professors anyone who sort of doesn't have those securities and and it's imagined as units of time versus like a discreet employee so this removal of Economic Security for working people the eight hours for work eight hours for rest eight hours for what we will dissolves into 24 potential potentially monetizable hours that are not even restricted to our time zones or sleep cycles and so in this moment when every waking moment has become pertinent to making a living and when we submit even our leisure to numerical evaluation on Facebook and Twitter constantly checking on its performance like one would check a stock and monitoring the development of our personal brand time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on nothing because it's too expensive it provides no return on investment and this cruel confluence of time and space means that as we lose our non-commercial space but we also see all of our own time as potentially commercial and just as public space gives way to weird faux public corporate spaces we also get the idea of compromise leisure freemium leisure that is a very far cry from what we will so as I was going through those byte magazines that I mentioned earlier from the 80s I came across a lot of ads like this that claim that there I'm going to save you time work and this one the Power Lunch I would like to point out that he's drinking milk I find that really weird so part of what's really painful about this image that we all know what happened we know how this story ends it did get easier to work from anywhere at any time all the time so compare the Power Lunch with this ad this was in the Oakland BART stations maybe some of you have seen it in other locations as well if you don't know what Fiverr is it's a micro tasking site where individual entrepreneurs sell various tasks so basically units of their time for $5 each whether that's copy editing filming a video of themselves doing something of your choice or pretending to be your girlfriend on Facebook and these individuals are the ultimate expression of Franco Berardi's fractals of time and pulsating cells of labour and this ad ridicules the idea that you even withhold some of that time to sustain your body with food so these people work from home but unlike the sandwich milk guy they must work from home home is work and work is home and this isn't I think limited to the gig economy after grad school I worked for a very large corporation where I would amuse myself by taking photo booth photos with this cardboard cutout that I found in the office and it's like the only documentation above that job and they had just instituted this thing called results only work environment and the idea of results only work environment is that there's no 9:00 to 5:00 you can do your work from wherever at any time as long as you get it done and it was presented as this great luxury and it sounded really nice but there was something about it that bothered me which was what is the e in row if it's an environment than your office but also your car your home the store are all working and at this time I didn't have a smartphone I was like a holdout and I put off getting one even longer because I understood what that equation meant and that I would just be on a much longer leash all of the time 24 hours this was our required reading work sex and it was intended to be the kind of like a merciful slackening of the nine-to-five model but in the text the work and non-work selves are completely conflated so they write things like if you can have your time and work and live and be a person then the question you're faced with every day isn't do I really have to go to work today but how do I contribute to this thing called life what can I do today to benefit my family my company myself and to me company doesn't belong in that sentence even if you love your job unless there's something specifically about you or your job that requires it I don't think that there's anything to be admired about being constantly potentially productive constantly connected the second you open your eyes in the morning and that no one should stand for that in the words of us although leaves me but a little to myself so this problem of constant connection and an overstimulation is already a problem after the election I think it became a very very big problem that I thought started thinking about a lot more so those same means by which we give over our days and our hours are the same with which we assault ourselves with information and misinformation at a rate that is frankly inhumane and I'm not saying don't read the news and what other people have to say about the news but I think we can all agree that there is a problem of quality and of speed and attention span that are all related so Berardi again mentions that modern regimes are not actually founded on the repression of dissent but rather on this proliferation of chatter the irrelevance of opinion in discourse and on making thought dissent and critique but now and ridiculous so the real problem is the informational overload and seizure attention and occupation of sources of information by the head of the company so this financially incentivized proliferation of chatter and the speed at which waves of this area kind of started happening online or had been happening online deeply horrified me and offended my senses and cognition as a human who dwells in human bodily physical time the connection between something completely virtual and something utterly real as evidenced by something like pizza gate or the daxing of online journalists or having SWAT teams into their addresses is deeply and fundamentally unsettling to me on a human phenomenological level and I know that after the election a lot of people were wondering about or searching for some idea of truth but for me it was also just about reality so Birds something else that happened after the election was I started to notice a lot more birds in my neighborhood and these are the first ones that really caught my attention these are night herons I think that you might have them here but not they're not very common and they they hang out by at KFC in my neighborhood and they're there almost every day and every night reliably because it's a KFC I called him the Colonel's but also my Twitter account is largely photos of these birds just say you know and I they have this kind of like grumpy stoic comportment and like other herons they do have a long neck but they keep a secret they never stick it out and they kind of stay in this football shape and I kind of without meaning to eyes modified my path home from the bus to pass by them because I was reassured by their reliability and it had something to do with the fact that I could look up from whatever trash fire was happening on Twitter and they would still be there unmoving with their pointy beaks regardless of the weather and I actually found them on old street view so this isn't 2011 they're still there and I don't doubt that they were there before that but it doesn't go back any further so I noticed them I also started noticing some crows in my neighborhood and I was paying attention to them because I had just read this book the genius of birds and it's about among other things crows are incredibly intelligent and can recognize human faces and remember them for years so I started leaving peanuts on my balcony railing and I felt like a crazy person because nothing happened then I just had these peanuts there and then after a while they like one or two would be gone but I didn't see what happened and maybe the wind blew them away and then I there started to be a crow or to you that would hang out but not on the balcony would kind of back on the telephone line and it started coming everyday at the time that a breakfasts and it was sometimes cough to make me come out and put a peanut there if I hadn't and then it brought its kid and I know that that's it's kid because the smaller crow had this like chicken like squawk that sounded very undeveloped and I named them Crow and crocin and I soon discovered that a crow and Crowson prefer me to throw peanuts off the balcony so they can do these fancy dives off of the telephone wire and I can't read crow minds but I feel like they enjoy doing this and I obviously enjoy watching it and sometimes they don't want any more peanuts they just sit there and stare at me and one time crocin kind of followed me halfway down the street and and to be clear I also stare back at them a lot and I imagine that it looks very weird to my neighbors but again like the night herons I was just comforted by their presence and I was also comforted by the fact that they recognized me and that whatever it is that they do the rest of the day that they always combined my apartment still to this day at 11 a.m. so and now there's three by the way that is either the other parent or a family friend um and then this guy so this is a scrub J that lives in a particular corner of the rose-garden scrub jays can also recognize human faces they also really like peanuts and whenever I go there I listen for that shriek that I played you earlier and if I hear it I will sit on a bench and put a peanut out and wait for this guy to come out part of the reason scrubs or one of the some of the evidence that scrub jays are smart is that they can remember up to 200 locations where they buried a snack for later and if they see another bird looking at them while they do it they will secretly go back and ribéry it so suggest that they have present a theory of mind they understand the internal mental reality of other birds and one of my favorite things to watch is scrub Jay taking a peanut finding a good spot hammering it into the ground with its beak and then very artfully placing dirt and leaves on top of it to make it look like it was never there so like I said this isn't just about me watching well I'm watching the birds but I also think a lot about what the birds see when they watch me and I think what they see probably is just recurrence day after day they don't know what my job is and they don't know what my problems are they just see a human that gives them peanuts and through them I'm actually able to inhabit that perspective on myself as the human animal that I am and when they fly off I can also kind of inhabit that perspective as well I started noticing the shape of the hill that I live on the different trees that are on the hill places places that they would land there are some Ravens that live half in and half out of the Rose Garden and then I realized that there is no Rose Garden to them so this kind of alien animal perspective on the world that I share with them unexpectedly provided me with this escape hatch from contemporary anxiety but also just a reminder of my own animality and the Animus of the world that I live in their flights enable my own literal flights of fancy and it recalls a question asked by one of my favorite authors David Abram do we really believe that the human imagination can sustain itself without being startled by other shapes of sentience and so as strange as it sounds this is what explains to me my need to go to the Rose Garden every day what was missing from that surreal torrent of information and virtuality is any regard or any place for the human animal situated as she is in an experiential time and physical environment with other human and non-human entities it turns out that groundedness requires actual groundedness in the ground Abram writes that direct sensuous reality is the soul and solid touchstone that we have as humans and reading this I sort of grabbed onto it like a life raft this is real the living breathing bodies in this room are real I'm not an avatar or a set of preferences or some smooth cognitive force I'm lumpy I'm an animal I'm different one day to the next I hear and see and smell things that hear and see and smell me and I find that it takes a break some time to do nothing to remember that to remember who and where I am so I want to be clear that I'm not actually encouraging anyone to do nothing in a larger sense there's so much racial environmental and economic injustice to be very angry about right now and to be acted on there's a lot to be mourned that's already happened but ironically I think that in the in this situation it's even more important to do nothing because that's the time that we reflect and sync and sustain and heal ourselves so I suggest that in this time of extreme overstimulation that we cultivate of fomo Nomo the necessity of missing out if you can't deal with that nas mo necessity of sometimes missing out whatever you can handle and in that sense you could sort of file this whole talk under the heading of self care but if you do that I want to be clear that I mean it in this in the political sense the Audrey Lorde described in the 1980s self preservation is an act of political warfare and not in the way that it's been appropriated by brands and I think that we're all smart enough to make that distinction but I just want to like you know put that out there but there's something else besides self care and that's that doing nothing teaches us how to listen so I've already mentioned deep listening but I think that in a general sense doing nothing means holding yourself still for long enough that you can perceive what is actually in front of you myself included I think we could all stand to learn to listen a little bit better and as someone who loves the internet and weird internet things I don't want to write off the amazing culture and activism that happens online but filter bubble aside the platforms that we use don't really encourage listening in my opinion they encourage shouting or having a take after having read a single headline and I alluded earlier to the problem of speed but this is also a problem of listening and of bodies so Franco Berardi who I mentioned already he makes this distinction between connectivity and sensitivity so connectivity is the rapid circulation of information among compatible units you can think of this as something like shares something getting a lot of shares by a lot of like-minded people on Facebook something getting a lot of likes in this case you either are or are not compatible red or blue other any other kind of categories and this often happens too quickly for anybody to really look into anything or question themselves or question the source of information or anything like that sensitivity involves a difficult awkward ambiguous encounter between two differently shaped bodies that are themselves ambiguous and this meeting and sensing takes place in time it requires time and it's a complex transfer of information that might actually change the shapes of those bodies as they come away so connectivity is a share or conversely a trigger sensitivity is an in-person conversation whether Pleasant or difficult or a little bit of both and obviously online platforms currently favor connectivity not simply because they're online but because arguably for reasons of profit since the difference between connectivity and sensitivity is time and time is money so again it's too expensive and as the body disappears from this equation so does our ability to emphasize Berardi suggests that the triumph of connectivity over sensitivity is making us deaf to everything that can't be verbalized in in these signs that we now kind of communicate with online the things that can be verbalized or figured as excess or incompatible even though we all know from human experience how much meaning can be carried by nonverbal expression not to mention this simple fact of a body in front of you so self-care also the cultivation of sensitivity those are two some things you can get from nothing but there is one more and that's the an antidote to the rhetoric of growth so in nature things that are that grow unchecked are considered parasitic or cancerous and yet we privilege unchecked growth over the cyclical and their regenerative so I'm gonna mention really quickly some regulars of the rose-garden there's the casual turkey there's grace in the cat who will sit on your book if you're trying to read it but there's also volunteers and so the volunteers are there maintaining the garden and to me our evidence of how much effort and care it takes to maintain something so beautiful and valuable and seeing that makes me think of something called the maintenance manifesto by the artists merely Lederman Yuka leaves some of her better known works involve the one where she washed the steps of the museum that she was exhibiting in she also spent 11 months shaking hands with and thinking in New York City's 80 or 85 hundred sanitation men and telling each one of them thank you for keeping New York alive and so she became a mother in the sixties and she started thinking a lot about maintenance work and how how much it was not valued and thought of his work and so she wrote this thing called the maintenance manifesto where she makes a distinction between cyclicality and care and regeneration as the life force and then the deaths had the death instinct basically which sounds to me a lot like disrupt and one is routinely valorized and masculine die as well the other one sort of goes unrecognized so that brings me to one last aspect of the Rose Garden these are some plaques that I sort of discovered and upon looking closer realize that they were the names of women who had been voted mother of the Year by Oakland residents and to be voted mother of the year in Oakland you have to have contributed to improving the quality of life for the people of Oakland this is from an industry film in the 50s showing one of their ceremonies and this past May I noticed a lot more activity in the garden and took me a while to realize that they were preparing for mother of the year 2017 there are many more mothers of the year to come it goes all the way up to 2050 so there's a bunch of empty spots and I just want to give a shout out at this point to my mom who has volunteered on top of working for most of her adult life and currently supports people with foster children so hi mom and I'm talking about mothers in this context of work that sustains and maintains but I don't think that someone needs to be a mother to experience a maternal and carrying impulse and thinking about maintenance for one's kin however you define kin always brings to mind this book called paradise built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit and it's basically dispensing with the myths that people become selfless and kind of crazed in the aftermath of natural disasters so she looks at things like the 1906 earthquake Katrina and shows the surprising compassion sometimes even humor but mainly just resourcefulness in connection that come in these very dark times some of her interviewees describe a strange nostalgia for that sense of connection and purposefulness that they had and so she talks about how after disaster people step up become their brothers keepers that disaster is terrible but it shows us maybe the people that we would like to be okay I'm gonna skip through some of this I'm sorry so alright very short okay so you might be wondering what this means for me as an artist doing nothing I'm a digital artist so looking back at my work I can see that I use a lot of Google Earth which is way of looking looking closely observing the earth even though it's from a digital remove I think about the most valuable experience as an artist has been my physical interaction with objects at the dump or even just the many hours that I've now spent in the Rose Garden meaning to go get coffee and ending up on top of a hill somewhere um three hours later the fact the fact that the most of the books that I've read recently have been about plants and animals I don't know where any of this is gonna end up or where I'm gonna end up so as a thank you for listening to me talk about nothing only to essentially have me tell you that I don't know what I'm doing I'm going to give you a little bit of nothing so a couple years ago I was on Cal train maybe some of you've been on Cal train but it's what a lot of people in Silicon Valley used to get to work so everyone on the train is working very stressed out I was very stressed out I was feeling very confined by my own specific concerns and stresses but I happen to be listening to a podcast by Gordon Hampton who's the acoustic ecologist that I mentioned earlier and he played a recording that he had made of thunder and the feeling of listening to this Thunder in the midst of everything that was going on gave me a feeling that's honestly very hard to describe so I'm not going - instead I will ask everyone to close your eyes [Music] Thank You Jenny let's talk I have questions oh I do I have questions for myself and I have some questions from the audience okay they're super fast you can also still get something in my first question is going back to the very beginning when you talked about well the granularity of attention and and this and also actually at the at the end when you were talking about this self-care this active kind of nothing yes how do I know if I'm new to this whether I'm being paralyzed or whether I'm doing political and meaningful self-care or like am i paralyzed with terror or oh great I think most of the time I feel like both like at the same time I think you can I don't know I don't know if you can tell it the difference I think it's important to if you I mean regardless if you feel paralyzed that is a sign that you should stop you know and have enough time to maybe move past that paralysis I mean just on a on a collective level I noticed in Oakland after the election there there was an interesting process that happened where people were paralyzed I mean they were still talking and I was really important but it took you know a long time before like the wheels got moving but obviously they they got moving because of the support and the conversations that people were having even as they were freaking out about not doing anything just Tarot associates this is a Twitter handle I think may possibly also a company they would like to know what would happen if everyone spent 10 minutes meditating every morning if you want to question this like enforcement of meditation you can also do that but maybe it specifically meditating or maybe it's just like doing nothing for 10 minutes I think that that would be great I think things I think what a lot of us to do with perspective I know I've already told some people here this but I recently visited a 25 million year old rock in Oregon and I just sat on it for a while and was just thinking about how insignificant my personal concerns were and I think that just you know spending ten minutes can achieve some of the same like just getting perspective again not to like there are real problems that need to be worked on but just getting the clarity to know what what to do first and what you don't even need to be worrying about just unlike a personal level we have some questions from our all balkon who actually I think he's gonna speak or I know has been a speaker on this stage he said that you were talking about how the public spaces are so crucial but online we have almost no public spaces at all because a lot of the infrastructure the context like Google and Facebook are of course private spaces mhm do you have any thoughts on this and and how we should should act on this I may have some friends who are trying who are much more technical than I am who are really trying to create like more right rhizomatic networks that are run kind of the collectives that are more local I think that's a really positive direction to go in that could be something more closer to a genuine public space but I agree that as long as there are these kind of corporatized spaces not to mention the total anonymity I think that's like a really big problem as well just trolls and stuff that will continue to be a problem and and he also wonders that this suggestion in in contemporary society that we have to be companies of one what that does to our rights in a context where there are companies of literally thousands yeah like like I said I'm glad that I had at least the experience of working in a giant corporation just to see that happening but you know I live in the Bay Area I've been to various tech campuses and I understand the desire to provide a lot of interesting and cool amenities to one's employees but I find that incredibly insidious because it takes away the boundary that you have where you are no longer at work you are not your work self you have you know it's what we will it it's like question mark not not of concern you know like what I do on my own in my own time so I think that I guess probably everywhere but especially in the Bay Area I see this like creeping encroachment within corporations on that individual and everything you have will get eventually yeah alas yeah but now even more probable still can you see though that it's also attractive the people would make these choices some people will will will think about the whatever it was called the work everywhere all the time ethos and go yes I am free finally yeah I mean I guess if you know if you wanted to I'm not stopping anyone from doing that if they want to do but even then I would even if your work was interspersed through different places and times I would hope that someone would even just artificially make sort of barriers in time or space that where they're like okay this is just I'm just being a human right now yeah and I'm even as you're saying that I'm also realizing that actually of course also then maybe with the question you need to ask yourself is like why like what is the underlying problem like what is my relationship to this work why am y well there's some other structural problem like I'm not allowed to be apparent at the same time as having a job for instance and maybe then I shouldn't make the devil's bargain I should actually fight for something else yeah okay I think I have one at least one question here if this is from another eonni at the Brioni sorry who says connectivity versus sensitivity can there be one without the other so I guess we should talk about what connectivity means to you can there be a connectivity without sensitivity maybe not but I feel like in there in its current configuration I feel like connectivity or platforms that favorite they hijack sensitivity I think a lot of I think a lot of us go to these platforms with very genuine feelings of wanting to connect with other people and feel like we're with other people and find those kind of we don't ever really find it there but we're constantly drawn there trying to find it not to mention that that is generating ad revenue which is a really big problem so I think sensitivity and connectivity might be connected in in that way yeah I definitely think yeah I don't know I think they they do exist in a complementary sense like you you can strengthen your friendship or relationship with someone on the social network and then have a very meaningful friendship offline yeah I think so I I guess they'll always be there but think that connectivity gaining the upper hand all the time is the problem yes oh I have so many thoughts but we are running out of time thank you so much thank you again Jenny Odelle [Applause]

Channel: The Conference / Media Evolution

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Length: 57min 28sec (3448 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 11 2017