heathervescent

Our Co-Perceived World

We had an extraordinary Los Angeles sunset a few days ago. The sky was a combination of vanilla peach and pink colors. The lenticular clouds over the city were highlighted pastel pink contrasting with the darkening blue of the evening sky. 

Los Angeles has fabulous sunsets and those of us who live here enjoy them. Just look up from our palm tree lined streets into a pink swirled sky and you'll get the feeling, an LA essence, a palm tree shadowed, behind a changing rainbow sherbet of colors. 

This sunset was better than usual. I noticed it on my dog walk, stopped to enjoy it and took a few camera photos. Minutes later, I started to see friends and colleagues tweet and instagram photos of this very same sky from all over the city.

We don't necessarily realize that we are perceiving the same environment - and in our current paradigm, often documenting it. What does the sunset look like from Hollywood? Silverlake? Venice? It's the same sky, viewed from many perspectives. Our digital mobile devices make it easy to capture our perceptions, our perspective. Instagram filters act as thesaurus for our images that we share with our networks.

Our capturing and sharing activities today are innocent, undirected and unintentional from a collective perspective.

What will the world be like when it's easy to access multiple perceptions/perspectives of the same situation/experience/landscape? Through a timeline - I am reminded of Richard Misrach's Golden Gate series of photos of the sky above the San Francisco Bay, but also of place, like the sunset view from Venice, Hollywood or Silverlake. 

I am reminded of the radical performance theatre, Sleep No More, where the audience is let loose in a 5 story set, in which the actors move from space to space performing/embodying the character within the confines of the set space. No more is the audience limited to rows in front of the fourth wall; the audience becomes part of the performance. Is threaded through the performance space. Each attendee (is responsible for) and has their own personal experience. 

I have trouble with absolute truth. 

I want to believe there is absolute truth, but I just can't see how it could be. Absolute truth would have to include all these various (and potentially conflicting) perceptions.  I see value in being able to perceive. 

Perhaps Absolute truth is a continuum, encompassing perceptions as sub-variables, explorations. There are infinite perceptions, and who is to say which one is "right" and which one is "wrong?"

But back to the long term impact of digitally capturing our co-perceived world. How does the world change when we have "user-generated" content capturing the same scenes from various perspectives? How do we as humanity change in our way to interact with others? The world? Our experiences? And how will the content we've created today (take these many pictures of my beloved LA sunset) be used and for what purpose in the future?

I think we're creating/collecting the raw materials today, in these digitally collected snapshots - documenting our co-perception, that will become something awe-some and transcendent.

Reflections on Preferred Futures, Possibilities & Impossibilities

I am fascinated by possibilities. There's nothing I like better than seeing what can be, than perhaps transitioning those possibilities into this world. In the past few years I have honed my ability to see possibilities (and a process to make them real). I can see around corners, juggle variables and play a metaphorical shell game with data, research & time extrapolations to create a cone of plausability, mine the possibilities in and around it (wildcards fall on the edge or outside of them) and identify (sometimes multiple based on your valueset/variables) preferred futures.

All futures are possibilities. The future is subjunctive tense. There are no future facts, as Bertrand de Jouvenel writes in The Art of Conjecture. So by definition the future is pure possibility. Of course, with the demonstration of the cone of plausibility, some futures have an increased likelihood of occurring, for various reasons. The probability of those futures occurring is more likely or of higher probability. While others have very low probability. (Wild cards aka black swans aka STEEP surprises defined by very low occurrence probability). But low probability does not mean impossible, although for all practical purposes, it may be.

It is interesting to note, that the probability of possibilities doesn't really matter when the present arrives. The present is made up of possibilities that held all kinds of probabilities: from the habit to the wild card.

When thinking about the transition of future possibilities into present reality/action, I like to borrow an example from Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig explains quality with a train. The train is riding on its tracks with quality the ever moving place at the front edge of the train as the train moves on it's tracks. This metaphor has stuck in my mind for over two decades. Rather than use it to define quality. Let me use it to explain the transition of the future subjunctive to the present (and riff off of China Mievelle's Iron Council a bit).

The train is moving along the track (representing time) but instead of one track in front of the train to drive on, there are many tracks (sure, go quantum here), some are more solid than others. Any track is possible; the more probably the track, the more real that track seems (higher probability). (Habits and other things create solid tracks for our metaphorical trains.)

The track the train has not already passed on is the future (even if it's the daily commuter train). There is no guarantee the train will pass on it (it could get derailed or float off into the sky of it's own accord a la the Glass Hotel or the Land of Green Ginger). As the train passes the tracks, pregnant possibility ends, rendering one possibility amongst all other, now impossibilities. This happening many times each second, train clipping along the track.

So let's talk about preferred futures. A preferred future is the future you would prefer to occur. You may have some (or a lot of) control in making it occur. And the more direct control you have over the variables, the increased likelihood for you to make it happen. And by variables, I'm talking about people, companies, technologies, etc. Whatever you need to make that future real. Subjunctive present. You are laying the track you want the train to run on. You want to increase the probability of the train running on this track when it gets to it. This is your pathway to your preferred future. (And here we can go full Iron Council.)

Now let's talk about impossibilities. For every present moment (a rendered possibility), there may be a thousand impossibilities. Evaporated forever. Or perhaps for just a moment (I will not eat that chocolate today! this week! for the next 5 minutes!). As a lover of possibility, you'd think I'd hate the impossibility and yes, they do provide some sadness. But one must love the impossible, unrealized futures as much as the one that is realized. And while the train is not on the track, those tracks still exist in possible form. Perhaps never to be realized. Or realized at another time. Possible impossibilities. 

Reflections on the Concrete Jungle

New York got to me. 

 

In past trips, she coaxed me with beckoning caresses, this trip she dug in her nails. Biting cold, wind whipping through the urban canyons. I opened my coat and let that cold wind pierce my heart, remembering cold January's in the early 90s. I found no solace in people. None in work. I felt I had lost my path with heart. And in heathervescent land, there's only one thing to do when that happens...

Returning to Los Angeles, brisk wind blowing through her, I was thankful for my new found NY clothing. At first moment, I took Lady Vescent on a long embrace. I was interested if I had grown rusty with almost two weeks of subway traveling. But I was sharp as a knife. Threading the needle at 90 through city streets and favorite freeways. The speed, she heals my soul. 

I needed to push my boundaries. I wanted to kiss the edge, go beyond it, etch a remembrance of my tires in the pavement. I went to the wildest place close to Los Angeles: not Latigo, Piuma or the Malibu hills "racetrack", but the raw mountains of San Gabriel, Big Tujunga and Mt Wilson. 

Lost, and found.

Lady V and I weave out of Hollywood, through the San Fernando Valley and I finally hit the triple digits on the 2 north of Glendale. Racing up a mountain, top down, wind blowing, white knuckle riding, conversing with my city. I decelerate quickly, pause at the stop sign and head north into the mountains. The stop is as critical as the acceleration. There can be no speeding without being stuck behind the slow car, no acceleration without the stop. 

I feast my eyes on the scenery as I pass the 2000, 3000, 4000, 5000 elevation markers. It's getting colder, I'm glad for my heated seats. The road is moist, rockfall peppers the pavement. We're above the clouds, a road twisting between the mountains. 

I reach the top, view shrouded in fog. There is no Los Angeles overlook today. But that's ok, because I know what my city looks like. I didn't come for the views today, I came for the roads. And off we are again. Painting the double yellow through a burned forest. 

Sharing the road with a few sightseers, motorcyclists and locals. I came to the roadhouse, a row of motorcycles parked outside. Lunch stop perfection. Body refued before pressing forward. With the intention of getting lost in the mountains. Easier with no cell reception. I sped again on roads, tracked and backtracked, turned off and turned off again. The mountains eventually changing, until I realized I was entering the desert. 

Such was my delight! Lost in the mountains only to find the desert. Look at those wide open spaces! 

The afternoon waned and I felt responsibilities calling. My heart rejuvenated, I returned to the mountain roads, pushing faster spurred on with favorite songs, winding my way onto the freeway system: 210, 118, 5, 170 into there's no place like Hollywood Home. 

Home again, home again. 

The Spike Returns

I'm walking a couple down Amsterdam in the UL /unlicensed district. Except in this reality, it's the upper west side not Triton. I'm wearing a fur shug, no gold eyebrow. I have been chatting with my new companions  over guava and a glass of wine. I've found a great connection with these two. We continue our conversation on the city streets, until I turn to stand in front of a familiar red door. (Familiar from my childhood.) My demeanor changes. I am no longer chatty. The show begins, the door opens and we step inside.

The building reminds me of Victorian remodels from the Midwest. Plaster and lathe ceilings, peeling paint, a worn buffet, dusty floors. I am tempted to explore, but do not. I know more faces from last time. We are all much warmer.

There are performers, there is an audience, I am a guide. Through rooms, up stairs and down, for listening, observing, interacting. A journey, an experience, a commentary of man and nature deep in the mechanical beast of Manhattan. Finalie culminates, led down the aisle. I whisper a few words, unlatch the door and the show is over. 

I take a momentary pause, then return to my place. The show plays again.

Note: this post is about a real microtheatre performance in NYC. I take the name Microtheatre from Samuel Delaney's book, Trouble on Triton, wherein, his character, The Spike, writes, coregraphics and performs (with her troupe) microtheatre or theatrical experiences in the street for an audience of one.

And the Italian one

For Mom, here is my third favorite selection... Fellini Satyricon.

My other favorite film

is a collection of tales... with my favorite section starting at 7:30 of this analysis. 

 

"All these adventures begin simply. The listener thinks it'll soon be over, but one story creates another, and then another.

We are like blind men lost in the streets of a big city. The streets lead to a goal, but we often return the to same places to get where we want to be.

I see a few little streets here which, as it is now, are going nowhere. New combinations have to be arranged, then the whole will be clear, because one man cannot invent something that another cannot solve."

 

 

 

Life is but a dream...

The final scene from my favorite film