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Category: Connect
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Published: Wednesday, 02 December 2020 11:15
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Written by Cherry
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The following is taken from ‘Eating Sand. Tasting textures of Communication in Warm Data' - Nora Bateson, blog.usejournal.com
'Knowing about complexity and systems theory is fun for me. The crunchy work my head has to do to play with the theoretical language is a delicious charge. This is my geek zone. Others have theirs in tech, history, mechanics, gardening, crafts, music or whatever. It is nice to have a niche, but ultimately insufficient. Finding the ways in which those theories and ideas have a place in my day, my body, my identity, my community, my microbiome — that is where the rigor goes into hyperspeed. In the intimacy of the tiniest of gestures is the multi-processed, multi-contextual, mutli-lingual, multi-everything-ed tissuing of what it is to be an animate, sensing learning, changing being. This is a portal into a sensitivity that is intensely personal and simultaneously universal.
The future is found in the logic of the affect. The salt is now desperately needed. The why of why an article is written in a particular tone, the who of who is verified by that tone, the when of when that tone is necessary to use. What is it not possible to say? Noticing that — is a revolution in itself. It used to be heresy to bring up aesthetics and tone, but now maybe its possible to bring this warm data to the boardrooms and parliaments. Remember, the opposite of aesthetic is anesthetic.
Each encounter, each conversation. Each action is an action in contextual processes saturated both into the detail of everyday life, intimately — as well as into the wider world. The texture and aesthetic of the way the crises of this time are discussed will become characteristic of the “solutions” generated.The warm data matters.'
April 2. 2019
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Category: Connect
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Published: Monday, 09 November 2020 17:29
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Written by Cherry
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(The following is taken from 'You Belong - A Call for Connection' - by Sebene Selassie (p 19 -21)
'Indigenous people of the Pacific Islands have a unique tradition of sailing referred to as "wayfinding." When Europeans colonised these islands, they recognised that people across thousands of miles of open ocean shared heritage. These indigenous people explained to Europeans that, yes, they traversed the thousands of miles between the islands of the South Pacific (and perhaps as far as South America). They did this on their large, open boats (think Moana) by connecting deeply to everything around them - to the elements, the animals, the sky, the ocean, and the spirit world. This seemed impossible to the European navigators and scientists. Clearly the people are primitive. How could they travel all that way without written language, maps, instruments, external navigation tools, large ships, and a Christian God? Why, we ourselves had all those things and still got lost! The Europeans settled on a theory that these natives must have accidentally drifted thousands of miles between islands (eye roll). It wasn't until the 1970's that Western disbelief was finally publicly discredited and way finders were recognised as expert sailors and navigators. But Europeans did not only not believe the way finders, they banned them from practicing their culture of way finding (though the communities secretly kept it alive). With colonisation came epistemicide....
'Epistemicide is the killing of knowledge. It refers to the wiping out of ancient ways of knowing. There was a rationalist/scientific paradigm within European Enlightenment that spread from the hard sciences to the social sciences and into the humanities. This worldview rendered nonscientific knowledge systems invalid. I believe epistemicide is a primary reason we as moderns have lost our sense of belonging...
(Science) is still only metaphor - words and numbers describing realities that are indescribable (time is an illusion!)... Science today (and for some time now) wields power. And science itself tells us that power makes us less likely to take on the perspectives of other people - it's shown we pay more attention to those we deem powerful... Power is wielded by those who master language and argument as well as access and resources...
All language is metaphor .. Some of it is complex. Some of it is simple (and poetic). All of it, as the Zen Buddhists say, "fingers pointing at the moon." We can call it a spirit realm or the energy patterns, but we will still have a hard time rationally understanding the myriad things that form the mystery and wonder of belonging.'
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