process Tag

Every now and again, as I walk around these not-so-pristine streets, my eye will catch something small, some strange forgotten detail on a building facade and it will tell me to record it in some way, sketch or otherwise, in order for it not to be forgotten entirely.  Other times, my forehead opens up and things fall out and I'll need a place to catch them.Most often though, the idle thoughts that pass through typically revolve around or revolve in some kind of environment, not necessarily a building, maybe a set of buildings, or a wilderness, none of which exist in the proper sense, and therefore need to find space on a notebook page.  The design process that has sort of formed itself within me over the years took a narrative turn while I was working on my master's degree.  The sense that buildings and environments needed to be created through the positivist flow seemed to be too limited and cold for my tastes and the only way to find new opportunities in design would be to come at it from the other side. Or from underneath, as the case may be.  This lead me towards intuition, accident, error, and then eventually to poetry, though I far from consider myself to be any kind of poet.

Pushing off the dock in Kodiak with a solid three weeks of work behind us, the small cannery we called (temporary) home, Alitak, lies behind a hundred miles of fog and snowcovered peaks. We set off on a thirty hour run north, to an equally small town, Kenai, for the salmon season on the Cook Inlet. I'd like to tell you about jigging for cod over this time, on a small boat in high wind and waves, but I find myself interested in showers, and their locations, scarcity.

Straight from Kodiak -- our second installment from poet and artist, Jacob Perkins. Here's an excerpt from PT 1 - to contextualize the images and drawings below. More words are incoming... he's on a fishing boat in Alaska, after all! "Myself, I am Alaskan born. Summer is the season of the sockeye. For others it is re-shingling, re-siding, decking, painting, some kind of hometown gig you begrudge seasonally, out of that season. For me it is sockeye, and a gillnet, and a boat. Whether or not you’re leaving your medium; the palette, the sound equipment, the studio, the computer; or if you’re lucky enough to bring them along, one thing is clear: summer is time to get down to some hard work, psychologically, ideologically, literally." [caption id="attachment_1544" align="alignleft" width="612"] A 45 pound Lingcod we caught in Kodiak[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1521" align="alignleft" width="632"] "from the seemingly random the rhizome develops" - Bob Holman, June 23rd, 2012 @ Naropa SWP | intuitive responsive visualised field notes by Lynne DeSilva-Johnson[/caption] Since the inauguration of the Field Notes series there has been a great rumbling -- not only of interest in the project [on deck: filmmakers, musicians, programmers, visual artists, activists...!] but also in the expansion of its attentions. Given our proclivity towards community collaboration we eagerly sop up the runoff of creative juices that gathers like dew on you all in the morning! So, naturally, to the question, "could we also include ____?" the answer is, why NOT? If you're new to Exit Strata, this is a good time to introduce you to our commitment to PROCESS: as much or more than we are excited to share and celebrate the products we create, we thrive and exist around the notion of creating community together via an intentional desire to the work of art. That is to say the WORK that is art, and the collaborative acts of craft across many disciplines that make this work so rich. We are not interested in what is NOT. We are interested in IS. Human attention, human questioning, universal energetic wanderings, coding, mathematical formulation, scientific inquiry, yoga, chanting, dance, film, music, sound, translation, fiction, poetry, prose, aphorism. Is it ART? is it art? is it Art? This is an interesting question for another time, but also a different question than it may appear to be. For our purposes, we are more interested in "does it inspire? does it help me and my community grow/think/learn/be better?" and to look at how the creative people (which doesn't necessarily mean "artists") in our midst use their notes to grow themselves and their work. Above, you see a responsive notebook page of mine that ebbed and flowed, responding to the rhythms of a poetry reading that was introduced by Bob Holman, who spoke the words above: "from the seemingly random the rhizome develops." Something perhaps I never would have shared before this series, which brings some questions to the fore, for all of us: What does your field-note-book look like?

"None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did. From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art. We can only quarrel with one or another means of defense." - Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation “...writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.” ― Doris Lessing

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