Jean Francois Lyotar, Principe de chromodynamique
Giuseppe Chiari, Da 16 a 16mila cicli al secondo in 24 ore
Bruno Corà, Maria Novella Del Signore: Continuum Sensibile
Laura Vecere, And living is so very close to dying
David Clegg, Memories of a Body incomplete
David Clegg, The Science of Animal Earth
David Thorp, Grace in a Disordered World
The science of Animal Earth.
David Clegg, London, April 2007
There are many conflicting realities available to us at any one time. What we perceive as singular and real is a tiny detail from the field of possibilities surging around us, which our nervous system has brought into being through computation. Other possibilities coexist within fogs of electrical signals and neurological white noise at the borders and interstices of our senses where they give rise to visions and unconscious leaps of creative imagination.
Back in 2004, Maria Novella Del Signore showed me an early, nameless version of Animal Earth. Then, as the piece evolved I occasionally thought about how other people I work with would react to it. What would they see in its shifting surfaces?
For close to ten years I’ve worked professionally alongside researchers, therapists and nurses to understand and interpret the seemingly alien worlds of people with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of degenerative brain damage. I’ve spent hundreds of hours piecing together disarticulated speech, trying to see behind the stuttering noise of misfiring words and colourless repetition. I’ve walked with them, watched them, collected their drawings and letters, and looked for consistency within the catastrophic processes of decline. I’ve seen intelligent people attempt to pick up shadows from pavements and reflected light from windows and mistake the patterns on fabrics and carpets for the movement of snakes and spiders. I’ve tried to empathize when the flow of music begins to effect the stability of architecture so the walls of buildings seem to shimmer and drift like water. Towards the end, when speech becomes almost impossible, it seems as if the understanding of space begins to collapse completely, the edges of objects rupture and fuse with their backgrounds, vertical and horizontal surfaces become indistinguishable and time and again inanimate objects begin to move. Eventually dementia wipes out the external world.
And what applies at the end of perception may apply at other times of changed awareness; in religious trances, delirium, coma, migraines, during sensory deprivation, dreams and drug induced altered states of consciousness. As disease and mysticism eradicate the external world the underlying neurological scaffolds on which we hang the information of our senses are stripped bare. Common to all the experiences is the interaction between the tangible world and a perceived self-organising movement or scintillation of a mysterious glistening white, transparent or iridescent veil, highlighted by intense points of moving light and shadow. Characteristically the movements radiate outwards following no pattern set by an increasingly obscured external world. The vision has been described as similar in effect to the swarming of water beetles on the surface a pool in the sunshine or the dancing entopic phenomena we see if we press our thumbs against our closed eyes. New techniques for mapping brain activity suggest that these neurological mechanics are at the very heart of our evolved consciousness. How these trembling surfaces and flickering lights are interpreted depends largely on time and context.
South African San tribesmen interpret the shimmering auras as the sound of bees and ritualise the collection of honey and wax. Hildegard von Bingen interpreted the same phenomena as radiant castles, falling stars and angels sent to her by God. New theories point to sensory deprivation and hallucination as factors within the development of cave art, when, 35,000 years ago man first began to make his mark on the world with floating grids, dots and rippled mud surfaces in the caves at Chauvet and Romanelli. Fortunately in day-to-day life the steady buzz of our central nervous system is usually as unnoticeable to us as the sound the earth moving through space.
But we should consider the physical reality of ‘Animal Earth’ before becoming caught up in the poetics of the rippling surfaces. Like dry dusty pools, both one thing and countless millions of tiny particles. They lack the cold certainties common to so much sculpture, displaying instead a sort of indeterminate, transient, impermanent quality – not quite there, never the same twice, dependent on and altered by the warmth and humidity of their architectural surroundings, a simple piece but one it’s easy to become lost in, absorbed by the decaying and regenerating landscape. Dust is the debris of humanity - decay in the form of dust, the stuff of human passage. We add to each little white grave with our skin flakes as we pass. Once, not long ago, dust constituted the smallest thing the human eye could see, now each one is a tiny calcium carbonate planet, which would reveal it’s own eroding, energetic little landscape under the electron microscope.
So how are we to decipher the totality of Animal Earth? Place, history, archaeology and change seem to be core themes. There is something suggestive of the nature of memory. How the past resurfaces in the present. Sounds and smells build bridges from one room to the next. But we could also read each piece more directly as a primordial incubator or as a hallucinated floor surface or as a bed. However we chose to read them it would be a mistake to see these works as too discrete, to disregard the importance of their self-organising, spontaneously emerging complexity. Ultimately what is important is not so much what people see in the gallery but what they see in the world around them after looking at these things, how they confront their reality again. Whether they open their eyes to discover what is already there in the ripples on the beach and the ticking of our senses.
Self-organising systems represent the recently discovered rule in nature, a creative or evolutionary perspective replacing the clockwork or ‘heat death’ theories of science. We now know that nature ‘thinks’ in terms of chaos, self-organisation and non-linear dynamics. Like the neurology of hallucination such systems are hidden for the most part, not seen and not suspected in the course of our daily lives. For three centuries science has been dominated by Newtonian and thermodynamic concepts, which present the universe as a sterile machine in a state of degeneration and decay. Now there is the new paradigm of the creative universe, which recognises the progressive unpredictable character of physical processes. This new principle generates complexity at every level from the sub-cellular to the cosmic, from the turbulent little avalanches of ‘Animal Earth’ to the social structures of insects. Oliver Sacks described the universality of this new mythology as providing “an entirely new view of nature and of God”.
Anthropologists and politicians have consistently told us that we innately desire a predictable and ordered world, a world to which we are orientated, and this new theory, suggests that at the deepest levels both internally and externally we don’t have it. The tyranny of order has lead us to deride anything requires us to experience periods when we cannot give simple meaning to the information of our senses. Only in the protected environments of galleries and churches, characterised by high walls of psychic insulation can we let ourselves be aware that our need for art runs against our supposed inborn preference for stability, certainty and order and comes from somewhere altogether darker within ourselves.