Relationships

Relationships are the entities that the exhibition attempts to question or expand. The objective is to encourage reflection and to make the audience/participant rethink what they know.

Index

Key Ideas

We can see the universe in terms of relationships
Abiotic structures and patterns are relationships
Living beings are always in multiple relationships
Colour is one characteristic examples

Key Relationships

Discuss and decide where to place discussion about data/quantifying (could belong to Communication or Culture)

Each of these is represented in a separate file

Subjectivity: as an expression of subjectivity that enables local creativity/persistence/existence of individuals [define what individuals might be somewhere: groups, genes, organisms, etc.]
Communication: as a necessary way to transmit information between individuals, groups, generations, etc. a. Literature b. Imaging c. Data analysis
Culture: as patterns that emerge because of place patterns and evolution
Place: as a spatial/physical matrix that limits the formation of patterns but also as a cultural product that underlies group learning, behaviour, ecosystems, etc. [the story of the universe, Berry]
Design: as an unavoidable action-oriented mode for curating the future a. Imagination b. Pattern formation/replacement

History of Relationships

Relationships, along with states, agents and other separable, unitary, linkable entities are expressions of processes.

In this context, colour or place as humans know them are expressions of much larger and older dynamics linking cosmology, the history of the universe, the Solar system and the Earth.

For example, colour is impossible without light and that is impossible without atmosphere that can act as a medium for light.

"The first historically significant event of the Archean period is the emergence of the sky from the centrifugal movement of the atmosphere. As the earth’s crust hardened, volcanoes subsided, and meteors slowed, something revolutionary happened: the sky began to clear. The carbon dioxide and sulfurous gases that darkened the earth’s greenhouse atmosphere began to dissipate. Flows of light and radiation from the sun, the moon, and the cosmos increasingly reached the earth’s surface.

What had for millions of years been a relatively sealed and turbulent surface became a medium from which the tripartite distinction between interior, surface, and cosmic exterior emerged. The earth no longer mainly recycled its dense low atmosphere but increasingly released its gases higher, outward, and into the cosmos, raining heavier gases and minerals back down. This process was not a sudden event but a slow transition of increasing volatile evaporation."

...

"The atmosphere is also the medium through which the earth absorbs, reflects, and circulates cosmic, solar, and lunar heat/light. The earth is the first eye—a central zone or surface of luminous accumulation and orientation. All other planetary eyes emerged from this basic kinetic pattern invented by the earth. The earth’s black basalt surface is its light-absorbing pupil, its clear sky its cornea, its blue oceans and swirling clouds its iris. Again, we have an inverted metaphor. Biological eyes are material metaphors of the earth itself, not the other way around. History transports kinetic patterns asymmetrically from the past to the present, not the other way around."

...

"Human sensation is part of the atmosphere. The atmosphere is the deep transcendental condition for everything we usually call environment and background.

Figure and ground are regions of the atmosphere that have crystallized as ground and evaporated as a figure.

Cloud figures float on a stage made of rock and sea. The distinction between figure and ground that we usually make in art and aesthetics is made possible by the material condition of the atmosphere".

Nail, Thomas. Theory of the Earth. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021.

Children

Backlinks

Index

Key Ideas

Key Relationships

History of Relationships