Category: thoughts

Is it a conspiracy to assert that we live in a period of relative prevalence of conspiratorial oriented opinions?
Perhaps it feels like that prevalence since a fair few peole approach me while thinking the viromecaravan has something to do with covid as a conspiracy.

When chatting with such conspiracy oriented humans, i think
that while i should counter their line of thinking one way or another when possible – ie
not leading into some kind of a circular self righteous argumentation session –
such interventions should be made with dignity and respect for the human i am speaking with.

Is that approach a mistake?

Indeed, it seems i learn too from these interactions. Afterall, these are humans with thought processes that i have not really encountered before.

For example?
A person that actually expects people in power to offer a correct guidance to rely upon without questioning.
A person that may take power greed as a sign for not that something is wrong with power and violence but of
an evidence that anything they say is misleading –
hence anything that they oppose or don’t say, is true..

Or
a person who told me they know covid is a conspiracy because they never met anyone who had covid.
Do you think the suffragettes were a conspiracy?
No..
However, you never met them, have you?
But I have seen films, seen photos, read texts..
Yes, i said, so it is possible to tell whether something happens even if you have no direct experience. (Thought it was nailed, however..)
But that was history, not what’s now.
Is it not possible to transfer the same kind of info-crossing research to the present?
How can you when the government obviously lies.
How?
They want to use covid to control us!
Yes.. That is possible – however, this is a different question from whether there is or isn’t covid. Its to do with how do we respond to the situation. How do we make the best of it and move forward better than we have entered. no?
Maybe.. But i do not think covid is real!!
At this point I broke a bit, i think.. Done something that perhaps i should not have. Said a truth:
Actually, a very good friend is fighting covid now, as we speak, at the hospital.
Here?? In Brighton??
I was surprised by the response.. This means they might have thought covid happens in some far away places but not here..
Curious??

Perhaps another strange thing that comes clear is that we don’t have lessons in critical thinking at school – and sometimes not so much at unis either.
Are there classes to work on fallacies?
Indeed, how do you tell another human they might have a difficulty in thinking?
Nothing psychological or intellectual in-capacity, but a luck of knowledge and experience in appling ways of thinking.
Yet, with AI, we do teach them how to overcome fallacies with ever increasing rigour…

I think it is a legitimate question for us, during covid – how do we do culture?

Before getting into that, let’s try and and unshade a few things. Doing culture, imho, is an evolution, energies that escape with, without and within volition.
aka – i doubt living is plausible – let alone possible – without culture, human and otherwise.
Therefore, imho – whether we go to cinemas, galleries, clubs, cafes, libraries and such places –
affects How we do culture, rather than waht the image suggests.
(..that somehow we are without art and culture while places like cinemas are shut..)
Indeed, when considering Cinema kind of places, venues humans may come together to question, reflect, wonder, imagine, energize and therefore evolve Their culture collective –
it seems the focus comes on art and culture as a collaborative oriented process.
Even when the orientation comes on individuals, the collaborative togetherness is there through reliance of such individuals on various shared contexts.

Since we have been covided – aka implicated by a virus that enforce alterations in life and therefore culture ways of doing things –
perhaps the question should address the How imho.
There are
instant solutions that we swell into- tech network oriented solution. Museiums, festivals, conferences, galleries and performances have been
xoomed since covid began.
Apart from the fact that there are other – not commercial – technologies we can use,
I think that perhaps we can also ask a wider question that these covided times may offer –
have we shared culture, before covid, in the best way possibly plausible?
Could
this break in the art sharing and doing habits,
this forced change,
could it not come as na opportunity to consider, let alone develop, other?
Some other ways to share, or are we going to confine ourselves into the technological solutions alone?

There’s nothing against technology going through my mind as i type on a networked pad via a laptop.
However, diversification is on mind, as well as multiple physicalities, frictions and ways.

The Virome Caravan offers a here and now suggestion to share and connect, do art’s calling for a shared evolution in a covid safe manner, while keeping a physicality mediated by other than binary pulses.

Well.. Probably not just viromecaravan – however, not a bad place to begin considering how social media may offer a distance
exactly where and when there’s a connection.

What’s that on about??

Well.. Lets’ begin with a context.

A friend pi9nged me with:
hey, you are famous – check:
https://m.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2995925503845137&id=100002831508622&set=gm.1016328472140231&source=57

(i am not on fb, btw..)

So.. turns out that when i think:
nice, people take pictures of the viromecaravan –
they take pictures of that which may bring buzz to a social media account.
There we get a point of connection – viromecaravan & image taking -getting split via how we imagine the very contact to operate.

Since I was looking at performance art recently, perhaps the following thought exercise came about:

With the skateboard taken in mind –
Can the whole episode be done as a performance?
How can we have, forgive the direct rudeness, something like
A skateboard theft Performance.
We could literally perform – someone leaving the board in town and someone else taking it away in an agreed fashion.
However, what if we took it a step further?
What if we said that the theft has to come genuinely from someone that takes without asking.
How could that come? Well, we may want to put the object/skateboard somewehre it can be taken from. However, suppose no one picks it up? Or suppose, in case the board is there for a few days, some local person places it in the bin? Or that since the object is there for a long time, someone concludes it belongs to no one – and Therefore take it. (ie they may think it’s there for taking rather than for getting stolen..)

If the skateboiard stealing was a performance –
how could it come re-enacted in a genuine and authentic manner?

Will it not then matter How such a performance be Named?

Something like:
“The stealing of X” – may come as any kind of taking the X object as stealing.
However, with a name like:
“A possible stealing of X?” – may come more inclusive and allow a genuine sensation for what ever may come?

The basic notion is that:

Suppose you have something someone else fancies.
A well funded person can always approach you and offer to buy.
Suppose you claim there’s nothing to sell – a well funded person could still attempt to buy via various legal means and sanctions. (eg, get you fired from a job, unless you sell the stuff.)

Suppose a similar situation with a person that has much less funds than yourself or the 1st example –
and what would they do in case they need, want or desire something you have?

Here comes the gps frictions.
A gps device that may track an object – however, to get it,
you need to agree negotiating with others who might take the thing being tracked.
In other words:
The GPS tracker can check the where-abouts of a bike, coat, phone, boat, art object, etc –
only after the person that places the gps
agrees that in case the stuff is taken, they will use that friction of taking the object – to negotiate theirs, and others, connections with each other as well as the object.

(
Perhaps this is a useful illustration of how stuff like ViromeCaravan is like a furnace kiln through which other, unexpected, may escape
)

How to get stuff tagged with gps – however, with the idea of using the friction (of someone taking without asking) as an opening to re-negotiate and imagine anew the connection with that which could be taken.

Another thought has to do with performance – and possibly art at that.

A tempo of shields?

There’s something between an agreement and materiality, when staying in the virome caravan.

Perhaps it will turn out that that the temporary is actually a question of Tempo – as in time of cultural acceptance rather than the temporal – less permanent than bricks and mortar – nature of the structure?

A shelter comes from shield. We can have a structure that shields from the elements. A sheild from the stuff we can not discuss and perhaps come to an agreement with.
Not domesticated animals?
Walls will fence them away.
Winds, rains, sun rays, colds and heat-waves?
Walls and roofs will keep them away from us, humans.
..and to keep humans?
Agreements.
Suppose we didn’t have spontaneous and un ruled elements nor animals to deal with. We could, as in dogvill (movie), to simply make lines that delineate domains. Like zebra crossing may tell humans where to stop a vehicle and where to cross.
We could have had lines. I could have a caravan that materialises anywhere by simply making lines on a surface stating – this is such and such Caravan. (Perhaps it could be an idea to do at times..)
However, instead of going around with a chalk – there’s a structure that operates to sheild from elements, animals and mostly – other humans.

That sheltering from other humans seems kind of strange in some ways.
The strangeness, in my mind, is that of violence. When I place the caravan somewhere – say on the side of a road, in a parking space or on a bit of grass inb a park – there’s a certain statement done silently:
I am Here.
In case someone don’t like me being there, they are required to challenge. In that way, perhaps there’s a violence of their course of life. How they might fancy that course of life without having to engage with the virome caravan.

Some people do say things. Perhaps tentatively, some suggest this caravan is practically a tent. Should I reply with a house is a kind of a tent in bricks and mortar?
or
Should I agree and move on?

Tents though, in the UK, are deemed illegal to pitch unless in pitching grounds.
A tent on wheels?
Hard to tell.

Winds, rats, foxes, rain, birds poo and such – don’t ask such questions. They just seem to go:
Oh! a physical thing, I can not go through. Lets go around, stick on top, bounce off, and so on – pending on the elements or animal.

These ways, perhaps we can claim that the Virome caravan lives as an in-between (moving) negotiations, negotiating shelter?