notes

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===== That feeling of being watched =====

Sandi Hughes told me that when someone was getting above themselves and taking up too much space, she would say to them "Get back in your body you!" This is the phenomenon I’m trying to explore, the feeling I get, that we send out parts of ourselves to scan, interpret and manipulate the social space we're in. I can feel myself do it and I can sense the presence of other peoples emotions and wants. Most of them busy, intense and pressing onto me or other people, trying to make sense of our complexity, showing what we should be. Some coalescing in tension with opposing desires, some like barely formed clouds, wandering abandoned, with nothing to support their growth. 

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGeyYoc6X/

I have this feeling of being watched from all around. It's not like a presence of one person being there, but my body feeling watched from all angles. Could this be how I experience critics in my society of mind? The feeling of being seen, in many ways, from many perspectives and what this does to how I feel about myself. I know this is a feeling I have. I don’t believe I’m actually being watched all the time from all angles. What if I didnt feel like I’m being observed? What if no one is watching me? What if nothing was holding my hips in place and my back still? What if I give more attention to sensations in my body instead of imagining how I look like from the outside? I feel the watching is looking for me being a certain way. It’s pressure, expectation. There could be criticism if I don’t . 

This feeling is similar to how I imagine eye beams would feel, according to emission theory,) highly popular in the middle ages, perception is achieved by eye beams emitted by the eyes. 

See this article and this article on medieval ideas about vision, eye beams and the evil eye.

My feeling of this is somewhere between eye beams and demon systems like Pandemonium and agents in liquid brains. Instead of the visual rays following geometric straight lines, as proposed by ancient Greek philosophers, I'm imagining vision agents wandering through spaces like anti gravity ants each looking for very particular shapes and forms. 

For the artwork - this feeling of being watched, with the sense of a disembodied agency of watching, scouting a situation, looking for something, could be described with 1000s of sense impressions swarming towards me, looking for me to be a certain way. 

Like demons in a demon system each looking out for a certain feature. Or jellyfish like entities, free floating eye lenses, foraging like ants in liquid brains, both looking and looking for something  leaving trails or screaming when they think they find what they're looking for.

What happens when swarms of these vision agents cross paths?

What are our different parts looking for in this scene? 

What dont we want to see from each other?

What might we miss even if we do see it?

When talking to my Zen tutor in Koan practice, I have a habit of describing what I’m experiencing ‘is it like _ _ _ ‘ or ‘it feels like _ _ _ _ ‘ instead of embodying it. As soon as I start to use language to describe what I’m experiencing, I’m translating what I experience into how I imagine someone might understand it. Translating instead of being.