notes

I want to create experiences through which people see thoughts as thoughts and so have vivid sensory and embodied experience of themselves in material social spaces. Picturing the moment people switch focus from augmented thoughts to their own presence, the presence of others and the space between.

The forms of the invisible presences I sense in situations, (the presence of absence) could be suggested by presenting fragments of the different group dynamics played out across different modes of communication and spaces, allowing the viewer to visualise their own gestalt patterns.

Capture groups doing all different kinds of activities, (play with toys, movement feeling for energies, footy drills, move something games, vocal movement non contact improv play, moving media in vr, sim games etc) keep only parts of what is captured and explore new forms suggested or implied between the gaps and transferance between them.

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This feels like grounding my practice in the dynamics of the world. I think I've spent 15 years in shock, dissociating my practice from my life. How much of my urge to create thoughts as platonic digital forms been a trauma response to growing up and coming of age being bisexual in the 80s 90s early 00s and then cancer?

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The artworks present moving fragments of social dynamics produced around the scene in different modes of communication and spaces, allowing the viewer to find their own patterns and forms.

—

Koan: Create a mountain.

Rushing to get dressed in Leos room I'm putting on some sheeney black wide, straight legged Sergio Techatini trackies, a thin tight marl grey 80s top and a navy zip up cardi with chord front that gives it some structure and wool effect arms. Looking down, I hear a voice a bloke, yorkshire accent ‘are you trying to dress gay in that?’ - I feel these ideas of myself separating slightly from my skin, Neil the lad or Neil the weedy gay boy, the sorted woke arty man from my 30's and 40's, or as a liberated queer inspired by all the amazing young people around me now. But what’s real are the sensations of my body as I stand and move. I can sense these different ideas of myself left, right, in front, to the side, but I’m right here in the middle. The naked sensations between my spine and my skin. If I move with them, dress with them, speak with these sensations, without planning, I don’t need to wear any of these ideas.

—

This practice is opening gaps in my expectations of the moment. I’m peeking through them, seeing more of how other people are. It feels intense and overwhelming, but slowly I'm allowing them to open milliseconds longer each time.

A vision of partial, scattered impressions is coming up a lot for me at the minute. I want to use AR to evoke the partial nature of the feelings that were dampened down, ignored or pushed away in my life, but leaving the gaps between impressions, instead of attempting to immerse the viewer in the whole scene.

Acknowledging that there are gaps between my sensations, perceptions, thoughts, feelings and memories, that those gaps arent nothingness, but a greater reality I'm unaware of. No need to arrange them into a particular shape, inner and outer, to contain and protect things I dont know about myself from things I dont know of the world. No need to inflate myself to protect an empty interior.

—

Sitting at Stonewater last night, thoughts popping up left right and centre, scatty, annoying, kind of banal. They just emerge and go. Breath. Then another, focus on my breath for a second or so, then another, left, right, all around. I kept geting Hey by the Pixies in my head. Clearly from talking to Andy the other day about him joining a Pixies cover band. I kept hearing the song, making that connection, then some other thing would pop up. But after, back home I felt so relieved. I normally find my thoughts so fascinating and mysterious, but tonight they were just the banal stuff my brain was doing. It was just what came up. I stopped feeling like I needed to solve the mystery of where each thought came from. Like how Sartre talked about the phenomena of electricity being just the heat, light and sound, just that. There is no pure essence of electricity to be found. These thoughts are just what I could observe of what was coming up at the time. What's the point trying to find the original root of any of this? I can just appreciate any poetry or beauty as it emerges.

—

Should I embrace the feelings of absence and loss? Are desires, losses and attempts to escape through creativity and imagination, parts of Dogen's 10,000 things?

Is the ache of not being with my mum on her birthday meal out, even though I spent the weekend with her, part of the 10,000 things?

Is the underlying feeling of some kind of stiffness, hindering me spontaneously express my love to my mum part of the 10,000 things?

I left York to find spaces I could communicate visually in and be around people who and underlying that to find places…

Maybe my anguish and losses are empty and impermanent too? I have a tendency to imagine them as things, with essential mysteries to solve, when they are fleeting patterns and processes that emerged from beginningless patterns of patterns and morph and dissolve into many more, rippling back out into the great reality.

Just because I'm in some way unaware of something im experiencing, happening to me or a part of myself, it dosent make it more real, more 3D or more powerful. It is just as empty and impermanent as anything else.

I have a tendency to join the dots and fill in the gaps to turn painful feelings bordering on unknown shame, into monsters, or ghosts.

Is my trying to imagine what invisible and unknown thoughts and feelings look and move like.