notes

Thoughts build the self as termites build a mound, living around the body like fish, shrimp and octopuses, in and around coral reefs.

This feels key for this method - I want people to be able to roleplay on the scale of the ants. There could be something liberating in dropping our responsibility for our self and playing, thinking, moving and talking as the multitudes of different small but highly specialised thoughts and feelings.

It's not so much I don't know who I am, as I don't know what I am. A superorganism stood next to other superorganisms in the queue at the chippy, different combinations of cells, skin, muscle, bones, organs, feelings, sensations, thoughts, gestures, clothes and words, being treated by society like I'm a self but not really feeling it. Here in Hang Fung chip shop on Park Road I’m both the very ordinary man I appear to be and this invisible mix of embodied and disembodied sensations. Queer sensations feeling their way around my guts and hips, team player checking the plannning spreadsheet for tomorrow, caring dad thinking of his sons problem at school, anxious weirdo worrying what the other Buddhists think of me, arty critical head aestheticising the entire situation, liquid brains and sensations pushing up against and melding with each other.

Trace what my different parts want to find in the scene.

Each part is a colony of different breeds of cognitive affective agents.

- Beliefs about itself and others - Desires - Filters, appraisers - Critics, defenders - Internal sensors - External sensors - feelers, lookers, listeners - Actors - Things it enables the person to do, speak, move

The key to this practice is to engage not at the scale and level of the the self but of these different agents.

Liquid brains

Pandemonium Architecture

Lying on my side, like a 50s pinnup pose, something in the way I'm gently rocking my hips feels so feminine, in a way they feel more deeply connected with my body, but they can't be mine. It's not unusual for me to experience parts of my body, thoughts and feelings, as not being mine. This, unhealthy confusion of what is inside and out, me and not me, could provide a way to unpick the borders of the humanist self.

Most thoughts are tiny, roaming around spaces trying to make sense of what is happening in the space immediately around them. They first grew in other spaces, adapting to be highly specialised to sense different things, e.g. what kind of place this is, what the decor is like, what things are in the space and which memories they trigger, people's body language and expressions, keeping track of the conversation etc, to feed information back to the thoughts closer to or in the body, that make sense of all this and the others that decide what to do next. Each has capacities to move, look out for things, to change their display to send messages, to feed, grow, and interact with other thoughts in other ways. They all bring the capacities to do different things that they adapted for different places and times, to explore what is happening in this space and time. Maybe they are even more highly specialised, not just able to 'sense people's body language and expressions' but particular kinds, e.g. Aggression, sarcasmOrSense body types, e.g.

Ant colony type behaviours of externalised thoughts and feelings, out foraging and exploring the space in all directions at once, as they send info and energy other thoughts that are close enough and leave pheromone messages to be found.

Some ideas and emotions make it back to the body, to be considered and possibly acted upon and some don't. The hive mind sends the most thoughts to follow the trails with the most pheromones. There could be a build up of anger, that doesn't connect back to me, hanging mid air between someone is doing something that upsets me and me. In fact most of the thoughts and feelings being explored in the room, the signals won't make it back to me strong enough to convince me to pay attention to them and act on them. Pheromones to ants are triggers to tell other ants something about what is here, food, threat etc. What is the mind/space equivalent?

Emotion pheromone?

Mental task allocation pheromone?

Ants have… Scout

Forager

Soldier

Builder

Minds have..

Perception

Interpretation

Emotional response

Imagine possibilities

Decision making

Action

Reflection

Thoughts can secrete pheromones that….

- describe what is happening there e.g. Danger bullying.

- Describe the emotional tone of what's happening there

- Suggest what kinds of thoughts or feelings are needed there Communicate with thoughts nearby either through visual displays or sounds

Send positive or negative energy to excite or inhibit other thoughts close by.

Use the look and feel and workings of social media to show some of these interactions. Read all the above

Hatch thoughts/emotions

Each kind of thought leaves a trail of pheremones specific to its specialism, encouraging other thoughts to do particular kinds of mental emotional work at that location. e.g. Bad vibe finder

Work - Sniffing out people thinking bad things about you. Muscle appreciator Gay detector Spacey ness Boy camouflage - act like the other lads

MOVEMENT BASED ACTIVITIES

ANT SCALE The trails of communication between each other, as if information moved like an ant colony, where is the Queen? Where is food brought to and from? Where is the shit? Where is the cemetery?

What are the human emotional equivalents in this scene?

Where is the shame? Where is the respect? Where is the laughter? Where is the energy? Where is the coolness / admiration? Where is the desire?

HUMAN SCALE Use each others sense of comfort in each other space as a way to map out the psychological/emotional boundaries.

Nervous Get lads to map out the psychological/motional zones by miming… The boundaries of how close they feel comfortable getting to each other, as if they could touch and feel each these emotions on each other but in mid air.

Where is the shame? Where is the respect? Where is the laughter? Where is the energy? Where is the coolness / admiration? Where is the desire?

ANIMATING SPIRITS OF OUR FACES BODIES Reenact scene(s) Identify gestures/expressions/PARTICULAR PARTS OF CLOTHES, FURNITURE OR OBJECTS Ask, what it does what it says, what it wants? if that were to move away from you and begin to move in and around us where would it go? How would this one interact with this one?