Who am I when I travel halfway around the world to be here in Lapland? Tourist? Scientist? Artist? These are three ways of coming and looking at this place that is far from home, three roles I have navigated in the two-week research laboratory. I would like to suggest that, beneath the social differences of these roles, there is a shared dynamic of encounter and documentation as an extractive exchange. Each comes with an expectation of encounter and the tools to facilitate this.
The tourist seeking a wilderness experience brings hiking gear, a camera, a map, and extracts an experience, wilderness photos, and a social media story. The scientist comes to extract knowledge with specific protocols and equipment for perceiving the unseen.
How do I (we) come as artist-researchers? To mediate ways of seeing for a distant audience? To author (to declare ownership of) alternative ways of seeing? The additive edict of Andscapes proposed to append an and/or to habitual and intrinsically extractive modes of looking. I am cognizant that while we can step out of the bus and change our city shoes for hiking boots, we cannot so easily change our accultured modes of world-viewing. Our baby step here is to come with looking, knowing, documenting and seeking to attune with endemic entities and conscious use of tools and attentiveness to physical and durational scale.
Attunement
I brought with me the understanding that a human being can attune with a tree, sensory body to sensory body, my spinal column like a tuning fork. Sharing breath; theirs resinous and earthy, mine warm, moist and carbon dioxide laden. Here at Field_Notes, I learned how a human might also attune with stone, how to wait quietly with their crystalline memory and feel their slow deep energy.
Attunement + tools
In the spirit of ‘and, and, and’ I asked myself is it possible for a human to step further and attune with and through the tools we have in our hands, cameras, tripods, microscopes and sound recording devices?
Over the research lab, I experimented with arrangements for multiple viewpoints and device voices, seeking to provide conditions in which the documenting machine and human are embedded in the documentation of the subject. Two weeks later my subjective and scientifically unprovable experience is that if I consciously and attentively align my sensory body with the sensing characteristics of these devices, (or, to acknowledge their agency, these sensing entities), I may attune with (sense an energetic exchange with) entities too small or too distant for my eye and mind to comprehend
Attunement + scale
Stepping from abstraction to practice, I spent many hours on my knees observing and documenting the tiny beings living in the tundra; mosses, lichens, mushrooms and tiny fruiting plants. Through spending time with them, I was seeking to move from looking-at to being-with. To become familiar with their small lively community in the hope that familiarity might transition, even a little, toward kinship. This was followed by a further subjective and unscientific first-person experience: When taking part in a group attunement meditation, standing barefoot in an open, cleared area I had a sudden optical flash of a moss community accompanied by a searing pain in my right shoulder. Was this some sort of attunement with soil grieving for its blanketing moss family? Or was it just my mind constructing a story? – Or can I stay with the unfamiliar notion that seeking to delineate ‘just my mind’ from ‘objective sensory data’ is an unnecessary binary division?
- At the completion of Field_Notes each group compiles a body of writings and photos for the SOLU Bioarts blog. this is my contribution to Andscapes
JILL SORENSEN 