LIVING SYSTEM TECHNOLOGY SUSTAINING A 40,000 YEAR OLD AESTHETIC URGE a revolution in favor of a NEW SYSTEM
Imagine that our connection to everything is creativity and that creativity is our deeply embedded dynamic with all things from the micro to macro in the universe. Many claim that In order to grasp this concept we need to understand our participation in nature as collective creative process. Aesthetic Urge is based on the assumption that creativity is inherent in all natural systems and that art is an ecosystem in and of itself while simultaneously an integral part of a larger whole. We have reached a time in evolution where our current system needs a new design mimicking nature. But first we have to learn how nature is designed.
Consciousness and Communication
1.5 million years ago homo sapiens adapted into conscious, efficient language communicators, storing information outside of their brains in the forms of images and writing. This adaptation became a technology sustaining 8 billion year old patterns of original information. This made us capable of manipulating, re-composing, re-cycling and encoding exposed information as a way of sustaining our 40,000 year-old aesthetic urge.
The “Aesthetic-taxis”
The aesthetic-taxis or aesthetic urge is our 40,000 year-old awareness of and inexorable gravitation toward beauty. For 7 million years early humans did not have a consciousness distinct from their environment. Over eons, we evolved into beings that perceived ourselves as separate from the whole of nature for the first time. We developed consciousness. This led to creation a complex communication system. One of its earliest expressions was drawing from observation. From that point forward, our species exhibited a relentless drive to surround ourselves with and to begin to create though our own efforts, things we deemed beautiful. Said differently, the aesthetic-taxis is a desire for deeply satisfying reciprocal relationships within Nature’s sensuous beauty. It is a biological condition–an inherent mental and physical human power. Aesthetics are the result of synergistic relationships between at least two or more things fulfilling a biological desire for equilibrium. Aesthetics evolved as a condition between humans producing what is not independently obtainable. It is our consciousness, our inherent knowing of the whole of existence and our place within it. The emergence of consciousness 1.5 million years ago, made it possible to replace the genetic mechanisms of evolution with more efficient social ones, based upon conceptual thought and symbolic language. Love and beauty are more than ethereal qualities. They are essential elements of natural harmony. We humans have been given the ability to appreciate their integrity, and these sensibilities can help us resolve the problems we have created.
“Life emerges from the arrangement of the ingredients (strings,or whatever); life is not carried by the individual ingredients. Beethoven’s 9th symphony is not carried in any single note played by one of the violins. It emerges from the collection of all the instruments playing all the notes.”
– Brian Greene
THIS EXHIBIT is a lens deepening our understanding of nature as a perpetually moving living system of patterns and processes. This view awakens our undifferentiated selves, our hard wired ecological memory of interrelationships with everything as we are coming into being as co-creators.This workshop was organized around the late Physicist David Bohm’s theory of the Implicate Order, an ultra-holistic cosmic view which connects everything with everything else. The central underlying belief system of Bohm’s theory is the “unbroken wholeness of the totality of existence as an undivided flowing movement without borders.” This process of cosmic movement, in endless feedback cycles, creates an infinite variety of manifest forms and vision.
OUR WORKSHOP guided us through a living systems practice of our 50,000 year old urge for making things,interchanging feedback processes with everything form the smallest vibrations to the largest supernova choreographing our living systems. Based on the assumption that creativity is inherent in all natural systems, our purpose was to demonstrate that art is an ecosystem in and of itself while simultaneously an integral part of a larger whole.
Whats happening on earth now?
Humans are out of sync with nature because we are evolving from the Empire to the Planetary geological era–transitioning from a belief system with hierarchies and linear systems that no longer work. We are in the midst of a cultural transition as deep as the shift out of hunting and gathering and into agriculture and cities that took place five to ten thousand years ago. This misalignment is causing devastating losses and the start of a collapse of a fully functioning global environmental living system. These epoch evolutionary changes create deeply unsettling feelings of loss. “Yet the western world isolates us in our grief, outrage and profound sadness and what we feel for the world into a reducible message that there is something wrong with us. We are pathologized. What people ache to do is to tell the truth of their own experience as not to get stuck in deep despair.” – Deep Ecologist Joanna Macy
It is agreed that in order to change systems we must first learn about them.
How does everything work by life self organizing?
Drawn from Coming Back to Life by Joanna Macy
Instead of looking for basic building blocks life scientists took a new tack: they began to look at wholes instead of parts, at processes instead of substances. They discovered that these wholes, be they cells, bodies, ecosystems, or even the planet itself are not just a heap of disjunct parts, but are dynamically organized and intricately balanced “systems,” interdependent in every movement, every function, every exchange of energy and information. They saw that each element is part of a vaster pattern, a pattern that connects and evolves by discernible principles. The discernment of these principles gave rise to general living systems theory.
What are Living Systems?
Living Systems are natures networks of relationships working by maintaining themselves as self organizing dynamical systems. Thinking Systemically requires thinking in terms of relationship-based processes such as cooperation and connectedness. Understanding the patterns and processes by which nature sustains life is central to ecological literacy or the facts of life.
Why Living Systems in general?
MayBeArt.org is based on the assumption that creativity is inherent in all natural systems, MayBe Art’s purpose is to demonstrate that art is an ecosystem in and of itself while simultaneously an integral part of a larger whole. Art is among the highest quality human achievements because it inherently guides us towards balance by giving us infinite possibilities for change. MayBe Art aims to create conditions for genuine dialogue based upon respect for shared values and cultural nuances; it embraces not only human interests and life spans, but also interests on planetary and evolutionary planes. The world urgently requires global visions of sustainable development.
Whats happening to humans?
During the seven million years that the humanoid form graced this Earth, consciousness was a dreamlike state that was undifferentiated from nature. These people lived in oneness with their environment and with others. This state of consciousness changed when the homo-sapiens-sapiens,our ancestors or the Cro-Magnon, burst into the evolutionary scene. This current form of human woke up from its dreamlike state and acquired self-identify. One interesting fact about the Cro-Magnons is that they were the first humans to have fully developed speech apparatus and were capable of complex communication.
We are at a portal of transitioning into Fourth generation humans in the Anthropocene and what Systems Scientists Bela Banathy defines as a Conscious Evolution. Our newly wired brains allows us the competence as co- creators through evolutionary learning towards creating an evolutionary vision of how to get from one point in history to another. Our adaptation of consciousness through our cognition has changed our neurology equipping us for redesigning the shape of our social systems modeling Earth’s new life support system.
Why do we need to learn about living systems now?
Conscious Evolution is our present evolutionary geological change where the complexity of everything needs to be unfolded and explained. We as a species are out of sync and incoherent with nature. This is a deeply unsettling time. It is vital to understand that acknowledging the belief system that we are living in and as creative processes are what will allow us to continue as a species.
What we did in the workshop
Welcome to your Living Systems Workshop where you will Imagine that your connection to everything is creativity and that creativity is our deeply embedded dynamic with all things from the micro to macro in the universe.
By creating a series of paintings and drawings you will be dynamically organizing personal and universal compositions in patterns, cycles, repetitions, relationships, migrations, decay, growth and renewal in infinite forms of nature. The idea is to see by experiencing this aesthetic process of making things and how all existence from the smallest vibration to the largest solar system perform in variations of each and with each other. According to the tenets of this theory, observations will reveal an interconnectedness and reciprocal reliance on biodiversity. In Andrew Beath’s, Consciousness in Action he refers to a natural harmony as a mutually beneficial reciprocity woven into the web of living systems that has allowed life on Earth to endure and evolve over billions of years.
This exhibit is an outcome initiated by a future presentation for teachers at the 2015 Climate Change Conference sponsored by the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Delaware County, Catskill Center For Conservation and Development, The Manhattan Country School, Catskill Watershed Corporation, NYCDEP and the O’Conner Foundation
Process
on FRIDAY FEBRUARY 13, 2015 from 10 flowing till 2 wear working clothes please come to BOVINA COMMUNITY HALL
1. Choosing your tools, surfaces and mediums Materials available are of the season which are plants in a decay cycle which could be used as tools. Palette of paint was also chosen via the tones of the winter season thus reflecting living adapting in the current environment. Surfaces are pages of several sizes, subjects and ages of old books which were to be discarded by the library. The paper, text, size and images of the pages and binders could be considered as part of the composition.11:00-11:15
2. I will guide you through a 10 part painting, drawing and writing process approx. 3 minutes for each part, where you will be responding visually to questions relating to your relationships in living systems. 11:15-12:15
3. I will bring breakfast and lunch from Table on Ten 12:15-12:45
4. Writing: parts culminating into a whole. Like our 50,000 year old ancestors, we will be reading, deciphering and decoding your visual painted patterns then re-organizing that information into written pieces for community presentation. 12:45-1:15
5. Presentation- Reading your work as a story to the group. the most efficient use of communication for humans is and has been storytelling. 1:15-2:00
6. Home Sweet Home