1.b Not starting at the beginning

• The joy of things that say something around what you have been thinking
• How to hold open spaces for things to happen in? 
  • How to gather with affectivity

I am not going to start at the beginning – but at a point just found; some paragraphs I read a few weeks ago– they speak of something I had been struggling to articulate; but also it was one of those moments that is a bit saddening – a moment when you realise that most, if not all of what we / I think is not new – or well at least not wholly new……. And this again leads me somewhere – that is again not the beginning, but maybe a beginning – but maybe the beginning of something else – so to try not to digress to far I will try and stay with this

I am interested in working with the ‘stuff’ from around us – gathering is part of my process and then working with this ‘gathered ‘material to construct new ‘things’; I don’t want to make documents of where things are from – but to ‘gather’ something of them – and from those gathered elements make something – something active.

Iteratively working with this ‘stuff’ is central to this process– its about exploring from different angles, placing new elements together, coming to it again from a different point. But again I digress….

the passage I read is from Yves Lomax, Page 32 – a twittering noise

The chapter is a conversation about event and when it happens (sort of) – it describes a tree and birds in it and how they come together to make a twittering tree (check name) the other voice is asking if you could photograph this – capture it 

She said that with the making of the twittering-tree there was a becoming pine-cone of small brown bird and a becoming sonorous of tall coniferous tree. She said that the twittering -tree was composed by such becoming, which was born from the affectivity that made tree and birds quiver and conjugate and become musical being. She said that in making a photographic image with the twittering-tree there would be yet another making, yet another conjugation, yet another becoming. Yes, another event. She said that there would be a becoming-photograph of the twittering-tree. This becoming, however, would not be the same as the becoming of the twittering-tree. There would be- would have been-a difference.

She continues by saying that just as there had been, with the making of the twittering-tree, a transformation of the functional features of a bird’s twitter and a tree’s seed there would have been, with the making of a photographic image, yet another transformation.

-       ‘A photographic transformation.’

She said that a photographic being would have been born. Not a reproduction of the twittering-tree but a being born by way of an openness towards being affected by the twittering-tree. As with the twittering-tree itself, such a being would have been born of affectivity.

-       ‘Isn’t an openness towards being affected what is asked for when one acts to make with something or someone else?’

And I said that if a photographic image were made with an openness to being affected then wouldn’t this- according to what has been said of how affectivity made birds and pine -ones quiver and vibrate – make the photographic being become musical being, even if not a whisper of sound is heard?

I smiled and so did she.

And there we were, waiting and grining.

And as I read it I grinned with them