Topic: Floating
Assigned Reading: Figures in Air by Micah Silver
I had to double check that our group’s assigned reading was indeed a Master’s thesis by Micah Silver — and intended for an academic audience. If last I wished the author had hired a discerning editor, this week I sincerely regretted nobody had staged an intervention. While I’m certain that Mr. Silver had aced his SAT’s judging by his sesquipedalian vocabulary, yet his prose was nearly impenetrable. Although he claims this work can be read as a “constellation of theoretical statements relating to: art, music, thinking, economy, being, governance” and about twenty other subjects including “everythingism” — I struggled to discern the meaning beyond convoluted rants, random photos of trash dispersed, and abrupt references to various individuals throughout roughly 167 pages.
Still, I tried to extend some grace to the author. For example, the reference to the “ideal technological and architectural interface” as “capable of more sensitivity than we are, and with a means of control” for humans to “tune the air with as much precision and subtlety as they are capable” spoke to me. Yet (like with most of this work) I failed to understand what it is to “de-trivialize audio as a means to de-trivialize the importance of penetrating our experience in ways that can result in conviction as to reality that doesn’t rely on knowledge structures beyond our the intersubjective reality we hope to participate in (quantum mechanics, for example)”.
There was only one page that I actually found useful — a seemingly random excerpt from an interview between two people named Smithson and Kaprow. The one-page discussion was humor not being appreciated as “high art”, about the role of patronage and assigning the value to art– was the only coherent portion; it made me actually wonder if Silver submitted the entire thesis as a piece of performance art — poking fun at the self-indulgent art theorists.
Thematic Map
I struggled with the thematic map, since there are so many directions to take this.
My sub-topic is Spacial Cognition, which is a “branch of cognitive psychology that studies how people acquire and use knowledge about their environment to determine where they are, how to obtain resources, and how to find their way home”.
I’ve been thinking about floating through different surfaces — and I’m very curious about the state of confusion/disorientation.
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