Living Data
Visualisations/Animations
Visualisations INDEX Artworks INDEX Animations INDEX
Descent into the ocean
What can we know?
Dance, video: Lisa Roberts 2013
Advisor: Barbara Cuckson
Exectutive production: Ken Wilson
The title refers to words by Joseph Conrad: 'Descent into the Ocean is followed by a return to light'. The words come from Heart of Darkness (1898) which I first read as a response to primal forces in the Ocean. Now I know Conrad's story also as a reconnecting of Ocean to Land through a river of primal serpent form. The title came to me as if from nowhere, after completing this film. I had been improvising and recording in a studio in Sydney one extremely hot day and had been reading another story, by Iain McGilchrist, about how the Western world disconnected from the natural world since the Industrial Revolution. McGilchrist tells how Western culture grew to privilege analytic over sensory ways of knowing and how these ways of knowing once worked together more. Perhaps we once knew the world and our place within it unselfconsciously, not so much by naming but through experiencing relationships. Life would have been different when cultures evolved isolated from each other. Now as we need to bridge gaps in understandings between people of different and seemingly opposing natures we are challenged to move from our comfort zones. For example it is painful for many scientists and artists to verbalise (explain) the unconscious (sensory) experience of the creative process, yet recognising this capacity within our selves may be key to Western culture reconnecting to the natural world (including each other).
'Philosophers spend a good deal of time inspecting and analysing processes that are usually - and perhaps must remain - implicit, unconscious, intuitive; in other words, examining the life of the right hemisphere [of the brain] from the standpoint of the left. It is perhaps not surprising that the glue begins to disintegrate, and there is a nasty cracking noise as the otherwise normally robust sense of self comes apart, possibly revealing more about the merits (or otherwise) of the process, than the self under scrutiny.'
Iain McGilchrist (2009. p.89)
I also question the merits of subjecting unconscious processes to conscious analysis, especially the creative process of forming a new way of seeing through art or science. Solutions to problems come from doing as well as thinking. Some of us experience creative insights in terms of a movement of the mind that comes through the body. Movement of the mind through the body may be understood as a journey.
On page 15 of his Introduction to the 1984 Penguin English Library edition of Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902), Paul O'Prey refers to Albert J. Guerard's view of the story as a "a psychological-anthropological 'night journey'", meaning,
the archetypal myth ...the story of an essentially solitary journey involving profound spiritual change in the voyager. In its classical form the journey is a descent into the earth, followed by a return to light.
Conrad's explanation of his creative process (on page 16 of the 1984 Penguin English Library edition of his book) may be applied to all the arts and to science as well.
To snatch... a passing phase of life is only the beginning of the task. The task approached in tenderness and faith is to hold up unquestioningly, without choice and without fear, the rescued fragment before all eyes in the light of sincere mood. It is to show its vibration, its colour, its form; and through its movement, its form, and its colour, reveal the substance of its truth - disclose its inspiring secret.
There's talk amongst the dance and movement community about 'chi' as energy flow, and talk amongst scientists about ADPas life's 'energy currency'. Are we talking about the same thing but understanding in different ways? If this is so then is there simply a need for respect for the different intelligences that are available to everyone?
It was photosynthesis, first by some Bacteria, then by Algal cells with green pigment (Protists) in the sea, and much later by Plants on land, that created an oxygenated atmosphere... Earth is the GREEN PLANET where the energy for nearly all Life depends on Photosynthesis.
Big Picture Story, Mary E. White, 2012
