What separates a pilgrimage from an ordinary hike? Or, a better question: have we tied the act of participating in a pilgrimage with normalizing the body through exercise and “healthiness”? Is being an idealized, healthy, youthful body the real destination of the pilgrimage of exercise and, in turn, a form of biopower?
“Buy. Buy More. And. Be Happy” or “You must! Because you can!” or Zizek’s “Obligatory jouissance”
Driving through the Imperial Valley of Southern California, I’m struck by the ways the landscape is in many ways analogous to the farmlands of Nebraska I grew up with. However, instead of rows of corn and soybeans, strawberries, kale, and heads of lettuce form a carpet varying shades of green–interrupted by the bleak and exposed earth of empty fields.
The intense agricultural uses of the Imperial Valley, coupled with dust from the slowly receding Salton Sea to the north, have led to some of the worst air quality in the country.
Stigmergy — is a mechanism of indirect coordination, through the environment, between agents or actions. The principle is that the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a next action, by the same or a different agent.
Recently, I’ve been looking at photogravures I created in Nebraska during an artist residency and experimenting with discursive and non-discursive universes of imagery. When two systems of images collide (abstract, handmade and photographic, apparatus made) what is the result? Which becomes dominant?