Dear friends,
Feedback greatly appreciated… You should know is that I spent time editing this piece in 4 different places. My bed, my manager’s car as a passenger, at my desk, and even on the toilet. TMI? Well that’s what this newsletter and the podcast are all about! My fingers are infrequently and then very excitedly typing on this old thing, by the way.
You can listen to the podcast of the same name where I will be testing the limits of my audio editing capacity!
On the podcast I aim to cover everything from movers, performers, artists working with robots or friends with housing startups, sex workers and friends talking about sensuality and empowering women creators, to indie entrepreneurs and future builders stepping forward with confidence to build a conscious ecosystem. I’ll invite musicians, psychonauts, athletes, and chefs to talk about how they engage in shaping their many collections of chaos, that we organize and call life.
If you keep reading, I’ll try to tell you why I’m interested in embodiment, embodied wisdom, and what I think it means for t̶h̶e̶ ̶f̶u̶t̶u̶r̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶w̶o̶r̶k̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶e̶d̶u̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ progress(?).
definitions
I think if you ask people what X means, they’re going to give you slightly different answers but hopefully with some theme that emerges where we can share in creating meaning. I think that’s a beautiful part of language that also gets incredibly messy at times. Embodiment, gets at how ideas can be communicated in the absence of words — think gestures, instruments, or body language.
space check
Tossing in this because I’ll also be taking you on some short phenomenological trips in future editions of this newsletter.
The discipline of phenomenology may be defined initially as the study of structures of experience, or consciousness. Literally, phenomenology is the study of “phenomena”: appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience. Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view. This field of philosophy is then to be distinguished from, and related to, the other main fields of philosophy: ontology (the study of being or what is), epistemology (the study of knowledge), logic (the study of valid reasoning), ethics (the study of right and wrong action), etc.
I’ll start with how I tend to frame the pathways for how we find unique patterns in our behaviors, affordances, and language.
1) Our Spaces for example… home, work, school, the road, playscapes, dreamscapes etc.
2) Our Interactions with forms of media… sometimes arbitrarily broken up like my learnings in architecture school *a conversation about the fallacy of digital dualism is needed 😩*
a) analog media 📓📝📚🌾🌱🥝🌊
b) digital media (think photoshop, animations, websites, movies, etc.)
c) hybrid media (a combination of the two)
3) The State of the Body which can be measured and ‘checked into’ in all sorts of ways which I won’t get into right now. There are two parts of this body, the represented body and the enacted body, but more on that later.
For illustrative purposes, to elaborate on hybrid media, imagine you watercolored the bottom left two figures on paper, cut them out and scanned them. The visual data now lives as a .PNG file on your computer where you might photoshop them into one of many layers, to build up this image. Collages and AR/XR can be good places to experiment with hybrid media.
To elaborate more on hybrid media, this could mean you mix a version of something analog with digital post processing, like mixing a realistic photograph with render-like edits, or it could be something like snapchat spectacles, if we take an XR (mixed reality view) 👓+🤳🏻. It could also be 🛴📸⌚️ with wearables or machinery, like tractors or pelotons, your body is the analog and there is usually a digital counterpart or accompaniment.
Going on a bit more with these dualism antics… Clark and I had this one figma party where we ended up sketching this together. My boomer brain drew the top, binary representation and clark was like, no no I’m imagining this Venn diagram like thing…
It sure made me think a little bit more about this tweet:
In How We Became Post Human, Katherine Hayles warns of embracing “the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality”. The disembodied thing is the going on all in on intellectualizing and rewarding thoughts and ideas, without remembering that we are still navigating shared spaces and cultures with our bodies too. This newsletter is an attempt to get to some of the philosophical implications of having a body.
Since, we have god-like technology, medieval institutions, Paleolithic emotions (E.O. Wilson) our brains are slow to update to radically new situations. We stick to the old assumptions, habits… unless everyone around us shifts (Tristan Harris).
shifts
I’ve been thinking a lot about shifts lately — shifts in collective sense-making, shift in computing, shifts in bodies. In the nature of both the decay & the reinforcement of shared space/time as we noticed the shifts in our lives as a result of COVID changing the nature of communication, of work, and of relationships.
Then of course, there’s politics. I’m particularly interested in the the power and incentive (often economic) drivers that tend to alienate us from solving the race, gender, labor aspects. In looking at shifts happening in the people who are creating the computing experience for us and who are leading the pieces of the economy that are wellness/health/fitness based, you might notice some patterns. It’s no surprise the people who are selling us Pelotons, creating agriculturally destructive products like Miracle-Grow, and controlling large media conglomerates are often white, wealthy, able-bodied men past a certain age, and I’m frankly tired of it. It’s definitely a good time to shift from old law of leadership to the emerging BIPOC leaders, who are willing and able to create new spaces for growing and healing, for community building, and for sharing an updated version of an inclusive vision together.
You might have known that I worked at a company last year (that intended to build cities) where the traumas ensued, served as a catalyst for doing a lot of deep inner work. I spent September 2019 — December 2020 on this kind of extended sabbatical instead of doing my fifth year of Architecture school. In the time between then and now, I’ve not stopped enough to pause and review my efforts.
embracing the subjective
My words are a tiny cry into the fullest feeling of the sublime, a place where one ‘might take pleasure from knowledge of observer’s nothingness and oneness with nature’. Your feelsy stuff takes center stage with unabashed and audacious artistry. This is not just trusting your gut or your intuition as much it is maintaining a sense of openness to the world so that upon the reception of phenomena, you doesn’t accidentally filter out the value in embracing, understanding, and working with your emotions. Sometimes our learned defense mechanisms will put up walls (haha walls) — in psychology they’re called the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse: Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness, & Stonewalling (Gottman Institute, Research Based Approach to Relationships). And so I ask you how have you been open today? Were there parts of you that felt closed off?! Do you ever go this route?
When truths are revealed to you, are they associated with a mode of being or a way of feeling? Can you articulate them?
What I like about visual images like these is that they begin to give us another way to approach complexity. “The more complicated the relationships and circumstances are that we are trying to speak truth about, the more varied the perspectives and perceptions will be” writes Suzy G in It Can All Be True, the Validity of Multiple Perspectives.
discovery drives but driving directions tend to limit discoverability
We wake up every day as tangible beings with bodies. Maybe you exercise or go for walks, maybe you don’t. The intent of this space is to feel inclusive. I hope the interpretation of what I’m playing with here is modulated with an imagination that has the best intent in mind. I fear being canceled like the guy who wrote “Human Diversity” and so I will also aim to extend my focus beyond ableism and highlight different abilities, since all bodies are unique, special, and dare I say — sacred. I’m particularly interested in the intersection of accessibility and technology as well as the issues that come up in urban planning and interior design, getting there with time!
what are the things connected to embodiment?
I think having a body that does stuff is a really cool way to relate and to share on a level different from the way we share online in an overly non emotional way… sometimes that’s about mental, object level (distinct from us) communication and/or other material status updates.
It also puts us in a tricky state of being since sometimes we want to be 😭 or 😤 or 😳 or 😇 as a result of what we did to our bodies (through often fun and culturally accepted forms and levels of substance abuse like drinking, drugs, etc.) or perhaps — that which our bodies did to us, like storing trauma in the form of pain.
The good thing is that a movement practice can help with those things (more on this later since this is still the introduction after all).
Aside from the ways physical or stored bodily trauma works, I have also been looking deeply into psychological trauma, love, and changes in our psychology through social interaction with my friend Tom Currier, cofounder of Cabin (posted with permission).
I think a lot of highly ambitious people might be able to relate to Tom’s questions here. What’s the best possible state to go towards? To request of someone? To request of ourselves? To request in our communities? I personally think it’s love and supporting those that we can, in finding and developing their potential.
I love the way Tom inquires deeply about everything.
“Progress is defined by how it is measured” as read in Lawrence Yeo’s, Pursue Mastery not Status (More to That). Another part of that writing that just make sense (this is a TikTok reference btw) “anytime progress is standardized, a status game is reinforced”.
how are we measuring progress right now?
to that I respond, how about love?
Finally, *deep breath* I want to welcome you to the era of expression where our collective knowledge becomes embodied in forms previously paid little attention to… where embodied wisdom turns into realities, rituals, and routines, increasingly by us and for us. This expedition of helping move the unconscious to the conscious and finding forms for movement and interaction together will be a joyous one.