Resonant Fields Audio (unedited raw walking file)  
(Notes toward a thesis. Recorded on Bunjalung country, 2021) 

Resonant Fields Transcript (slightly edited for clarity)  

What are the conditions required… to listen? What are the conditions required to create? What are the conditions required to know to resonate? 

We move on the notion that there is discord with creative practice that is not in connection to the capital system that we live in. 

And so, there is a necessity to find the creative space that allows us to investigate, to resonate into-and-with ourselves, and into-and-with the land. 

What do I mean by land? 

Land is not just the physical attributes of nature, it also is the living environment as it is, as it currently is. The ecology that we find ourselves in, the natural organic ecology that we find ourselves in. 

So, we can understand that in relation to the Nicholas project. That this is about tapping into what is there – the creative soul and spirit that moves through the building. 

That’s the eco, the nature that is the now the contemporaneous spirit of the space. 

So we combat against others who want to supersede a different culture on top of that or away from this and push the (current ecological) culture away. Hence why the antagonism, hence why the struggle. 

And what we do is attempt to wrap around that ecology, to elevate it, platform it, allow for it to be heard and to continue. 

Obviously there needs to be shifts inside of how that works regarding access etc. but ultimately it is about that flow of spirit which has allowed itself to come into the building and through the people over time, and then continued-on. 

That’s what resonates. 

So, we can understand maybe as we fold back through the other practices that we have an attempt to understand what are the conditions required to create. It’s a similar thing to what that Deleuze asks: what are the conditions leading to the creation of philosophical concepts? But what I am asking is that, and plus: What are the conditions in order to create… dot dot dot. It may be concept; it may be possibilities. It is potentials. 

It could be how we are playing in materiality. It is then hence about constructing. The object. 

But more to the point, it is about that question in order to create. 

Throughout the whole four years there’s always been this exploration. It started in the studio, in a place that I had designed to forge a scenario where I’d be able to create within. 

Same for the home-work which occurred on the land of the woiwurrung at the swallows. That was also about being and listening to the home environment, something that I had created for myself in order to exist and to belong. And then aestheticized and utilized it as a space to create possibility – at that stage the potential around pitching for a UBI, which is also about creating conditions for people to create.

What happens when I’m in a position where the conditions are there? I am able to play and to evolve the materials that I have access to and turn them into something which is then presented in relation to others.

Two good examples of how that’s occurred through the process of the last four years: one in Venice where the conditions were curated, and eventually, once I found myself freed from the actual preconditions of the conditions, I was able to recondition the material assets, to confound something which was perfectly resonant to my own experience (personal), but also, to the field research in Athens with refugees, anarchists and artists looking at alternative ways of doing being. 

Why is this important? What is this process methodology? What is the theology that surrounds it? And what’s the importance of understanding that philosophically now, in regards to the re-flection through the research? Is there something about the conditions that allow for the resonance with process to occur? 

There’s a feedback thing: you start a process, it resonates, you feedback in more with more process. The resonance then is the process, and you know when it lands. And you know when it doesn’t. And you know when you’re doing the right thing by the materials and by the environment, by the ecology. That’s when the different aspects of my practice come in, and why they need to be in duel with each other in this thesis.

Because now what I’m looking at setting up those conditions for multiple others – for the multiplicity of others – to create in perpetuity. 

And this goes into another force-field in the research, which is around the artist-led and that of course reflects back to the previous philosophical thing I put forward about process, and that if we allow ourselves and our systems to listen to the processes of the actual-natural ecology of the thing that’s resonant in a space in time, then we can create more potential, and we can allow for more creativity to continue on. 

Obviously checking in with ethics, and checking in with privilege, and checking in with the aeffects of that creativity. And so, the process-led becomes the artist-led. It is a political statement or action, as much as it is (in itself) a practice.

(This makes me) think about something I was reading by Frances Aly last week. He talks a lot about the poetry of politics and the politics of poetry; trying to use poetry as a political vehicle. And that goes into the kind of questions that I’ve had previously: can art really transform society or can it only ever really affect itself? 

I guess that the idea with Aly is that they are parallel processes; they need each other, and they push each other and they…

Poetry opens up the potential for politics, and often politics closes the potential of poetry. 

This goes into the thing Deleuze wrote about the politician versus the poetician (he didn’t use the word ‘poetician’ but I did) and the differences between the two actors, and how they work in the network. The poet has a place or continues to forge a space withinside the field, which resonates with others. This then continues to resonate with others because it talks to the human, it talks to the ecology, talks to the resonant field, talks to the land, talks to the indigenous knowledge. If we’re only ever working in politics with the big P as we know it – economics, efficiency, identity, solidity, structure, law, violence – those things are shut down and out. 

But this is not a binary, right? 

No. It is around the notion of the processual, fluid, transversal, active force-field of creativity and potency, which is really our social order, and that the political mechanisms that I just described are launched on top of that, and we think that they are our reality. But we also know within our human that they’re not. And we, kind of ironically, allow ourselves to participate in those structures in order to have a position in the world, in order to have an identity, a role, and something which ‘pays’ us to live. 

Again, this goes back to why the push and the force around the other project (UBI). Which is creating space for people to create. Forging the conditions.

OK. That’s probably enough for now.