Developing the (Dow Jones) Infinite Scale of Thrills, Novelty and Risks-seeking that goes up and up and up. Then Cat dies. What goes up must come down - or could it go up and up, infinitely? Yes, if the Dow Jones' past 120 years' record is taken as a reference. ADHD is not just about attention deficit. In any case, according to comedian Rory Bremner at the UK Adult ADHD Network 2017, it is a surfeit. The 'H' is about hyperactivity, and related to this are notions of impulsivity, novelty- and risk-seeking, and one school of thought explains this as due to how the ADHD brain understands (or not understand) reward. In this insatiable quest for to (try to) feel, to sense, to pursue sensations, to deliberately/unwittingly go with your instincts, and to deliberately/unwittingly go against your instincts, you keep going, doing, running, climbing. You dip/crash/need and take time out, but press go, again. The world didn't stop after the 1930s and 2008 financial crashes, the way 2017 followed on swiftly, indifferently, nonchalantly after 2016 Summer, which is the silliest Summer season of them all, and now 2018 is happily coming along like nobody's business. There are costs/victims/editing/regrouping/changes/lessons learnt and unlearnt, but it stubbornly climbs and climbs and runs and runs and spins and spins. Your keep your right foot pressed firmly down on the accelerator pedal in the go-kart permanently, even if you step on the left foot steps on the left every now and then, even if Cat dies, Cat with the ill-temper and large belly that sways side to side when she walks, acknowledging as you do the juxtaposition of death/pause/halt with life in a sensate/evolving/revolving/sentient world, and of tracking/charting something fluffy/intangible/unquantifiable/vulgar as happiness/pleasure with a yardstick for money.
Special thanks to data scientist Lukas Stappen for inspiration and advice. This post is dedicated to Wes, who was 16, maybe 15, maybe 17 on 23 December 2017 when she went, and who appears in several places and times in the tapestry, rather like Shroedinger's.
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Towards the design of the tapestry + reflections on fieldwork at SGDP The more you learn or try to learn, the more you realise that the less you know. Artists enter/land in situations to make interventions; for an encounter to be meaningful the intervention has to be bi-multi-directional. I had expected the residency to be challenge my assumptions, habits and blind spots as a mid-career artist, early-career researcher and fulltime scpetic. So it has.
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