Turbulence & perception: When do you notice (sense) it?
Turbulence happening on different scales: air/wind/atmopsheric turbulence made visible by light and moisture (clouds), turbulence there taking place on scales that are not perceptible/sensible in the same ways. From a distance, the clouds above Texel look fixed in place, look like they are moving together, unilateral, bodies, whereas at the level of the body of water, at the molecular level, turbulence intensifies to extremes, holding, tightening the body together until it's so heavy that it rains, or on the contrary, atmospheric turbulence will undo them, dissipate. Droplets that are suspended between holding and releasing.
Holding together, holding each other.
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Tether.less
Look for tethers. What is being held in place? Against what is it tethered? To what does it tether?
Tether implies a ground for grounding, a place to root [roots!], to attach. What is grounding in this field? Tether can both harbour and protect, hold and sequester.
Look for instances of partial, contained drift (the drift trap, the kite, ): suspension. Battering by elements. Exposure. Weathering. Look for where teathers tense, look for knots of resistance.
- Plants attempting to hold dunes in place
- Seaweed ribbons knotting ("stalk of a seaweed between holdfast and blade; this resembles a stem"): "A holdfast is a root-like structure that anchors aquatic sessile organisms, such as seaweed, other sessile algae, stalked crinoids, benthic cnidarians, and sponges, to the substrate. Holdfasts vary in shape and form depending on both the species and the substrate type".
- See walls, mounds of rocks, ridges, locks, attempting to hold in place (see also: containment)
- Drift traps
Feel for the drifts around you, like a boulder fixed in the river (hear: Esmee Geerken's meditation), you who are tethered, what are you tethered to? [gravity alone?]
What is tetherless? What is drifting and choosing its own pathway(s) (dérive, to derive), creating tributaries for itself? What is it that constantly dissipates, that is never fixed?
Paritcipate in the drift
"Anthropologists and sociologists often practice participant observation, in which they join a group as a participating member to get a first-hand perspective of the group and their activities. Instead of observing as an outsider, they play two roles at once—objective observer and subjective participant"
[subjective participant to being battered by the wind?
it's not a clean cut]
"She would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone [...] she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that"
Be on the move, too. Slicing through space, give in to being neither this nor that. Neither part of the crowd nor excluded, but constantly renegotiating the ways in which you are at once [line, blob (Ingold), streaming consciousness .. ]. Be cheeky about calculation, and fail at that too in your(our) human ways (when hunger demands a plan, when the desire path becomes dangerous, when you're too cold to keep floating away with the tide, when others' care won't let you).
"The dérive [literally: “drifting”], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects [...]. In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones. But the dérive includes both this letting-go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities. In this latter regard, ecological science — despite the narrow social space to which it limits itself — provides psychogeography with abundant data. The ecological analysis of the absolute or relative character of fissures in the urban network, of the role of microclimates, of distinct neighborhoods with no relation to administrative boundaries, and above all of the dominating action of centers of attraction, must be utilized and completed by psychogeographical methods. The objective passional terrain of the dérive must be defined in accordance both with its own logic and with its relations with social morphology."
[Debord on being drunk]
Tuning? [see: Field synchronicity]
Tetherless
To hold/to be held / Ceremony
Ballooning in smooth space
Oceanic Feeling
Dérive
Plastic bags
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'Finding th field in all of you' (Marit)
Finding the field in the collective
Drifting disrupted, accepting distruption and interference: the way you can't quite drift away because others care tethers and grounds you
The way plants are used to structure the dunes, to attempt and fail at holding them together, delaying drifting, delaying dissipation
Drift traps that are only allowed to drift to a certain extent, because they are localizable (GPS), because they remain tethered to their role, will get reeled back in.
"The primarily urban character of the dérive, in its element in the great industrially transformed cities — those centers of possibilities and meanings — could be expressed in Marx’s phrase: 'Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.'
Tethering is everywhere in the field. Thethering everywhere on the shore: buoys, depth gauges - the need to be constantly vigilant of what is tethered and what is not, what might blow away, be swept away.
The wind cone as an instrument of attunement to the wind's presence, strength, direction
"Windcone are made to orient against the wind when the wind speed reaches three knots (3.5 mph). At that wind speed, only the first segment of the windsock will extend. If the windsock extends to the northeast, the wind comes from the southwest or southwest.
The second segment of the sock extends when the wind speed has reached six knots; the third segment, nine knots; and the fourth segment, 12 knots. At a wind speed of 15 knots (17 mph) or more, the windsock will fully extend and point away from the direction from which the wind originates."
"We do not all thirst, or flow, equally. We are not all gestating the same futures. I think about these lessons when the breaking of relations seems in some ways increasingly unbearable. The ice caps melt and the Amazon burns, but no matter how hard we pull, we cannot press a pleat into the planet’s surface so that the now-gushing glacial waters might connect with that scorched earth to soothe it. Corporations so large or so mystified that you can no longer see where they start or stop profit from the wet, and then from the dry. [...] What if for some, tetherless meant stepping up, speaking out, saying no, letting go, lifting up, stepping back? What if tetherless meant refusing the false compass points that directed us to this place? What if tetherless meant learning new tricks of navigation from those who have long been swimming, diving, floating, submerging, growing different kinds of worlds? In the words of poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “who do you think thought of the ocean. we who would be whales. how could we prepare for the lives we evolved into. immersed in a substance we could not breathe. and nevertheless called to be graceful. huge in ways that the world could not hold. except by these means. unbound by the limits of time'. I worry that we carrier bags are forgetting how to hold things. In the English language, “to be at sea” is an idiom that suggests that you are discombobulated or confused. You have lost your bearings. To be alive as bodies* of water, in these times, some of us might feel tetherless. But what if for others, tetherless was another way to say: getting free?"(Astrida Neimanis)
[*Utopia? Foucault]
The embodied experience of being untethered or being out at sea. Experience distrupted by your body's need (for warmth, to keep the salt from burning your eyes, the seawater from getting in your ears, your airways...
See also: harbour.ing
Flow/energy looking for a path is what creates shape, gives us form (Esmee)
Meditative practices
Militarization of the sea and defence systems (protection vs hiding)
Beach nourishment