Today the first thing I did was check my email. I opened the Art & Education email to see a lecture series at MIT. This caught my eye because, for me, a new term emerged – “nonorganic vitalities”. So I googled the term and got to Deleuze which took me to Etienne Turpin which took me to his website anexact.org and his book in pdf form Architecture in the Anthropocene which has some interesting art as well as essays all of which, at first glance, in some ways seem to relate to my thinking about art and knowledge and things and scientific atlases. Being a visual thinker, I added a chain of events notes to the chalk board.
Then I thought it looked like a map so I added a more elaborate map in my lab book (superimposed over a map of Iceland)
which contained a saying from Alice about the importance of words with pictures, which made me think of the rabbit hole I was going down, which coincidently related to the image on the facing page of a rock and its hole from the ICI garden.
The lab book and the lab I am working in, increasingly, resembles the layered maps in my head.
a map of getting lost
I like to look at maps not to know where I am going or where I was, but to know where I am. Which at the moment is a bit lost.
The more images I put up, the more associative ideas come to mind, and new connections happen. The painting of a rock next to a painting of a tide pool where the rock once lay reminds me of the stone and its hole. And the tide pool painting reminds me of the faux marble reproduction from a portfolio of decorative painting techniques, which makes me imagine an Atlas-of-faux-marble-paintings and it so happens that very portfolio cover is the one I am using for my own Atlas-about-unusual-stones.
All of which makes me feel a bit less lost…
Here are more additions to the walls in the lab:
I think the rubbings of stones are like the etching prints.
Here are some working ideas for the Atlas:
