Fungal Colonies, Black Swans & Inductive Leaps
Session with Alexis | 13th June notes
Continuous present
Deep past and deep future
https://www.newscientist.com/definition/inductive-reasoning/
JK - bell hooks “love is the will to nurture
Paulo Friere The Paedagogy of the Oppressed “dialogue cannot exist in the absence of a profound love for the world…”
Brian Eno Music for Airports - JK’s concentration music!
Black Swan Fallacies
As part of the DCS we will be exploring epistemological systems and taking Alexis’s ideas around Inductive Leaps further into our own thinking. I am also vaguely recalling the Black Swan fallacy from earlier eduction and think it may apply significantly to my thinking in art making. By this I have beliefs, or possibly limiting beliefs, around what my art might be - in other words, there is no evidence that I would make good or logical leaps into sculpture or installation on the basis that I have never done it and it sounds scary but my intuition is that this may be a way to go.
I have often felt like it is cheating to make art and then work backwards to retrace the steps of logical development (if any!) but it seems Alexis is encouraging this sort of thinking. I have often loathed what I perceive to be post-rationalised art, where a concept is tagged on afterwards as if it were there all along. I suppose my structured brain leans towards baby steps in a specified direction with a logical development as this seems to be the way my art education has taken me to date. I think philosophy should be actively taught as part of our education to see that systematic thinking need not be Cartesian or indeed logical at all. Unpicking dualisms in favour of a more fluid approach to art making will only benefit me. Clearly inductive leaps aren’t always about post-rationalisation but rather an authentic process of the brain catching up with the intuition or instinct.
So - how to apply this new approach. I will be less cautious in how I approach all of this paper making, as it feels more exciting than I am really allowing it to be as I keep stumbling over logic blocks: is this the next adjacent development? Is this a logical next step or have I missed a step? Am I being too logical etc etc. I am really enjoying recycling paper and seeing how to make it into a 3D object and I may have to retrace my thinking after the fact to see how/if it applies to my wider concepts - allowing inductive leaps to happen from the specific into the general, rather than a general idea that deduces into something specific at the end of the process. Tom has discussed with us his approach to his PhD in Computational Chemistry where a specific finding was then extrapolated to question a much wider purpose. We are having some good conversations about deductive and inductive thinking systems in the DCS and I hope this will help support this goal of freeing myself up from the shackles of logical thought.