Linguistic Underpinnings

A friend recently asked me to describe my concept of mobility. After writing a few drafts of my ideas I realize I haven’t knocked it down to a glib one sentence witticism. I am still in the long description phase.

I will begin by saying that I describe myself as an artist who makes portable  sculptural artworks and template like formats for performance based works that are meant to be recreated again and again in different settings. I choose this way of working because I see that it mirrors the world and people in it- we move, change respond- our lives are based in change and fluctuation.

Since childhood, an interest in travel and people who travel out of leisure and necessity have been a point of fascination to me. This fascination stands as an informing contrast to humanities dueling romance between stability and the ephemeral. I have often considered the two motivations to be great rivals in the world and to manifest themselves in rivaling human beliefs and ambitions.

On one hand we have a segment of society who are driven towards STABILITY. This segment establishes homes, solid careers, cities, all shapes and forms of material construct (and emotional construct as well)  that are meant to quell anxieties concerning uncertainty in one form or another.  This impulse to me seems both logical and instinctual- serving as a nest egg of sorts that an individual can build from, and allowing for chances to be taken with a safety net below. Establishment of a seemingly stable structure in a person’s life can battle disquietude in both immediate uncertainties,(health and financial stability, comfortable housing) and abstract uncertainties ( well-being of the soul, happiness, love).

On the other hand, there is a segment of society who either by force or choice embrace change and fluctuation in ideals and lifestyle. I see this segment as one which mimics nature and CHANGE which seems to me a constant in the world, as we can know few other constants to be.  Those who accept this mode of living have largely become comfortable with living situations that involve renting (you can always go somewhere else), work that determines where one will live, the assumption that health will take care of itself, and that financial well-being does not need very much regulation but will be a matter of consideration as employment issues present themselves.

I think that many people partake of bits and pieces of each of these approaches, but for most, an over all observation of approaches to the world could be made and could accurately describe how a person has chosen to place themselves in relation to the world.

These two approaches to lifestyle, a change based approach and a stability based approach exist independently, but are each informed by the others existence. It seems that many people have chosen one approach and before describing what they believe in, will take the time to describe to you what they do not believe in.  It is mysterious and perplexing to me to try to winnow out what’s nudged people to live the way they do.

Perhaps a third approach to the world, APATHY, indulges a bit in both of the approaches I have described above, but is generally neither and may accidentally, but only accidentally lean towards one of the two dispositions in the end. I am unsurprised to find in many cases that choices are not so much decided on as they are happened into, accepted as integral to ones identity and defended against change if a person is confronted with an alternative.

It is disturbing to have pointed out to you the ways in which you have not so much given thought to an issue as you have immediately experienced or responded to a proximate concern and created  a history of experience with an idea rather than a consideration of an idea. More plainly, the absence of consideration does not prevent the development of something, but rather sets the atmosphere for something unanticipated to take place.  I think of these unanticipated responses as psychological and physical places. In the mind and personality they are bold beliefs based on assumption or opinion, in your house they are the closet you fill with scraps and junk, in a city they are an abandoned building or a trash littered empty lot. Something could be done with the space, and something has definitely happened in the space anyway.

And so, my series of writings concerning “mobility”  and my relation to it, begins with the declaration that I am most interested in the segment of society that embraces CHANGE. While I believe many people and places to be the mix of tendencies partaking of change, stability, and apathy, I find individuals who actively embrace change to be most fascinating to me. In change is housed the possibilities of innovation, progress, improvement, relief- new learning, new understanding, and the like. I am interested in change as a vehicle for the realization of human hopes. It is an element which ensures that something new might happen, and I personally think that something new might bring something good.

This drive for something new, something that I subsume optically or through some other sense is what I gauge as the drive behind mobility in many circumstances. I apply this reasoning for mobility in relation to work environments,  technologies that allow for steady and frequent short-range mobility, travel,  and new ways of seeing(imaging of place as a surrogate for going to a place)as a way to travel in a cerebral sense. I include in my definition of mobility any physical or intellectual relocation that allows for new information and sensory experience.

In my next writing I will further describe the what I mean by physical and intellectual relocation and walk through some examples of how and why this takes place.