My notes from AROUSING SENSE of Tomie HAHN
1 IMPULSES
Smile so
deeply and strongly that your eyes close.
Hear and
feel anything?
As you
release, notice what stirs in your awareness.
There is an endless sea of sensory information that we are immersed in, noticing what you
are aware of (and what is filtered) reveals and situates your reality, your
sensibility.
Sensory
modalities express (manifest) energy and existence differently over time.
building
awareness of the sensibilities someone else might be experiencing can expand our
knowledge of self/other and open communications.
Deepening
awareness, sensational knowledge, supports empathy and encourages
compassion. The consciousness starts
with the smallest of impulses. Shifting one's
sensory point of view, being open, shedding assumptions, and inviting empathy
and vulnerability into our explorations can enable deep revelations that we
experience may not be the same as what others experience.
Let us
ponder what sensory information might be absent, overlooked, or overshadowed
because other sensory modalities mask its presence or because of our lack of awareness
or sensitivity.
Fostering
Transformation
new
possibilities to collaboratively address the harsh political climate and social
conflicts.
How ideas to
move every one to their own edge of vulnerability flourish? How curiosity, and creativity alongside emotional
well-being?
engage
embodied practices to observe how we think with the body.
creating
prompts and offering them as experimental sensory challenges for others
The
Importance of Time
Awareness of
changes in sensory qualities over time magnifies presence.
Recognizing
changes allows us to be sensitive to others, to pause, and to consider how to
respond and interact. I cannot emphasize
enough how strongly the impact of heightened awareness
can be
self-awareness, communication, and the sense of connectedness to others and our
environment.
As an
example try this:
Directly
after reading this sentence, hold your palms against your ears, close your eyes
and breathe in and out slowly, and note as many sensory details as possible.
(Pause here.) Although brief, such a
pause in one's day can summon a deeper understanding
of time, sense, and being.
The nuance
of sensory counters throughout the day ...
can provide profound transformations.
2 MAKING
SENSE
Curiously,
the persistent sound of the ocean, so ever-present and noisy while traveling by
boat, became filtered once on the island.
I imagine that the muting was partially my own sensory
filtering,
not only due to my excited anticipation to listen to the chaotic bird chatter
and wing flapping, but also because I was now habituated to the wall of ocean
sounds. Sensory filtering.
Interpreting
Sense
'Twas a
sensory spoiler alert that would impose upon my first sonic acquaintance with
puffins--a mere suggestion of an auditory memory, or scheme, that would
initially not allow me to experience the actual puffin and razorback
chatter. Stolen sensory encounters.
I often wish
that language did not impose on an initial experience. The human capacity to use language, paired
with our tendency to compare new experiences with the past, helps us to
communicate and grow.
Schemas--frameworks that represent experiences, categories, and patterns
that we have previously encountered--help us to discern, learn, and broaden our
sensory vocabulary and provide a theory of learning through information processing
and comparative judgments. Growth arises
throug a perturbation of previously experienced schemas.
Arousing
Sense, and Situating Sense
arousing a
blissful wonder
Sensory
experience orients us in the world. The
senses situate us directly in a location and in the moment, as sensory experiences
occur and change over time. The more
sensory impressions that arise and are noticed, the greater the memory imprint
of that moment, event, environment.
Sensory experience is essentially about communication--transmission
between our bodies and the environment, other individuals, and the interior landscape
of our bodies. what we sense and what we
make of an experience reflexively reveals who we are, our environment, and our
culture. I value how attention to
qualities of sensory experience conveys both our individuality and our connectedness to our environments and other people and
beings, if we are able to note our differences and similarities through our experiential
engagements.
reflexivity
supports transparency. Identifying who
is writing and why, from a clear voice, helps readers frame the text and to
attempt to comprehend the perspective from the author's point of view.
If
multisensory approaches to research and creative endeavors are acknowledged,
disciplinary boundaries blur. I propose that
theory needs to follow experience and practice.
Rather than clutch a theoretical approach and proceed to apply it to an
experiential encounter, theory needs to arise from
the wealth
of experience, artifacts, creative output, fieldnotes, interviews, conversations,
and so on.
Sensory
experiences never occur in a vacuum, devoid of social, cultural, and
environmental filters, insights, patterns, language, or emotions, simply
because the person sensing embodies a cultural and personal background.
To be
insensible--unconscious and unaware--of other people's sensibilities dismisses
the rich diversity of our world, our humanity.
Making-Contemplating
There's
something about the iterative, cross-pollinating flow between creativity and
research that offers a precarious edge to explore how art making and research
inform each other.
Making and
thinking need not be separate endeavors.
there is
creativity in research and research in creativity. Making and contemplating are engagements of
embodied consciousness in practice.
Teaching
Sense
How do we
teach and learn from sense?
--the wisdom
of the body? Can we reach beyond dualities?
Can we reach beyond(false)
constructs
of only five senses to include other sensory modalities? How can we reveal culturally constructed sensibilities? How might we convey the potential profundity of
sense without stating the obvious, "This is going to be a deep
experience"?
Serving
Sense
Here I
arrive at the core of Arousing Sense. Offer
experience. Offer sensory encounters.
Arousing
Sense is a collection of experimental recipes for engaging sensory experiences.
Vulnerability
Always hold
vulnerability as a key to unlock sensational knowledge. Be existentially open. Resist defining. How else might we step outside of ourselves
and allow for experience to be fresh?
IF we are
able to reveal and monitor our vulnerabilities, the dynamics of power and
control issues that play out in ethnographic practice can be incorporated
as part of the work.
