Our field study occurred on lands on the Pueblo people—the true stewards of this place. I was/am a guest.

ways things connect—

1. By similarity
e.g. an echo of movement, color, shape, etc.

2. By direct influence on each other
e.g. through touch or exchange

3. By an intermediary
e.g. something that touches both or contains both (such as a category or place)

—pointing

Everything is connected.

Yet to consider connection—whether in thought, speech, or art—requires you to isolate. Thus to connect requires a temporary (and false) disconnection.

So yes, my white finger making synaptic connections in your mind should make you wary.

Especially since I have a feeling mental connections influence physical ones.

movement of matter—

Matter is meant to move.

It folds and turns. Gathers and dissolves. Even in a bodily pause—it drips and sheds.

It may rest, whether for a moment or an eon, but eventually it continues—in someone else, to somewhere else. 

Ants move it up and out. Water drags it off mountains, scouring arroyos. Trees thread into it. We all digest it. 

We all are it—matter.

So when does movement cross a line?

—ownership

I’m not sure how to answer that question yet ( the one above). But I wonder if the notion of ownership plays a part. When one assumes ownership of matter, it alters its movement in strange ways.

Ownership provokes a desire to preserve and contain. It grips matter close, doing everything to avoid its (dis)integration. It supposes stasis is possible.

Owning also leads to moving matter in unfettered ways. To own means one can move or alter matter, all to one’s advantage.

It can result in moving uranium out of stone, then hiding it under stone, leaving a trail of harm along the way. It can look like dragging steel up a mountain, to speak beyond the mountain. 

But what if matter is life? And as such it is a responsibility, not a right?

I think of people who move matter to help matter other than themselves.

I think of Jenn saying the focus of her summer: move “life” from her farm to the farmer’s market—as a way to feed her community.

networks—

Connection within movement: a network. It’s when some distance or difference is crossed and thus connected.

Its imagery is ubiquitous: nodes and lines. Often static. Often abstract. (An asset for neoliberalism, I wonder?)

Patrick Jagoda (in Network Aesthetics):

The problem of global connectedness cannot be understood independently of the formal features of a network imaginary. By network imaginary, I mean the complex of material infrastructures and metaphorical figures that inform our experience with and our thinking about the contemporary social world.

How can I see it differently?

Arroyo flowchart:

Arroyo:

Abstractions fall on bodies. Networks—whether they help or harm— manifest materially. We may chart and arrow, but its in bodies that we really see.

So the questions shift.

In what bodies are networks manifest? How is a network felt?