Dream with your eyes open.
Make art in an instinctual way, and allow the subliminal brain to reveal a story without your conscious direction.

Packet #3 Writing delves into the loud and uncomfortable parts of my personal narrative, and beginning to embrace the fact that some of the parts are going to be loud and scary because they just are. It also explores scholarly research about the way we determine truth and the role of self-concept and bias in determining that truth. Writing also begins to expand the framework for teaching the thing I am doing.

There is a strong narrative structure starting to form, and I am beginning to see how this work can move toward a tangible format.

Surviving

In his book “Into the Wild” Jon Krakauer points out that the thing that made John Muir so heroic was the fact that he didn’t die. Many people began similar adventures and met their end. It’s the surviving to tell the tale.

I think we could draw a similar comparison to the life of Frida Kahlo. While many women live similar lives—Frida survived a horrific accident, she married a misogynist who cheated on her while benefitting from her work and her genius, she suffered pregnancy loss, and infertility, she was betrayed by her sister, she was opinionated and political and scrutinized for breaking from the expectations of her gender…and she survived. She is a hero who survived the fate of being born female. She is a hero for saying it all out loud. She continues to survive even as the critique, and the attempts at deconstruction and reconstruction continue. She survived, she lived, and she suffered, and she created, and she loved and she did it all out in the open.
Sin vergüenza

Notes on the Sublime

In Chemistry:
Sublime refers to the process of a substance transitioning directly into a gas/vapor, bypassing the liquid state.

In Art Theory:
Theorized as early as the 1st century, the sublime has captivated writers, philosophers, and artists alike. Through its various definitions and interpretations, at its base, the sublime is a feeling rooted in humans' relationships to the world, to nature, and what lies beyond that helps us to formulate an understanding of ourselves.

So often the sublime evokes a sense of what is beyond us that we cannot comprehend, and for this reason, it has long been associated with religion, spirituality, and transcendence. Even in secular contexts, the sublime conjures something awe-inspiring and reminds us that humans are not necessarily at the center of the world.

I am applying the word “sublime” to describe a process of art-making where ideas that exist in a vaporous state in the subconscious mind are expressed through instinctual making (flow state), and the post-rational interpretation of the work reveals the solid state or sublime meaning.

How We Live With Contradictions/
When You Need It To Be True

Hidden Brain podcast

When we want something very badly, it can be hard to see warning signs that might be obvious to other people. This week, we bring you two stories about how easy it can be to believe in a false reality — even when the facts don’t back us up. 

In Leon Festinger's studies of cognitive dissonance, he found that challenging people's core beliefs often produces a boomerang effect. After wavering for a moment in the face of disconfirming evidence, people often return to their core beliefs with even greater ferocity. Leon eventually came up with a list of conditions that typically produced cognitive dissonance. The first, was that a person had to deeply believe something. The second was that the person had committed to their belief by taking some kind of irreversible action, or sharing something deeply personal that left them vulnerable. The third condition was that the belief needed to be specific and grounded in a possible reality.

SV: In the book that you wrote with Carol Tavares, Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Me you are looking at how, regardless of how marriages turn out, people in them tend to tell themselves stories that explain why their marriage is the way it is. If you have a happy marriage you’re gonna tell yourself a story about why you have a happy marriage. Also, if you have an unhappy marriage.

LF: Yeah it’s true—but if you have a happy marriage, you don’t need a story! Everything is just working out. (laughter) If you have an unhappy marriage, you need a story. You need a story about why you’re staying in it, you need a story about why you’re ending it, and chances are the story is very self-enhancing.

I recently wrote an autobiography, and in writing that autobiography I had a great learning experience because as soon as I started it, I realized that the trap any person writing an autobiography falls into is to resolve cognitive distance the whole time. We tend to put ourselves on the side of the angels when we’re doing that. What I kept doing was questioning myself "Was this the way it really happened or is this just a self-serving way of presenting this story?" I became a severe critic, and eventually, I decided to write what was truest and allow the cognitive dissonance to remain unresolved.

Number five is, I love work in progress. It's another humanity thing. Once I realized that it's OK to not be a perfectionist, all of a sudden, I can do a million things at once and go to sleep at night. And I think it's important. I look at other friends work, who are super precise and perfectionists. And I realized I'm just trying to be a perfectionist, that I'm not even thinking anymore.

The sort of design process is just going on to find some sort of space that, ultimately, actually looks like something else I've seen. And I think it's important to remember that your hand in your brain will tell you when something's finished. And then post-rationalize. Make up something afterward, or whatever.