In my last post, I referred to autopoiesis, narrow structural determinism and generative content. I am aware some people have concerns about the idea that culture is autopoietic since it triggers difficult questions about free will. I am reading Donna Haraway’s (2016) Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene in which she discusses sympoietics.
sympoiesis – “collectively-producing systems that do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries. Information and control are distributed among components. The systems are evolutionary and have the potential for surprising change.” By contrast, autopoietic systems are “self-producing” autonomous units “with self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries that tend to be centrally controlled, homeostatic, and predictable.”
I suspect this is a word I need to retain and come back to.
I have continued working with images from my family album, hoping to overcome the AI’s narrowly deterministic aesthetic limitations, blending old, new and iterative materials. I’m wondering about using my father’s manuscript again in some way, or the few smokey documents I managed to take from his flat. And if I should begin creating a film/narrative; about entangled time-material which feeds on itself. I should experiment with different materials but my instinct is saying moving image. Noteworthy aspects of this process are that it may be less about what we see – the image, the surface of the screen, (although that plays a role), and perhaps more about its process – the scraping, blending, digitally emerging – and the overabundance of outputs. I’m also fascinated by the male character below, who keeps emerging, and whose looks are informed by a picture of my brother, yet it’s clearly not him. Could it have been someone, had their parents or grandparents not perished in a ghetto or a camp?
