one-track-mind

[image by Aushaf Widisto]

Recently I experienced temporary deafness for over two weeks. Throughout, I kept pushing my GP via multiple visits and tests, finally succumbing to medical intervention being told it was due to an eustachian tube dysfunction associated with an unidentified virus. 

This also coincided with my attendance at the International Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA2024, Everywhen) in Meanjin/Brisbane for 10 days after being on the steering committee for almost two years and also being involved in a number of presentations.

To protect my ears, I decided to take the train (or 2 trains) from Melbourne to Brisbane, contained in a muffled bubble, passing through the wonders of the Australian landscape towards a 10 day program. For the first part of ISEA, I sat in silence during talks, looking more deeply at ways of communicating, and passed on hosting duties to wonderful colleagues. 

It was during a site visit in the Australian bush with artist Keith Armstrong (Qld) and his collaborators as part of the forest intelligence project, my hearing almost miraculously and spontaneously hearing. After a couple of hours of walking in bush land and forest, including hugging a 400 years old gum tree, Keith’s version of the story was the group was standing at the top of the hill, under a mother tree, talking about the regeneration project and Indigenous cultures with Angie Abdilla (Old Ways, New). It was then, I sneezed holding my nose and could hear the birds. 

The experience opened up my world in ways that were new to me, throughout navigating the world without sound, the generosity of many deaf people who found me and shared with me their stories of deafness and how best for me to navigate public spaces, the dangers of walking on footpaths, across roads, things to be aware of. Some people with born deafness others with acquired deafness at different points of their lives, from youth to older age. 

During the long return train journey, without internet connection (connectivity drops out in the XPT in Australia), I read books, I watched the changing landscape across three states, from rainforest to farmed land to country villages and cities. I became more focussed, more one-tracked in my thinking. 

With training in a number of health science and wellness modalities and a keen interest in neuroscience, I’m a practitioner of things like meditation, yoga, nutrition and committed to this exploration. I also work and operate at a high frequency, with every tab open and often scattered energies in my down time, doing multiple things at once or thinking about many things at the same time. 

What I am taking on now as a practice is one-track mind activity. I’m actually doing one thing at a time. This is changing the way I work, my relationships and the way I’m seeing the world in subtle and not so subtle ways. 

I’m finding I am naturally more quality and focussed within my routines, which are shifting to more valued rituals. My awareness of the world is heightened as I notice what is immediate and tangible, things of note. If I am walking, I am walking. If I am reading, I am reading. If I am writing, I am writing. If I am checking emails or messages across various platforms, I am doing that. If I am watching streaming media, I am doing that, when I’m with you I am with you, moving from elsewhere to here.

References: 

silent walking https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-08/silent-walking-taking-off-on-tiktok-boosting-youth-mental-health/102938224) 

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/flow-state#effects-on-brain

https://positivepsychology.com/mihaly-csikszentmihalyi-father-of-flow/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/the-athletes-way/201504/mindfulness-the-power-thinking-about-your-thinking









Today's listening from Douglas Rushkoff's Team Human

Douglas Rushkoff explains his decision to leave X, and all social media platforms, behind him in a first-of-its-kind monologue-only episode of Team Human.

In his monologue, Rushkoff draws inspiration from Chaucer's Parlement of Foules to discuss how the platform dynamics of X/Twitter are unfit for nuanced discussion about global tragedies and human suffering.

https://www.teamhuman.fm/episodes/267-leaving-x-and-social-media-behind

Some notes from me,

Things social media is still good for 

  1. Staying connected with far flung friends. For those of us who may live in ways that sees us located in places other than where are families of origin live, or travelling a lot for work or play, social media can be a way of creating a sense of connection from far away places. 

  2. Showing your work internationally and staying in touch with what others are doing all over the world. This is especially valuable if you work in the arts, education, science, technology as I do. 

  3. Finding new friends/connections with shared interests. 

  4. Ask ‘is this good for me’.

Some tips to manage social media anxiety

Create flexible personal parameters around how you use different platforms. 

There is a fine line between controlling the media and it controlling you.

Lock your security down as much as possible, particularly on your ‘personal’ accounts. Decide what you want each platform to do and be for you. 

Rarely, if ever take your social media into your bed. We know this but often ignore it. Since I’ve picked up the habit again of turning off my phone (it’s hard I know), when I’m in bed and reading books in bed before sleep, I sleep soundly and am enjoying the creativity of reading and exploring more and more books with excitement and anticipation (and supporting the work of other artists).

Social media can contribute to envy, jealousy and FOMO. This is an opportunity for reflection and self-inquiry, check in with yourself and work out if these sparks have any truth in them and if so why. What is it that you perceive you are missing out on and find ways to address them. Or have a break from the people/pages triggering these responses. The mute or sleep button is your friend.

Overall enjoy the dopamine surges, step away when you feel anxious and follow supportive and uplifting accounts. 

Breathe

Go for walks or look up every now and then. Simple but effective. Change your viewpoint of gaze.

  • Facebook (I recently had an extended absence from until I was relocating overseas and needed to be in contact and use the platform to see things), is for my long term family/expanded friends/personal network..

  • Linkedin … professional and work related posts. Keep it that way. Linkedin has actually been quite usual for me. Again, your choose who you connect with and it has the facility to mute people on your time line and unfollow people if there is too much ‘noise’ or something jars.

  • X to see the drama and pain of the world and catch up in real time of the unfolding of the follies of humanity. X is also a work platform, it seems a lot of scientists/artists/researchers still use the platform. Despite it being a repository of pain, ‘X’ remains my main news source. You can curate your feeds, use the mute buttons when needed. Reduce scrolling time. Hide things, block people, clear the space.

  • Tiktok, I avoid although at night before bed I scroll Reels that come via Tiktok often for some lolz. The reason I avoid Tiktok is for me it is the latest in social engineering and programming and is mostly branded content space that has questionable algorithms and policies (don’t they all). 

  • Instagram is more curated, visual imagery. A mix of observational things from the world I inhabit, selfies (I’m a fan, I see it as a way of controlling your own image and media and what the world sees and broad representation. Anyone should be able to show themselves, not just famous people from the entertainment industry), art things from things i got to and my own creative practice. 

  • You Tube is a viewing/vod cast platform for me. I access a lot of information through You Tube. Again, be careful what you click on as the algorithm is quick to devise suggested watch lists for you that at times shift quickly into weirdness. I do a lot of deleting on You Tube, but enjoy watching/listening to channels on nutrition, spirituality, meditation, yoga, cultural/art things, documentaries. 


Death Watch Club

Yesterday I joined a group of futurist practitioners at MOD. in a day of speculative design on the Future of Death. Watch this space as MOD develop these ideas into their 2025 program. We workshopped a whole lot of cultural practices, what death will look like and feel like by 2080, rituals, kinship and community, end of life care, mourning, dreams, burials and funerary rites, suicide, climate and environment, memorialisation, forever, gamification, the funeral industry and disruption (shout out to Tender Funerals Australia), time, legacy, spirituality, & a good death.

Thanks so much to Kristin Alford, Lisa Bailey, Claudia and Daniel at MOD and our Death Watch group who together navigated sensitive topics and experiences, public and personal into respectful play and design work.

#ArtScienceTechnology #design #creativePractice #DeathIsNotTheEnd #PossibleFutures #eternity #systemsOfCare #CreativeResearch

a partnership for uncertain times

I was commissioned to write an essay for this project partnership between the University of South Australia and the Australian Network for Art & Technology (ANAT), along with other writers, artists, filmmakers, and photographers. You can read the digital catalogue here (and films to the artist documentaries).

https://issuu.com/marchellematthew/docs/a-partnership-for-uncertain-times


more here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrG9BkDo-4E





easter sunday thinking about resurrection

& what it means to be human. at this moment in time. it is the perception of imperfection that holds me. that density of the body as i witness your emotional state delving into a flesh-sigh to expel breath into ether.

i hear your footsteps and this echoes nostalgia of every person who has ever returned. a life time of returning.

the act of surprise. around a corner i walk into a destiny created step-by-step. glitching the system.

‘The very essence of what it means to be human is treated less as a feature than a bug.’

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/23/tech-industry-wealth-futurism-transhumanism-singularity

Dipping in to Jaron Lanier

‘The way to ensure that we are sufficiently sane to survive is to remember it’s our humanness that makes us unique, he says. “A lot of modern enlightenment thinkers and technical people feel that there is something old-fashioned about believing that people are special – for instance that consciousness is a thing. They tend to think there is an equivalence between what a computer could be and what a human brain could be.” Lanier has no truck with this. “We have to say consciousness is a real thing and there is a mystical interiority to people that’s different from other stuff because if we don’t say people are special, how can we make a society or make technologies that serve people?”’

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/23/tech-guru-jaron-lanier-the-danger-isnt-that-ai-destroys-us-its-that-it-drives-us-insane

[Image belongs to Jaron Lanier]

Neuroscience and the Roots of Human Connections: The Social Synapse [World Science Festival, 2018]

https://youtu.be/sCXlaOKOczk

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION: Humans work together on enormous scales to build complex tools as large as cities and create social networks that span the globe. What is the key to our success? This program examines the development of the human brain — and the brains of other animals — asking how neurons orchestrate communal behavior and guide group interactions, demonstrating how our social nature is key to our humanity. PARTICIPANTS: Louise Barrett, Agustín Fuentes, Kevin Laland, Kevin Ochsner, Dietrich Stout MODERATOR: John Donvan Original program date: JUNE 2, 2017 WATCH THE LIVE Q&A WITH LOUSIE BARRETT: as part of the Big Ideas Series, made possible with support from the John Templeton Foundation.

Re-activating Through Deactivating

This weekend I’m in the process of de-activating my Facebook account. I’ve been on Facebook for over 15 years and am interested in exploring how my brain and routines shift once Facebook ceases to be an omnipresent force in my daily life.

I’m in the process of downloading my Facebook data and contacting friends with other social media channels, mobile phone and email contacts.

Watch this space >>>

http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/facebook.pdf

https://hbr.org/2012/05/your-brain-on-facebook

In Transit 18 December, 2022 [Live from Adelaide Airport, Australia]

The last time I flew on an international flight it was in August, 2020 when i was one of 35 people leaving Vietnam on what was the last flight for a long time and returning to Australia after an absence of almost 4 years.

This morning I sit at the airport in Adelaide ready to board a flight to Sydney and then another flight to Denpasar, Bali.

Over the past few years I’ve managed to traverse the country boundary riding with loads of road trips from Adelaide to Melbourne and out again as soon as the threat of COVID lockdowns loomed. Driving across the countryside of the shifting Australian landscape, through country town some thriving and some on the edges of decay and abandonment, small towns with traces of fear from what the city dwellers would potentially bring in.

There have been a few work trips to Canberra, to Sydney and to Melbourne by air. The small containers and deserted airports now open and beating with human throng.

Today I sit in the airport in Adelaide awaiting my flight to Bali. I lived in Bali for almost a year in 2011 and worked as the International Program Director with the Ubud Readers & Writers Festival and then visited regularly spending most Christmas and New Years there. It is a holder of memory for me as well as a place now distinctly unfamiliar.

I have places that hold memory, riding through the jungles of Ubud in the night when my Mother lay dying in Australia, past the village cremation site where nightly ceremonies were held to ferry the dead across from this life to next, singing Nick Cave’s ‘Death Is Not The End’ at the top of my voice. Expansion.