Sunday, July 19, 2015

THINK ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE, an ongoing process : Margaret Bellafiore

Sun Jun 28, 2015

You are invited to join Collapse Dialogue #2 on Monday, June 29th from 6 ~ 9 pm 

I have been collaborating with artist/activist Lydia Eccles who has introduced me to thinking about climate disruption in a new way.


Thought is never just thought, It’s also the bodily state, the feeling, the nerves. It connects with everything else. 

It’s not merely intellectual activity. And it passes between people. It’s all one process all over the world. 

David Bohm ~ Thought As A System 


COLLAPSE DIALOGUE is an embodied, face-to-face experiment in conscious observation of our collective
system of thought as it relates to social-environmental collapse. Investigative principles of insight meditation
are applied to our collective expression to allow us to perceive incoherance caused by individual and cultural
conditioning, and other inherent flaws in thought itself. The Dialogue is free of any agenda; we are not trying to
reach conclusions, find concensus, plan action or learn the latest figures about climate disruption. Everything is
allowed. Habits of persuasion, debate and self-censorship are to be abandoned. We aim to develop the ability
to suspend our beliefs and judgments to listen with full ‘selfless’ attention to others, and more especially, to
our own reactivity as it arises: thoughts, emotions, feelings, body sensations... Hidden assumptions emerge
through friction between us, producing discomfort that we affirmatively choose to sustain rather than escape,
so we can see into presuppositions, ideas and beliefs that subtly control our interactions and reveal puzzling
patterns of fragmentation, repression, avoidance, denial, conflict. Our agreement to carefully lower instinctive
ego defenses, to speak truly and spontaneously, opens a free flow of meaning between us.

Physicist David Bohm and philospher Krishnamurti addressed systematic faults in thought, and saw
them as the root cause of global incoherence. Bohm conceived of Dialogue as a way to ‘see through’ thought,
yet he never specifically defined a process.


We will create a template based on our 5-session experiment.

ACES TOO HIGH : Margaret Bellafiore

Tue Feb 24, 2015

Cissy White and I have been collaborating on an upcoming workshop (March 15, 2015) at Mobius on the ACE SCORE, a test to measure adverse childhood experiences. White recently had her article, Weathered by My High ACE Score,selected for the home page of the website Acestoohigh.com

Read it here:

http://acestoohigh.com/2015/02/22/weathered-by-my-high-ace-score/

Margaret Bellafiore writes about Global Trauma : Margaret Bellafiore

Sun Oct 05, 2014

http://healwritenow.com/global-trauma-margaret-bellafiore-guest-post/

David Miller, a former member of the Mobius Artists Group, is launching his new (and first!) chapbook, The Afterimages : Joanne Rice

Mon Sep 29, 2014



Thought you might be interested in learning that David Miller, a former member of the Mobius Artists Group, is launching his new (and first!) chapbook, The Afterimages, published by Cervena Barva Press on Saturday, October 4 at 2pm.

Cervena Barva Press Studio, is located at the Arts at the Armory
Building, 191 Highland Avenue, Somerville - room B8 (basement).

He will be reading with Lee Varon and M.p. Carver

Mobius friend, Jane Wiley did the cover art.

If you cannot make the launch on October 4, perhaps you can see David on October 11.
He will be reading as
part of the Mr. Hip Presents series in Jamaica Plain.

That event is from
6-8:30 pm. Here's the link:
http://www.mrhippresents.com/events/2014/10/11/mr-hip-presents-october-reading.
The UForge Gallery's site is here: http://www.uforgegallery.com/ .



photo credit: Variations 8 (by John Cage) at Skowhegan.  Produced by David Miller.  Participating artists include, in this photo,  L-R: Bob Raymond, Larry Johnson, Jane Wang, David Miller, Margaret Bellafiore, Jed Speare.  At the Skowhegan School of Painting and Scuplture.  8/6/11.  Photo by Marilyn Arsem.

Mobius/808 Infuse-Yuka Takahashi + Angela Sawyer @ the Fund-Raiser Event - June 14 : 808.Mobius.Infuse.

Tue Jun 03, 2014

Mobius/808 Infuse

Yuka Takahashi + Angela Sawyer @ the Fund-Raiser Event - June 14
 
Sinking Adam
Yuka Takahashi + Angela Sawyer 

Walking through life, our actions and beliefs are often judged by other people with their own unique perspectives. How much does the fear of being judged influence our own actions and, on the other hand, how does the way we deal with this fear influence the judgment? There is an almost physical quality to the vibe given by judging eyes.

Do invisible vibrations in the air change a person's body? Can a body change the signals those invisible vibrations give off?

Yuka Takahashi and Angela Sawyer work in somatic movement & sound respectively, but they both cross back & forth between conceptual composition and improvisation. Their collaboration blends their separate arts in unique ways.



Yuka Takahashi

Yuka Takahashi is a dancer, performer, improviser and choreographer currently based in Boston. She is originally from Japan. Her works are highly influenced by conceptual /experimental practice and movement invention. Her experimental approach towards her creations are by actively making an attempt to employ various media and taking advantage of the specific performance site to expand the possibility of presenting the concept from many perspectives without forgetting the existence of the body. At the same time she is interested in taking the audience out of its passive role and actively engage it in the performance.

After she received professional training at Joffrey Ballet School, she extended her interest and training in dance and performance art in NYC and Europe. In 2006 she moved to Vienna, Austria. There, she received a residency at D.ID curated by Liz King and she was an artist in residence at the experimental performance LAB called LABfactory for 2 years. At LABfactory she regularly created inter-disciplinary productions with full professional support under the direction of Thomas J. Jelinek and Kazuko Kurosaki. Since she was in Vienna, she has been strongly engaged with artists of other disciplines. Her works and collaboration projects were performed around Europe, Japan and the United States. Since moving to Boston in May 2011 she has presented her own works at Mobius, Boston Center for the Arts, Boston University, Movement Research (NYC), Y Theater at YMCA and OBERON. She produced the experimental performance events 'Living Space' at OBERON (2012) and 'Test Kitchen' at Cambridge Y (2014).

Web: www.highbridgeproject.com



Angela Sawyer

After finishing a philosophy degree specialising in Husserlian phenomenology in the mid-1990s, writer and musician Angela Sawyer felt fully prepared to start astonishing audiences around the Boston area using her mouth, some broken electronics, toys & noisemakers. Impromptu squealing & gargling has become her specialty, and she’s released a steady trickle of small-run lps, cds, cdrs & cassettes over the years. She changes the names of her projects to suit her every whim, but longer running ones include Preggy Peggy & the Lazy Babymakers and Duck That. Her 2014 lp release “A Short Visit To The City That Bleeds” is full of weird up-close intimate wordage and environmental activity recorded in and around a rental car parked in Baltimore, MD. Dennis Tyfus from the Ultra Eczema label says Sawyer is “the best living vocal artist”. You can also catch Angela doing stand up comedy around town, & she runs the one & only Weirdo Records from a tiny storefront in Central Square Cambridge.

Web: www.weirdorecords.com

Jan Świdziński, Polish artist, performer, philosopher and art critic : Joanne Rice

Thu Feb 20, 2014

On Sunday (Feb. 9, 2014) Jan Świdziński died.
He was a Polish artist, performer, philosopher and art critic.
He was very inspirational.
My condolences to his family, and the art community in Poland.
Joanne Rice



Pictured: Lewis Gesner, Kristina Lenzi, Jan Świdziński, International Festival, In the Context: of Art / DIFFERENCES, Warsaw, Poland (2006)

Documentation from An Un-interpreted Experience V2.0 (Just another day) : Aaron Lish

Wed Aug 07, 2013

Text extracted from Aaron Lish's blog:

http://uninterpretedexperiencev2.blogspot.com/

On January 19th, 2013 five participants and myself went for a walk in the woods at night just north of Boston.  We played a compass game that had each of the participants walking solo through the dark, waiting in the woods for the whistle, and then returning.  This was repeated three times, with each wait becoming longer and longer; the first interval lasted approximately 1 minute, the second interval was 5 minutes, and the last interval lasted 20 minutes.

During the time in the woods participants meditated on the following koans.

-As we walked into the woods, and while playing the compass game:

“THE FIRST IS LIKE A MASSIVE PENDULUM OF IRON THAT SWINGS BACK AND FORTH, BACK AND FORTH, BACK AND FORTH.  THE SECOND SQUIRMS AND WRIGGLES LIKE A BLUEFISH IN THE BAY.”

-And as we walked back from the woods:

“MU, WHY DID I KID MYSELF THAT THE FIRST TIME HAS ABOSLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH LIFE; THE FIRST, THE SECOND, AND EVERY OTHER TIME HAS ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING AND ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH MY LIFE. THAT IS WHY I ENJOY IT AND HATE IT AT THE SAME TIME.”

We then sat on the floor of the Oak Grove T-station (which was closed for construction) and engaged in dialogue.  The discussion started with  how the compass game in the dark could relate to the koans, and how any of the experiences or thoughts had in the woods could relate to daily life.  From there the conversation "drifted" to various things, including sharing childhood memories.

The project was designed to indirectly analyze our society and culture through a camouflaged look at our daily patterns.


Note:  I intentionally do not include documentation of the dialogue as there is no way to represent the experiences had by the participants. As James Turrell says of his work, this is a "non-vicarious art".  Unlike with reality TV, you can't have a secondary experience by listening in on the conversations that happened in the subway stop in Melrose.

- Aaron Lish



Related Mobius Event Page: http://www.mobius.org/events/un-interpreted-experience-version-20