Non sequitur; Latin for "it does not follow"

This post has no relation to the preceding post but does have a relation to the post of 29th October and the preceding discussion on the topic of cows, and animals in general as a subject in art, and, who knows, might have an afterlife as an ongoing theme? Things that do not follow are not necessarily a logical fallacy. There is the possibility that it's a matter of eccentric connections not being recognised in the context of a linear mind set.

What follows now in the e-space lab international is open. Here is a video of cattle in the foreground and an urban skyline in the distance;



The video is of cattle on the common at Basing (near where I live in Hampshire) with the skyline of Basingstoke in the background. The video is what it is, a record, a document of cattle in the landscape. Some are chewing the cud. It is natural, but, nevertheless, an effort, work undertaken for benefits that we share. The video is also a way of referencing and illustrating something about space and scale that I find fascinating, and relates to this space we use when we skype across the world to Shanghai.

One of the first things I want to point to is the fact that the cattle are grazing on a grassland that is something more than a field, it is a common.

A common (or common land) is a piece of land owned by one person, but over which other people can exercise certain traditional rights, such as allowing their livestock to graze upon it. The older texts use the word "common" to denote any such right, but more modern usage is to refer to particular rights of common, and to reserve the name "common" for the land over which the rights are exercised. By extension, the term "commons" has come to be applied to other resources which a community has rights or access to. (Wikipedia)

Using digital virtual spaces, using blogs and skype and so on, makes us commoners of this particular type of newly created common territory. Rights and privileges also apply, and so it becomes a political (with another small 'p') space.

The newness of spaces, perceptions and understandings is not new (especially in an industrial society), but when new dimensions burst on to the scene, then it is both exciting and alarming. Modernity, in a word. According to Svetlana Alpers, in her book on Dutch art in the 17th century called The Art of Describing, she connects the new lens based optical technologies of both microscope and telescope to a significant shift in an understanding of scale and measure when it comes to sight and seeing.

• An immediate and devastating result of the possibility of bringing to men's eyes the minutest of living things (the organism viewed in the microscopic lens), or the farthest and largest (the heavenly bodies viewed through the telescopic lens), was the calling into question of any fixed sense of scale and proportion. (page 18)

She then comments on how:

• To many it seemed a devastating dislocation of the previously understood measure of the world, or, in short, of man as its measure.

To illustrate this point she uses the example of the painting The Young Bull by Paulus Potter (see above) in her chapter called Constantijn Huygens and "The New World", for she uses Huygens take on these new perceptions and experiences to show how this dislocation could be embraced as heralding a new era of possibilities.

• The juxtaposition of a tiny crevice and huge town gate, or the expansion of the degree into a panoramic view brings to mind characteristic features of Dutch art. Paulus Potter's famous Young Bull looms against a dwarfed church tower and sports a tiny fly on its extensive flank (pages 18-19).

The way I am seeing it these days is that;

• the territory we inhabit on this blog, and our exchanges on skype, the thinking about elsewhere, and the thinking about the here and now, are part of a big shift in the species of consciousness that is the body electric.
• The term Body Electric arrives in a poem by Walt Whitman from his 1855 collection Leaves of Grass. Its original publication, like the other poems in Leaves of Grass, did not have a title. In fact, the line "I sing the body electric" was not added until the 1867 edition. At the time, "electric" was not yet a commonly used term, but the electric telegraph had already inaugurated the age of electric communication over the previous two decades.
• The 1840's saw the philosopher Kierkegaard publish major works that include critiques of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and form a basis for existential psychology. Philosophical Fragments, The Concept of Anxiety, and Stages on Life's Way include observations about existential choices and their consequences, and what religious life can mean for a modern individual. No wonder, when it was possible, due to the telegraph, to know, simultaneously, the barometric pressures at a number of geographical locations. The space that God's consciousness had inhabited had been substituted by the daily telegraph and the weather report.
• This sense of dread is no longer with us. What we need to guard against is feeling too comfortable with the way things are at this relatively early phase of this new electric communication structure. The new commons will need to be established through occupation and use. This is why open source is so crucial.

Posted by Philip Courtenay