I had my 121 with my tutor Gia on Thursday. She also sent me her own research paper from the same course, Identifying a depiction of metamodern alienation in the Apple TV+ series Severance, which is hyper-specific, deeply researched, and very inspiring. The combination has made me rethink the direction mine should go and it makes sense now why she was pushing me in our last meeting to be more specific!
What Gia said
- It’s my paper, I can do whatever I want. The research paper doesn’t have to be about an artwork or even about an artist. I can explore whichever topic I am most passionate or inquisitive about. Until now I’d been holding a loose question of “which artworks create states beyond ordinary perception, and how can we tell?“. But the implication of what Gia said is that rather than asking what art does, I could go a layer deeper.
- Think about the paper as one chapter, not a book. This helps me be focused and forces me to choose what’s most worth saying, rather than trying to provide an overview.
Who Am I?
I loved Gia’s research paper because of her commentary on the blurred lines between our personal self and our digital self. It made me reflect on my own digital presence and use of social media.
Whilst reading her paper I wondered if I could take it one step further. I remembered a stat I came across a couple of weeks ago that says,“researchers estimate 30-50% of our mental activity while we are awake is spent in thoughts that are not related to what we’re doing in the moment.” (Killingsworth and Gilbert’s 2010 Science paper put the figure around 47%.)
And the title of that linked article – Wandering mind, not a happy mind – shows why this matters. It’s not just as a topic to investigate, but as something my art practice has always been trying to address.
The mind, in those moments, is layering something over the present – past, future, judgement, projection. In some ways this is another self made of thought, veiling the one that’s actually here.
Essentially this boils down to the question of Who am I? – without all the conditioning, judgements, preconceptions, and noise of the mind.
This is the question I’ve been investigating through my spiritual practice, the books I’ve been reading, and the retreats I’ve been on. It’s what I really want to know, and it’s the topic that interests me the most.
It’s also the deepest thing I could investigate. Buddhism, Hindu traditions (including Advaita Vedanta), neuroscience and certain artists have all been looking at this for centuries. It’s the question my meditation practice keeps pointing me towards.
And this question gets me far more excited than my previous draft. I’m excited to see how it might come to life through the paper.
Some adjacent threads
Other areas we discussed on the call:
- Light, time, space. What’s the higher topic I’m really exploring? What do I mean by real?
- Duality and unity. Rather than the time question, there’s something about how meditation collapses the apparent duality of subject and object into one. How mind creates separation or division. The idea of the bicameral mind that Gia mentioned sits in here too.
- You are not your thoughts. Time spent defining what a thought actually is, where it comes from, and how it differs from an emotion.
- Bruce Hood, Supersense and The Self Illusion. Scientific accounts of the constructed self. His work bridges the science of consciousness with the felt experience of being a self.
- Who Am I? Deepest truth. How has the question been talked about over time? The language used and the metaphors used. And where do I end up taking that.
How this might develop
One thing that came to mind: rather than writing about the dissolution of self from outside, the paper could invite the reader to investigate it directly.
This isn’t a new idea – it’s how the question has always been investigated. Ramana Maharshi’s Who Am I? self-inquiry is exactly this. The neti-neti practice from the Upanishads (not this, not this) works the same way. Ram Dass embeds these exercises into the back of Be Here Now – the I am not my body, I am not my organs of motion, I am not my thoughts sequence is the same 2,500-year-old practice.
By using this form, the paper would do what it describes rather than only describing it. It would also solve what would otherwise be the hardest part of the argument – the question of evidence. The reader could check for themselves.
This also closes the loop on a challenge I’ve been carrying since the start of this MA: can the art / writing itself transmit something of what it describes?
I’d want to follow the rhythm Ram Dass uses in Be Here Now – text, an invitation to look directly, a short reflection, a confirming quote from one of the traditions. The reader’s own experience becomes a third voice in the conversation.
Next steps
- Create a blog post with a more detailed structure for the paper.
- Re-read Ramana Maharshi’s Who Am I? and Ram Dass’s Be Here Now with the paper in mind.
- Identify a few core books from my library that will actually do work in the paper and start highlighting key quotes.
- Run past Gia for feedback.