how slow can you go?
how slow can you go?
I’ve been thinking about slow a lot lately. Partly because I’ve had to increasingly embrace slow as a way of being, and partly because I have always been interested in time. I’m fascinated by time as revealed by physics, and by time as a human construct, the way we talk about it and how and why we’ve built clocks and systems to measure it. At least, we imagine we are measuring it — because from a physics point of view, time doesn’t really exist.
“Things change only in relation to each other. At a fundamental level there is no time.” Carlo Rovelli, Reality is Not What it Seems.
So if there’s no universal time anyway, who gets to say what’s fast or slow, and relative to what?
If you look up the synonyms for slow in a thesaurus, they are mostly negative, framed as a lack of something — a lack of speed, of smarts, of busy-ness. If you or something is slow, according to Collins thesaurus it is: sluggish, lagging, lazy, behind, unwilling, hindering, disinclined, tedious, uneventful, unproductive. And it gets worse, being slow is apparently also associated with being : wearisome, boring, and even….dead.
Meantime, the words listed as antonyms, the opposite of slow, are : interesting, exciting, stimulating, lively, animated, action-packed.
Could slow not also be interesting or stimulating? Has the Thesaurus never laid on its back in the grass and watched a cloud slowly morph in the sky, or had all the cinematic feels watching an epic slow motion sequence in a film?
There are just a tiny handful of synonyms that suggest slow as a quality that might possibly have something positive to offer : unhurried, leisurely, easy. These are pretty much the only meanings that don’t give slow a hard time, or make you feel like you definitely wouldn’t want to BE slow or have to be around anything slow. Having had plenty of slow time to absorb this, I am furious on behalf of slow. Who was it that decided slow is all these negative things?
You probably already know the answer, because it’s the same answer to a lot of the problems we’re facing as humans right now. The main reason I can find for slow having such an apparently undesirable set of meanings associated with it, is that dominant white capitalist culture that has colonised peoples, lands and languages to position our bodies solely as actors for work. It has conditioned much of the global population to labour under a clock time coupled to productivity and financial value. This has broken our relationship to ourselves and our natural world, and creates a society where slowness is viewed as either something to feel bad about, or a luxury. It excludes or devalues any human life that exists outside of this dominant temporal framework. Honestly, this blows my mind in a very uncomfortable way.
But happily, there are plenty of far more articulate artists, researchers, writers and thinkers who are challenging and enquiring around ideas of slowness and rest and time, and have hugely influenced and inspired me:
Tricia Hersey’s Manifesto for Rest as Resistance
Raquel Meseguer Zafe’s rest and horizontal centred practice and exploration of crip time
Bayo Akomolafe’s The Times Are Urgent: Let Us Slow Down
Professor Keri Facer — Possibility and the Temporal Imagination and Educating the Temporal Imagination
There are lots of Slow Movements too — in architecture, design, cinema, food production. And slow adjacent work, people advocating for long termism — the Long Now Foundation and the Long Time Project. There will be many more I’ve not come across yet and I’d love to hear about them.
In my creative practice, I’m starting to, slowly, dream up something that reclaims the word slow. What if we could design an experience that celebrates and explores slow, that challenges our perceptions of time and opens up different ways of being.
Could slow be nourishing, restorative, expansive, thoughtful, beautiful? What would it mean in the world if different values for slow existed in our systems?
I don’t know exactly what it is yet, but for now I’m developing The Slow Show, and like most of my work it exists somewhere between art and science, experiment, experience and exhibition design. It brings in a bit of not knowing, a bit of curiosity and invites everyone to imagine new possibilities for humanity and the planet through a liberated understanding of time.
I have found more precise and generative language for what I want to do with The Slow Show in Professor Keri Facer’s work — adopting her term, ‘the temporal imagination’ and responding to her proposal and provocation for the need to sensitise and cultivate our temporal imaginations as a possibility practice.
In an exhibition/experience space for The Slow Show, I want to explore the potential for cultivating temporal imagination, with slow as an entry point.
There’s lots of great work already out there that connects with slow and time that it would be great to curate, and brilliant people to commission. And as I develop my own installation ideas, I am interested in what happens when we use experimental media to alter the anticipated temporality of an object or experience space.
Can we play with temporality by integrating technologies with objects we otherwise expect to be analog or unsurprising — might a hybrid, expanded reality sensitise people’s temporal imaginations more than something we read as purely digital or virtual?
And how might we be able to gather, describe or visualise different lived experiences of slow, that could inform and expand our collective temporal imaginations?
If you want to share something about slow that you’ve seen, or are making, I’d love to hear about it.
conversations and imaginary collections
The Imaginary Museum has been in existence for about a month online, and it’s already had over 1000 page views. I’ve really enjoyed imagining it, and discovering what it wants to be through the writing of it.
As ever, working with other people has expanded the possibilities and horizons of my creative practice and of the Imaginary Museum as a thought experiment, far beyond where I could go on my own. So I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who’s helped me along the way in this process, in conversation and in their contributions to the Imaginary Museum.
THANK YOU to:
Bryony Benge-Abbot - on moving from museum practice to making art in the public realm, and the ongoing evolution of describing a hybrid creative practice at the intersection of art and science, nature and spirituality.
Bryony very generously took an idea for a walk, or maybe even a dance in the Imaginary Museum - with a sketch and unfinished painting in the collection, that really lifted my spirits as a response to a new type of public cultural space being full of movement and joy, and celebrating ideas in motion.
Jessica Bradford - for conversations that totally unwrapped ideas of what museums are and do, and then put them back together again around the most fundamental behaviours that would be beneficial for everyone. She embraced the idea of not knowing with a beautiful personal interpretation of an object in the Science Museum collection and reset objects for me, as storytelling vessels for completing with our own memories and experiences.
Sado Jirde - who also has an Un-Museum project - as Director of Black South West Network, hers is exploring intangible cultural heritage, and we found so many energising parallels in her thinking about a new space she is setting up at the CoachHouse in St Pauls, Bristol.
Immy Kaur - co-founder of Civic Square for sharing the challenges of change-making, and for describing such a galvanising and compelling vision of her neighbourhood, walking out of her door in ten years time.
Ariane Koek - whose breadth of work is impossible to do justice in a paragraph, for re-energising me around just getting out there and making things happen, and for sharing insights from her projects and collaborations around the world curating and producing at the intersection of art and science.
Charles Phillip - shared his experience as co-founder of MICRO, tiny museums that are installed in public spaces like hospitals and train stations, made me think about the the invitation and careful holding of curiosity in public spaces where people are not expecting to encounter something like this. I love MICRO’s notion of joining up habitat fragments of these types of spaces in a city.
Matt Rogers - who brought a whole world of Imaginary Museum spaces to life in a way that would never be possible with words alone - his Archipelago Suite of compositions explode the imaginary space into new realms, with new textures, and with attention to detail (the importance of a good cafe) and the widest possible picture - with the idea of a museum in which the objects are keen to learn as much through you, as you are through them.
Amy Rose - as co-director of Anagram, talking about her work in creating open experience spaces and narratives that allow for, or rather design for ambivalence, for people to bring what they know and feel and not set fixed outcomes for stories. And for playing with ideas of spaces and festivals and relighting an anarchic spirit in my thinking.
Prof Peter Weibel - artist and CEO of ZKM, who shared his incredible encyclopedic connections, references and approach from a lifetime exploring the relationships of art and science. He also gently provoked me to reconsider the (Un) Museum and to take a philosophical route into thinking about trust in public spaces.
Caroline Williams - for conjuring up a whole new space in the Imaginary Museum - with the most happy making giant canvas to cast out our childhood conditioning of who can and can’t make art…her vivid writing and painting leaves me in no doubt that this space should exist for all of us.
Raquel Meseguer Zafe - for bringing her thoughtful explorations of rest and horizontality to the Imaginary Museum, with a generosity of space and time and a guided audio invitation to slow down, release your knowing and find your questions. Her pathway to rest in the collection really challenges me and all of us to think about the quality and intention of our public cultural spaces, and how they can be designed for everyone to thrive in them.
I have so many new connections and conversations to pick up, and thank you also to everyone who’s been so supportive and responded on Twitter, it’s been great to find a way to find this online space as a fruitful imaginative container for more than just me.
an Imaginary Museum
So there I was (see last post) and here I still am, sitting in a body of not knowing, literally and figuratively, and excited about further articulating a fundamental particle of not knowing for my creative practice. I want my work to be about crafting experiences that carefully hold people in a state of not knowing - so that it feels exciting rather than scary, and so that audiences and participants in experiences feel their presence has an active value, an agency in engaging with ideas that are in motion.
I have also always wanted audiences to leave an experience feeling uplifted somehow, with a memory of a moment out of the everyday. Something to wonder about, and maybe even sometimes, something to smile or laugh about - just for a minute alongside the hard stuff. (And there is so much hard stuff right now - horrific and unimaginable - so do we stop, or do we, at the same time as finding out how we can help, protest or advocate, also choose to continue to find and create moments of lightness for each other. It seems that we always choose to keep telling stories.)
‘The careful carrying of uncertainty’ is a phrase that has stuck with me from discussions that I had with Applied Magician Stuart Nolan a few years ago, who helped us design an exhibit exploring the embodied feeling of invisibility at We the Curious. And in many ways the development of my creative practice is building on what I began there, where we built clusters of exhibits in a 360 multidisciplinary exploration of a central question, putting people’s curiosity at the centre of what a cultural space can be. It also placed different approaches to a question on an equal plane with each other - and was particularly exciting to design for, when the questions were truly unGoogleable : “Can science see your soul?”
Onwards from there to here, and the next bit of not knowing in my development process was to find a way of more tangibly exploring the notion of ‘not knowing’ while I wasn’t able to do what I’d been hoping to do in the wider world in the last year. I did know a few things :
I’d originally hoped for some online conversations I was having, to be thought experiments, and that had turned out to be not quite the right shape for them.
I still needed a space to imagine in, with others - and I couldn’t shake the notion of a thought experiment, after being further inspired by Prof Peter Weibel’s description of his Critical Zones exhibition as a thought experiment at ZKM, (see previous post).
Whenever I’ve been working on something new, particularly with teams of people in a change process, there comes a point where we have to move on from talking and thinking about it, and just try something out without pressure of so called failure.
I needed to be able to bring a space of not knowing into being, to see what it felt like, and notice what came up that needed attending to in terms of a careful invitation to people to enter it.
So I made an online thought experiment. A website for an Imaginary Museum. Written as though it really exists. That was important, as it was almost like what a physical rapid prototyping process does for the mind - it brings new ideas into being that wouldn’t have happened if you were only intellectually thinking and talking about them. It forces you to test out what it feels like, and usually, the Thing tells you what it needs and what it wants to be through the doing of it - and if you share your prototypes, audiences will tell you want it needs to be too.
Side note, but connected - while I was physically limited in what I could do last year, I took an online hybrid writing course led by Tania Hershman. It did exactly what I hoped it would, challenging me to try different ways of writing, encouraging me out of set patterns of working. For one of the exercises, we were asked to collide two different forms and contexts of writing - the list was brilliant, things like: a wedding speech, a station announcement, a shopping list. I chose to collide ‘footnotes’ with ‘an object label in a museum.’ And out popped a teapot from the Horniman Museum talking in the 1st person, giving the footnotes to its own label. There was something about the object having a voice, talking directly to the reader that I found interesting to play with. So when I was starting to write the website for the Imaginary Museum I found myself using the 1st person voice again. It seemed to come up naturally as I was thinking about questions of trust, of making a generous invitation. What if the museum spoke for itself on its own site…?
This thinking has all been part of my Arts Council England developing creative practice grant - and I’d originally written the application saying that this was all working towards an Un-Museum of ideas. But luckily I’d put a mental question mark at the end of this, if not a real typed one. Because I now realise that Un-Museum doesn’t work. I love museums. I am not really trying to Un-them. I would like to change the way they work, but not replace them. Museums need to continue doing what they do brilliantly while working on the stuff that needs to shift.
This is something else - about a hybrid practice leading towards hybrid spaces that don’t have the language assigned to describe them yet. I had a conversation with artist Bryony Benge-Abbott about how we describe hybrid practices, and how the language we choose might change. And with Amy Rose, Creative Director and co-founder of Anagram, we talked, amongst many things anarchic and joyful, about the invitation to audiences to participate in work that leaves space for personal experience and interpretation. Prof Peter Weibel, CEO of the hybrid space ZKM also generously challenged my framing of the Un-Museum, and propelled me towards some philosophical context for the trust that is needed to be designed into these spaces.
I am most interested in working in the almost impossible zone, opening up ideas that are under construction, exploration and experimentation for wider audiences. Sometimes that makes it almost impossible to describe something without referring to existing things that are known already. When you pick a new word or phrase to name and communicate the values of what your hybrid work or space is, it needs a little time to be trusted and understood. I wonder if in the interim transforming phase, using a word that anchors people, even if only to give a context for what it’s not, can still be helpful.
So for now, this online documentation of my thinking is called the Imaginary Museum, as that’s what it is. If it were to become not-imaginary, it would need a new name, one that suggests the values and the why of it, but is neither museum nor art gallery nor science centre. I always have a long list of ideas for names for this type of hybrid space, but that’s not the most important part of this process right now.
You are very much invited to have a look around. It’s deliberately lo-fi in the sense that it is largely text and images as a rapid prototype, and it is also avoiding the perceptions and expectations that come with a 3D virtual space mimicking ‘standard’ gallery spaces.
Its collection will be building over the next few weeks and months, thanks to the generous people I’ve been connecting with and accepting the invitation to contribute something. Crucially I want to invite a diversity of individuals, groups and communities to contribute thoughts to what they’d like to see or do in an Imaginary Museum.
If you have thoughts and provocations for the Imaginary Museum, please let it know!
a year of not knowing
This blog post is about not knowing.
It’s about a year of quite intensely unexpected not knowing, along with everyone at the pandemic scale, and also on the macro personal scale, where that state of being became particularly uncomfortable. It’s also a story of realising and releasing a fundamental particle of my creative practice that’s been part of me and my work the whole time. It just needed first of all to be given a name, and a bit of space to wriggle around a bit. I’m excited to be able to describe it, and I am ready for the next chapter of my practice of not knowing, almost.
Here’s how the not knowing goes…..
A lot has happened and not happened since my last blog post a whole year ago. I had a part time position for a year at the History of Science Museum in Oxford, where I was looking forward to learning more about engaging with objects and scientific instruments, and I was in the excited first month of a Developing Creative Practice grant from Arts Council England. So although the pandemic was very present, I was in the privileged position of being ready to distract myself with the delicious not knowing of new spaces, people and ideas.
Then back in April, a few quirks of my biology took me in entirely another direction of not knowing. I almost didn’t mention at the start of my blogs last year, that I have a queer body in all the ways, and somehow it was prescient that I did. What had been a manageable long term baseline of not knowing, with mild ME and fibromyalgia, became a black hole of not knowing after an adverse response to my first Covid vaccine, and a whole bunch of new unknowns in my body to adjust to and navigate.
( I still don’t know how long it will take to return to my baseline, or if I ever will, but I should note here that not hiding the fallout between a vital vaccine and a poorly researched chronic illness is not the same as being anti-vax. I would love to be fully vaccinated. And in fact if medical science had historically been better at the practice of active ‘not knowing’ alongside the chronically ill community, rather than dismissing unknown illnesses, we wouldn’t still be in the dark when it comes to things like Long Covid.)
Meantime, the point is, I had an unexpected plunge into a murky pool of not knowing. I couldn’t work at all for a bit, let alone get out of bed. Gradually, as I navigated a fairly choppy ride of sometimes being able to sit up at a desk, and often not, I found my imaginative horizons almost impossible to activate. They were out of reach, quite literally obscured in a brain fog. Luckily the initial phase of my development process was about personal reflection rather than original ideas, so I went along more gently, allowing deeper reading around the threads from my previous work and the focussed set of questions I was interested in thinking about.
After a phase of trying to be too academic about those questions, reading papers, books, academic essays - about museology, metaphor, perception, alternative economics, philosophies of reality - I got myself stuck trying to find an intellectual articulation of where I was going with my creative practice development. I then had a breakthrough conversation with a friend, about the creative validity of running with whatever conceptual connections these texts triggered for me. I realised we don’t think twice about surrounding ourselves with books of visual references to draw inspiration from, and that it’s just as OK to do that with lines of non-fiction text as much as it is to jump between, and rearrange snippets from imagery and fiction. I decided I should give myself permission for non-fiction text to be equally in the mix.
So for example, while I’m probably a few miles from the rigorous depths of Bruno Latour’s actor network theory, or Karen Barad’s agential realism, I’ve taken something valuable, an excited gut feeling more than anything, about what it could be for creative practitioners, cultural spaces, objects and observer/participants, to be entangled agents in an experience rather than separated out in unhelpful hierarchies.
All this enforced slower thinking took me on to researching a list of practitioners that I wanted to have conversations with and being bolder about the thought leaders that inspired me with their work in hybrid art/science/museums/innovative people centred design. I felt daunted to make a cold approach to people I was so interested to speak with, and I said as much in my emails to them, but I slowly started to send out my invitations for online conversations and receive replies.
I am not used to my brain not being able to keep up in a conversation and having to make notes to hold onto threads I want to run with, so I was tentative about kicking conversations off, but by late summer I was adjusting to this enough to start a few with people online. I had really wanted to travel to meet UK based people in person, to be part of their spaces, walk and talk, but between my health and the pandemic, my fantasy of unfettered creative freedom remained, as it did for so many of us, stuck in a set of very familiar on screen boxes.
Despite that, it felt good to start talking to people. I had naively imagined that each conversation might be a thought experiment in itself - a moment to break out of the exhausted pandemic mode we all found ourselves in. I had wanted to create a conversational space to dream in a little rather than just discuss survival, but it was immediately clear that was really hard to do with someone you’re meeting for the first time on a screen, who’s already been generous enough to reply to an email out of the blue and start a conversation. So I settled for simply exploring the research questions that I’d identified, to see which ones naturally came up in my discussions. Other people’s perspectives immediately expanded my thinking out again and I tried not to hold on to my original questions too tightly, to see what came up.
And then just as I felt I was getting going, I hit another health wall in the autumn, with a whole new set of bodily not knowing to navigate. So I had to pause again. I was miserable and furious and a bit scared. And somehow, while I was flat out on the sofa, in an extended personal state of not knowing, with more time for the few conversations I’d had to percolate a bit, I started to realise that everything was coming back each time to the same thing….
I started out in physics, with a particular interest in the poetic world of particle physics, and so I often find myself searching for the energetic engine at the heart of something, and the fundamental particles that a thing or an idea is made out of. Of the four questions that I’d set myself to think about for my creative practice, one of them was identifying itself as the fundamental particle that the others could all break down into when you poke them.
Where is the invitation to not know?
I’d come up with this question originally because I felt like some something was missing in our cultural spaces. Somewhere in between the didactic explanations of phenomena in science centres, the often sparse or knowing interpretation in art galleries, and the dry catalogue numbered labels in museums, I was looking for a more human invitation to engage with the ideas and processes behind each experience. I’m generalising of course, and I love all these types of spaces as a visitor and as a practitioner, but what if we could bring in more playfulness, curiosity, and a permission to not know. The most thrilling and memorable experiences are often the most unexpected ones. Serendipitous discoveries, turning the corner on the street and finding a musician playing, the rare moment in the empty gallery when a friendly curator opens up a closed drawer for you to see inside.
Exhibits can be too tightly designed for specific learning outcomes without considering what it FEELS like to encounter them. Ideas can be too securely nailed down to allow you to wonder. What if science could be presented as beautifully as art, but without the clean white cube, tiny labelled reverence? What if more museums designed people rather than object centred experiences? What if there were spaces which present what is Not Known rather than what is Known.
For our collective joy and collective survival in a world of wicked problems, we need to teach the art and science and the creative potential of not knowing, as much as we need to teach and test the collected body of things we already know. Where is that happening in the public realm? (An adjacent link here is a joyful reminder or introduction to the brilliant Sir Ken Robinson on the imposed conformity of schools killing creativity.)
Once I started thinking about what this invitation to not know would mean, or need, I found it sat at the heart of all my other questions:
NOT KNOWING AND CURIOSITY - there has to be an element of not knowing for a state of curiosity to arise. If you provide audiences with all the answers, there’s no space left for anyone to feel like active agents with valued questions. But curiosity and not knowing needs to be held safely and carefully designed for. If you’re not given enough context or scaffold to hold on to, you’ll just feel uncomfortably adrift. In an unknown space, the scaffold will be minimal for some people and for others, it will need to be a clearly defined, easily navigated structure. This scaffolding of the invitation to not know is a key challenge for my hybrid creative practice.
NOT KNOWING - A MORE POROUS SHARING OF POWER AND KNOWLEDGE - the shared experience of not knowing is also where I believe the boundaries of power and knowledge can be dissolved. An imbalance of power and knowledge is baked in to the colonial history, architecture, grammar and tone of many of our cultural institutions. But if the museum meets the visitor in what is not known, together, rather than what is known, then hierarchies can melt away. We started to test this out by centring a whole new exhibition around people’s questions at We the Curious. So that the visitor can walk in and see something phrased in the way they would say it or think it, and seeing that a person like them asked that question, feel immediately part of the space rather than peripheral to the way it operates. By inviting people to not know, we are exploring together and in the best case, perhaps even generating new knowledge together. ( I love Alexander Dorner’s vision of the art museum as a ‘kraftwerk’, a generator of new energy.)
NOT KNOWING = IDEAS IN MOTION - not knowing is the space where the questions are more alive than any answers are yet. It’s an exciting and sometimes frustrating space to be in, but artists and scientists have expertise in charting a path through not knowing. This is what the invitation to not know offers audiences, to become valued participants in an active process of thinking and testing out the edges of things. And the more diverse the people included in this way of being, the more generative and creative that process is likely to be.
NOT KNOWING IS GENEROUS - finally, I think not knowing also lies beneath the question of whether a museum can be as generous as a forest. This question came from biologist Janine Benyus’ idea about urban planning, with a city in generous equilibrium with its environment. Thinking about new cultural space, it makes me wonder where parklets might intersect with distributed museums. I also want to expand the notion of generosity too. After generations of institutions holding tightly to power and knowledge and collections, and gatekeeping whose work is presented or commissioned, the most generous thing a cultural space can do right now is to loosen that grip, by inviting people in to a process of not knowing rather than a highly controlled sharing of knowing.
All of the above needs something that society has lost, at least at the moment in the UK - and that is trust. A invitation to not know needs trust. People are overwhelmed with fake news, deep fakes, corruption in the media, in government. And it’s all largely mediated digitally. It’s hard to trust what we can’t touch, or test out with all our available senses. Curators are in the top 5 most trusted professions in the UK to ‘tell the truth.’ I wonder what it would take to be able to also trust curators, artists, scientists, each other, in not knowing, and where the spaces are for us to do that together.
In many ways, my last year has been about learning to trust myself, in all the states of not knowing.
My next post is shorter as it doesn’t have a whole year to catch up on. It’s about an imaginary not knowing space, to play with how that might feel as a container to locate cultural experiences...
Meantime some connected inspiration - to check out the work of Civic Square, whose co-founder and Director Immy Kaur shared her vision of a more generous local environment with me in conversation and made me want to step into it immediately. And the work of MICRO, who share mini museums in urban spaces, as a network of habitat fragments - co- founder Charles Philipp talked to me about his approach to designing for curiosity in unexpected locations.
And a thank you to all the people that have helped me through all the personal not knowing - in particular, Clare Reddington, for love, and incredible food, and listening and making me laugh even in the worst bits.
Also Silke Ackermann, a rare museum director who was kind and trusted me with flexible working when I needed it. And Jessica Bradford, the best co-pilot job share partner in this year of not knowing, or in any year. And to Arts Council England for extending my DYCP deadline twice, and giving me this chance to think and develop and have an imaginary horizon to reach for.
And all my friends who are still wonderfully there even though I mostly haven’t been.