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  1. Seke Chimutengwende on storytelling, non-verbal communication, haunting and horror

    14/10/2022

    Seke Chimutengwende on storytelling, non-verbal communication, haunting and horror

    It begins in darkness by Seke Chimutengwende is on Thursday 27th October 2022 at the Bluecoat in Liverpool. Recommended reading: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa - Walter Rodney Beloved - Toni Morrison The Rats in the Walls - H P Lovecraft All episodes and full transcripts: listeningwith.substack.com Marie-Anne McQuay 0:05 Hello, you're listening with the Bluecoat in Liverpool, a series of podcasts taking the themes of our exhibition programmes as a starting point for 15 minute insights from artists, scientists, writers, educators, storytellers and more. In this episode, dance artist and choreographer Seke Chimutengwende discusses storytelling, nonverbal communication, haunting and horror. Seke Chimutungwende 0:33 I'm Seke, I'm a choreographer, a performer, and teacher, and I live in London. I guess in terms of work, that's the main thing, the main role that I have is choreographer. I perform in other people's choreographies and performances as well. I've been involved in in dance and performance for about nearly 20 years. I don't think I really started thinking of it as a profession until I was about 18. That's when I started doing formal dance classes. And when I was 22, I went to London Contemporary Dance School and did a three year training there. After graduating, and up until now, I've studied various improvisation practices a lot. And I've performed a lot of improvisation. But yeah, I'd say a lot of my training is rooted in various improvisation practices, as well as more traditional contemporary dance / modern dance techniques. Seke Chimutungwende 1:37 I've always worked a lot with text and language and voice work. A lot of the work that I've been involved in has sort of crossed over from dance into theatre. And I would say, that's been a big part of my practice. Growing up, I was definitely very into storytelling and mythology, fantasy, science fiction, and the sort of fantastical. And the other thing that I was really interested in as a child and growing up was history. At one point I wanted to be a history teacher. I was always reading history including world history. So both of those things have always been there. I would say I wasn't particularly interested in ghosts or horror, that's sort of something that's come much more recently, but definitely the general fantastical realm has always been an interest, as well as kind of real history. I'm not sure what I mean by that - history is history, the subject. Seke Chimutungwende 2:43 I made a piece a few years ago called Black Holes with another choreographer. Alexandrina Hemsley. As we were researching that piece, we were very interested in Afrofuturism, and black science fiction. I've always been interested in sci fi, and I discovered the term Afrofuturism, I didn't know when it was, about seven or eight years ago. And I was really interested in that. Part of that research led me into looking at horror and black horror as a genre. Films like Get Out and books like Beloved by Toni Morrison. I was kind of intrigued by this relationship between horror and blackness. There was something very interesting about that, for me. Something that particularly resonated for me was the idea of haunting, and histories that people don't want to look at so much or acknowledge, or if they do look at them they're sort of disturbing and troubling. For me, there's a function of 'ghost' to that fear of something that might be there, as well. Seke Chimutungwende 3:59 It's interesting, the idea of exorcism. I think, in a way, bringing something out into the open that can then help us move forward - that's definitely part of it, for me. Another part of it is more... it more just feels like a kind of inevitable sort of point of research or point of focus. It's something that I feel like I just can't really ignore. When I look at it in that way, it's not so much that I'm wanting to achieve anything through it. It's more that I just feel like "Well, as somebody who makes dance pieces, what's the thing that's present that I can't ignore?" It's something that's sort of inevitably in the space and it's, in a way, more of a formal question of "well, what happens if you make a dance piece and instead of pushing that subject to the side, let it really be in space?" What then happens? So it's sort of a kind of experimental question. Seke Chimutungwende 5:08 There's something also really interesting about the idea of a ghost and horror more generally, and even the sort of idea of the Gothic that I think it has... I don't know if this is through post modernism, or late 20th century culture, but everything is sort of now ironic. And if people think of horror, you know, they often think of humour, and ghosts and vampires, and all of these entities are definitely jokes now, if they weren't originally. For me, there's something interesting about that in relation to dealing with subjects that are serious, like the legacies of slavery and colonialism. It feels like on one level, it's quite a neat metaphor to think of the ghost and the haunted house, and on the other hand it's quite jarring because these images are, you know, filled with humour and excess, and the ridiculous, and entertainment. I think there's something about that feeling. It comes up quite often in what I'm researching where I'm like, "oh, this is actually inappropriate", or we're laughing about something that's incredibly serious and terrible. And I feel like those points are really useful in terms of, it's almost like it kind of wakes me up to the reality of it. Seke Chimutungwende 6:37 I guess with looking at something like that there's a temptation for me, and it's easy to get into a kind of moralistic place where it's like, well, slavery and colonialism are things that, you know, were and are perpetrated by very bad people, and the fact that I can recognise that means I'm not a bad person. So I'm kind of separate from it, and therefore I'm okay. And I think somehow introducing an inappropriate image of a sort of stupid ghost or a kind of friendly haunted house, or whatever - it interrupts that almost worthy way into it. I find that that tension very useful. Seke Chimutungwende 7:22 I wrote this text for the symposium a couple of years ago. I wrote the text because I couldn't be in a studio. I just started writing some stuff and I didn't really know what I was doing, but it kind of led me to this text, which is a kind of hallucination of the work that hadn't yet been made. That was interesting, because we're working with that text in the studio now as the a sort of blueprint for the actual piece. It has created a kind of bypassing effect, because I think it's sort of located the work in my point of view, but my point of view almost as a kind of character, a sort of unnamed character, who's witnessing something. That's a different kind of irony too, not comic irony, but distancing that has the effect of quieting some of the other types of emotion, I think. Including humour, that been a very unusual process for me. And I think also it's created this object, that's somehow... the effect of it has been that it's a channelling where it's like, now we have this object that was sort of channelled through me even though, obviously, I wrote it and put it together. The after effect is it feels like it's been channelled, and now it's this thing that we have that we're working with in the studio, that we're trying to figure out what it means. Seke Chimutungwende 8:53 I think distance is an important element in the work for me. What I was saying earlier around this moralising approach, it's like I wanted to avoid making something that felt personal in the sense of, I guess, autobiographical. For me, there's a question around "whose history is this?" There's something about dislocating it slightly from me or from the performers, because I'm not performing in the stage piece. I think one of the questions around this history is around, well, "who were our ancestors, and what did they do and what didn't they do?" You know, when I say 'our' I mean 'everyone', not a particular group, that there's some sort of ambiguity there, I think, in terms of responsibility and guilt and burden. That's very, very complicated. Giving things a sense of distance allows a bit more space for that, rather than kind of closing it down too quickly. Seke Chimutungwende 9:53 There's the idea of of things that are unseen spoken and things that can't be spoken, which are not the same. I guess that there are lots of things around histories, around colonial history and the history of slavery, which for me is one history, really. There's a lot that's just not spoken about, a lot of that history has been destroyed, even. You know, the records, it's not really taught very much in schools. Maybe it's beginning to be a little bit, although there's also quite a big backlash against that. It's something that people don't really want to talk about anyway, even if they're given the chance, they sort of don't want to get into it for many reasons. You know, one being that is just awful and terrible. And I guess in relation to that there's the unspeakable in the sense that there's a side to it that's impossible to really understand through language and express through words. Because it's so unimaginably terrible that it's something that people don't want to speak about. It's the kind of experience that you would sort of want to wipe from your memory. There's sort of a side to it where there's a kind of impossibility of speech and dialogue and intellectualising. I think they go together, even though they're not the same thing, the things that are unspoken and things that are unspeakable. What is there is the physical body and the physical body being a kind of moving thing. Something that I find interesting about movement as a material is that it's created by a physical thing, a physical organism that's very material and tangible. And yet the

    18 min

  2. 10/10/2022

    The story of my life: Sadia Pineda Hameed on unspoken histories

    In episode six, artist and writer Sadia Pineda Hameed reads an extract from 'To Make Philippines' and considers the things we can't talk about that stay as unspoken histories. Recommended reading: Hélène Cixous - Philippines Gina Apostol - Insurrecto Augusto Boal - Theatre of the Oppressed Web links: sadiaph.com thebluecoat.org.uk All episodes & full transcripts: listeningwith.substack.com Sadia Pineda Hameed 0:06 One morning, light from the window wakes us together. The hazel tree outside acts as a net curtain, letting just enough sun in from between its branches and offshoots. The slits of light permeate so gently, so knowingly, billow about the two of us, and I can feel an almost impossible breeze. My mother says "you should paint it, it would be nice, and if any art critic asks you what it is, you say 'this is the story of my life'". Small branches from big branches lost in each other. And here, I remember a dream in which she says this to me. I wonder if this is that very dream right now. Am I in the past or the present, reliving or living for the first time? I'm lost between two times but regardless, remembrance is in abundance. We both remember the dream. We both wonder if we are in that very dream right now. Our collective memories, hers and mine, overflow. Remembrance is in abundance. And though we are lost between two times we keep treading together. We tread this in-between state together in circles that always progress. We tread together in circles, always progressing. Treading together in circles we progress. This morning we circle around that tree that brought us into telepathic communion. My mother tells me she has just dreamt of the hazel tree in one of several dreams that night. Another dream involved waiting to have her cards read by the manghuhula. A third about looking for a young girl who was eating spiky leaves from the garden. The last was a trance dream, which I woke her from when I heard her muffled voice asking for help. She says after remembering these, it was like one montage. I say montage in my film class, but I would explain it as the sewing of fabrics together. Then we look out the window, focusing on the tree, and she says "you should paint it". This morning we circle around the tree. We are never lost if we know we will return to the beginning. We are never lost if we tread in circles together, progressing. That morning feels like a part sewn into a whole. I match this loose thread up with a thread from the past, a dream from two years ago. My mother and I look down at a triangular bed of flowers in her garden. She tells me to look up but it is dusk so she lights it up with a torch. She tells me to look, is getting impatient, insists. But the lilies are so overexposed, so unnaturally illuminated for this time of night that I avoid looking. I look eventually when she tells me that this is the story of my life. These two threads of morning and dusk almost make up a full day. It is a slow-releasing story I've had to sew together myself, and I'm still searching for more loose ends. There'll be one called Night, another called Noon and a third named Dawn. I intuitively know this. And I now come to know that this is the only way to communicate a secret held for too long, to scatter the beginnings, middles and ends so that the secret can only be discovered gradually. These things need time, the comfort of time, to be understood. And yet these things also insist that I should already understand. There is an insistence on knowing, that I should have already known my mother would offer her camisa to me when she reminded me of the pillbox hat that night. I think I knew already. This knowing is a kind of ancestral intuition. I weave together fibres to form a whole. Then only after do I remember that I knew already. I visit places with a compulsion for reconnection, then come to remember that I have been already. It is so simple. The knowing is always there in the soon to be remembered. It can only be accessed through intuitive journeying, treading across associations, of dreams, of fabrics, of language, of visions, until you circle back and realise that this is where I started. Still I look. I look for the start in the material. I find a book called 'Philippines'. A few weeks earlier was when I took the name Pineda. I didn't realise then, but perhaps I already knew that I was enacting the start. It starts with the semiotic praxis of taking names, holding them sacred, enshrinement. I adorn myself with a new name. I adorn my arms with a new book to hold and I grasp both just as tightly as the other in adornation. Sadia Pineda Hameed 4:52 Philippines, a book adorned with names of its own that signed to me in their individual ways. Hélène Cixous who dreams of her mother and writes on it. Laurent Milesi, who first caused me to write on signs itself - signature, event, context. Marcel Proust, who was a secret book for my twin Almond. Peter Evetson, Godiva, Freud, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. But before reading about these names, all I know is the books. I grasp for ‘Philippines’ only to find out that it is not about the Philippines at all. It is only a sign. It signals me towards the names within, to enact the start. But I cannot begin to write on this book, only circle around it in its own words. Sometimes they think this is because I've already written it. Or maybe I'm too entranced by its knowledge of me that I can only speak through it and not of it. When I read it, I am not reading but communicating. The book, its pages, so sheer, so permeable. I've never come across a book that expresses my experiences of it back to me. Every one of us has a secret book. It is a cherished book, for it is goodness itself to us, the absolute friend. It promises and lives up to what their promise is. We forget it but it never forgets us. It knows everything about us but it does not know it knows. Marie-Anne McQuay 6:24 That was an excerpt of 'To Make Philippines' by artist and writer Sadia Pineda Hameed. In this episode she considers the things you can't talk about that stay as unspoken histories. Sadia Pineda Hameed 6:49 My name is Sadia. I'm a Filipino-Pakistani artist currently based in Cardiff, Wales, and I work in a lot of different mediums like installation, sculpture, film, but most of my work comes from a place of writing, so it always begins with writing. Me and this other artist Beau W Beakhouse, we started a journal, an arts journal, to kind of be a space for our more experimental writing, and that was a way that led us into the visual arts. And from there, we were able to gain a coherency and fluency in how the art world worked, but also develop our own practices and our joint practice as well. It's called Lumin journal, it's part of Lumin, which is a press and radio show and curatorial collective that we have. Sadia Pineda Hameed 7:42 I'm really interested in the idea of the unspoken, because it figures so much especially from my perspective, as a second generation immigrant, feeling all these resonances of what I feel like is the effects of colonisation, but intergenerationally through my parents. And the unspoken is quite a big thing, I think, in a lot of immigrant households where your parents have gone through something that, if it's ever mentioned, they get very tense. Basically, what they experienced when they migrated in the '70s to the UK, and I'm assuming the racism they experienced, but also the effects on their own countries and the idea of losing, and moving, and rupturing of the land that they travel away from. In a lot of ways, just their inability to be able to express it to you, for a variety reasons. Maybe it's because the English language as their second language doesn't have the right vocabulary to express those types of things. Or it could be a form of protection where they don't want to talk about those things, because they would hope that you wouldn't have to go through that. Sadia Pineda Hameed 8:53 What goes unspoken passes down and sits there and festers, I guess, and it becomes a tension that really doesn't need to be there as a… familial trauma, I think of it as. I'm interested in what goes unspoken because I think in those spaces of absences and silence, that is where we talk about those things. Sadia Pineda Hameed 9:17 Being in a westernised culture, growing up wanting to be everything but the culture that you came from, losing the ability to sense those resonances. For me, I started to understand a bit more when I think it was when my parents were ready to talk about some of the traumatic experiences of being in the UK in the '70s. "Oh, now you're 18 I think you're ready to hear it." From there, it wasn't necessarily that they were able to express it to me and tell me "this is what happened". It was more that for me, I felt like I was being visited by my parents in dreams, and they would talk to me there. Not necessarily verbally but through symbolic actions and kind of signals, which I go into in that film 'The Song of my Life', which showed at the Bluecoat. Sadia Pineda Hameed 10:07 My dad feels quite tense about it still. I think he's interested, but I think he's still in this framework that these things need to still be kept secret. It's something to be protected still. My mum, on the other hand, I think she's kind of a born storyteller. Her dream when she was a kid was to be a radio play performer. She's appreciated the fact that I'm retelling her multiple retellings. I think she's always been really interested in the slow release of information over time. Parents and grandparents just tell the same story over and over again, and you just kind of have to smile and nod. But actually something is being released in those retellings. There's a new piece of information each time, when they sense that you're a bit more ready to receive it, you slowly get a few more details. This memory that when it was first told to you was r

    18 min

  3. 06/09/2022

    Do it, don't say it: the HECS on precision, partial knowing and decentering histories

    In our fifth episode, we hear from the Heritage Education Centre Space at Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre. The HECS speak on precision, partial knowing and decentering histories. For full transcript and web links, visit: listeningwith.substack.com Mary-Anne McQuay 0:02 Hello, you're listening with the Bluecoat in Liverpool, a series of podcasts taking the themes of our exhibition programmes as a starting point for 15 minute insights from artists, scientists, writers, educators, storytellers and more. In this episode we hear from the Heritage Education Centre Space a Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre. The HECS speak on precision, partial knowing and decentering histories. Kym Ward 0:29 I'm Kym, I'm one of the people who operate and run Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre over on the Wirral. We've been running for a couple of years now since 2018/2019. And is a space for researchers, artists, philosophers, dancers, musicians to come, stay and work on their own practices communally or individually. Maeve Devine 0:56 I'm Maeve. I am a musician and sound art practitioner. I've been a friend and associate of the Observatory for about a year now. And I'm really interested in how we experience sound, and music in places and spaces and linking those experiences with oral histories. And this idea that there's a lineage of sound, when you hear a sound, you can trace it to its origin. And that becomes part of a wider kind of interlaced, I guess kind of tapestry of sounds and experience, which then for me, kind of bleeds out into like, music history and like popular culture, and then little bits of identity politics and whatnot. But specifically for me, I'm interested in how neurodiverse people process sound sensually, and how they experience sound in places. So I've been working a little bit with some of the artefacts here at the Observatory, and some of the spaces here as well. I'm really fascinated by reverb, but I haven't fully explored what that is yet. And I too have an interest in witchcraft and I guess specifically the - how would you say it - the transformation of energy from state to state, and, um, where sound fits in with that? If indeed it does. Spoiler: it does. Jara Rocha 2:51 Hello, my name is Jara Rocha. This is my second time visiting the Bidston Observatory. I come from Barcelona. I'm an interdependent researcher there and around. And I'm here as part of the Vibes&Leaks group, which has a focus on the inner crossings between the phenomenon of the voice and its inscribed politics. Kym Ward 3:27 So HECS is the Heritage Education Centre Space, and it sits inside Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre. The Artistic Research Centre is a place that artists, designers, dancers, philosophers, musicians can come and stay between two nights in a month. And HECS is dedicated to the history of the building. So the building's an old observatory. It was built in 1866. And from its foundings, to the mid 2000s, it was home to natural earth sciences research. So the Heritage Education Centre Space, which has a physical room in the building, empty at the moment, this is the focus for some of the researchers that come through here who want to engage with the history and heritages - multiple. Yeah, so HECS is a play of sound. We understand that it sounds a bit like a witch's spell somewhat, and we're having a kind of a joke reference or a playful reference to that which sits outside science or sits outside 'capital H History' or sits outside, well, received knowledges. And we're trying to do that in lots of different ways, which I guess we're going to go into. If we start to think about maybe we could separate the words of HECS so Heritage Education Centre Space and we can maybe talk a little bit through those. Jara Rocha 4:54 H as in ‘heritage’, and I guess also patrimony, and inheritance, and unexpected modes of passing on memories or knowledges. Kym Ward 5:08 Well, the building itself is quite a monument on the like skyline of the Wirral. And it's really cherished by lots and lots of people from their childhoods to adulthood. And then when people find out the specific histories, which were important histories in British imperialism, British war efforts, then they feel quite a close bond. Kym Ward 5:39 We are trying to think through heritages in slightly different ways and expanded forms, not just the stories that might usually be told of the directors and those images - they still will be told - but also very many other stories which relate to the histories of different explorations of science. So this place was always used for applied research. So that's one of the things which now connects it to its current usage as a artistic research centre. We do a lot of... or the researchers that come through here, or the practitioners that come through here, do a lot of thinking through making. One of the things that we can inherit in different forms of knowledge is our practice of experimentation, which might not be the same as science has recognised previously. Kym Ward 6:31 In every point in history, heritage is also what is kept alive by the people who are living, and the people who commit and want to push energy, or to hold space, or to transmit. And so I guess this is kind of what you're motioning to, no? It's the community that keeps it alive, which is giving it the life to be able to transmit into the future. We don't know how it's going to work, because the communities that were here were scientific communities, and now they're more artistic communities. So we're definitely experiencing the moving together of these two, well, I mean, traditionally they would be called disciplines. But maybe if we can think a little bit more expanded then we would just say, people who have a kind of interest in or a job or a vocation or however, or the labour that they would like to push. And then we try to figure out what are the precedents which was set by modern Western science, that allowed for a lot of research to take place, and a lot of new applications to occur. And then we and then we see how we can repeat these stories or not repeat these stories, or engage them in different ways. Kym Ward 7:53 So we didn't call, I should probably say, we decided not to call the space and the activities, we've decided not to kind of put it under the umbrella of 'museum'. So we tried to find other ways to describe the kind of relation to history that we would have here. So 'heritage education' would be then a kind of co-learning again, of what heritage would be, rather than teaching anybody about what heritage is, that's not the point. The point is to try to communally come together and take it as a constellation of objects or an instrument, or maybe an activity that used to happen here or well, some artists work with the idea of time itself, you know, and then figure it out together, try to kind of make new new practices and knowledge. Kym Ward 8:45 Maeve was working with the weather cabin upstairs. And she was working with an anemometer up there, which is from early 1900s, late 1800s, early 1900s. So that instrument is completely defunct now, it doesn't work in the way that it's supposed to. You probably see it if you've driven around near the observatory, then it's the highest point on top of the roof and it's like a big weather vane. And it would have once measured wind speed, direction and pressure. The wind would blow down some tubes and then that would be registered with an arm on a drum and it makes a notation. So, Maeve - you were turning these notations of the wind into different notes? ('Gust Compression Composition' sound piece plays) Kym Ward 10:33 That's one example of ways in which different researchers engaged with the instruments here. We're calling it education or co-inquiry or co-research. And in this case, it would be the co-inquiries might be Maeve, and the wind now, and the wind from 1906, and the weather cabin, which is quite an exciting constellation to be working with. But there are many other different ways of working with the instruments. A lot of them you can see featured on the wiki or trying to be described on the on the media wiki. Jara Rocha 11:12 I want to ask you about C, as in ‘centre’, despite maybe our intention to displace the object out of focus Kym Ward 11:23 I know that a lot of museums right now are starting to examine their collections, they're starting to engage in different processes of decolonisation, and that it seems to be quite well known in the public realm. We've been working with this with these types of critique, and also playful and also energetic works for quite some years now, I would say. We know that as a building of this kind can't be thought of outside of the era in which it was built. And so in that time, the predominant mode of ascribing, or collecting or acquiring or accumulating was what was producing the value of the objects. Kym Ward 12:09 We find ourselves being very careful about how we would like to go forward with the Heritage Education Centre space, not to repeat old modes of colonialism, basically imperialism. It's not necessary to, for example, have the object that was here in 1867, the exact one, you know. It's not so important to have the object that is attached to the name of the director, it's not so important to have the original object or even a facsimile or even a simile, but rather to try to keep at the centre of focus, a displacement of the object itself. So what we mean by this is that if you would enter the World Museum, then one person might have an understanding of a chronometer, let's just take a ship's chronometer (as the example). In one way another person might have a another way, the history of the chronometer might be repeated by a material understanding. So the history of the oil that the chronometer used in its internal mechanisms, or it might be described b

    16 min

  4. 05/08/2022

    Michelle Henning on Walter Benjamin, modernity, and unfaithful atmospheres.

    Transcript Michelle Henning 0:00 If you think about Marcel Proust, if it takes a smell and the taste, or I mentioned it could be a song to bring the past flooding back. That's why art and the arts is so important in in the treatment of people with Alzheimer's and dementia, I would imagine. Marie-Anne McQuay 0:18 Hello, you're listening with the Bluecoat in Liverpool, a series of podcasts taking the themes of our exhibition programmes as a starting point for 15 minute insights from artists, scientists, writers, educators, storytellers and more. In this episode, writer and Professor Michelle Henning discusses Walter Benjamin, modernity and unfaithful atmospheres. Michelle Henning 0:42 My name is Michelle Henning. I'm a professor in photography and Media at the University of Liverpool. My background originally I was a fine artist, I did my first degree at Goldsmiths, and then I did an MA in the social history of art, I still am to some extent, a practising artist and writer. Most of my career, I've taught cultural studies, that's where I became interested in questions of memory, around ideas of culture, and everyday life and everyday experience. But also, I've always been interested in the writing of photo Benjamin or Walter Benjamin, depending on he wants to say, so I'm interested in his writing. And he writes about modernity and culture. And it's also relevant to to understanding how media changes, our daily experience, that kind of thing. One of the books I used to read through a plastic bag while I was painting was Susan Buck-Morss book about Walter Benjamin's arcade project, which was this big project he'd done on the 19th century shopping arcades in Paris. And it was just a really, really inspiring book. I was interested in the kind of slight utopianism of it, you know, how you can just be attracted to the way someone thinks, how do we encounter new media, because he says, it's often in the disguise of old media, and so on. A lot of my work is concerned with that relationship between new and old media. And that's, that's where Benjamin came in. Benjamin, he was interested in the way that people of his time, wrote about memories, if there was there was a kind of authentic kind of memory, which people were losing. And then this kind of alienated modern memory, there was an authentic connection with the past that people used to have, and in modernity, something has happened, and we've become broken from that. And Benjamin wants to challenge this. But at the same time, he also wants to argue that they're right in the sense that modernity and modern technology, modern everyday life, you know, living in big cities, and so on, has changed how we remember things. So he wants to say it has changed, but it does. It's not this simple kind of opposition between authentic and alienated. What he does is he takes Marcel Proust notion of involuntary memory. So the famous book by Marcel Proust is called remembrance of things past. And this is this begins with Proust describing eating a Madeline cake with like a little biscuit, which has got soaked in chamomile tea, because it's sat in the saucer. And it's that combination of flavours, when he bites into it, suddenly takes him back to his childhood. And that's involuntary memory. It's usually stimulated by smell, or taste, or the famous ones newly mown grass or song, things like that. These things stimulate a sudden rush of the past into the present, and you don't control it. It's that's what the involuntary memory is, it just comes upon you and you can't You're taken by surprise. And then Proust has this other category, which is voluntary memory, which is straightforward recollection. So if you said to me, how was your train journey this morning, Michelle, I would recall what had happened. So there's these two kinds, involuntary memory is the one that gets seen as authentic. So the idea would be that in the past, say you were from a more rural society, pre modern, you'd have this kind of deep connection with your own past with your ancestors, and so on, it wouldn't be this random attacks of involuntary memory would just be this kind of deep, full, rich experience of remembering that you get from an involuntary venue and sort of takes this idea in a way he's using it. But he's also challenging the idea that it's pre modern. And he's sort of saying that it's actually modern. So this experience that we're having, of what we think is authenticity of this flood of the past is actually a product of being modern. So that's the complicated bit. For example, the storyteller. Do you have an oral storyteller? Who might come to your village and tell you the news, the storyteller will embed the news in their own experience. They want to make the story exciting for you though. They'll give detail and you'll be sat around the fireplace place with a storyteller so you have this kind of rich experience of it. You can trust that with a newspaper where The same story might be printed in amongst another 10 different things and ads and broken up across several pages. And next to articles that almost directly contradict it. Modern experience is seen as fragmented and broken up. And old, pre modern experiences continuous and rich and memory is this rich thing. But he's kind of saying that nostalgia for this older form of memory is itself. It's all a product of modernity. That is because we're modern people that we experienced this in this way. Michelle Henning 5:32 It relates to memory loss as well, because for example, someone who has memory loss of a certain kind won't be able to, to recollect things consciously and bring them back. But they will still have that experience of the past flooding back, you might play a song and suddenly, that will stimulate a really old memory, this distinction that Proust sets up to still has some kind of value. Benjamin is not kind of throwing it out. He's kind of saying, yes, it exists. But it is actually because we're modern, that we experience it in the way we do. He's interested in how being modern people has changed us, for Benjamin, and for me, and for a lot of cultural historians, I suppose the modern period really begins with industrialization. So it's industrialised modernity. So we're talking about post coal, if you like, we're talking about the steam age. Because I am a photography historian, I think about the invention of photography in 1839. That's a good date. To start with, I can't remember the date of the invention of steam train, but it's not that far apart. We've also got the telegraph around that time, invention of modern communications, modern forms of transport all of these kinds of highly technological things that transform everyday life. And obviously, this happens differently in different countries. So in the UK, it happens very early. In other countries, it will happen at different times. It's a kind of uneven thing. And it's a problematic category, because of that depend, because it is not a time category. It's more of a technical development thing. The society, I was talking about where the storyteller comes and talks to that that would be in a kind of pre modern setting. Once you've got fast transport, and you've got modern communications, you've got a much different sense of time, because you have to have clock time. You know, so if you're taking a train, like I just did, from Bristol to Liverpool in the 19th century, you'd have gone through timezones, probably London to Bristol would have, you'd have gone through a timezone and London to Liverpool. So standardisation of time regulated society, I suppose it's to do with the technologies. And one of the ways in which you can think about modernity is in terms of they sometimes call it time space collapse, the Victorians used to call it the annihilation of time and space, which I quite, which is the idea that if I'd come to Liverpool by horse, it would have taken me a lot longer. So I've effectively made Liverpool closer by by coming here quicker. So and once you start flying around the world, you know, think of Around the World in 80 days, or something like that, the world gets smaller. But it also gets bigger in the sense that you can visit more of it, and you expand your horizons and so on. So there's this really weird relationship of time and space that happens. So for Benjamin modernisation is crucial, because it happens very fast. And it changes people's relationship to their own actions. So he gives a really good example, which is a button pressing, if I press a button in a lift, that one gesture causes the left to go up or down. But I could do exactly the same gesture on the top of the camera, and it causes a photograph to be made. So there's no longer any connection between this thing I do the pressing if my finger and the sequence of actions that unravelled from it, before you have kind of this such complicated machines and so on, you know, you would wind something and something would turn, you know, there was some kind of connection between your gesture and what happened in the world. modernity is also closely linked to capitalism. So certain kinds of economic development is also closely linked to a broader sense of alienation, where you're separated, meaning you're separated from the consequences of your own actions, the nuclear buttons, another obvious example of that Michelle Henning 9:14 how our time how a kind of much more computer based, technological time differs. We're talking from the perspective of thinking about memory and everyday life and how these things kind of unravel. Let's first talk about how they don't differ how they're similar. So what I just said about the button is still very true of mobile phones. So you swipe a screen and this whole series of things happens that you have no idea because it's completely black box, do you have no idea what's going on in your phone, but it sends an image across the world or something like that, so tha

    18 min

  5. 01/06/2022

    Chris Frith on perception, swarm consciousness, and seeing things that aren’t there.

    I have a prior expectation or hypothesis. This is the evidence. Should I change my prior expectation given this evidence or not? Hello, you're listening with the Bluecoat in Liverpool, a series of podcasts taking the themes of our exhibition programmes as a starting point for 15 minute insights from artists, scientists, writers, educators, storytellers, and more. In this episode, neuroscientist and philosopher Chris Frith discusses his work into perception, swarm consciousness, and seeing things that aren't there. I'm Chris Frith. I'm currently an Emeritus Professor at University College and also a research associate at the Institute of Philosophy. I originally trained as a clinical psychologist, and I then went into research as an experimental psychologist, which was at a very good time, I think ’65 -  we were the first psychology department in the country to get a computer. So I started using computers very early and carried on ever since. I then went to work for the medical research council on a special unit that was interested in schizophrenia. We did a lot of work on schizophrenia and we were particularly interested in the biological basis, where the brain comes in, but I became fascinated with hallucinations in particular and how to understand what on earth is happening when you see things that are not actually there. I was also able to start doing brain imaging in the first unit in the country where you could do that, which was originally in Positron Emission Tomography, and then subsequently MRI: Magnetic Resonance Imaging. So I did some of the early work using brain scanners, and one of the first things we did of course is look what happens in the brain when you're hallucinating. As you probably know, the hallucinations assisted with schizophrenia are basically hearing voices. And some people say they’re just making it up. They don't really have voices… but the brain imaging showed that there was really something going on, interestingly in the speech areas. It was as if they were speaking to themselves, but didn't realise this. When I retired, which was a long time ago, I became particularly interested in social cognition, how people interact with one another, Schizophrenia, and my wife's speciality, Autism, seem to be in a sense, primarily a problem of interacting with other people. I met Suki Chan through my colleague, Colin Blakemore, a neurophysiologist particularly interested in perception, and we were both working at the Institute of Philosophy when we retired, because that's what you do when you retire, you become a philosopher. Suki was particularly interested because of my work on hallucinations and perception more generally, and what we'd like to call the Bayesian approach, which is to say, actually we're all hallucinating all the time, but in most cases, what we hallucinate corresponds very closely with reality and what goes wrong in schizophrenia, for example, is that what they are perceiving no longer coincides as reality. I'm particularly interested in artists because art - particularly visual art - is all about how perception works. My colleagues Semir Zeki has gone into this in a big way, talking about what he calls neuroaesthetics, but making the point that many of the developments in modern art, like Op art and so on followed by developments in science where you discover there’s a bit of the brain that’s only interested in movement. There's a bit of the brain that's only interested in colour. So many of these developments take account of how the brain works, which the neuroscientists only discover a few decades later. So that's quite interesting. There are cultural effects. So we all think we see the world in the same way although we don't. One of the things we’ve noticed about synaesthesia is if you go and give a lecture about synaesthesia, somebody will come up afterwards and say, I am like that. But I thought everybody was like that. We think we're experiencing the world much more similarly than we are. What culture does is pushes us all together into this common view. And so it was very striking when the dress went viral, people suddenly found that they were looking at the same picture and seeing something different. So I think that's fascinating, and I think artists’ reveal to us how different the world actually is for other people. The disorder in the sense that pushed me in this direction: people who lose a limb, they have an arm amputated or a leg amputated for some reason, often develop a Phantom limb. The sad thing is that in some cases they feel pain in their Phantom, and the question is how on earth does that happen? So in a sense, when somebody has a Phantom limb, they're hallucinating where the limb ought to be if they had it, but for the rest of us were hallucinating where the limb ought to be, and it is there. So that’s the hallucination coinciding with, and also being constrained by reality. It obviously goes wrong in the case of the Phantom limb, because you haven't got one, but also it can go wrong when the constraint doesn't happen. There's a very strange phenomenon called Capgras syndrome, named after  the neurologist who first described it. So this is where people with brain damage become convinced that their spouse is not their spouse. And they say, it looks just like my wife, but I know it isn't … just not right. When you see your wife or anyone familiar, you have a strong emotional response alongside the perceptual recognition. And if you get damage to your amygdala, the emotional response doesn't happen so that you get this very strange experience.This is not right. My experience of seeing my wife is not quite right. And then they presume this rather bizarre account of how and why this might be that she's been replaced by an impostor. So that's where your interpretation is no longer being properly constrained. So in dementia, you'll get this phenomenon where they suddenly say, this is not my room, and the carer typically has to go round the block and then come back again and then they lose this strange experience. There's lots of experiments where you have one person in the little room, and you present them with horribly difficult visual stimuli where they have to detect targets. It's called psychophysics and they have hundreds of trials and you see how good they are at detecting targets? So we had a twist on this, where we put two people inside this little room and they had the same task. So they had to detect difficult targets in a visual display. The same thing was presented to them separately. They made their decision and if they disagreed, they had to have a discussion and come up with a joint answer. And what we were able to show, to our delight, is that two people working together can get a better answer than the best one working on their own. So you get this advantage from working together. It's inevitable that your attention lapses, so on some presentations, you didn't quite see it, and if you know this, then when you discuss it with your partner, you can say, well, I wouldn't see it very well on that trial, so we'll take your answer. So you can actually get rid of these bad answers, and it critically depends on talking to each other about how confident you were in your response. And that enables you to get this upgrade. Now, what I did not realise is that bees do the same thing. So when bees swarm, they all sit in this big mass of bees and they have to find a new nesting site. A few hundred scouts go out and they explore the environment, and if they find a nesting site, they come back. So when they come back, they do their little dance, which tells you the direction of the nesting site and the length of the dance indicates how good the nesting site is. And they assess the nesting site for… is it dry? Is it high enough about the ground? Is it big enough? There are various options and they're all doing these little dances. The idea is that they do the dance and then other scouts will go out and do look at the same site. Now, if it's a longer dance, more scouts will go out in that direction and look at that site. And if they come back and they agree, as it were in quotes, they will also do a longer dance. So eventually most of the scout bees are going to the same place and coming back and saying, this is a good site. So that's a positive feedback loop, and once they get a high enough proportion saying this is the best site, they actually then turn on the scouts who are giving different information and suppress them. And then after an hour or two, the whole swarm goes off to this new site. And that's how the bees are making this joint decision as a swarm. In a sense they're sort of using confidence. Now, what is particularly interesting is the people who studied this phenomenon and wrote it up, the computations are exactly the same as what neurons do in the mammalian brain. So, there’s lots and lots of neurons which are getting information. They have to make a decision and that's how they finish up with a single decision. There are two things there. First of all, it suggests that the swarm certainly knows things and is able to make decisions that the individual bee can't do. So maybe the swarm is more capable than the individual bee. In that sense, maybe it's more conscious than the individual bee. But the other thing I'm fascinated by is, by putting all the bees together, you get an advance over the individual bee, and we've shown in a very simple minded way that putting people together gets an advance over the individual person. So people working together in big groups should be able to do much better than individuals, and in fact, we know that's the case. That's where culture comes from. That's where science comes from, to some extent that's where art comes from, because it's all building on what's happened in the past. But that's why I became so interested in the swarm. These results are too recent for them to have filte

    17 min

  6. 01/06/2022

    Roger Hill recounts his life and work, the dementia dimension, the undefinable and the role of remembering

    You’re listening with the Bluecoat in Liverpool: a series of podcasts taking the themes of our exhibition programmes as a starting point for 15-minute insights from artists, scientists, writers, educators, storytellers, and more. In this episode, storyteller and broadcaster Roger Hill recounts his life and work, the dementia dimension and the role of remembering. We started with the idea that this would happen: that there would be a recording of some thoughts relating to the current Bluecoat project. The cultural force that is Roger Hill has actually gone into a number of territories. I mean, throughout there's been education, but also there's been the arts, both as performer, but also in that kind of workshop facilitator, somebody who helps other people to do their own art, and the other people itself has branched out hugely from what started out really is working with young people mainly of school, age to people older than that, through youth theatre and then moving on to older people, to very old people in fact, to people in there they're third age, but also to much younger children, so that now the work concentrates, for example, on babies. So that spread out, and also it spread out geographically - what became something that was pioneered in the North West of England, all around Liverpool and beyond, then moved out through the rest of the country, through the national associations that I was involved in,  and then went abroad to Europe connections and then round the world couple of times. So there'll be the geographic expansion as well. If you said what's been consistent through that, I'd say: one,  the enabling of other people to do things. The consistent offering of information, skills, and experiences that would help people to grow and develop individually. I think also a real sense that there is a lot to be learnt from the other, from not this here now, but from the different things, the things that are culturally other than us and therefore a real hunger, a real taste for always finding something new and different to engage with and probably looking from this perspective, which I wouldn't have been able to do a few years ago a real interest in the way in which the individual engages with the wider reality. I suppose what we now call neuroscience, but the validity of certain kinds of personal experiences, which has fed into the other thing that runs through it all is writing. Reading, writing, researching have been something that I've been able to do, even when there's been no other kind of work around. So I don't think I'd find it very easy to give myself a job description or job title, but it must have something to do with adventurer in ideas. The one thing that people have always associated dementia with is a memory loss. It's a cliché. It's been going for as long as people have identified this thing called dementia, and Alzheimer's to a certain extent.  I think it's really important at this stage of history to unpick the cliché, which is that you know that the person is experiencing dementia because they've lost their ability to recall. They seem to have lost their ability to deal with the present. And that for me is the shift. It is indeed about the extent to which certain experiences which have happened in the past, aren't available anymore. But it's also about the ability to simply negotiate the present, even if those memories aren't there. One of the things that I think was very important was the idea that people would develop the capability -  in fact, they automatically have the capability thrust upon them - of getting through daily life, without reference to their past experiences, or to their recent experiences and things that they've recently learnt. This is a state which we're all actually getting into more or less because we do don't we. We spend a lot of time outsourcing our memory to our phones and to our computers and to our hard drives. So basically, we're having a bit of a reality crisis in society at the moment. Without actually volunteering for it, people who are experiencing dementia are in the forefront of that because they are themselves learning how to deal with -and the people who care for them are also learning to deal with - how to sustain individuality and, and identity against that background. So we could come to a very, very blurry situation indeed as time goes along. And if so, then the work that we're now doing - partly in the Bluecoat, but obviously much more wide, and sometimes academic research - is about how do we organise the society around something that has less reference points and a weaker anchor to particular things. There's a science fiction writer called Robert Heinlein, and he wrote several books. One of the characters in some of those books is a person whose role in society is to remember,  and to carry experiences for other people, almost like a seer, a Magus, a Shaman or something like that. And the idea that there might be people whose role in society is to be the remembers of things is both fanciful, but actually in a strange way it’s actually true.  Now, as usual with this thing you say, what will the future look like? And you say, well, just look around. Because the future is out there now. It's just, this doesn't happen to be right next to us. There are some of us, I'd count myself in on it, somebody who remembers and says, but back in the day, these things happened, and you say, oh right, we'd forgotten about all that. Thank you for keeping us with that. But whether you can prolong that and leave a trace of those memories beyond human's physical existence without committing completely to technology is a very big question because, you know, it's easy to say all these server farms all over the world, they contain everything we ever need to know. It's fine. Then, let’s say, the electricity supply breaks down, a bomb hits them, then everything was gone and we didn't keep anything up in our heads. So there's a real kind of existential question to be picked up on. But again, we're back with the idea that if you're experiencing dementia, then you were already in some sense developing a coping mechanism for what might be the human condition sometime in the future. I will be doing something very ordinary. Not necessarily concentrated like this now, but I might be cooking an egg or I might be sweeping the floor or whatever it is. And I'm suddenly somewhere else. and the somewhere else I am is somewhere  I have been already. I can be very precise about it. It's not somewhere as in San Francisco. It is a moment when I was in San Francisco and that comes back to me and suddenly, in almost every sense of the word, I am there not here. I'm not holding the frying pan with the egg in it. I am actually in San Francisco for that moment I am in a moment that I had somewhere else, some other time. And the implications of this are huge in lots of ways. I mean, one of the implications of it is that the neurons firing about in the brain are actually much more diverse and connected in interesting ways than we may be even thought. So what connects the cooking of the egg with the moment I met somebody in San Francisco? There is nothing that I can name that does that, but the brain has already posted that letter to that place, and to understand how the brain works the way it does is absolutely fascinating, but it also is an anticipation again of the idea that we have got multiple realities available to us. Under those circumstances, whether I choose them (and at the moment I don't choose them, they come to me involuntarily) or whether they're part of the scattergun effect of my thinking, that actually means that we've got possibly even a superpower there, which is the ability to access, if it's directed, a huge amount of things that are in the past and out there somewhere. Living requires us to have a story, a narrative, and it's one of the things we are. We are effectively machines for creating narrative. We're machines for creating story and image and meaning. And so somewhere along the way, it is about the extent to which we can find strategies for still pulling islands out of the ocean, for pulling images out of blur, and the rest of it. And that will be the way in which we continue to function, but we will do it in a much looser way, such is happening now. And as I get older, I realise that one of the principles of that kind of dynamics is that energy must always be going into a system to keep it having coherence. If energy falls away or declines, it will get lost. That's one of the reasons I think why dementia is more common now. As people get older, their energy levels do drop. The amount of energy that goes into them, the amount of stimulus, the amount of simple bodily umph that we have declines, and therefore the coherence of it, the pattern of it declines, and then we're in the cloud, and that wouldn't be a bad place to be as long as everybody understands that that's what's happened. And I'm very aware of it happening in myself, but I'm also very aware that it's probably reflective of … you could probably hear it in the type of music that's made in the 21st century. You can probably hear it in in the internet. You can hear it in the diffuse newness of everything. And it seems to me that that diffused, and this is something I'm experiencing in my later years. But I think again, I'm kind of a little bit ahead of the game because, anybody out there - which is most people are younger than me - will actually at some point start to say to themselves, well, I kind of lost that. I didn't know where I was for a minute, what was that all about and so on. And rather than panic, which is the way we've taken it up to now, which is that the moment all that stuff goes - well the only way is down the plughole basically -  we might actually start to restructure society around that being a human positive. And if it was a positive, it would allow us to do some

    18 min

  7. 01/06/2022

    Suki Chan on deep time, intergenerational care and making art

    You’re listening with the Bluecoat in Liverpool: a series of podcasts taking the themes of our exhibition programmes as a starting point for 15-minute insights from artists, scientists, writers, educators, storytellers, and more. In this episode, you'll hear from artist and filmmaker Suki Chan on deep time, intergenerational care and making art. I'm Suki Chan, and I'm an artist and film director. I use moving image, photography and sound to create immersive experiences that transport people to other realities. I explore nuanced subjects ranging from dementia, sight loss, identity and belonging. I think for me, art is about showing other people another worldview. We go to great lengths to create this world for others to perceive. I think I've always been interested in consciousness, perception and memory, right from the beginning of my art practice, but certainly perception and memory were really big themes in my early works, and I would delve into my own memories of living between the UK and China and being between two cultures. So that for me was a rich way to explore my heritage and my personal experiences. I think now I'm opening up and I'm interested to engage with people and discuss what our individual experiences of reality is. Some of the key themes or the key philosophers that I read that really resonated with me, for example, Plato with the allegory of the cave or philosophers like Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, the idea that there is a world out there and we subjectively experience it and perceive it in a unique way. It's really difficult to understand what someone feels. I mean, we can express it with language, but that only gets us so far. We can go a step further and I can show people what it's like to be someone who was living with dementia, and for example, waking up in a familiar environment and then not really understanding where you are and having a very strange, surreal, foggy moment where you can't connect with space and time. And so normally one has those feelings of continuity because I think that's how we are able to do what we need to do. But sometimes with cognitive diseases, these continuities that we're used to breaks down, whether that's in time or space as well. I mean, we also naturally have it sometimes as well… you might go into a room and suddenly go, oh, why, why did I come here? What was I was I doing? And then you're, you're sort of wondering around the room, looking, thinking, well, what what's I doing? I can't remember. So that’s a familiar one that many of us will have experienced, but some people really quite know what's going on with their experiences or they have hallucinations. Over the past 15 years or so. I've developed a language where I juxtapose different scales or seemingly opposites, for example, big and small; micro and the macro. And I've been doing this a lot and I think I'm starting to understand why this is important. I mean, for me, opposites - they're not completely opposite. They are interrelated, and there's a very interesting symbiotic relationship between the two, but particularly with memory and the juxtaposition of say a human lifespan with geological time, that was poignant for me. And looking at the growth of say a stalactite, which is about a centimetre every hundred years. So in a typical lifespan of ~80 years, it would have grown eight millimetres, and that's really insignificant. If you imagine what one person can achieve in their lifetime, it can sometimes seem like a lot. But at the same time, when you think about geological time, which is vast and immense, our little place seems really, really insignificant. So for me, I wanted to oscillate between that, a feeling that humans are really important because often the narrative is that we're super-duper, we’re amazing, we've achieved all these things, but it's really useful every now and then to zoom out as it were, you know, like you're doing a cityscape when you zoom out completely, you don't see the humans. And if you were to zoom out in time as well, we wouldn't even be on the scale if you're thinking of human time in terms of seconds, minutes, hours, days. But what if you think about time in terms of millions of years? And so I think it's this shift in perspective that for me really helps when we're thinking about our relationship with each other or our relationship with the wider environment, because often I think we see nature as something that we can exploit or dominate. I think the feeling of not having enough time is greater now than it was say, 50 years ago. This constant rush that we all feel that's often the perspective that people find really refreshing with Wendy Mitchell’s narrative of how her life is now with dementia. When she says that dementia has given back her time. It's something that I think as individuals, we perhaps need to actively take back some control over because there is this sense that time is ticking away. I think that is a societal construction that we feel that time is ticking and that we're not doing enough. I feel it's very intense. I think maybe that's why within my work. it's really important that it is a space that people can enter into. And there isn't that sense of time just whizzing by without you being able to really understand or contemplate what that meaning is, of that moment that you're experiencing. Having met Wendy and having been in dialogue with Wendy for almost five years now, I think, I think my views of technology have changed. I've seen the positive aspects that it's given her. Wendy uses her smartphone, her camera and her computer to document what otherwise would be lost because of the dementia. Knowing who she met yesterday, what she talked about in an interview with her, if it's not written down immediately or recorded in some way, then she can't recall it and it's lost to her. With Wendy, she can't recognise that something is what it is unless she's got a visual cue to remind her. So for example, when she looked at her cupboards in her kitchen, she sees the shape of the cupboard, she sees the whiteness of the cup of doors, but she can't recall or remember that these are cupboards and therefore there are objects within them that she might need in the kitchen. I think the way that we compartmentalise a lot of these things is not very helpful because we expect that young people won't want to hang out with elderly people, or we expect the adults should go and do these things on their own. And because I've not experienced that in my younger years, I’ve looked after my elderly grandmother for many years as a child, and I even took my kids along to the residency when I did the residency in Crewe and it was phenomenal, the elderly people love my kids. And I think it opened up a new aspect that wasn't there previously. So the idea of different generations hanging out together is so, so important, and the picture that we paint for a lot of elderly people is one of isolation and dependency. It needn't be that because elderly people still have a lot to give. They need to be supported, but actually there's a really beautiful proverb which literally translates as, ‘if your family has an elderly person, you have a gem.’ I think that's really incredibly beautiful to think of it in those terms rather than, oh, you know, Dad or mom isn't the person that she used to be… A psychologist that I worked with many years ago, Kevin O’Regan, he describes the world as an outside memory store because when we look at the world, we're not purely receiving the signal from our senses. We're looking at the world from inside. We're inferring what we're seeing. So we're relying on our memory anyway, but what we're seeing in the world then triggers us to formulate the picture of reality. So that's something that happens ordinarily within perception. It’s just that sometime,  these connections break down with cognitive impairments and diseases. So having these memory aids are really helpful for people living with dementia, and I think the way that Wendy came up with this coping mechanism is really ingenious and it's a testament to her remarkable brain. Although it is diseased, it is remarkably resilient, and we might like to think of people who have dementia as having a brain that is dying or diseased, but actually there is also growth as well. Wendy is making new memories too. She’s learning new skills. So there is this incredible development going on in her brain, as well as what dementia is doing within her brain. Going into the library is wonderful and finding books that you would never have dreamt of borrowing is an experience of learning. I often used to go into a library thinking that I would get one book out and then I end up seeing on the shelves other books that, that fascinated me just from the title, and that wouldn't happen, say on your laptop because that's not how we search for on a computer. So, the experience of just coming across something on the trolley because someone's returned it, that's not going to happen. I think those scenarios are really beautiful and then you end up finding things that you weren't looking for in the first place. I think there is a need for varied experiences and it's not about one over the other. [SM2]  You can actually write over your own memory. So, with false memories, they found that if someone suggests something, they could actually help you to rewrite your memory, often without you understanding that. So our memories are fallible. One of the negative sentiments of people living with dementia is that they often feel like they're not understood, or their voices aren't heard, or they are misunderstood in, in the way that society pathologises dementia and it doesn't help them. It isolates them and deskills them. By working with people with dementia, I suppose I want to show another reality of this disease that we're very frightened off, and showing them that it isn't a death sentence. It isn't th

    15 min

  8. 21/05/2022

    Listening with

    Listening with is a series of podcasts from the Bluecoat in Liverpool taking the themes of our exhibition programmes as the starting point for 15 minute insights from artists, scientists, writers, educators, storytellers and more. Join us for the first series, inspired by two exhibitions at the Bluecoat: Suki Chan's CONSCIOUS, which explores how we understand our own mind, memory and consciousness, and Where the Arts Belong: Making Sense of it All, featuring eight artists from Liverpool City Region who undertook residencies in Belong Village Dementia Care Homes. Subscribe now on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google or with RSS on your preferred platform. Listening with is a new podcast produced by George Maund, Marie-Anne McQuay and Sam Mercer, with sounds by nil00. Thank you to Garfield Weston Foundation for supporting this series, and our core funders Arts Council England, Liverpool City Council and Culture Liverpool. Our public programmes rely on grants and donations, you can support us at thebluecoat.org.uk/donate This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit listeningwith.substack.com

    1 min
  9. Coming soon...

    18/05/2022

    Coming soon...

    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit listeningwith.substack.com

    4 sec
  • 9 Episodes

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
5 Ratings

About

Artists, writers, scientists reflect on memory, technology and culture listeningwith.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    the Bluecoat
  • Years Active
    2k
  • Episodes
    9
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © The Bluecoat
  • Show Website
    Listening with...