Outrageously magical (a misreading)
And other stories ¹

A piece of ground is seen from the fourth floor of a building some meters away.

You are far enough to see what kind of activity is going on but not close enough to see details. You can see a large animal from this distance but not an insect unless you us-e a prosthetic. You observe this ground without moral judgment, perhaps curious about the assemblage of activity that takes place in relation to your inner world and your surroundings. Observation might be considered useful when it is linked to scientific thought or leads to a useful outcome, where everyday life sparks an idea and the experiment tests it out.

Let us keep in suspension Samson Kambalu’s notion that access (seemingly-idle time as part of a social construct that is against capitalist efficiency). Samson talks about excess, writing it in terms of the priest or the witchdoctor as a trap of taking out excess, dispersing surplus; the witchdoctor may say that the only way to heal an ailment is to throw a party, to be in community, to expel the hoarding of time, against saving.²

I am starting to grapple with the assemblage of ideas, methods, sources, sauce, tools, and observations from dizzying disciplines, histories, and landscapes and its potential for practitioners not only for the purpose of thinking in relation with the entanglements of life. Not as a mirror image of life but perhaps closer to life. Clapperton Mavhunga in his book argues for scientific experimentation as observation which puts forward an ability to work outside of the sanitisation logic and the inability to calculate the variable (A categorical variable (also called qualitative (read: when you calculate in stats (I passed so I can make some claims) there is a particular formula no matter what you’re calculating, so in your formula you would have to add a percentage of variable based on what you cannot foresee the variable is if you have no clue what can change things significantly) that might go down as a variable) refers to a characteristic that can’t be quantifiable).³

Low-frequency noise is typically defined on the Common Octave Bands as 500 Hz or less. This means people are more likely to feel the sound’s vibrations rather than hearing it. Low-frequency noise also has longer wavelengths, can travel long distances, and has high endurance. Frequent exposure to low-frequency noise can cause a variety of negative reactions such as headaches, increased heart rate, anxiety, vertigo, and fatigue.⁴

The western model is that you reduce the variable to control the outcome by controlling the condition and producing strict parameters. That doesn’t work now, so what does it do to increase the variable? African scientific thought is observation of daily life, in which you are able to account for some of the variable in real life through observing the interactions between elements. A meteorite can fall any day but the ability to calculate certain variables is socialized.

Plants panic when it rains.⁵ Mars enters my orbit again through Nikola Tesla’s radio waves where his reputation suffered because he was convinced that there was extra-terrestrial life on Mars. Listen to John Coltrane’s Mars song from his Interstellar Space album. An amoeba that senses its surroundings without a nervous system.

What is the pull to this way of thinking and working, this miscegenation, where you can no longer map the beginning and end, where things are on some continuous plane, producing a feeling of vertigo. A sense of non-placeness, where context (geographical location, culture, sexuality, gender, literacy) no longer gives a clear motivation. McKittrick writes about this in Dear Science where she argues that interdisciplinarity is a making of place through “the metaphoric, allegorical, symbolic, and other devices that shape stories”⁶

Jackie Karuti is continuing her ongoing moving image project using “Fûkeiron” (translated as ‘landscape theory’), which inverted Benjamin and Recht’s observation: rather than photograph landscapes like they were crime scenes, they would photograph ‘crime scenes’ as landscapes”.⁷ Inversion, things upside down, downside up.⁸ I misread (think of a misreading as a device that shapes stories) Jackie’s “the depths of possibility enabled by radical imagination” and made it “deep observation enables radical imagination”.

Sara Ahmed’s writes in On the uses of use that usefulness is a question of time.⁹ Usefulness works as an appendage but usefulness doesn’t need to be found in the moment of observation. A day on Mars is 1.88 days on Earth. Time and time again. Repetition, or repeating acts. Absolutely everything is useful; inconclusive curiosity, arguments developed and built up over time, or maybe just instead of need-to-know, let’s see where it goes, let’s see what happens, let’s be led by curiosities.

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¹ This title is made up of three components; a phase from David Hammons’ 1987 interview with Kellie Jones; my own misreading of Jackie Karuti’s bio and the title of Katherine McKittrick’s Dear science and other stories book
² Samson Kambalu in conversation with Marc Barben and Kabelo Malatsie, 2015 and Ahmed, S., 2019. What’s the use?: On the uses of use. Duke University Press.
³ Mavhunga, C.C., 2014. Transient workspaces: technologies of everyday innovation in Zimbabwe. MIT Press.
⁴ This definition is written by Alison taken from an acoustic and thermal manufacturer’s website
https://www.techniconacoustics.com/blog/high-vs-low-frequency-noise-whats-the-difference/
⁵ “One of the most interesting reactions involved the plants “communicating” their fears or stress with other nearby plants. They communicate via the release of airborne chemicals that can travel to other plants. As Millar said: “If a plant’s neighbors have their defense mechanisms turned on, they are less likely to spread disease so it’s in their best interest for plants to spread the warning to nearby plants.”
https://earthsky.org/earth/plants-panic-when-wet-how-plants-communicate/#:~:text=The%20researchers%20used%20a%20spray,of%20water%2C%20these%20scientists%20said.
⁶ McKittrick, K., 2020. Dear science and other stories. Duke University Press. Pp 29 – 30
⁷ Taken from Conor Bateman’s text The hills have ideologies: the fûkeiron tradition in Japanese landscape cinema in 4A Papers, Issue 5
https://4a.com.au/articles/the-hills-have-ideologies-the-fukeiron-tradition-in-japanese-landscape-cinema
⁸ Kinetic energy
Spin – bodies, ideas, material, memories, histories, contexts. driving force, electromotive force, locomotion, motivity, prime mover, propulsion. Movement. Spin. Drive. Transmission. Flood. Kinesis. Advance. Perambulation. Furtherance. Transfer. Flow. Propulsion. Vitality. Stream. Walking. Sweep. Throw. Force. Push. Transferal.
⁹ Ahmed, S., 2019. What’s the use?: On the uses of use. Duke University Press.