Systems of Pain / Networks of Resilience is a creative exploration of observation and entanglement as a means of overcoming pain. Research on ecology, restoration, and psychology creates a series of videos, installations, and performances. The project cites its exploration of recovery and strength in the words that are used to describe relevant professional and personal processes, then turns those words back on the seemingly irrelevant actions I undertake within various artworks.

The term vulnerability can mean both a level of emotional or personal exposure and a fragile status within an ecosystem, susceptible to changes in climate. As an artist, I have the opportunity to examine words through the lens of multiple professional fields and personal experiences simultaneously.

The project begins in audio-on interviews with people who have personal or professional experience with trauma, resilience, and recovery. I reach out to individuals based on their professional research or relationship to site. Some respond to an open call for the project.

Interviews have included a political scientist, a habitat restoration specialist, several artists, survivors of domestic violence, a physical trainer, a professional humanitarian, and an animal care specialist, among others.

The other thing I think it helped me do was to objective, like to objectively look at a lot of what happened to me.

Many disciplines and personal narratives will use different words to describe the same concepts or experiences, or the same words to describe different processes.

My initial investment in the project started with a naive hope that the active observation could be a unifying force, a connection between different points of view, a way of making peace and getting past the projections and prejudices that divide and conflict humans in their relationships.

“Unbiased observation is a clearly stated goal in scientific and journalistic processes, but history is rife with examples of facts skewed towards a dominant or vested perspective while claiming impartiality.”

The New York Times only just recently reported on a move by sugar manufacturers to essentially buy scientific results in the 1960s. That being said, recall and observation are often key therapeutic tools, ways of bringing a patient back into their own body and memory, of reclaiming agency.

A 2016 University of Michigan Study cites mindfulness and observational meditation as possible key tools for veterans recovering from PTSD. My own exploration of observation as a potential tool for uniting scientific research, personal experience, and the ecological or nonhuman, was emboldened by an interview with a teacher in Nebraska, whose friends used observation to pull her out of flashbacks. In this clip, from a chapter of the work entitled Nebraska, I intersperse her narrative with audio description of my own actions, with a series of objects drawn from the visual vocabulary of a still life.

The person rights a table and places a tablecloth on top, then a cornocopia, the oranges, a vase, and then a knife.

I was sitting with my friend, Amy, who I was really close to this whole time, in the basement of a coffee house, well, it’s a basement coffee house called Crescent Moon. We were sitting kind of in this back corner in two chairs next to one another, and it was sort of dim lighting. And we were having a conversation and something she said, like, not anything… It was just something normal, she said, triggered a really intense memory for me. And it was at a time when that was still happening very frequently.

The artist assembles the oranges, stacking them in a pyramid, rearranges them on the table, and places the oranges all in a line.

Umm. And usually what happens if I go into flashback mode is, I just sort of zone out and my friends describe it as, I look like I’m no longer behind my eyes. And so usually they know to say my name, to touch me, things like that. And so, what she did was she immediately grabbed my hand and she started naming the things that were around me. And she said: There is a picture on this wall. We are sitting in Crescent Moon. You are sitting in a green chair. You have coffee next to you. We were just talking about this… And I just sort of listened to her for a while and then she would say, where are you? What day is it? And, you know, just kind of ask questions that they ask you after you’ve been unconscious in the hospital, kind of.

More rearranging on the table. The lamps continue to flash on and off.

Umm. And then, you know, once I kind of came out of it, she continued to hold my hand, continued to stay close to me, umm, and then just made sure that I was okay after that. And she said, you know, usually she would ask me: Do you want to tell me what you saw? And sometimes I wouldn’t and sometimes I wouldn’t, at that moment, depending on how I was feeling, or the nature of the memory that I was experiencing.

But yeah, but that happens often, and my friends, they’re adorable. They’re just, they know exactly what to do and they don’t act weird or get weird about it or treat me weird afterwards, you know? It’s just, yeah, it’s really, it’s kind of like, it’s almost like they’re saying bless you, after someone sneezes. Like it’s just become sort of second nature to them. And I, you know, it’s made me feel a lot better, because I do think that my body and my brain have felt safe enough around these people to let me escape when I need to process, when I need to… As annoying as it can be sometimes, I would rather it happen around people who love me and are willing to take care of me than around people who aren’t or even by myself.

Audio description is a professional service used in order to make films and video more accessible to the low-sighted or blind. An audio describer’s task is to articulate the action that they see on screen, to give someone as full an account of the film as possible, working within the limits of the film itself.

Within Systems of Pain / Networks of Resilience, I work with my audio describers to structure the pace of a video or performance. They are not telling a story for me. There are not characters, per se, but a series of actions.

In the barn, the person leans into different positions in the wooden chair underneath the lamp. Off to the side, an orange rests on the ground, next to the table.

The American Council for the Blind States: “The audio describer is part journalist, faithfully relaying the facts.” While some concrete guidelines can be established to reduce observer bias — “citing the race of only non-white individuals, establishes white as a default and is unacceptable,” and the Council is very clear in stating guidelines for what should be described, who, etc. — much of the process remains with the describer to determine what, within an image or moment, is a pressing matter of concern.

No matter how many connections we take into account in our scientific description of a phenomenon, we will always be forced to leave others out.

I chose to navigate this potential bias on the part of the audio describer consciously, at one point allowing them to narrate a chapter of the work completely, given a library of quotes from both research and personal interviews. The resulting chapter, entitled “Moment 2,” serves as an extension of the initial thesis, both drawing upon and articulating the limits of observations and systems.

The pattern of organisation of any system living or non-living is the configuration of relationships among the system’s components that determines the system’s essential characteristics. In other words, certain relationships must be present for something to be recognised as, say, a chair, a bicycle, or a tree. That configuration of relationships that gives a system its essential characteristics is what we mean by its pattern of organisation. The structure of a system is the physical embodiment of its pattern of organisation.

So, a lot of times we warn people that there’s an ugly face to restoration?

“Living successfully in a world of complex systems means expanding not only time horizons and thought horizons; above all, it means expanding the horizons of caring. […] No part of the human race is separate either from other human beings or from the global ecosystem. It will not be possible in this integrated world, for your heart to succeed if your lungs fail, or for your company to succeed if your workers fail, or for the rich in Los Angeles to succeed if the poor in Los Angeles fail, or for Europe to succeed if Africa fails, or for the global economy to succeed if the global environment fails.”

There is some irony in attempting to address systems thinking and objectivity as a solo artist, given the logistical constraints of a single life and practice. But in the end, that’s all each of us can hope to do, as we gather tools for navigating pain and cultivating resilience, faced with the complexities of both ecologies and our inner selves. The project attempts to articulate both the hope and futility of making connections clear.