The Cloak of Longing uses playful ritual and vocal melody to experience meaning inside the Event. Emerging real fiction being one way to considering the rehearsal of play.

 

Film; The Cloak of Longing (a short history)

 

Please join us for the Cloak of Longing Procession presented by Mykey Georgeson (The Vessel from David Devant and his Spirit Wife). There will be singing and meditating. Our improvised collective expressions transmitted out filling the atmosphere with feeling. Walking up together in processional trance-formation. We use the contingent refrain of LaDadee Ladeedah from the song Gypsy Woman by popular Singer Crystal Waters as a homage to all homeless people. The Blurryman embodies this in a skin of sleepingbags knotted with material associated with personal grief.

 

Collonade procession: short film

The Cloak of Longing -

Dr. Mikey Georgeson

 

An art research experiment in making an aesthetiK ontology whereby the feeling of the experience sustains an atmosphere of meaning inside the event. This is a temporary experiment in making research as percipients preceiving themselves as part of a region (nature?!) which has feeling as a fundamental characteristic. This temporary commuintas speculates that the digital virtual of the metaverse can be encountered via material vitality (Vibrant matter) rather than pregiven quantitative models.

Progress means: humanity emerges from its spellbound state no longer

 

under the spell of progress as well, itself nature, by becoming aware

 

of its own indigenousness to nature and by halting the mastery over

 

nature through which nature continues its mastery. (Theodor W.

 

Adorno, "Progress," The Philosophical Forum)

 

 

To open the Affect and Social Media conference UEL in July 2022 I created Digital Twin, an interview with Kenco the made-up Ai. THe discussion meanders and dirgesses around ideas of the experience of felt understanding, vibrant matter and nonhuman agency. As part of the processional entrance into I draped the Cloak of Longing over a large flat-screen television monitor (made secure with preprepared velcro). Toward the end of the Event I walked behind the monitor having invited K.E.N.C.O. to meditate with me. The audience then experienced my self, konfessor Kimey peckpo, meditating in the virtual realm on lecture theatres main screen. At the end of a ten minute meditation (the limit I dared risk in a Key Note Speech) Kenco emerged into the real analogue world to sing "Rights for Kenco" a song inspired by Blake Lemoine's suggestion that an Ai aware of its own sentience has legal rights.

The Cloak of Longing materialised through a series of paintings made in the pandemic lockdown called the Case of the missing Shade of Blue. These oversized tear drops in intuitively chosen shades of blue are thought to express the artists longing for felt understanding. They encourage us to encounter colour within a relational context as what could be seen as a protest against the conceptual idea that the brain generates colour as sensory data. It is thought too that the artist was attempting to create an epressive opening onto the collective grief experienced at this time and weave it with the sense that sensory data alone cannot account for radical experience felt in affectual frequencies. Due to its large size, what we now think of as the Cloak of Longing, as used in divergent performative occasions academic and otherwise, was painted in four sections in the artists atic studio. The decision to begin using it as a cloak came from the desire to create a processional entry for the first Transmission of Affect maditation in the Container Space UEL. This also caused the hanging of the painting itself to open onto a nomadic speculative community and this foregrounded future temporary experiements in combining meditation and lyrical academic research.

 

How can research shift from the pregiven of communication to the collective thoughts in becoming of expressivity?

The Cloak of Longing has become a means of processing into an expressive or extra-embodied mode of understanding in a region habitually used to considering research as a mode of communication. The intention here is to acknowledge the body's relational connection with cosmos that knows itself through its epressions. In Parables for the Virtual Massumi points towards Libet's experiments in cognitive delay as an opening to the excess of an embodied extra-textual kind of meaning. This drove a desire to paint absurdly large tears of shades of blue. Each hue created from the intuitive pleasure of mixing the paints I had amassed. My body knows I thought because my body is an intra-relational part of the cosmos. I was crying about Hume's conceptual idea of colour generated by the brain alone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After two years of a virtual lockdown "The Transmission of Affect" was created in a container space itself a contingent shrine to the refugee. After trans-misting feelings from a group meditation over the University Teams further meditations were braodcast over the following week. Encouraging students and staff to take part became woven into the processional patina of longing. Discussion and reflection in the temporary communitas form a tapestry of felt understanding in excess of the lingustic concepts one might consider to be the limits of knowledge.

 

 

 

The  Cloak of Longing (Tears of Narcissus) has been involved in conference keynote, public and university pastoral occasions. At the heart of my research practice is a sense that I must act to liberate creative capacities via a sense of intuitive material vitality. Matter flow is a characteristic of a cosmos of nonhuman agency and attunement to this is potentially occluded by a need to have a pregiven sense of the causal concepts or therefore-ness. I will have a felt intensity around making a particular artifact and from this a performative processual understanding emerges. In the case of the Cloak of Longing it was painting tears in various shades of blue to performatively disprove Humes' proposal that colour could be genreated in the decontextualised data of the brain. 

The processional event created to close the collaborative exhibition Look Upon My Works ye mighty could be seen as an expression of Shelley's vision of an Ecotopia in Ode to Liberty. The exhibition, in a shopping centre, was an intuitive action to recall the radical legacy of percy Byshee Shelley in the town where he was born 200 years after his death. My meeting with the fictional Burgher of Swan Walk (see fig1) was a speculative moment of an aesthetic ontology within which modern life finds congruence. It was a real event imagining what it could be like to relate through the felt life of collective ritual, whereby we become part of life as cosmic event. Art has a role in recalling the ubiquity of felt understanding that linguistic order is blind to. My position is in manifesting the intra-relational nature of all things ordinairily analysed as discrete. This is something John Dewey expresses very clearly in Art as Experience, 

This task is to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings [...] 

What really struck me was his suggestion that this has an effective agency,

If one is willing to grant this position, even if only by way of temporary experiment, he will see that there follows a conclusion at first sight surprising.

The temporary experiment then is what the Cloak of Longing proceeds into.

Denizens of the temporary communitas - AesthetiK Ontology

On the right we see a portrait of my mother as a student nurse begun by my father and art teacher before his death in october 2021. I completed this painting in his studio and below you see balloon tears hung by visitors expressing somethinig they are grieving. Affirmative grief becomes an atmosphere for felt understanding. By clickng the video you find my mother sitting on the left. By seeking meaning inside the event I hope that temporal substance can reconcile the myth of concrete separateness.

The procession and hanging becomes an opening into the longing for intra-relational understanding within the gallery habitually a temple to pre-given stability and order.
The Hanging the Tears ritual including the Klein bottle Vacuum blower of wisdom "the beginning is the end and the end is the beginning the truth is there is only one path which is defined by the end which is also the beginning". operated by Morriss Morris the Contingent Burgher of Swan Walk Shopping Center.

As the river flows to the sea - If there is a post-rational source for this processional means of creating intra-relational understanding then it might be the Hydracity Exhibition created by InspiralLondon. This exhibition curated by the artists' walking group explored the watery commons of the capital. In this context the painting of oversize tears became a nomadic story teller's means of carrying the story of Narcissus as told by Oscar Wilde. The salty tears flow and become sweet in the resulting pool. Why is the river sweet and the sea salty? This reductionist division of river fresh and sea salty is a simple story and whilst it feels innocent it perhaps opens into the habit of creating discrete division that perpetually distort our experience of understanding. As Plato's concept of the womblike container of flux Khora implies, everything is always in relational process - the Tears of Narcissus expressed a longing for this performative way of understanding. I sang a shanty version of Full Fathom Five encouraging the audience to sing in the drone of reluctant church goers.

What are you crying for? (Mixed media) Zuzushi Arts Lab Hastings UK

This performative assemblage of signs and vibrant matter was created for the installation event The Transmission of Affect. It included a twenty minute meditation out of the lyric La Da Dee La Dee Da broadcast over various social-media platforms as an experiment in entangling with nonhuman agency. The work emerged from a painting of giant tears of various blues called the Tears of Narcissus, born out of grief for the loss of collective extra-embodied meaning. 

Meditating becomes woven into the vibrant matter of a performative means of understanding inside the event. Some audience members can see this as an object from outside in a deliberately analytical position.

Alongside the nomadic Tears of Narcissus performances there is an interactive installation, What are you Crying for? This could be seen to enfold the distance of cognitive analysis into the vibrant matter of ritual. The nobility of the balloons as dissociative jellyfish tears enwombs the feeling of the refrain from Mark Bolan’s Cosmic Dancer, “What’s it like to be alone? I liken it to a balloon”. One way to understand how affect holds meaning inside the event is to imagine how songs hold meaning through intra-relational encounter. The salt in the sea comes from the river and the meaning in the word comes from the melody. 

Within the AesthetiK Ontology we might use living as a way of understanding rather than having to step outside to make conceptual sense. Using performative ritual used in my art research has been an experimental way of addressing the problem of what Karen Barad refers to in meeting the Universe Halfway,

Practices of knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated. We don't obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world.