Tutor Thoughts:
Connection As Carl Sagan, the American astronomer and cosmologist famously said, we are ‘star stuff’ exploring the stars. Life is the information pathway by which the universe achieves consciousness and self – awareness and begins to explore itself, including evolving new modes of experience, creativity and beauty.
By Hayley Lock
Reality can be seen as an aggregate of objects and phenomena that is linked through relations and connections. These objects and events are linked in an infinite chain joining everything that exists to a single whole where matter is often discrete and everything interacts with everything else. The principles within relation and connection presents systems that form as well as order, expressing the materiality of our reality which has its own motion within that matter. Jane Bennett in her book titled Vibrant Matter, a political ecology of things professes that everything is alive, interconnected and in process, stating that specific things are drawn to us and are alive through complex interrelationships and entanglements, stating that humans are neither sovereign or autonomous but instead composed of complex webs of active bodies and materials. All matter is alive and in process with other matter.
On the flip side, it is true that to function, humans appear to need some solitude or quiet time too, so how do we navigate reaching out as well as recoiling back into our personal space to make work that is meaningful, questioning, playful even? How can we make purposeful work that sits within the wider culture?
