Group 3
These 8 inquisitive minds camped on artist Koen Vanmechelen's farm and thought out their ideas around Movement in the thinking boxes of LaMouseion at LABIOMISTA from 6th to 8th July 2023.
Movement and Stability
Introduction
Our team is still in the process of exploring movement, everything is a process, every thinking is in the process of becoming, and the outcome is also unknown. However, there are several things we are working on now. First we would like to present an open conceptual box for everyone, enlightening them with our own understanding of movement, which is not only physical, but also a combination of mind and spirituality. Second, we are trying to cross across the binary of human and non-human, go beyond anthropocentrism and humanism, seeing the connections happening in the movements between different subjects and objects. Also, we would like to demonstrate how different disciplines and thinkings react to each other, moving towards “unthinkable” knowledge.
Movement and Stability
“Movement” is also an unthinkable concept in La Mouseion
From a physical dimension, movement is one object moving from one place to another place, and regarded as one state of one moment. Also, there exists another opposite state "stability". For example, put one glass on the table, it keeps stable and still. The explanation from physicists is that the state of "stability" is caused by different forces. The glass has an action force to the ground opposite to the reaction force from ground and they counteract with each other, achieving a state of “balance”.
Newton's first law states that all objects always remain at rest or in uniform linear motion when they are not acted upon by a force or a combined force. Its state of motion does not change in the absence of an external force. The glass is still on the table, it will not change from “stillness” to “moving” if no one picks it up.Therefore, force is a crucial element in movement. Force drives the beginning of movement, and movement can be regarded as the product of force. Further, the concept of “absolute stillness” is still hypothetical. In reality, physicists have shown that absolute rest does not exist and that what we think of as rest is merely a combination of forces. More interestingly, the Kinetic theory of glasses suggests, from a more microscopic perspective, that molecules and atoms are in perpetuating and everlasting motion. Whether it is a tangible rock or an invisible gas, there are elemental atoms of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, etc. Atoms collide with atoms to produce molecules, and collide with molecules to produce various chemical reactions, and the movement of atoms and molecules continues unabated.
“Stability” can therefore be seen in a way as the balance of movements and the result of the interaction of forces in the various movements.
The concept of stability itself has also been linked to biology. For example, a single breed of chicken produced in a single environment cannot survive when it undergoes drastic changes, so biologists tried to crossbreed the African chicken with the French chicken, and the resulting cross-bred breed is bred to produce one breed that can adapt to different environments. Similarly, in the social context, although the age of navigation opened by Columbus brought about bloody colonialism, it was also the starting point for the meeting of different civilisations, which constantly collide and intersect with each other across the globe, generating all kinds of “chemical reactions”, with modernisation and globalisation acting as macro structural forces to bring about moderate or radical social changes in different regions.
A Chinese sociologist called Xiaotong Fei proposed the concept of vernacular China, arguing that traditional Chinese society (during the dynastic era and the Chinese Republic, before 1949) was an Apollonian vernacular society, where the Chinese countryside was a stable, moderate small farmer economy, where people worked at sunrise and rested at sunset, and where people solved problems by opening clan shrines and inviting the clan chief or village chief to make rulings, presenting a stable and orderly society.
The meaning behind this stability, of course, is that the state of this traditional village society was slowly changing, rather than being disintegrated in an instant. By the time of the founding of the new China and the modern revolution, new political, economic, technological and social cultures had arrived, the village had gone from the static and stable represented by Apollo to the dynamic and restless Faust, young people went to the cities in search of more promising job opportunities, the rule of law brought litigation, and people began to seek legal aid to adjudicate matters. And today, with modernity still at work, society is forever undergoing dynamic change and, as Deleuze, a representative of post-structuralist philosophers, says, everything is becoming.
Therefore, when we talk about “stability”, we not only try to deconstruct the fixed, static image that the image of “stability” itself may have, but also deliver the idea that everything is in movement and becoming. Our work also brings together partners from different disciplines to break down the idea of knowledge in a seemingly unbelievable box, and to see the different understandings of movement that arise from the intersection of multiple disciplines. The results of our work include not only the concrete outputs that may be presented, but also the thinking itself that interacts and continues to be cross-border.
Expectations
We would like to present our thoughts by a conceptual box, a short-documentary film and a PDF documenting our process and current outputs. Also, we are still in the process of exploring “Movement”.
