pied midden: issue no. 17 : images from the unknown : thomas little
Magnetic drawing made with Sable Wave pigment, crafted by Thomas Little. Drawing & Photograph by Tilke Elkins.
May this decade bring more than just solutions, more than just a future - may it bring words we don't know yet, and temporalities we have not yet inhabited. May we be slower than speed could calculate, and swifter than the pull of the gravity of words can incarcerate. And may we be visited so thoroughly, and met in wild places so overwhelmingly, that we are left undone. Ready for composting. Ready for the impossible.
~ Bayo Akomolafe
“Throughout dominant histories, acts of prophesying are often focused on discrete instances of grand proclamation from a single, messianic individual. We seek to refocus our attention to prophecy as an act of receptivity rather than assertion — ecologizing the prophet into communal gesture rather than one individual’s ascent above the flock.”
~ from event description for Confiagua: Practices in Prophetic held by bronte velez and Jiordi Rosales through the Emergence Network’s series The Wilds Beyond Climate Justice, 0.6.02.20
‘[Poems] …become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action.”
~ audre lorde, from Poetry Is Not A Luxury
resting open
What can happen when there’s no single center of control, when the impulse to create happens as part of a collective longing, drawn from an inner magnetic field, in response to a need larger than individual wants?
What can happen when poetry is in charge? Or magnetism? Or slime molds? The force-field that orients us and calls us home operates from a space greater than thought. To be guided by this force is to rest open to cerebral unknowing and to transmissions from the heart.
Sable Wave, this month’s Ground Bright pigment, is a warm black magnetite made from transmuted gun parts donated to artist/alchemist Thomas Little (A Rural Pen) by the collective Lead to Life. The pigment responds to the tug of magnets. The guns were confiscated by police from crime scenes, and have been part of Lead to Life’s ‘public participatory ceremony,’ the re-crafting of gun metal into shovels which are used to plant trees in areas of violence against humans and interspecies communities. This act, in the words of creative director bronte velez, ‘transforms that which ends life into that which sustains life — to facilitate an alchemical healing process that can physically transform both our weapons and our imaginations.’
Lead to Life is doing really profound work. Led by black and queer artists, including Jazmín Calderón Torres, Stormy Saint-Val, and bronte velez, Lead to Life hones for justice with the full body, welcoming all the senses to join in, inviting every kind of intelligence, giving emotions their rightful place in the circle, tending to the seat of attunement in every individual. A union of racial and environmental justice with poetry and art, L2L manifests black wellness on every level, conjuring healing, elegance and ceremony, “not [to] show white people that we can make something beautiful from their terrorism, but actually giving something to ourselves that white people could never imagine for us” (bronte velez).
This is what the kids these days are calling “post-activism”. An activism that includes the whole being and everything that being does and feels. An activism that slows way down while accounting for instant revelation. L2L cultivates space for black dreamwork, and space to grieve “the afterlife of slavery” (Saidiya Hartman). The group nourishes “homecomings” — a uniquely black American cultural rite to celebrate the end of life. This summer, they distributed luscious care packages to mothers whose children were murdered by police, and continued their ongoing Trauma Stewardship program for these families. They continually invite prayers of care for the planet, as they did recently to honor and protect the Tongass, the ancestral forests of the Haida, Tlingit and Tsimshian people, which has been exempted from Roadless Rule 9 by the Trump administration and is now much more vulnerable to extractive activities.
Image from course description for ‘We Will Dance With Mountains,” offered by Bayo Akamolafe; a screen shot from course.bayoakamolafe.net.
It was through Lead to Life that I heard of the Emergence Network, a collective of “trickster-activist-artists inspired to rethink our patterns of responding to crisis.” Like Lead to Life, they are fueled and fed by poetry, by unknowing. Bayo Akomolafe is among them, and is currently leading a related course called WE WILL DANCE WITH MOUNTAINS / LET US MAKE SANCTUARY. The life-shaking quote that opens this issue of Pied Midden is drawn from the course description, which details a program of “ceremonial inquiry, collective sense-making, and prophetic exile,” about “unlearning mastery, becoming fugitive, and slowing down in times of urgency.” Please do go and read the rest — each word dissolves and rebuilds. Maybe those words are for you.
Receptivity to intent beyond individual will and cognition, in service of mystery and union: sounds like a hot technology to me. I guess that’s one reason I’m so moved by the work of Thomas Little, whose strange numinous antics delight multitudes of us on Instagram. Relinquishing his role as sole director of the artistic product, Thomas invites collaboration from forces that exceed his own knowing: the earth’s magnetism, for example, or the amoebic intelligence of Physarum polysephalum, aka slime mold. Both are carried by their own energies and channel intelligences beyond our capacity.
This and all images hereafter courtesy of Thomas Little.
Thomas is a supreme poet, so it’s time I passed the pen over to him and let him tell you about what he does (or, un-does)…
Archeiropoietic Materials by Thomas Little, aka A Rural Pen
I began my work with ink and pigments as any young artist, knowing them in smelly tubes, pretty cakes in a tin, or sheathed in wood. These were products, of course, that we are told to use, to shape images into semblances of light and color and depth. We were taught to see them as tools in our hands, rather than the material of the actual art. Early on, it pained me to see the wasted dried gobs of a color on my pallet compared to the scant marks that same color made on the image in front of me. In that gob there were sublime moments of expression that would never see their potential.
It was much later, through a meandering life path, that I found myself making marks again on paper, as an illustrator. Determined to be self-sufficient, I was making my own ink, and found joy in the simple chemistry, and fascination in the history. Soon I was deriving as much satisfaction from a well made batch of ink as I was from a particularly neat drawing. From here I began to better appreciate the material separate from the tool, separate from the hand, and ultimately, separate from the artist.
I do not harbor disdain for the tool, the hand, or the artist, of course. As an illustrator, I felt the role of all three. In my client's mind, I was a tool for their creative visions, the hand that executed them, and where their visions came up short, I was the artist who filled out the space. But all this imposition on the blood and bones of the material seemed heavy-handed. The colors had their own stories to tell. Some paintings darken through time, some poison their owners. Their movement through the universe wasn't hampered by being put under glass and framed.
So in what way could materials be collaborators? If you are an artist reading this newsletter, it may likely be a line of thought you have engaged in, and perhaps even a central tenet to your practice. At some point, I think we all return to that moment as children, beaming at a bright red pile of tempera paint, marveling at it, not just as RED, but as this magical substance that has shown us RED. Remembering this moment, re-establishing this learning relationship, has informed my practice and renewed my vision of the world. Now I want everything to speak its own language, to let invisible forces author work, write tomes even, that I can have the humbling honor to read.
There is a category of sacred images known as acheiropoieta, which means "made without human hands". One of the more famous examples is the Shroud of Turin. These works of art are attributed to divine will and are held in higher esteem than pieces executed by the most skilled artist. In all likelihood, most acheiropoieta are fabricated by hand, and have their provenance obscured. Of course, there are instances of true acheiropoieta occurring. Divine figures appear on toast, or in water stains. This is a result of pareidolia, the mind's natural inclination to see a representation of a figure where there is not one. In either case, it is not the artist's hand that we appreciate in these occurrences, but the mystery, whether of the mind or of history, that surrounds them.
In removing my hands from the creative process, I engage further with the mystery of the substance, allowing a collaboration to occur through the negation of my will. I, in turn, become sculpted by the materials. We establish a reciprocal dialogue with each other, and in yielding my expressive aggression, the universe takes its role as catalyst, and a holistic synthesis of spirit and material occurs. It certainly sounds transcendental, and it is, but it is as common as caterpillar dung! (To be clear, the purpose of my words is not to encourage a complete disengagement. Human expression is a cosmic force, and to ignore that would be perilous. We all, quite literally, have skin in the game.)
To facilitate the dialogue, it is helpful to have active participants. The materials I've been experiencing have their own animism and mystery that I think even the most unimaginative would find compelling. They are magnetite and slime mold.
Magnetite is iron(II,III) oxide, and is notable for its black color and, of course, its magnetic properties. In ancient times, it was known as lodestone and, as a pigment, black Roman earth. It's chemical synthesis in the early 20th century allowed for its popular use as an artist's pigment, marketed as Mars Black. The ease of production also secured its place as a popular substance in laboratories of the burgeoning field of electronic data storage. Here it enjoys a unique place in information technology history, for it was simultaneously being used to depict image information in the form of a pigment, while also serving to record information as electronic data. This ability to move effortlessly between what we see as two very different modes of technology is beautifully demonstrated in the Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) system. This system gave us the font we see in retro sci fi movies, square with some intriguing bumps here and there. The font is known as E-13B, and could be considered a cyborg language. The unusual bumps correlate to a code readable by a magnetic sensor, while the form of the character is still recognizable to the human eye. This technology was created to facilitate check processing, and can still be seen on the bottom of most checks today. That the animistic force that the natural philosopher William Gilbert once described as the "soul of the earth" is now put to the task of facilitating the flow of money around the world is perhaps a topic best left for another time. Though, the concepts of animistic force and flow do segue nicely to my other dialogue participant...
Slime mold, specifically Physarum polycephalum. I perhaps do it a disservice in describing Physarum as a "material", as it is in fact a living organism. But one could be forgiven for thinking that, as it is, on outward appearances, a bright yellow slime. Technically, Physarum is not a mold, but a population of amoebae that engages in incredibly sophisticated behaviors while simultaneously enjoying a life cycle so bizarre, it leaves one in a state of philosophical wonder. It is perhaps a billion years old, dating back to before plants and animals and fungi were discernible from each other. It is biologically immortal, which is to say, it defies senescence. It has 780 different sexes. Under duress, it can consolidate itself into a dormant mass, or produce fruiting spore stalks and scatter to the wind. If submerged in water, it develops a flagella and the mass becomes independent individuals again. It is truly a Protean creature. But its behavior as a collective plasmodium is what is so captivating. Through its collective action, it seems to exhibit intelligent behavior. It can solve mazes, learn through habituation and external memory, and merge with other populations and imbue them with the knowledge it has collected. It also can be a pigment vehicle! It leaves pigments, along with other waste, embedded in the slime trails it leaves behind as its external memory. By coloring the slime trails, it can leave a record, visible to the human eye, of its decisions.
I work with these animated substances, though my job is more in providing opportunity in allowing different interactions. There is mystery in their movements. They operate from their own memories. Magnetite holds its quantum secrets in an invisible dimension. Physarum pulses with vital and unimaginable intelligence that's survived several mass extinctions. The more I work with these things, the more I see my physical role diminish, but I feel my spirit, my animus, grow and sense the unknown. I can feel the lingering breeze of the solar winds, feel the pulse of life that goes back through space time to when we were all so much protoplasm. So much beauty in the world is acheiropoieta, and maybe more could be appreciated if we knew when to keep our hands off it.
~ Thomas Little, A Rural Pen, December 2020
Thomas, thanks for sharing your process of creative dialoging with the unknown with us, and for all the ways you inspire and confound us, and push us to stretch the limits of our imaginations.
Huge thank-yous to all the folks at Lead to Life for everything you do to compost colonizer culture and share windows into worlds where all life, and especially Black life, is honored and attended to.
Thank you, Thomas, and GB subscribers for directing 22% of this month’s Ground Bright net profit to Lead To Life, to help support their excellent work!
ink bonds
Dear reader, if you are intrigued by Thomas’s work and would like to participate in what might rightly be called an “art investment” opportunity, now is the time for you! Thomas’s bonds are the images on yellow paper (thus colored using a turmeric moonshine) made with magnetite inkblots and red trails left by physarum who consumed red-ochre infused oatmeal.
Thomas describes the bonds so well, I’m going pass the newsletter back to him for a moment… (from a recent IG post…)
Friends, submitted for your consideration: an investment opportunity.
I've been working on making bonds that are good for 100 ml of ink. That is 4 of my standard ampules. The bonds are available for $50 USD, which is half the price of 4 ampules. Why am I doing this? For numerous reasons, really.
For one, I have been interested in alternative currency, community currency, and its subversive qualities of undermining capitalism and centralized authority.
Two, I like documents. Ones that have a kind of life, that are carried, weathered and traded. Ones that have anatomy to them, like serial numbers, places for stamps and signatures. Trappings of purpose, even if they are just vestigial limbs of a bureaucratic ecosystem.
Three, documents are magic, and I enjoyed using witch technology, alchemy, and my own brand of necromancy in creating these certificates.
Four, they are a showcase of inkcraft. They utilize security features that ink can provide like ph sensitivity, magnetic images, and fine slime work, virtually irreplicable by hand. (This is not so much to discourage counterfeiting. Rather, if one were to present a counterfeit certificate that had these qualities, I would gladly honor and reimburse!)
Five, thanks to Hewlett-Packard, ink is worth more than its weight in gold, caviar, and fine champagne. So in a way, these are backed by something of genuine value. I mean gold is just another kind of dirt too, right?
The bonds mature at the end of [October] next year (Halloween, 2021). In these famously uncertain times, who knows where we'll be then. But regardless, I will gladly honor any bond that enters my hand, or the hands of A Rural Pen Inkworks agent. (BTW, seeking agents in major cities and not so major cities!)
slime mold for prez
People just love saying SLIME MOLD. Even more than they like saying “Physarum polycephalum.” The two words inevitably invoke chuckles of delight. So when I tell you that there’s a college that has given slime mold a position on the faculty, you’ll… see? You’re already laughing. Of course, it’s hilarious: Professor Slime Mold. Say it! And say it again, multiple times in your head when you’re done reading this. I know you will.
But hang on: it’s true. Sort of. I guess it was more of a “scholar-in-residence” kind of gig. The Center for Plasmodial Research at Hampshire college in Massachusetts established “the world’s only academic program for non-human species,” and gave a collection of Physarum polycephalum people their own office (with office hours!). By “people” I mean “individual beings,” not just humans, though in this case the word “individual” is different than what we’re used to, as one slime mold contains multitudes of individuals who share a single cell wall…but you get the gist of it. All beings are people, not just humans.
“We are delighted to have representatives of the Physarum genus join our academic community,” said Eva Rueschmann, Dean of Faculty & Vice President for Academic Affairs. “As they help solve important [human] problems from a non-human perspective, these super-organisms promise to greatly enhance intellectual life on campus by helping us all think about and see the world without our normal human biases.”
Physarum can speedily map efficient routes from one spot to another (“optimization abilities”) waaaay faster than humans can, which makes them skilled at working on human problems like food insecurity and income inequality. I think the humans who gave them an office may not quite be honoring them as equals yet, though they do return the Physarum to the forest floor when the collaborations are complete, as does Thomas return the one(s) he stewards (to the swamp, that is).
Even if it does seems awfully similar to a joke, I see the scholar-in-residence as a sign that perhaps the same-old same-old speciesist human-centric shtick run by Western culture is starting to show actual fault lines. I really can’t wait until Western humans once again recognize the authority of other beings (most other cultures never stopped). We need some people in charge who aren’t human.
What does it mean to the Physarum to be asked to navigate human problems? As the scientific community’s conversations with these beings progress, the perspective may shift. Can humans have the intelligence, for example, to solve slime mold problems from a non-slime-mold perspective? Or be receptive to slime mold wisdom that slime mold may transmit? Thomas, always ahead of the curve, has been navigating these questions and listening to the woods for answers.
Thank you, dear reader, for spending time with Pied Midden today. If anything here has sparked an impulse to write to me (or Thomas!), I would very much like to hear from you. In the days after I send this lil thing out into the vastness, I do often check to see if any messages come back to me from the void. Writing can feel like such a solitary game! You can find Thomas at thomas.little.films@gmail.com or @a.rural.pen, and me at info@wildpigmentproject.org or @wildpigmentproject.
Stay safe, stay snug, stay connected to whatever brings you life & as always….
~ Stay tuned ~
<3 Tilke
Still from time-lapse video of Physarum devouring Thomas’s ochre-infused aspic jelly.