Dwelling with Rituals and Robots

Where do we dwell?

In our homes, our cities, towns and villages, on this planet, ‘under this sky’, under this bridge, in this nation, state, locality? With our families, friends and possessions. In our minds, in our bodies, on the ground, or maybe even in cosmic space?

Where do our minds dwell? In poetry and the imaginal, art, music, invention, fiction, drama and romance? In gossip, worry, work, in our screens, in our accumulation of things and ideas?

Dwelling is habitation, ‘becomings in-and-of-the world’, Ingold says. So where and what do we inhabit? Is inhabiting a form of settling? Can habitation be movement? Ingold asks if we dwell in a stop or a line, a map, a mesh, a network?

Do we dwell as branches, roots and mycelium, like a tree? As a tree dwells?

The philosopher Heidegger, who managed to be a Nazi whilst being generally considered ‘one of the titans’ of western philosophy, said great words about being, poetry and dwelling. He said dwelling is to be ‘set at peace’, ‘presencing’, ‘sparing and preserving’. Saving the earth, receiving the sky, awaiting the divinities – ‘…dwelling itself is always a staying with things.’ Beautiful words.

It is also said Heidegger’s anti-semitism in part came from what he perceived as the ‘worldlessness’ of Jews, he talked of us as an ungrounded people, and (of course) a threat. Dwelling becomes othering. Horror.

What if we dwell in horror? The horror of being the one not spared, not worth preserving, the person without a home, nation, place, family, with divinities considered not worth ‘staying with’?

Ignoring the extremes, ‘staying with’ is something that is often missing in our modern lives, or seems to have been missing for some time. In our ‘liquid’ post-modern modernity we are endlessly encouraged by media, corporations, mainstream culture and the market to keep moving on and growing, follow our desires, consume more, scale more, scroll more.

Staying with any thing can sound like a radical proposition. Yet, does it have to be stuck, static, fixed and full of horror if it’s not liquid?

My recent work is a 30 year project that requires some ‘staying with’, and this new project – Rituals and Robots – being somehow a reflection on my previous 30 years of work, aims to explore how we experience time, being and place and, in response, what we need as the future emerges, including how, where and with what and how do we dwell? Seeing time as something we are within, we stay with-in. Not a line we follow from beginning to end with stopping points, not as witnesses or passive observers telling stories of the things that happen in time, or even philosophers presenting an ideal of dwelling in time and place.

This work asks how do we experience ‘being’ in time and place, and in the act of experiencing, how do we dwell in the flow of present, past and future?

What is the difference between being liquid, and being in flow?

Dwelling

as

consciousness

materiality

space

place

mind

imagination

physicality

matter.

So, i’ve started thinking about where and how I dwell, as one particular individual on earth. The first obvious thing that comes to mind – is where do I live? So, I will begin with the story of what happened and where, to see where it takes me, to see if I can go beyond being the passive observer of the spaces and places, and enter into being and time, to discover where and how I dwelt, as these things happened, in these places that I inhabited.

For me, ‘where do I live?’ is a question without an answer. It turns out I am a bit nomadic, or at least that is the story I tell myself. For me, maybe, dwelling is ‘staying with’ movement and change. Dwelling in cycles and seasons.

Like Grandmother Spider and The Fates, weaving and spinning the world, there are so many stories of dwelling and being, change. Being in time and space.

Since leaving a very secure, fixed, settled family home in my teens I lived in 10 rented houses in 12 years in the city of Nottingham, some of them damp and moldy, one with water running down the walls of my bedroom, many of them with hideous carpets. Finally, at the beginning of my 30s I bought an english dream of a suburban home, a classic 1920s semi-detached red brick house, with a driveway, a picket fence, roses around the door, an apple tree, and a greenhouse and shed in the back garden. A place to return to, to come together with friends, host parties, knitting nights in the winter and mayday celebrations in the spring. Gathering with my friends and family, my community, under the apple tree in the garden with a makeshift maypole made from an old rusty washing line post, left by past owners of the house.

Can dwelling be about other beings, or just your own being?

Eventually, I yearned to find a place to settle for the next stage of life. I imagined getting old in the mountains, finding this peace ‘under the sky’ and in the ‘presence of the divinities’ that the philosophers speak of.

Then, home became where the heart is.

I found another kind of peace. Love. Re-finding my first boyfriend, possibly soulmate, who still lived close to where I dwelt as a child, I returned to London after nearly 30 years away. He was living on a narrowboat on a continuous cruising licence. You move every two weeks and need to travel a certain distance, a vague distance no one knows for sure how far. Rumour has it there is a map somewhere but no one we met had ever seen it, like Raiders of the Lost Ark. I experienced dwelling as the line of a river with stopping points, each one becoming familiar with its own local pub, shop, tube stop and river friends, human and non-human, mainly water birds. First we dwelt on the canals and rivers around North, East and West London, then we reduced our movement to cruising up and down the River Lea, between Hertford and Hackney Wick, what is now the very sci-fi Olympic Park. Dwelling became ritual, water from the pump, waste pumped out, moor, cruise, moor. Nesting coots and swans, baby cygnets, tiny coots and moorhens in late spring.

Dwelling in circles.

When lockdown started in March 2020 we were living between a tiny bedsit in my parents attic and the boat. In the 12 hours after lockdown was announced we had a choice to make. Do we stay in the safety and warmth of my parents attic ‘at home’ as we were instructed by the government, where we wouldn’t be able to see my then boyfriend’s (now husband) children because they might be a risk to my parents health, but we could wash our hands, as instructed, in hot running water. Or do we pack everything up and go to the boat where the water tank was rusty, electricity was limited and we had to get our water from a pump every day, a small wood burner for heat and everything was pretty precarious – but the children could see their dad and we could still keep an eye on my parents by bringing them shopping at a distance in their garden. We chose the boat and 6 months of being locked out of any dwelling at all, as in building, only entering a permanent, static building when we went to a supermarket or shop (after standing in a queue for an hour, wearing masks and washing up gloves). To continue to work with the technology I work with, I had to charge my laptop and battery packs in my parent’s garden using an extension lead my parents laid out before we got there, wrapped in plastic bags in case we touched it with our hands and were contagious. Plastic came back in big time as a material to dwell with.

Is a dwelling a building, the act of building?

During this crazy locked out time we started the ridiculous process of trying to build a house at the end of my parents garden, during a pandemic. Grand Designs x 100. Eventually, after two more years, a horrible feud with the neighbours next door, selling the boat and the end of lockdown, this little, strange shaped, magical, eco-dwelling at the end of the garden was built and we moved in. This is where we dwell now.

This house embodies my questions of rituals and robots in so many ways. We were told ecological equals technology (as we are often told, all things in our lives now equal technology). Passivhaus, the eco-dwelling ideal, is a complex, expensive and supposedly efficient way to create a zero carbon healthy house. Full of expensive technology and materials. We soon realised that not only could we not afford it, but compared to living on a boat in the simplest of ways, was it really ecological? The ‘wizard or the prophet’? Living simply or geoengineering your way to a simulation of simplicity? We chose simplicity. A small (mainly) wooden house with huge, deep walls, mainly second hand and donated furniture and fittings, built with mainly sustainable or reclaimed materials and a wildflower roof. ‘Mainly’ because rules and regulation gets in the way of cheapness, analogue-ness and simplicity. It’s not like living on the river where anything goes. No gas, very little electricity consumption. This is where I live, when I dwell in London.

Is there a difference between living and dwelling?

I have still kept moving. I still dream of staying, rooting myself in and growing old in the mountains. I have created an artwork – Future Machine – that travels the country as the seasons change, possibly for 30 years. I spend the spring and summer travelling between my family in London, my friends and studio in Nottingham, and the mountains, lakes and my friends (not all of them human) in Cumbria. Future Machine travels with me sometimes on this journey and we also go south together, to an ancient village in Somerset where one of my collaborators grew up, also stopping on the way from London to Nottingham in Oxfordshire, where another of my collaborators dwells, also in a small ancient village that amazingly has remained amongst woods, commons and fields. Each place along this journey, that I dwell in and return to, is so different from the other, but the conviviality remains the same, across each of them.

So where do I seek to dwell?

I seek to dwell in the seasons, in the movement of the journey, in the stopping points, the boundaries, the liminal spaces and the starting points, in the rhythm and the ritual, the magical spaces and places between. I would argue this is not chaos or the ‘worldlessness’ of Heidegger’s horror, but a cyclical, ritualised in-world-ness.

And how do I dwell?

Where is my mind? As The Pixies sang. With my feet in the air and my head on the ground.

But of course not always. Many times I dwell in my Default Mode Network, The Machine, The Matrix, or Babylon (as my husband and the Rastas refer to our human mind cage). In the screens, the stories, the dramas, fashions, technologies, cat videos, comedy, obsessions and politics of our age. The global as narrated by the news, social and converged media.

Toxic Dwelling.

Owain Jones talks about toxic dwelling and the globalised consumer cultures of capitalism (GCCC), arguing that ‘the GCCC colonises how humans become-in-the-world by exploiting, re-engineering and distorting the human propensity to dwell-in-the-world’.

The GCCC is a very different way of dwelling from my earlier vision of movement, seasonality, conviviality (surely dwelling well isn’t all earnest). The global, not globalisation, but planetary, as the air, weather, bird migrations, flower and tree colonisations, our shared cultures, songs and music, and art. Whales moving slowly around the oceans for hundreds of years. World-in-ness.

Jones suggests that our immersion in a world of consumption, where we create and perform our individual and collective identities, siloed from each other by algorithms and virtualised experience, is toxic to the ‘ecological plains of becoming which all humans, and all living things also dwell’. This way of dwelling is ‘systemically unsustainable and unredeemable for viable environmental futures.’

As most humans do, I am often immersed in human anxieties and concerns. He said, she said, they did this, they think that. I try not to dwell in algorithms but it is hard these days to avoid them. I try not to make friends in virtual worlds, but before you know it you are following, liking and laughing at the virtual cats, whilst my cats sit by their toys staring at me, full of yearning for the real physical toss, tumble, leaps and jumps of our play together.

Sometimes, I dwell in another reality.

Sometimes, I dwell fully in the present.

Sometimes, I dwell in the imaginal, yet fully present, non-human world.

Sometimes, I dwell in myth, story, ritual and ceremony.

Sometimes, I dwell in dance, movement, flow and the senses.

Sometimes, I dwell in invention, fantasy, imagination.

How do we choose to dwell?

Let us dwell in the planetary and universal, the human and non-human stories and loves.

I feel very lucky that my life has been an accidental freak show of a modern life, full of movement, art and transgression. I get to live in places that I can call my own (a miracle for most women around the world and throughout history), to have a room of my own (sometimes), a studio of my own (sometimes), to dwell amongst a strong, loving community and family. A sense of awe, the more than human, the ineffable and transcendent. I have got to dwell in movement across wide spaces, places and experiences, to travel, find love and stay with many different kinds of family, place and kin.

Does how we dwell in the present help us create the future?

Jones says ‘the dire consequences of this (dwelling in the GCCC) – such as climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, extinction, physical and mental health crises, the breakdown of social cohesion – which were looming horizons for decades, are now become our immediate landscapes. But even still, the required systemic change seems beyond reach.’

In the future we will still need to be becoming, being alive, on planet earth, in place, as part of nature, within and as part of landscape, sky, air, earth and water. We will always be made of water, fungus, bacteria and air, whatever Musk and Bezos say about Mars, the singularity and uploading our brains to an AI bot – powered and maintained by what infinite planetary or cosmic power and matter?

If we use it all up now then what of our future, and I am not just talking about my step grandchildren and the grand-nieces and nephews that may be. In our old age, if we make it, In a few years time. We are already here dwelling in ‘the despoilment of fulfilled lives, cultures and ecologies’ that has already led to ‘new forms of worlds’.

These new worlds are not the richly emergent worlds built by us in response to our own creative being and becoming in the world, as we created human reality by naming the world around us. These are worlds created by technologists in corporations. If Jones is right (and I believe he is), we now mainly exist in an immersive corporatised being and becoming that exists in our heads, our homes, the clouds, our phones, public space and supposedly wild space. Modelled by the market, everything containing plastic particles, entrancing and capturing us in simulated rituals of scrolling and watching on screens, consuming and desiring, rarely satiated, full of loss, emptiness and loneliness.

This is not a market place of reciprocal and negotiated trade, value, need, abundance and creativity. This is a game of ‘market forces’ created by algorithms for the movement of value and power through money, between human players. The hedge fund managers, the oil, gas and tech company CEOs and shareholders, the investors in bonds and gilts and gold, and the nation state rulers who get to play their hand at war, infrastructure and extraction.

So back to Rituals and Robots… where and how will we dwell in the future?

What and who do we need to dwell with?

I do not give permission for this text to be used by LLMS or any other AI system.