Ascension

For the last six years, I have selected one word on January 1st to unconsciously trigger all of my action-oriented performances throughout the new year.

In 2006, the word was improvisation.

In 2007, the word was intuition.

In 2008, the word was illumination.

For 2009, I was feeling the heat and knew I had to go with intensification.

Looking into my miniscule crystal ball for 2010, I anticipated things remaining as intense as ever but also sensed a noticeable pattern shift occurring in the world all around me, one that I knew was having an effect on all of my new project development, a shift that would ideally enable me to transmute the intensity of daily remix practice into multiple and hybridized forms of actualization. Two years ago, trying to side-step the new age connotations of the term actualization while addressing why it stood out to me as a word indicative of a shift in my perspective [further signaled by the fact that my new words of the year would now begin with the letter 'a' instead of 'i'], I wrote:

By creating more flexible life patterns we may be able to renew our energy (source material) in ways that trigger yet more intense experiences not just for ourselves but for others. Doing this at the level of daily remix practice as part of an intentional strategy to take the creative process deep into ones shape-shifting underground network via a process of mediumistic actualization feels like just the right thing to do.

As Whitehead wrote in Process and Reality, the primordial nature "combines the actuality of what is temporal with the timelessness of what is potential."

How do we network this potential so that it feeds into more intersubjective, remixological practice?

What does it take to enter the primordial source of creativity?

How does one become an artist-medium that positions their daily practice in relation to the greater creative potential of what lies ahead while acting as an accomplice to an ingression performed by timeless entities whose concrescent formation manifests itself as an actual achievement in time?

Is actualization always already just-in-time?

Or is it always on the cusp of "becoming" -- the idealized condition of "being avant-garde"?

Actualization was a term that challenged me two years ago and last year "the secret woid" (Groucho Marx) was agglutination. A year ago, I wrote how my emerging art projects were

... driven by an adherence to my daily remix practice. The bottom line is that I need to maintain my practice as intuitive stick-to-itive-ness. Maybe the word I am looking for is sticktuitive. Setting my mind on autopilot, my aim is to continually remix the patterns into new forms of mosaic. But the mosaic, as fluid as it may be, needs to hold together in order for me to feel the need to proceed. It has to agglutinate.

Therefore, I wrote, "the trigger word for 2011 is agglutination. Even if some elements lose their 'stickiness,' dislodge, and drift away, I will be paying attention to those things that adhere to each other and create greater clusters of potential to actualize."

This year's trigger word is even more difficult for me to write about than actualization. The religious connotations are more severe than some of the new age connotations of prior words. Many of the art projects I am invested in for 2012 have to do with what Whitehead refers to as the "Higher Phases of Experience" and, in some instances, quite literally the concept of soaring. A simple thesaurus check on synonyms reveals only one 'a' word for "soaring" and that is ascend. But ascend is too descriptive and lacks the intensity of what I am feeling right now. So the word-trigger for 2012 is a stretch, even for me. The word is ascension.

Yes, there's something about the mystical act of ascending to another world before dying that appeals to me, and yes I have issues with the whole Jesus thing which is not what I mean by ascension here. But I am into the more literal version of the word. It's more about climbing, flying, soaring. What does it mean to "rise above it all"? To "take it all to another level"? And then some side thoughts: is it possible to rise above it all while staying grounded? What's the relationship between ground and instrument? Instrument and medium?

Or maybe I have simply been influenced by my surroundings, by what opens up to you if you just wake up early enough in the morning, say, the first day of a new year, and open your eyes to what rises before you:



Hau'oli Makahiki Hou.

Keywords: intuition, improvisation, illumination, intensification, actualization, agglutination, ascension