The Feedback Loop.

I study myself to study transformation. 

feedforward, as far as a brain is concerned, is any
input received from our body’s sensory apparatuses   
Those inputs include stimulation to all senses, which
extend well beyond the five we have been taught to prioritize

feedback, despite the way we use this term in our
vernacular speech, is the output put back to our sensory
processing centers after integrations of all inputs

a feedback loop, as I’d like to name it, is the interaction
between feedforward and feedback     

a living system that is attuning                                            to no end



Our bodies are already attuned to moving in systems that listen and change.                                

It’s no wonder movement itself is a type of thinking.

I want to study feedback loops. Or more imprecisely, I want my work
to move in feedback loops.
To speak in feedback loops.
To listen out for the silences of the inbetween.        


A feedback loop makes no distinction between sensation and action. That is to say, that with which I am absorbing from the world and that with which I am offering, are interdependent. For my work to move in this way, it would be perpetually at a threshold. Not just any threshold, but something more akin to an ecotone in nature. A boundary, to be sure, but one that is alive and aware and kaleidoscopic. Whether my role is one of facilitator, performer, or collaborator, I want to remain in the dig.

As I make change, I am a site of change.

Ecotone is a term first voiced in 1859 by naturalist, biologist, and illustrator, Alfred Russell Wallace. After pausing at an abrupt boundary between two biomes, he molded the label using ecology and -tone, the Greek tonos or tension.       That is the tension of the feedback loop— an ecology on either side of my skin. On either side of me and you. On either side of us and other.

I often find myself coming up with reasons to reject specifications. The truth is, I tend to soften when I accept contradictions and dualities in real time. But the boundaries of specification— and the testing of those boundaries’  power, validity and bearings— are innate to life, and that gives me pause. The tension that a boundary holds is irresistible, and like an ecotone, grows from living intelligences. Though I often wrestle with defining edges, it’s become a site of hyperawareness in my work. I’d like to consider the edge of binaries  not as intransigent, but an eloquent feedback loop worth investigating. Poet Maggie Nelson points to a similar discomfort found in Eve Sedgwick’s research:

It’s easy to get juiced up about a concept like plurality or multiplicity and start complimenting everything as such. Sedgwick was impatient with that kind of sloppy praise. Instead, she spent a lot of time talking and writing about that which is more than one, and more than two, but less than infinity.

The finitude is important. It makes possible the great mantra, the great invitation, of Sedgwick’s work, which is to, “pluralize and specify.” (Barthes: “one must pluralize, refine, continuously.”) This is an activity that demands an attentiveness - a relentlessness, even - whose very rigor tips it into ardor.