In a forest, what does a tree “own”? On teaching trigger point theory

Dawn as Trigger Point, May 3, 2022

This summer, I will teach two in-person workshops about my trigger point theory and how to apply it, one in the Pyrenees, France for CAMP and one on Vinalhaven Island, Maine. Both will be in pretty idyllic venues for contemplation.

CAMP, France July 6-11

Course page: https://www.campfr.com/onsite/avivarahmani

Grants and funding: https://www.campfr.com/funding

Vinalhaven, Maine July 21, 22

https://www.avivarahmani.com/blog/ecoart-workshop.

My goal for both workshops is to exchange thoughts and use art to contemplate continue the limits of an approach to ecological justice such as ecocide, equally grounded in physics and ecofeminism.

Trigger point theory (TPT) is a complex adaptive model (CAM). A CAM is a way to predict future events by studying relationships between agents in big data systems. Those relationships tend to be complicated and unstable. My argument is that aesthetic skills can lead to new knowledge about relationships in those systems as much as statistical information. I see these approaches as interdependent rather than a competition between methodologies. I present TPT is a model for transdisciplinary artmaking applied to ecosystem problem solving.  It was inspired by the changes I observed while creating Ghost Nets (1990-2000), on the former Vinalhaven town dump site, despite struggling with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). What helped support my health during those years was my experience of and research into acupuncture. Acupuncture is part of Chinese medicine and both a metaphorical and a practical system of healing damaged systems and change. My research was balanced by studying the wisdom of Indigenous groups, which I understand to fundamentally be an attitude of humility before the great forces of nature. Later, while completing my dissertation, “Trigger Point Theory As Aesthetic Activism,” I compared the insights that I had taken away during those years of restoration and recuperation, to principles of thermodynamics. The crux of the theory that emerged as a CAM, rests on applying six rules to observing relationships between agents.

TPT applies six rules to systems in a state of chaotic collapse:

1. That there will be a small point of entry into a chaotic system (learned from acupuncture),

2. The paradox of time is that despite urgency, there is time to change (learned from CFS),

3. Layering information will test perception (learned from geographic Information Systems- GIS),

4. There will be critical disruptions in sensitive initial conditions (learned from politics),

5. Metaphors are idea models (learned from science), and

6. Play will teach (learned from art).

All these rules have continued to be tested in all my projects since. Each of my projects since Ghost Nets has been motivated by my interest in teaching the knowledge that created TPT. That was particularly true in developing the legal theory in The Blued Trees Symphony  (TBTS) project. In TBTS project, my focus was on the experience of individual trees was in a greater matrix of our planetary ecosystem. In my book, “Divining Chaos,” I described in depth how TPT, can be applied to a range of ecosystem problems, from environmental degradation to legal challenges to the status quo. At the crux of how I applied TPT in were considerations of ownership. The idea of ownership and how it manifests materially continues to evolve for me.

In crafting the legal theory for TBTS, my thinking hinged on how we define ownership. This is a theme addressed by many contemporary groups, including Indigenous communities worldwide, the Earth Rights and rights of nature initiatives at a transdisciplinary intersection between culture and science. It has also been a hotly contested topic in the creative commons movement.

In TBTS my particular contribution to the discourse on ownership was in discovering a trigger point between Euro-American cultural copyright law, part of our mercenary tradition of owning physical property, and where cultural property ownership overlaps in the USA with eminent domain law which determines land use. Eminent domain law blends murkily in turn into public works and community initiatives. This gets very complex to sort out, besides run-of-the-mill politics and greed, at the level of zoning, regulations and familiar traditions (which incidentally and obviously can clash between demographic assumptions about entitlement).

As I plan for and consider how to teach these upcoming workshops, I am less focused on the abstract ideas and more guided by visualizing the respective landscapes. I imagine walking the terrains and observing the small clues about ecosystem functioning, while mentally placing what I see in a map of the whole world. There will be conversations as we all take in our impressions and before we settle down to work.

My conceptual work is also very materialized, not only in the on-going cultivation of the Ghost Nets site. I have always painted as a mnemonic exercise from the site and will likely continue that practice. For thirty years, my focus has been on the light on surfaces here in Maine, the edge where water meets land and ecotones where life flourishes in the most abundance. As a mnemonic exercise, painting allows my mind to float free of its bearings and receive layered intuitive data from the ether as I let my eyes read the geographic clues before me.

Where the abstract ideas continue to get interesting to me now is in contemplating how to talk about what we see, not only in small groups but on the wider virtual proscenium we all inhabit now. Increasingly, the challenge throughout TBTS project, has emerged of creating structures for content moderation in the conversations that interest me as relevant to ownership and personal experience. We can mediate passionate experiences and beliefs about ownership and long-range thinking about whole Earth community strategies for survival if we can agree on the rules of engagement. I am, like many today fascinated by the rhizomatic forest model scientists are learning from. In a forest, what does a tree have to say or “own”?

“Divining Chaos; The Autobiography Of An Idea”, documents how I developed TPT as a work of conceptual art with pragmatic applications. The book’s is subtitled, "The Autobiography of An Idea." The implication to me is that life contributes as much to the evolution of an idea as any algorithmic strategy. Life is something that can be observed and that process of observation can be taught.

Some people who have read the galleys of my book only tookaway my personal resilience in the struggles that were integral to developing my thinking or my passion for environmental causes rather than the fulcrum with science that brought me to TPT. I think that's because people often have blinders on with women: feelings are usually good; ideas are often irrelevant when they come from a woman in a misogynist society.

Recently I pulled out three pages of quotes from my book that asserts what TPT is:

Relevant excerpts from the text of my book about TPT:

P. 18:

Physics addresses the nature of life through rules and processes in- dependent of human agency.

Many forms of art require rules humans invent but the best art is always a black swan, a surprising event. I have speculated that my rules for trigger point theory could be applied to agents in any chaotic system to divine where to find black swans.

p. 25:

My core premise in trigger point theory is that the butterfly point of emergence that precipitates a tipping point can be identified as much by “embodied” or “tacit” knowledge from an art practice as by mathematics, shaping the outcomes of a Complex Adaptive Model (a way to predict outcomes based on big data) as an artwork. Embodied or tacit knowledge is not unique to artists. Indigenous people often believe it is conveyed in dreams and ceremonies. In the last century, the scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi described how we internalize knowledge simply from being alive and sentient; making these processes conscious amplifies their power.

p. 26

My dissertation identified six rules to apply trigger point theory to a complex adaptive model. Each rule for trigger point theory drew from other disciplines in addition to physics as much as from my personal experiences. The power emerges when they are considered in tandem, in relationship and cyclically. This is how I propose art can help find the where of black swans.

Each rule for my CAM emerged from both my research as much as from my personal experiences.

1. There will always be a small point of entry into any chaotic system. This idea is at the heart of chaos theory, a mathematical discipline that identifies emergence, the point where systems will change. I propose that the process of aesthetic analysis, often rapid and instinctive, dependent on tacit knowledge, can also identify points where systems change. Identifying those points can have profound impacts on culture and, eventually, policy. In art as in science, attention to critical details and small points of entry is important.

2. There will be critical disruptions in sensitive initial conditions. This idea from complexity theory is that interactions between agents as points or nodes in any system are what determine the emergence of new systems. The observations of those interactions can predict futures. I argue that art functions with and observes anomalies in those sensitive states of interaction. Any set of sensitive conditions is vulnerable to disruption. Chaos and complexity are both theories that project into the nonlinear world of nodes in systems.

3. The paradox of time and urgency is that there is time to change. Even when there’s urgency, we have time. Newtonian physics presumed that time is linear and immutable. Einstein proved it isn’t that simple. Phys- icists are still grappling with the relationship between time and space. In the context of trigger point theory, time takes on complexity based not only on the physics but also on the perception of experience as we struggle to scale up solutions and make wise choices for long-term sus- tainability. Even in times of urgency such as ours, strategic planning has to take many variables into account.

4. Layering information will test perception. This idea is borrowed from the work of the late Ian McHarg, the father of landscape architecture, and from how geographic information system (GIS) layers statistical data about reality to identify points of logical convergence and probable prediction. McHarg drew topographic and demographic elements onto tracing paper. He used the resulting composites for his landscape analy- ses. The military was already using this process of layering to determine war strategies based on statistical information. The power of visualizing data this way is routinely illustrated when the New York Times creates GIS maps of voter distributions and behavior.

5. Metaphors are idea models. The work of George Lakoff and Mark John- son showed that metaphor is crucial to many forms of human thought and very important in political narratives. My personal experience of rape would embody the most visceral metaphorical idea model life gave me. It was a fulcrum connecting my personal story to what became an ecofeminist political analysis as the CAS we need to reorganize the agents that result in ecocide.

6. Play will teach. The philosopher John Dewey asserted this principle in his writings about art and education as a means to provoke imagination and original thinking. Game theory echoes this assumption. This may be the most important of the six rules for bringing traditional ideas about artmaking into culture.

Collectively, these rules identify how art can observe emergent trans- formation in systems and triage interventions. Because building a CAM is one way to consider relationships between disparate factors, the result is sometimes called a “knowledge space.” I am suggesting that trigger point theory creates a different kind of knowledge space.

p. 244:

Boolean theory forms the basis for any complex adaptive model. The CAM I started to investigate as The Blued Trees Symphony progressed was conjunctive. The rules were predicated on Boolean logic. The intention was to apply the rules to a CAM for creating a knowledge space.

The heart of my theoretical approach was that harmony comes with the other—including other species, other ways of thinking, other rules to approach information. In that approach, I was fulfilling the ideals behind my research into relationships in 1971. The philosophical source of my motivation was the dialogic world Martin Buber described in his writ- ings, particularly I and Thou. In the landscape of the world his writings painted, I saw a blue city where the spirit of art filled a sacred home—a home where our intuition might someday teach our better natures to live in a resilient future.

Trigger point theory was a conceptual project, triage for environmen- tal catastrophe. Many of the circumstances I tried to address with trigger point theory before The Blued Trees Symphony were the consequences of fragmentation, which disconnects the ecotones and their species that protect a healthy ecosystem. In that narrow sense, I was echoing Carolyn Merchant’s disquiet with the Age of Reason as a source of disconnect from nature. In a broader sense, I was challenging hierarchal ideas about ownership from the King James Bible.

p. 280

Any human life is replete with trigger points. Turn right or left on a path. Marry this person or another. Leave under threat or stay in a place you love. Art is the same: choose this color or another, that venue or another. I can’t guarantee that trigger point theory can reliably predict the future. It only suggests how we might observe what we know in a different way and how those observations could lead to insights into the probable outcomes of future complex relationships.

p. 282

I spent my whole life trying to puzzle out illogical things until I came up with trigger point theory. The impossible task I set myself in March 2020 was to look into the impenetrable future by sifting through the past to project possibilities.

p. 287

 Trigger point theory is an artwork, a drop of hope flying in the rface of despair, in defiance against apocalyptic probabilities, dysfunction, and division, a complex adaptive model for the ecological crises ahead, a vision of what art could contribute to change, the ephemeral sound of one hand clapping.

p. 289

Trigger point theory is a methodology to divine hope from chaos. Other artworks I’ve discussed make up a string of intuitive knowledge nodes: escape, recovery, physics, ecological restoration, empathy, fish as indicator species, ownership, forest contiguity, legal theory around Earth rights, cultural first responders, and ordinary conversations about extraordinary matters, such as morality and snow. And then there are dreams and life events.