I’ve been playing around with Blender the last week or so as I try to find some ways to spend this time in isolation as more of a residency: learn some new skills for the studio after this time of coronavirus. I’ve actually meant to learn a 3D modeling program for awhile, since I’m not a very good technical drawer and when pitching ideas for new spaces it helps to show stakeholders mockups that actually relate to the thing that will get made.
Makes sense, right?
I had played around with Cinema4D for a bit, but the price and then subsequent inability to find good torrents of it made me move on to something open source. Enter Blender! It’s been a bit of a learning curve, but things are stating to make sense. After 2 days I’ve almost modeled a clamp! Look at me go!
BUT the more interesting thing that using Blender has made me think about is what a tool is. I’ve always thought about a tool as the thing that allows me to pursue an idea. But ideas are not as concrete I usually think they are. In fact, just talking about them hardens them into something that is no longer what I originally thought of. Language itself, when applied to the first glimpse of an idea when it is still in a pre-language state — when it is in a cloud of feeling like something out of the Poetics of Space — is a tool that automatically shapes the idea. It’s like the idea is an amorphous jello and things like language are the forms that the jello sets up in.
I just watched Gladiator the other day (other day = within last year), which probably pegs me as a bit of a bro, but there’s a scene where Marcus Aurelius (he wrote Meditations! It didn’t occur to me until this viewing that it’s THAT Marcus Aurelius talking to the Aussie) is telling Russel Crowe about Rome and that one couldn’t do more than whisper the idea of what it is for fear it would disappear.
I think he was talking more about the fragility of what makes up powerful ideas, but this is also jumping into my head right now as him talking about the perfection of an idea being somewhat tarnished by the application of a verbal description (or written one). In some ways the poem and writing in general (or song and spoken word) are ideas working on the tool, language. Ideas are the tools for tools. And tools in turn are a tool for ideas. They sort of swap positions in who is leading the dance on the creation of something that has truly new properties.
In the upheaval that coronavirus has created, the rifts, inequality, and unsustainable nature of our current social-economic systems have been laid incredibly bare. Given this stark perspective, I’ve heard a lot of people talk about us needing to get back to some basic part of who we are. I don’t think there is some basic part of ourselves that exists. I’m coming from an object oriented ontology perspective here (grab Hyperobjects sometime if you haven’t read it), where I think talking about things like the environment and the need to get back to a place we once were is absurd: the world that exists now is an entangled complex object that can not be rewound: Russian nesting dolls entangled with a cascading tree of Russian nesting dolls. Talking of these past utopias is a way for people to stall in the present in inaction while debating exactly what the past was that we are all trying to get back to.
The culture around us has been shown to have toxic parts. We have pushed hard in directions we have suspected are harmful to our being in the long term, directions that are now in this crisis being shown to harm in the short term as well. But this bubble of the current moment we have created is a boundary to examine ourselves again. It provides an opportunity. We did the same thing in “simpler times” although they probably didn’t feel very simple then. Culture is a tool to shape values of self and community. It’s maybe time to switch the lead in the idea/tool dance. We now have the opportunity to shape culture in a way that reflects who we want to be in the future.
The idea, culture, is the tool shaping the tool of the individual.