I instructed peter to take two techno-artifacts from our messy biocrafting station which we were setting up (it has a sign now!). We would use these to enact some sort of performance prototyping a behavioral tool. As with any performance, I find myself always internally cynical. I default to being my own devil’s advocate despite the purported performative basis of my research. Before hand, i always have a nagging feeling of, “this is stupid, we are going to dance around and pretend, and nothing will be accomplished because we know what’s going to happen.”

But all this serves to continually prove my point where, by forcing myself or others to physically realize a theoretical model of action, the doing immediatly 1) reveals the mental crap clogging up the original idea, 2) inspires and manifests unthought of arrangements, and 3) polishes the revealed good parts that were supporting the original idea.

At the end I had him bow and it seems like it would be a good idea to come up with a set of these performance self signals (ahhh there is a word for these in ethology that i cannot remember right now) where a creature performs certain actions that put it into and pull it out of a certain behavioral state. The self-signals can help put the performance into a focused activity for better reflection.

 

Showed the film, The White Diamond, by Werner Herzog this evening between jobs, and everyone loved it!

Am now about to [truck pulls up] help Santiago and some of the bat crew test their high-speed camera they are borrowing from Wcislo. Through pure perserverence in fighting unmatching equipment (they only had a nikon adapter, but canon lenses for the high speed camera), I made the strange discovery that canon Eos-M lenses can mount directly to the nikon. We haven’t been able to check and see if the lens distance isn’t too screwed up or anything, but it certainly fits just fine right in there.