In the process of creating Orbit, one idea that’s struck me earlier on but took me about 18 months to work on it is the idea of using the body as a seeing eye. It is abstract and conceptual. And I’m not sure the movement manifestation is representative to the idea.  

Yet I keep getting back to it. By May/June 2011, I shelved the “bones” and “periosteum” sections after working on it for quite sometime. I felt I’d like to explore on ideas that’s more integral to the eye and seeing. So I got back to an article by Irene Dowd, 'On Metaphor', from her book Taking Root to Fly. It’s a book on a branch of somatic practice called “ideokinesis.” I’ve been reading this book on and off since I was a student at VCA. I revisit it so many times for creative process and practicing of ideokinesis, which is where my “internal imageries” method came from.

In 'On Metaphor', Dowd suggested that the stages of development of the human eye is an abstraction of how we see. She drew a diagram of the eye’s growth (which I imitated a poor version of it below) to clarify what might happen in ‘seeing’ and how it is happening...

...In each stage, except for the very first one, there is simultaneously both movement outward from the neural core towards the surface periphery of the body and movement inward from the outside towards the neural core. The stages successively provide a more and more complex and elaborate map of precisely how these oppositional streams of moving cells and light waves can travel, grow and interrelate.

If all the stages are put together in a single composite picture, they form a complex but consistent pattern of fluid dynamics. As a core moves outward towards the surface, it also expands to cover a broader area. Seeping out past the surface membrane, it dissipates even more widely into space. As the outside moves inward through the surface membrane, it coalesces as if compacting the whole of the boundless outside into a tine enclosed globe. Concentrating even more, it continues to stream into and through the centre of the central core itself. 

Gradually, the fluid dynamic was just a start of other emerging ideas. From the inward and outward dynamics through membranes, condensing in the body and radiating out, it seems like the body is like a plant taking in carbon dioxide, synthesising it with chlorophyll and releasing oxygen. The plants are product of sunlight, no doubt. I’m wondering if the fluid dynamic can apply to the Sun itself...

Somehow in a showing in October 2011, I found myself embodying a dying Sun. The fuel inside the Sun is gradually used up. As a red giant, the dying Sun would be swelling up until it has a maximum radius beyond the Earth’s current orbit, 250 times its present radius.  Then, intense thermal pulsation, will cause the Sun to throw off its outer layers, forming a planetary nebula until, as its fuel runs out in every level, the hot stella core collapses on itself. The core will cool down and fade into  a white dwarf over many billions of years...

RERERENCE

Irene Dowd. 1990. Taking Root to Fly: Ten Articles on Functional Anatomy (New York, NY: Contact Editions)