Naive Yearly
The sunflower was the symbol of the day. In my opening remarks, I reflected on its meaning: In the language of flowers, sunflowers represent loyalty and adoration; they turn their heads to face the sun. It is also the national flower of Ukraine, and with its yellow petals and dark center, it is reminiscent of an eclipse, symbolizing both the end and the beginning of an era.
As I entered the film school, I realized something that had never occurred to me about sunflowers: they are heavy. I had been thinking about sunflowers metaphorically, and neglected them as literal, physical flowers. It was an ironic moment; in my conversations with the speakers, I had asked them to talk in first-person. I didn't want concepts or abstractions: I wanted figurative paintings of their lived experience.
...I wonder if sunflowers feel lonely; they might not even notice each other standing in a field of flowers. They are too busy trying to see and be seen by the sun. Chasing the light, not unlike how we chase visibility, failing to recognize those around us, and those absent. This publication is both for those who I met at the film school and those who weren't there, because you are also part of the network. Naive Yearly is not just one thing: one offline event, one group of people. It's also the newsletter, and the community around it, and these pieces, and anyone who engages with them. It spreads and erodes. Just like the internet, which is also multiple: productive, extractive, colonial, monolithic, capitalistic, but it is also full of poetry, wonder and care.
I'm happy it happened, and that the adapted talks are published here on Are.na. It is the site that opened my eyes to the wildflower fields outside of the walled gardens and reconnected me with hundreds of people with a similar love for the web.
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The middle distance Lucy Keer [Brian Cantwell] Smith’s first example [from On the Origin of Objects] is fanciful but intended to quickly give the flavour of the idea:
…imagine that a species of “super-sunflower” develops in California to grow in the presence of large redwoods. Suppose that ordinary sunflowers move heliotropically, as the myth would have it, but that they stop or even droop when the sun goes behind a tree. Once the sun re-emerges, they can once again be effectively driven by the direction of the incident rays, lifting up their faces, and reorienting to the new position. But this takes time. Super-sunflowers perform the following trick: even when the sun disappears, they continue to rotate at approximately the requisite ¼° per minute, so that the super-sunflowers are more nearly oriented to the light when the sun appears.
A normal sunflower is directly coupled to the movement of the sun. This is analogous to simple feedback systems like, for example, the bimetallic strip in a thermostat, which curls when the strip is heated and one side expands more than the other. In some weak sense, the curve of the bimetallic strip ‘represents’ the change in temperature. But the coupling is so direct that calling it ‘representation’ is dragging in more intentional language that we need. It’s just a load of physics.
The super-sunflower brings in a new ingredient: it carries on attempting to track the sun even when they’re out of direct causal contact. Smith argues that this disconnected tracking is the (sunflower) seed that genuine intentionality grows from. We are now on the way to something that can really be said to ‘represent’ the movement of the sun:
This behaviour, which I will call “non-effective tracking”, is no less than the forerunner of semantics: a very simple form of effect-transcending coordination in some way essential to the overall existence or well-being of the constituted system.