Evolution by Choice

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!Department of Design and Architecture

Master of Design !!!!!!!!

Evolution by Choice!Bodies and Minds On!

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A document submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Design Angela Edwiges Salcedo Miranda

Spring 2017 !

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Department of Design and Architecture Master of Design

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Evolution by Choice!Bodies and Minds On

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A document submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Design Angela Edwiges Salcedo Miranda

Kt.:020583-5929 MA Thesis Supervisor: Hildigunnur Sverrisdóttir

Thesis Advisor: Guðbjörg R. Jóhannesdóttir Spring 2017

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This thesis is 6 ECTS credit hours of a total 30 credit hours final project towards the degree of Master of Design. The written content of this publication as well as images are the responsibility of the author. No part of this publication may be reproduced

in any for or by any means without a written permission of the publisher: Iceland Academy of the Arts, Þverholti 11, 105 Reykjavik, Iceland. !

References to this publication should be as follows: Salcedo, Angela, “Evolution by Choice, Bodies and Minds On” Reykjavik: Iceland Academy of the Arts, 2017. !!!!!!!

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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Abstract. We are facing the fact that our capital-centered economics, —built on a reduced understanding of life that spread through colonialism—, have led us to seriously injure earth and multispecies life. Inspired in indigenous-Mesoamerican art-symbolism within the cross-disciplinary field of multispecies studies, my research aims to illustrate the complex nature of the living as a context to collectively envision alternative life-based ethics and thus, economics. Through the metaphorical dialogue between two concrete entities: a fern, seen as a biological and symbolic system (context for evolution) and the Icelandic turf house, seen as living craft (evolutionary design); I will reflect on the concept of fractal time, drawing a picture about why it might be essential for our evolutionary process. !!Keywords: Conscious Evolution, Time Decolonization, Mesoamerican Thinking, Icelandic Turf-house !

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!Index!!! !! Introduction ············· 4!!! Dreaming the Context: Complex Systems & Indigenous Thinking ············· 7!!! Logos, Ethos and Myth: Fern Gestalt and Interpretation ············· 9!!! Reading the Logos Deciphering the Ethos ············· 11!!! Choosing to Evolve: Fractal Time ············· 14!!! Crafting Evolution: The Icelandic Turf House ············· 18!! !! Final Thoughts ············· 20!!!Appendix A. A Cross-disciplinary Approach towards Economics of Life ············· 20 !Appendix B. Crafting the Fractal Consciousness ············· 20 !Appendix C. Mesoamerican Maps. Territory and Environmental Defenders in Danger ············· 21 !!! Bibliography ············· 22!!!!

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!!Introduction !!!“Humans are like insects that are transformed from one state to another in their evolutionary process. Some transform by going through other animals.” ! !

-Halldór Kiljan Laxness- !![My Mexican feminist soul feels like dissolving in this volcanic smokey bay to reclaim her Mesoamerican androgyny]. !!Few months before moving to Iceland, I went with my team of architects to the Mixe-Mesoamerican region of Oaxaca, in the northern highlands. We were meeting Honorio Alcántara, a friend that wanted us to design a piece of architecture there. Among us, was another friend, Jorge Ocampo, a young biologist that became intriguingly interested in the local ferns during one of our walks in the site. He collected some samples while telling us about them. His interest was so contagious that we were all bewitched, observing and taking photos of the pre-historical creatures. This intangible link between him and the organisms, might have been just an iteration of a scene that occurred for first time thousands of years ago in the same Mesoamerican-indigenous territories. !The intention of looking at the fern-entity as a metaphor for inquiry and discussion is evidently related to its natural or biological properties. But, beyond that, why is it interesting to speak poetically when referring to such an invisible link or connection? How these intangible or metaphysical threads could explain how past non-capitalist cultures, and still present indigenous societies, have kept the balance between what they get from and give back to nature? How can we take steps forward towards an ethos of attentiveness and reciprocity as the 1

unifying force to overcome capitalism? !When looking at the present approaches facing environmental disruption, it is clear that the metaphysical-spiritual debate has been treated as a separate matter. By going back to analyze the principles of the living, I intend to build on the contributions of biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela , for 2

bringing back to the evolutionary discussion the metaphysical gear as main driver of the system we call life.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Correspondingly, from the Mesoamerican point of view our multi-species becoming and evolution only exist in the intersection between both: the metaphysical and physical realms. The importance of recalling the concept of conscious evolution is that it allows me to emphasize that evolution is still going 3

on. Implying that either actively or passively we are choosing while becoming. Who in our minds do we want to become?, What content are we bringing into our collective ethical code? How are our bodies transforming? !My grain of sand to this venture will be crafted while standing with one foot in the field of multi-species studies (including related post-humanistic ideas) and with the other, in my own embodied, lived experience as the daughter of an indigenous Zapotec-Mesoamerican woman. I will from here intertwine the theoretical (written) framework of the first, with the indigenous worldview (art-symbolism) of the second. !Since my core belief is that reflecting on the concept of evolution linked to our human free will can empower us for switching from the economics of capitals to the economics of life, it is timely to consider that evolution has never been an individual process. The strongest has never been a one, but that multispecies collective whose organization and response diversity are best. I know, “making 4

kin is perhaps the hardest and most urgent part” . At least let’s say it out loud: in 5

this tiny planet we are all one tribe, and all together need to find out “How can we do the work of inhabiting and co-constituting worlds well?” 6

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Fig. 1. Young frond of fern (2015). Mixe region, Oaxaca, Mexico. Personal archive

Thom van Dooren, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster, “Multispecies Studies, Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness,” Environmental Humanities 8, no. 1 (2016): 1, accessed October 2, 2016, http://1

environmentalhumanities.dukejournals.org/content/8/1/1.full Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition, The Realization of The Living (The Netherlands: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1980).2

The concept of conscious evolution has been analyzed through a different path by Barbara Marx Hubbard and others. My role will be to reflect on it through a different path, within the context of the 3

mesoamerican-indigenous world view. Thomas Elmqvist, Carl Folke, Magnus Nyström, Garry Peterson, Jan Bengtsson, Brian Walker, and Jon Norberg, “Response diversity, ecosystem change, and resilience,” Frontiers in Ecology and 4

the Environment 1, no.9 (2003): 488-494, doi: 10.1890/1540-9295(2003)001[0488:RDECAR]2.0.CO;2 Donna Haraway “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 161, http://environmentalhumanities.org/arch/vol6/6.7.pdf5


environmentalhumanities.dukejournals.org/content/8/1/1.full

I am leaving behind generalizations and judgments of Western ‘colonizers’ (without denying responsibilities) but also leaving out romanticisms about the ‘colonized’ indigenous peoples. My intention is rather to open a synergic arena by bringing together the best of both. !What is relevant to this purpose is observing that while the predominance of the individualistic, capital-based mindset associated to western control structures has led the world to the actual Post-Chernobyl anthropocene ; the endangered 7 8

community-based Mesoamerican economy has arguably proven to know how to maintain harmony with and within nature throughout millennia. !As Indigenous-American thinker Kim TallBear suggests “scholars are increasingly pointing out the tremendous debts that post-humanist and related work owe to indigenous thought.” Indeed, both parts can learn from each other 9

in the search for answers to common questions. !In this context, the access to the root drivers of the Mesoamerican reciprocal dynamics of life, is the bet I’m offering in the need of establishing an intercultural dialogue as a way for making present and empowering my ancient legacy that is non-the less at risk in the jaws of patriarchy and neoliberalism. In a dreamlike fashion I’m bringing these thoughts to the table of one of the few turf-houses remaining in Iceland. As this earthly-multispecies-refuge, —crafted testimony 10

of the past—, is clearly becoming a present-artifact for reclaiming the nature-11

human potential that exists uniquely in this island: a smooth, fluid or non-fixed 12

young West. A highly networked country still exceptionally tribal in scale that reaffirms itself as feminist. !This hemispherical discussion demands of course the will for intercultural dialogue as a necessary step for speaking about universal interspecies ethics, revolution and evolution. The intention is “to go a step further by not only changing the way we think about our relations to the world, but also changing the way we think about thinking and knowing in general.” 13!!!!!

On this narrowing-the-gap-between-worlds basis, I will move to my main interest and contribution: awaking a reflection on how overlapping scales of time, its parallels and patterns might be re-considered as essential drivers for our survival and evolution. Where the importance of the lived experience first 14

claimed by phenomenologists will be rephrased in the context of the Mesoamerican time-frame. For re-signifying the meaning of the living as the process of becoming , both in the now and in the everlasting , I will tailor the 15 16

concept of fractal time. The expected result aims for the schizophrenic attempts of measuring time together with the idea of a dire death to decline. Releasing 17

the fluid potential for being and becoming in an ever-lasting now. !In the last part, looking at the turf-house as traditional craft (or collective art), I will reflect on how it can be seen as an evolutionary artefact and what are the opportunities it opens not just for imagining a consciously desired common future but, for making it happen. !This is therefore a call for architects-philosophers in spirit, for crafters of life as well as for architecture and art training students, professionals and scholars that want to explore different ways of understanding space-time. Particularly, for those wanting to move out of the tide of capitals to reconcile with the senses of life. This exposition might be also suitable for Mesoamerican-art audiences that are interested in having broader, deeper experiences. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Zaida Muxí and Josep M. Montaner, Arquitectura y Política [Architecture and Politics] (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 2011), 95.7

Donna Haraway “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159, http://environmentalhumanities.org/arch/vol6/6.7.pdf8


environmentalhumanities.dukejournals.org/content/8/1/1.full Op. Cit. 110

“Turfiction,” The Oh Project, accessed November 2, 2016, https://oh-project.squarespace.com/turfiction/11

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, The Smooth and the Striated, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).12

Guðbjörg R. Jóhannesdóttir and Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir, “Reclaiming Nature by Reclaiming the Body,” Balkan Journal of Philosophy 8, no.1 (2016): 46, doi: 10.5840/bjp201681413

Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (London: The University of Chicago Press, 1962).14

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 1983.15

Scott F. Gilbert, Developmental Biology (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates Publishers, 2006).16

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 1983.17

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Fig. 2. Fern’s frond with spores (2016). Reykjavík, Iceland. Personal archive

!Dreaming the Context: !Complex Systems & Indigenous Thinking!!As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.

Max Planck, Das Wesen der Materie, 1944 !!By the end of October days were already very dark in Iceland. Lack of external light seemed to have turned-on a light inside myself. Thoughts seemed to pop up, flow and organize much more clearly than before. Among other things, I had been reading about Mesoamerican-indigenous cultures. Some fragments telling the story of the moment of creation in the Popol Vuh resonated particularly in 18

every cell of my body. After moving back and forth between readings, the idea of a circular duality, —different from western binarism—, parallel to the Taoist circle of Yin and Yang, became stronger till finding permanent residency in my mind. !Out of routine, in that kind of zero-gravity state that the Icelandic smoothness 19

seems bound to trigger; full of learning sensitivity, the night of November 2nd an unexpected breakthrough occurred. It was 3 am when I opened my eyes half asleep. A self-generative circular image, depicting the young frond of a fern, stayed for a few seconds behind my eyes while waking up. Converging thoughts, memories and mental connections overlapped to eventually collide. In that moment, a timeless space opened making sense of a set of chained hypothetical realizations about my indigenous-Mesoamerican worldview. That was magical. Especially in the context of a world dominated by male values and rational thinking, it is both significant and poetical to be aware that dreams are right brain operated, meaning they occur at the supremacy of the feminine or non-rational brain-hemisphere. 20!The most meaningful spark from that night arouse the belief that such a self-generative (autopoietic ) entity, —the young frond of the fern—, was the symbol 21

that my Mesoamerican ancestors chose thousands of years ago to represent ‘divinity’ . A kind of divinity that semantically speaking differs from the western 22

conception. A parallel figure replicates in other ancient cultures corresponding with the Jungian description of a circular pattern that points to the most vital aspect of life, its ultimate wholeness . For instance, for the inuit Silap Inua was 23

the possessor of spirit. Also called Silla, meaning breath or spirit. A voice that created all what exists in life.

!!!Imagine we are all plugged into a divine holographic spiral that lays in the skies. Where myth, logos and ethos holding our collective consciousness are intertwined. Imagine that the crafting matter of this communal cognitive system is time: the primordial source of movement or the force that keeps us alive. !!

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One of the few Maya painted books that was reproduced in alphabetic writing during the spanish conquest. Later on was translated from the Quiché language to Castillan and copied 18

again. One of its versions made it to our days. Hildigunnur Sverrisdótir, “The Destination Within,” Landabréfið Journal of the Association of Icelandic Geographers 25, special issue (2011): 80. 19

Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess (U.S.A.: Penguin/Compass, 1999), 16.20

Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition, The Realization of The Living (The Netherlands: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1980).21

For the Maya this same ‘deity' was translated into Hunab-Ku under a different symbol. Compatible translations of this kind were common across cultures in Mesoamerica.22

Carl G. Jung, M. L. von Franz, Joseph L. Henderson, Jolande Jacobi and Aniela Jaffé, Man and his Symbols (U.S.A.: Dell Publishing, 1968), 266.23

Fig. 3. Time is the breath of universe. Via http://www.wakingtimes.com

!With this picture in mind, I will dedicate the following sections of this chapter to illustrate and describe life through the symbolism of the fern, seen either as a complex biological entity and the Mesoamerican symbol representing the universal collective consciousness. !From a biological perspective, in words of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, “living systems are cognitive systems and living as a process is a process of cognition.” In other words, the physical (bodily-earthly) realm of the 24

living is always intertwined and driven by a metaphysical (cognitive) existence. Where every living organism, from a tiny cell to the collective of cells that conform plant and animal bodies (including us), are kept alive only in their relation to a cognitive realm. Thus “Life begins not as quantities of this or that identifiable substance, but as quantities of force which, in relation, produce identifiable or discernible qualities.” 25!Although I will sometimes refer to the fern symbol as the glyph of the speech 26

(‘voluta del habla’, as designated by scholars), for the purpose of this reflection I will look at it as the depiction of both: our cognitive realm (expressed by our speech or breath) and the universe’s (represented by the breath of universe or time). Where this metaphysical mind, as I mentioned before, is the driver gear or the consciousness of an earthly “multispecies relationality tuned to the temporal and semiotic registers [of] a lively world in which being is always becoming, becoming is always becoming-with.” 27!Even when this may seem religious or fictional craft, the intention of such a decolonizing defiance is first to make this approximation graspable, so we can analyze why the oblivion and denial of such metaphysical, cognitive gear might be part of our collective disconnection to nature and life. !In addition, I am inviting Mesoamerican-art experiencers to be aware that as long as we empathize with this smooth-driven , multi-fractal conception of life, 28

our perception skills (particularly the visual) will move from being just surfaces voyeurs to become haptic sensors . 29!This sensorial-awakening approach also might bring missing pieces to the historical Mesoamerican puzzles supporting unofficial versions that are revealing more and more the advanced pre-colonial societies that once inhabited such a world. Whose heirs remain alive. 30!!!!

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Fig. 4. Tepantitla Godess Mural. Teotihuacan Mexico. Via http://www.uweduerr.com


Jeffrey A. Bell and Claire Colebrook, Deleuze and History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 21.25

The glyph of the speech is a convention with countless variations, that replicates in ancient codices throughout the vast Mesoamerican territory26

Thom van Dooren, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster, “Multispecies Studies, Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness,” Environmental Humanities 8, no. 1 (2016): 2, accessed October 2, 2016, 27

http://environmentalhumanities.dukejournals.org/content/8/1/1.full Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, The Smooth and the Striated, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 486.28

Op. Cit. 49229

Linda Manzanilla and Leonardo López Luján, Historia Antigua De México [Ancient History of Mexico] (México: M.A. Porrúa, 1994).30

http://environmentalhumanities.dukejournals.org/content/8/1/1.full

Logos, Ethos and Myth: !Fern Gestalt and Interpretation!!The study of non-linear dynamic systems has helped Western scientists to also recognize order in phenomena that were previously considered chaotic and random. These patterns reveal new sets of relationships which point to the essential balances and diversity that help nature to thrive. Indigenous people have long recognized these interdependencies and have sought to maintain harmony with all of life. 31!For the academic tradition, religious or spiritual beliefs on one hand, and objective knowledge on the other, seem to be different incompatible things. This predetermination has been so far a limitation for approaching scientific problems in their multidimensional, complex nature. The relatively recent theories on affect , are taking part in the incorporation of this metaphysical 32

existence. It is precisely a holistic comprehension of life, —experienced as an ever changing entanglement of multi-fractal scaling phenomena—, originated and affected by the primordial cognitive convergence between chaos and order (black holes and gravitational waves), what has been the basis for the long lasting sustainability that characterizes Mesoamerican societies. The autonomous (non-capitalist) Zapatista territories of the ancient Maya, constitute an exemplary living case . 33!Nevertheless, since the ‘valid’ or official logos we are taught in schools worldwide passes through the filters of colonial or colonized education structures, the native-tacit understanding has been broadly underestimated, desegregated and shut off even by indigenous people themselves. Helena 34

Norbert-Hodge and her collaborators have affectively documented the cultural 35

disruption and ethnic shame prompted by the predominant education structures in indigenous communities. In consequence, the science contained in art, crafts, and story telling has been often reduced to its mythical character. Nevertheless, myths were metaphors based on strict scientific observations. !Metaphors have multiple levels of meaning that are perceived simultaneously. They supply a plasticity to language without which communication would often be less interesting, sometimes difficult, and occasionally impossible. 36!The unfolding of these metaphors would therefore reveal the underlying logos. New fields of study, —for instance ethnobotany that focuses on the long lasting relationships between peoples and flora —, are opening reflections about such 37

entanglements. !

!!!The reproduction of artistic metaphors in Mesoamerica, in contrast with the present symbolic or subliminal top-down visual propaganda—, was first communicated by mouth of word and then expressed through diverse forms of collective art. In an act of knowledge embodiment but also as a grassroots 38

action of ethics, politics, mental and physical health. This crafted, non-alphabetic words, where the primacy of semiotics is achieved by capturing essential features in a synthetic form, have the capacity of establishing 39

dialogues with diverse audiences beyond linguistic differences, literacy and temporalities. In words of Deleuze: “Great thought is untimely; it seizes upon a truth or essence that cannot be reduced to its occurrence within chronological time. If philosophy, art and science have any value it is only insofar as they transcend lived time to grasp that which has a radically eternal reality.” 40!A common timeless code to connect multidimensionally with the world is something that is currently lacking in the global circuits of knowledge, despite the powerful, restless global inter-networks we count on. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Ray Barnhardt, Angayuqaq O. Kawagley, “Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Alaska Native Ways of Knowing,” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 36, no. 1 (2005): 8-23.31

Ben Anderson, Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014).32

Diana Taylor and Lorie Novak ed., Dancing with the Zapatistas: Twenty Years Later (New York: Duke University Press, 2015), http://scalar.usc.edu/anvc/dancing-with-the-zapatistas/index33

Deloria, Vine and Daniel R. Wildcat, Power and Place: Indian Education in America (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Pub., 2001), 734

“Local Futures”, Accessed November 2, 2016, http://www.localfutures.org35


Lira, Rafael, Alejandro Casas, and José Blancas, Ethnobotany of Mexico: Interactions of People and Plants in Mesoamerica (New York: Springer, 2016).37

Op. Cit. 1738

Pablo Escalante, Los Códices Mesoamericanos antes y después de la Conquista Española [Mesoamerican Codices before and After the Spanish Conquest] (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura 39

Económica, 2010), 20. Jeffrey A. Bell and Claire Colebrook, Deleuze and History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 8.40

Fig. 14-15. Two convergent pyramids symbol and the ‘invisible’ threads of time. Left: personal piece (Iceland 2015). Right: Woolen handiwork of Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico (2014). Personal Archive.

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Illustrating the idea of a timeless-time (divinity) or the collective consciousness through the metaphorical symbol of the young frond of a fern would make sense to the Mesoamerican societies that were permeated by botanical expertise, as the indigenous medical-herbalistic manuscript known as Codex De La Cruz-Badiano accounts. Consequently, pieces of art were considered divine themselves, as they expressed a time-based feedback between the creator and creation. Between the subjective and the intersubjective realms. !A scientific layer of content or logos, might be present not only in the shape or explicit visual content of Mesoamerican art, but in every aesthetic or material feature participating in a piece. Under this consideration, art becomes a multi-fractal expression. Meant for the collective venture of re-crafting an ever-changing code of ethics pulled by the force of reciprocity. An ethos or divine 41

agreement between humans and time. Together, logos and ethos, constituted what is considered a religious belief or myth. !The look I’m talking about here conveys not the human-centered science pursued by western modernity, but a sense of nature that venerates all animals, plants and humans as object creatures in which the deity resides; they are all considered to stand aligned on level ground. These are [also] the eyes of pre-Meiji Era Japanese, before the forward progress of civilization began. 42!Traversing linguistic differences to make a deeper reading of the glyph of the speech, —comprehending better its significance for indigenous societies—, is possible today by looking at the logos or scientific biological features of ferns. Which is fascinating. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Fig. 7. Young frond in my hand (2015). Totontepec, Oaxaca, Mixe Region (Mexico). Personal archive

Figs. 5-6. Alebrije. Contemporary wooden craft with young fern’s frond motifs (2016). Zapotec region of Oaxaca, Mexico. Personal archive

Thom van Dooren, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster, “Multispecies Studies, Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness,” Environmental Humanities 8, no. 1 (2016): 1, accessed October 2, 2016, 41

http://environmentalhumanities.dukejournals.org/content/8/1/1.full Kenya Hara, Designing Design (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers, 2007), 340.42

Reading the Logos Deciphering the Ethos !!Since my point for now is illustrating this metaphysical realm driving life as a base to enter into our main matter, —that is to say time—, I will just briefly name and comment on the biological properties I've found relevant to this purpose. Although scholars haven't referred to the entity fern, the academic work exploring the different aspects of Mesoamerican worldview is vast and at this stage becomes an immediate source for further interpretations. The fern's biological characteristics can be read as fractal metaphors contained in the metaphor fern as a whole. Where the total set I suggest participates in the indigenous-Mesoamerican understanding of the living. !The non-human vitality of the vascular plant achieved by the constant motion or ollin —in the Mesoamerican tradition — reminds me of the Spinozist very active 43

concept of monism that in an updated scientific understanding speaks about 44

the self-organizing or ‘smart’ structure of living matter referred to by Rosi 45

Braidotti in The Posthuman. Where synaptic animal-humans and others, 46

navigate at heartbeat pace pulled by gravitational laws while becoming other animals, while becoming-earth. As their lower bodies are waved together by 47

rhizomatic terminals. Running underground to interconnect the more than 10 thousand fern species throughout the noosphere. The upper bodies, as mentioned previously, rooted in the astral canvas, follow the laws of universal ‘time’ or consciousness. Both the rhizomatic heart and the rooted mind display into a divine (cognitive) androgynous speech or breath. !…All living organisms are a perceptual organ we call a body (plant body/animal body/human body); it is the body that allows the organism to develop self awareness, intelligence and the ability to search for meaning, and thus ascribing these capacities only to a human mind separated from the body is too limited. Once we realize and acknowledge this, we can come to understand that nature is indeed not an object out there […] But rather, that which carries us. 48 49!The fractal and hermaphrodite features of the fern are associated respectively to what has been explained by academics as an “unfolding of a cosmic duality that projects in nature’s daily life. Corn for instance was at shifts feminine […] and masculine.” 50!!

!What touches the idea of a “cyborg ‘sex’ […] that restores some of the lovely replicative baroque […] and nice organic prophylactics against heterosexism.” 51

Where each and both, the feminine and masculine, hold pairs of polar yet complementary concepts that are always open, fluid, non-hierarchical and in constant change in the search for balance. An imperative of multidimensional 52

non-symmetrical equilibrium that demands the ever mutable synchronization with the cosmos to tune the opposites. As in “Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, 53

‘life’ is a tendency towards difference, creativity, variation, becoming.” 54

Therefore, such diverse existences are a synonym of plenitude and abundance. The hemispherical cognitive activity in the human brain exemplifies this autopoietic becoming in-between, in a graspable scale: !The human brain lobes, while appearing symmetrical, are functionally different. This specialization is called hemispheric lateralization […] A bridge of neuronal fibers called the corpus callosum connects and integrates the two cortical lobes so that each side knows what the other is thinking. 55!!!

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Sylvia Marcos, “Embodied Religious Thought: Gender Categories in Mesoamerica,” In Religión 28, no. 4 (1998), 21. 43

Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (New York: Zone Books, 1990).44

Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (UK: Polity Press, 2013), 56.45

Op. Cit. 6746

Op. Cit. 81.47

Guðbjörg R. Jóhannesdóttir and Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir, “Reclaiming Nature by Reclaiming the Body,” Balkan Journal of Philosophy 8, no.1 (2016), 45, doi: 10.5840/bjp201681448

Op. Cit. 4649

Sylvia Marcos, “Embodied Religious Thought: Gender Categories in Mesoamerica,” In Religión 28, no. 4 (1998), 9.50

Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto. Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in The Cybercultures Reader 2000, ed. David Bell and Barbara M. 51

Kennedy (London: Routledge, 2001), 292. Sylvia Marcos, “Embodied Religious Thought: Gender Categories in Mesoamerica,” In Religión 28, no. 4 (1998), 24.52

Op. Cit. 1953



Fig. 8. The Brain as hermaphrodite autopoietic spiraling system. Background illustration via http:// www.etsy.com

!!The property of Fractality describes as well aspects of the Mesoamerican ethics code that can be read in terms of mathematical fractal and related theories. For instance, the idea of nature’s high sensitivity to initial conditions, a complex behavior commonly known as the butterfly effect, in the Mesoamerican ethics fosters the need of maintaining harmony between all scales and all beings. Since the value and role of entities don’t depend on their quantity or measure, but on their qualities and relationships within the world, through time. In a post-anthropocentric conception that refuses to assign “difference on a hierarchical scale as a tool of governance.” In the same way, since this vision 56

regards life as a complex-relational (non-linear) system, every action, no matter whether it is about using or not using a straw or running for the presidency of a country, must be taken consciously. As the effects are potentially equally immense. !Mentioning one more important reflection about fractality; in the earthly or tangible world, all that was and is being created by nature is an imperfect replica or an imperfect fractal of a previous existing recipe. Thus, the power and beauty of nature resides in this ‘imperfect’ uniqueness. Imperfection becomes therefore divine. Such an unquantifiable set of variables that make possible for difference to exist are related to laws of order and chaos. Gravity and time. The question that opens here is how time, as the complementary gear of a gravitational force that is variable or multi-fractal, became a measurable sellable product? How did we start selling our animal-human time-based cognitive realm and how could this be linked to the dominance of masculine aggressiveness? !Following the context of these same queries, the frame of time where Mesoamerican people swing in the search for meaning and balance is cosmic or prehistorical. Therefore futuristic. !In the next chapter I will make a more detailed review of the relation between the glyph of the speech and time. For now, I’ll just put forward that such a dynamical schema, the young frond of the fern’s continuum, will be treated as the depiction of the space-time continuum. !!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Fig. 9. Glyph of the Speech sculpture. National Museum of Anthropology and History. Mexico (2014). Personal Archive


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Fig. 10. Life Cycle of Ferns. Via http://http://wizzyschool.com

!Choosing to Evolve: !Fractal Time !!The city of the Maya, as the ancient cities of Cambodia, China or Iran, is an imago mundi […] an absolute and real space […] Polarized by a center that holds the pyramid or palace. Expression, word and figure of a divine plan for all that is created. A social and 57

moral plan that provides oneness to things, living beings, natural accidents and the mind that meditates upon the universe 58!In a previous event, two years back in Mexico, Juan José Santibáñez architect and I were exploring the archeological site of Palenque, in the southern Maya-Mesoamerican coast. Among other curiosities, we were amazed when noticed that the profuse stone galleries crowning the top of many of the pyramids looked clearly alike the surrounding system of roots lying at the base of the exuberant jungle trees. It was not the first time we wondered how could those ancient people have such a great sensorial ingenuity and refinement, as for recognizing beauty in places that for us may often seem ordinary. Rejoicing by this aesthetic realization we kept on walking. !It was until I stretched my indigenous roots by crossing the Atlantic Ocean to come to Iceland, when I would awake again to confront that moment. Our sense of peripheral sight was maybe very keen, even squeamish, but still short in hapticity for finding meaning. How is it that neither in the academic nor in the everyday circles of knowledge has been considered that those crowning roots at the top of the pyramids contain the converging sky as an intentional physical component of the architectural space? !Exposed by Carl Jung, recurrent converging triangles that in the eastern tradition are among those geometrical figures called yantras, symbolize the tension between the opposites in the self (conscious and unconscious). Hence, the dynamic wholeness as the process of creation or becoming. Not 59

surprisingly, such properties pertain as well to the Mesoamerican conception of the pyramids. Described as a cosmogram that imitates the foundation of the universe; “sacred space that expresses the existential experience of being in the world. A meaningful, conscious world.” 60!I wonder if the omission of the upper convergent pyramid in the discourses is just lack of interest in a matter like the sky, that is intangible and can't really be measured. Anyway, I rather think the feminine side of our hermaphrodite cognitive existence ‘got lost’ somehow, together with our contemplative self. !Thinking in works of art of James Turrell, What is the sky if not the escape to infinity? Or the cognitive tunnel into the time-governed cosmos as a way to establish a dialogue with our gravity-governed inner cosmos?

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Fig. 11. Sky-Space by James Turrell. U.S.A. Via http://cavetocanvas.com

Miguel Rivera Dorado, La Ciudad Maya: Un Escenario Sagrado [The City of the Maya: a Sacred Scenario] (Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 2001), 67.57

Op. Cit. 7158

Carl G. Jung, M. L. von Franz, Joseph L. Henderson, Jolande Jacobi and Aniela Jaffé, Man and his Symbols (U.S.A.: Dell Publishing, 1968), 268.59

Miguel Rivera Dorado, La Ciudad Maya: Un Escenario Sagrado [The City of the Maya: a Sacred Scenario] (Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 2001), 67.60

Back in the moment of creation, the attraction and intertwining or feedback between dual (non-binary, instead vortical and autopoietic) elemental components, were essential for life to start awaking. Call it physics, biology or myth. Life in its essence is a relation or a set of relations called cognition . A 61

cyclical unfolding in-between opposite poles. Sufis explain it in terms of sound and call it vibration . Intermittently pause and activity. Varela and Maturana 62

explain it in terms of learning stages, in a process they call structural coupling. 63

In physics, it is the continuum feedback between space and time. As happens in magnetism, each pole is a vehicle for the other. As in the living both poles are intertwined, holding the opposite, therefore, both are made out of both. !This attraction for the opposite in the Deleuzian or affective sense, is ‘The’ driving force that keeps life in motion. And, it has nothing to do with hierarchical binaries . Finding balance is thus, an opening/perceiving-closing/knowing-64

choosing while becoming. !The body is the place of intersection of the different identities emerging from closure, which makes it so that inside and outside are intricated. We are and we live in such an intertwined place. Our body doesn’t have a single external identity alone but constitutes a meshwork divided and intertwined without any other solid foundation than its own procedural determination 65!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Synaptic chains of impulses promoted by the biggest or tiniest knot in the system is speculatively simultaneously affecting all scales in the universe in quantic terms. While the perceptible physical effects are unfolding exponentially in terms of non-linear dynamics. Mesoamerican people call this responsibility we are as a becoming, the divine agreement. What turns out into a main task 66

but, moreover, into a core existential fulfillment. Where the need of giving becomes instinct. Whereas generosity becomes the new reciprocity. Here, the ultimate source of life is of course love, in the broader sense. Which is empathy. Varela alike other phenomenologists also used the term inter-subjectivity . As 67

Mesoamerican, I understand it means the ability to filling and feeling myself with the ‘other’ (that is actually ‘me’, in a multispecies context). In a conscious act of self-love and health. Buddhists call it compassion. !Reciprocity also entails the constant listening and co-responding with the collectives that inhabit us, allowing them to follow their own learning tempos: microbes, cells, organs, parts of the body, mind-body. As well as with the multispecies collectives that we share scale with and inhabit: best pals, neighborhood, tribe, earth, universe. Allowing them, at the same time, to follow their own learning tempos. This listening or sensing skill has no recipes nor rational but cognitive-intuitive explanation. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Fig. 13. Ground roots system. Palenque, Maya region, Mexico. Personal ArchiveFig. 12. Stone sculpture crowning pyramid. Palenque, Mexico. Personal Archive


Inayat, Khan, The Mysticism of Sound. Victoria (B.C.: Ekstasis Editions, 2004).62


Katarina Bonnevier, Behind Straight Curtains: Towards a Queer Feminist Theory of Architecture, (Stockholm: School of Architecture, Royal Institute of Technology, 2007), 19.64

David Rudrauf, Antoine Lutz, Diego Cosmelli, Jean-Philippe Lachaux and Michel Le Van Quyen “From autopoiesis to neurophenomenology: Francisco Varela’s exploration of the biophysics of 65

being,” Biological Research 36 (2003): 35, http://brainimaging.waisman.wisc.edu/~lutz/VarelaHommage_Biological_research_2003.pdf Miguel Rivera Dorado, La Ciudad Maya: Un Escenario Sagrado [The City of the Maya: a Sacred Scenario] (Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 2001), 68.66

David Rudrauf, Antoine Lutz, Diego Cosmelli, Jean-Philippe Lachaux and Michel Le Van Quyen “From autopoiesis to neurophenomenology: Francisco Varela’s exploration of the biophysics 67

of being,” Biological Research 36 (2003): 21-59, http://brainimaging.waisman.wisc.edu/~lutz/VarelaHommage_Biological_research_2003.pdf

!!In Deleuzian words “time in its pure state is intuited, and becomes revolutionary when intensities are experienced as having their own duration.” Faster or 68

slower, evolution depends on the possibility for living organisms to follow their own intensities and durations. !All scales need to go inwards (in silences or pauses) as much as they need to go outwards. In the openings they perceive the environment, in the stopings they realize and write down in the intersubjective memory storage called consciousness. So the collective in question, —for instance neuron as a collective, mind as a collective, noosphere as a collective—, is informed for self-organizing, tuning and adapting. Rhythm patterns in a specific scale are not fixed either, but changing [Appendix. B]. !!!!!!

!!The question is when to meet with ourselves in those spaces for entering into the silent smooth of the multi-synchronic evolutionary time; If in our current life 69

“even those times spent outside work —time spent viewing television, listening to one’s iPod, taking leisure breaks— are areas of capitalist production and exchange.” 70!Puzzling the pieces together, by bringing forth the concept of fractal time, I want to set in motion the idea of a time that is experienced as a multifractal overlapping of living patterns or rhythms. As a continuum of projections and gears that unfold from the sky to intertwine with the earthly realm of the living. A time that only exists in life, as a cognitive or autopoietic process. Exhausting its rules in terms of scales at certain limit. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Fig. 16. Fractal gears in terms of time and gravity in a dynamic system. Via http://giphy.com


Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, The Smooth and the Striated, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 486.69

Op. Cit. 2870

Crafting Evolution: The Icelandic Turf House !!!!All living beings are “sexual to the core of our being“ Buhner writes that if you refuse to see the presence of sex every place and in every thing of the Earth, you can never understand Earth, never truly act for the Earth. 71!Last summer I spent some days in one of the group of three turf-houses by the Jon Sigurdsson Museum in Hrafnseyri. Since the matter concerning this reflection has evolutionary purposes, I will allow myself to reduce my aesthetic judgments to one expression: that was orgasmic. And poetical. I felt like taking roots in there. I mean, isn’t evolution about driving kicks for life? !According to Pallasma’s hypothesis on the absence of the dimension of time in the cyborgs era, it is our fear to wear and death what has pushed us to 72

occupy refuges that aim at an ageless perfection . It is certainly death or the 73

moment of zero degree what capitalism has emphasized to make an 74

abstraction of our lives into measurable quantities. The swinging of the tick-tack has integrated into the daily life as a reminder of the limited frame we have to succeed before annihilation. !Perhaps the most powerful virtue of the turf-house, as happens with other non-fixed ways of handmade crafts, is that at the peace of a rhizomatic heart that pulsates under the soil, it responds to the multiplicity of fractal bodily tempos and rhythms. In a mutual haptic becoming that opens silent spaces, as moments of enclosure for establishing a series of cognitive and bodily dialogues-couplings and failures. Awaking our poetical instincts and thus, guiding our path towards evolution. !Following the rhetoric of the previous chapter, the fact that the turf-house is literally alive, makes it potentially subject to death. The potential that lies in such a vortical tension, is not much that of relieving our fears of death subconsciously or something. But that of giving life back to us, demanding our entire presence (in every cell and the whole of our body) to keep feeding it, in the now. !Whereas the inter-cultural possibility of the turf-house in the context of this reflection, may be the excuse of its finite materiality to start a collective discussion about the meaning of death. Being myself the cyborg identity 75

behind these lines, Inspired in Rosi Braidotti and the Mesoamerican tradition, I will expose some starting thoughts in this respect: !!

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Fig. 17. Icelandic turf house via http://bondwest.files.wordpress.com

Fig. 18. Icelandic turf house by Thorsten Scheuermannia. Via http://www.flickr.com

Guðbjörg R. Jóhannesdóttir and Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir, “Reclaiming Nature by Reclaiming the Body,” Balkan Journal of Philosophy 8, no.1 (2016), 44, doi: 10.5840/bjp201681471

Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto. Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in The Cybercultures Reader 2000, ed. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy 72

(London: Routledge, 2001). Pallasmaa, Juhani, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (Chichester: Wiley-Academy, 2005), 32.73


Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto. Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in The Cybercultures Reader 2000, ed. David Bell and Barbara M. 75

Kennedy (London: Routledge, 2001).

!!!!“Death is the event that has already taken place at the level of consciousness.” In the mesoamerican hermaphrodite logic, death is 76

consciousness. “We are all synchronized with death—death is the same thing as the time of our living, in so far as we all live on borrowed time […] Death, as the driver gear that keeps life in motion, feeds life. “The temporality of death is time itself, by which I mean the totality of time.” 77!In the Mesoamerican-Nahuatl myth, there is an anime called tonalli that inhabits the body, specifically the head. It travels all the way around during dreams in the night. In extraordinary events it can take off from the body, but it also leaves the body during orgasms. 78!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Final Thoughts!!!Along this theoretical essay I have borrowed concepts and language from the natural and exact sciences, as well as from continental philosophy to demonstrate, how the essence of contemporary scientific theories was embedded in what is known as Mesoamerican-indigenous worldview or myth. Such mythical stories expressed through bodily practices like traditional handiworks and vernacular architecture. Reaching the conclusion that an evolutionary living pattern, rather than linear or circular, has the complexity of the spiraling motion and geometry found in the shape of a young frond of a fern. !From a critical-feminist perspective I analyzed broadly the concept of time to provoke a collective reflection about the possible causes of the present narrow understanding. More importantly, I pictured an alternative complex conception of time, proposing that as the natural tangible world, it might have a fractal nature. Therefore, since it describes an asymmetrical, ever-changing, multi-scalar behavior, it is unhealthy to treat it as a monetary, measurable unit. Instead, It can be experienced as a metaphysical matter that intertwines with the physical, filling with life multispecies living bodies. !Along the argument I defended that learning lessons from mythical indigenous thinking, is a way to overcome the current systemic striation called capitalism. To enter future, more complex paradigms, guided by ethics of life rather than by laws of capitals. !Finally, I started an exploration of the Icelandic Turf-House, seen as a smart-evolutionary object that allows the mind and body to follow fractal living temporalities. Even though I just opened the doors of this topic, it is a thread that I look forward to investigate further in the next stages of my design process. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Fig. 20. Maya calendaric wheels. via http://mexicolore.co.uk !Upper wheel > Solar Calendar: 365 kin count Sky/Breath-Speech/Consciousness/Time/Death !Bottom wheels > Ritual Calendar: 260 kin count Earth-Moon/Ground/Heart/body/gravity/fertility

Fig. 19. The smoothness of Hrafnseyri, Iceland (2016). Personal Archive


Op. Cit. 13377

Sylvia Marcos, “Embodied Religious Thought: Gender Categories in Mesoamerica,” In Religión 28, no. 4 (1998), 24.78

!!Appendix A. A Cross-disciplinary approach towards the economics of Life !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Appendix B. Crafting the Fractal Consciousness !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Schema 1. Personal elaboration. Approaching the economical systemic problem from cross-cultural perspectives. Fern illustration via personal archive

Schema 2. Consciousness crafting process. Personal interpretation schema based on Varela and Maturana theories on living systems. Illustrations from left to right: brain via http://www.reset.me, DNA pattern via http://www.pinterest.com, nervous system hologram via http://askabiologist.edu, neuron cell via http://health.howstuffworks.com

!!Appendix C. Mesoamerican Maps. Territory and Environmental Defenders in Danger ! !!

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Map of Mesoamerica via https://moon.com

Environmental Defenders in Danger in Mesoamerica (2012) via http://miningwatch.ca

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!Web Sources!!“Local Futures”, Accessed November 2, 2016, http://www.localfutures.org !“Turfiction.” The Oh Project. Accessed November 2, 2016. https://oh- project.squarespace.com/turfiction/ !!

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Evolution by Choice