Hi David,

There was one particular thing you said some time ago about dissent as a positive thing. And in my case, I find myself appropriating this as "constructive dissent." 
 
Constructive dissent. That particularly resonates to me to a great degree although with a particular and loaded set of inversions and peculiarities. A huge sum of it is primarily coming from a place with a huge amount of its art historical narrative remains undocumented or invisible while also inaccessible. So, in light of this, I see constructive dissent as a means to pursue a kind of radicality or irreverence while being aware of the art historical field in relation to being a Filipino artist. And more and more, I find myself consciously engaging in dialogue with specific historical contexts in relation to my country while balancing it with the shifts taking place in the contemporary art world. But the weight of these tropes of historicities find themselves infiltrating more and more my stream of consciousness. In this regard, they've come to look like these images below.

The codes overlaid with my images of the city find themselves like a filter whether just on the surface or beyond affecting things. It's much like how the digital world just like how on social media platforms we easily filter things (whether consciously or unconsciously) and how some peculiar contexts specifically historical ones are in a way eliminated in pursuit of the aesthetic or perhaps it can also go the other way around. It's like how that glaring simulated version of the screen deepens its reach into our daily lives. Somehow, on a good note, I'd like to imagine insisting on making these invisible stories come to the surface and work with these technologies that conveniently mute or dilute things from their actual potential. I think in that way, that's the best way we can create a more positive and constructive outlook on the subject matter of dissent. It's much like how as artists, we become respective of shifting between different contexts and operating with them while also being deeply rooted and conscious of our own set of peculiarities. 

It's been a great exchange of ideas with you. I gladly enjoyed my time here.

Cheers and all the best from Manila,

​Gian

Hi David,
 
 
I’m glad it all fell into place somehow despite some unexpected detours and distractions that came along the way. And truly pleased you enjoyed my post.  On a side note, I find myself rather amused with the René Descartes excerpt for a good couple of minutes. As I was reading it, instinct has me figuring it out in the French. I was simultaneously reading and translating it.
 
It must have been an impractical habit of mine that stems back from the first semester I pursued postgraduate studies (almost a decade ago). It must have also been a kind of preoccupation to imagine elsewheres of different contexts/persusasions/historicities/systems/syntaxes/and so on if you were born somewhere where English is not your first language. And there’s always that uncertainty with a language you feel like you can’t completely express the recesses of your innermost thoughts. Yet somehow the reality of things being lost in translation is a form of dissent in itself and such actuality infiltrates a huge quotient of my artistic practice. These days I easily find myself precariously shifting from Filipino to English to French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Sometimes, it’s out of necessity but sometimes it’s also borne out of curiosity. It’s like distractions and detours that leads us to “elsewheres” which are in turn possibilities especially in light of the digital age, which is a Pandora’s box of discourses we have yet to surmount and properly catalogue… or at least we are somewhat pressured as it’s too ephemeral. The necessity quotient erstwhile is borne out of 

On this note, that particular image you left behind perfectly synchronises with my train of thought now… semi-linear yet actively seeking for contours and peculiar distractions here and there to break the cycle. Dissent is very much indeed linked to language and our desired forms of communication and also how we try to deviate from these often systemic means of communicating with each other and try to find our own negotiated terms like a universe or perhaps an orbit we imagined in light of ourselves.
 
​I end this post for now with an exterior and interior view of two cities I'm much fond of... a contrast between Berlin and Manila. I'm fascinated with the linearity of Berlin and how it enables me to be mobile and explore more (and easily navigate my way). This then is in contrast to a city like Manila where there's a restless reconfiguration as urban dwellers like me constantly insist on turning the city centre towards the peripheries or rather a "polycentric" hence postmodern vision of a city. The notion of centrality has been failing us immensely in terms of our capital city over the past few years. It's primarily due to our mobility issues and lack of sufficient infrastructure to efficiently take us here and there. This also perhaps sums up the tropes of the Apollonian and the Dionysian in me in Nietzschean terms but I'd always like to believe the latter is more exciting as things are in a restless state of movement. Lastly, this also sheds a light why dissent is in the core of the chaos surmounting living in a city like mine.... trying to find movement in something that hinders movement... embracing centrality when another centre emerges on the peripheries... the imaginary of another city infiltrating your way of life in the current place you're in... the simultaneity and discord much like detours and distraction contributing to your artistic process...

Best,
 
Gian

But it wasn't that passage in itself that got me ticking, it was your bit about blind spots.

People often talk about blind spots in relations to how they deal with problems that  can linger, expand and become entrenched obstacles. Focusing on problems reinforce them.
Sometimes the less direct look offers greater clarity.

Here I'm reminded of the practice of Averted Vision. Its used by astronomers when viewing faint object through a telescope. The astronomer moves their eye, looking away, and examining the object with peripheral vision.  I've just found that this practice is much older than thought, having been first recorded by Aristotle observing star clusters. I like finding out things like that.

Also, it appears there a a similar method called ‘Scope Rocking’ which sounds altogether more groovy! That method involves moving the viewfinder rather than the eye. Still, Averted Vision works for me.

Blind spots are interesting.
They speak of limits.

They are flags that remind us of a reality other than our own immediacy.
We can see and function beyond our natural limitations, but we require adaptation to do so. A change to our method, a shift to our perspective, an extension to our functionality.

We exist in a universe of infinite vanishing points yet default to one.
That’s not to say that this type of singularity doesn’t have value, just that it has a tendency towards greed and the monopolisation of our attention. It is, in itself a kind of blind spot. If we avert our vision we can break from its monocular ways.

My preference is to dissent from such singular absolute values, that yield a linear reality. That said, here's a linear perspective of me sitting, perceiving and focusing on the moment I had:

​Hi David,
 
It’s a pleasure to meet your virtual acquaintance! After a bit of the ineluctable delay of having to attend to a rather overwhelming degree of things concerning my health… here I am resurfacing to my own stream of consciousness pondering over the theme of dissent.
 
I have been reading on and off Joan Fontcuberta’s Pandora’s Camera. Photogr@phy After Photography. And I thought of sharing with you this rather riveting excerpt of his in one of the essays taken from Edgar Morin’s La vie de la vie. It goes like this:
 
            Every gaze implies a blind spot on the retina; every visual system involves
            an area of blindness that is the necessary counterpart to the area
            of elucidation. 

In this light dissent finds itself within these premises in which validating a peculiar way or manner of looking at things... and the stronger and deeper we delve into these actualities, the greater the blind spots we induce. As we immerse ourselves into the recesses of particularities and specificities, we also lose a lot. Or in a sense it's much like our perception and how its keenness fluctuates at certain periods of times and is condition based. The volatility of the whole matter still provides more crucial elsewheres and these unstable things in line with dissent is something I always find myself inevitably drawn to.

​I'd like to talk to you about Manila on another occasion. Allow me to just gather my thoughts in a more cohesive manner. In the mean time, I'd like to end this post first with an open-ended possibility of a quote in German which translates as "Utopia gets better and better the more we wait for it." I believe I have picked it up as an excerpt from one of those books I've been reading under the contemporary art, urbanism and cosmopolitanism umbrella. Somehow, don't you think that we as artists with our own set of imagined/created/induced/gestured utopias (which extends from aesthetic motivations down to the peculiar socio-political contexts and other transgressive motivations we fall into as we do our art)? Our so-called utopias, whether private or not, offer a sort of resistance on our end to the immediate environment and ecologies we interact with whether positive or negative. And each one will have his or her own set of inversions and peculiarities that could never be put precisely into words nor even gestures but rather just fleeting instances of constructs that can either evolve or just disappear.

In the meanwhile, I'm looking forward for our next interaction... and hopefully it comes with more clarity from my end.

Cheers from Manila,

​Gian
​