Episode Details

Movement I: Epistemology

Metacognition is the awareness of awareness itself; the capacity to observe the structure that generates thought while experience is unfolding.

The unconscious mind is capable of discernment; it has its own delicate sensibility. It knows how to choose, how to divine.

— Jules Henri Poincaré, “Mathematical Creation,” lecture delivered to the Société de Psychologie de Paris, 1908; later published in Science and Method (1908).

As I was browsing X, I bumped into Eileen Gu [Watch video at the end of Movement I,] who had just won Olympic medals. She was asked how she thinks, and when she was responding, I saw myself reflected in her speech and in her work. I smiled unconsciously, and it led immediately to something very relaxing. I said to myself, oh, I must be doing something good. I must be observing myself being observed and then observing others. It all started again with the outside making me reflect about the inside.

I first remember wanting to lock myself in my room when I was ten or eleven years old with the excuse that I wanted to read, and I would be reading a book and then I would turn it over, put it on my belly, and with my eyes open I would start visualizing the different things that I wanted to do. Somehow I was projecting into my mind what I wanted to achieve. My mom would ask what I was doing, and I would say I am reading and daydreaming. She would answer keep on reading and daydreaming, and that became part of the understanding that my reality was something I could create.

It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover.

— Jules Henri Poincaré, Science and Method (original French: Science et Méthode), 1908.

When I was around thirteen and entered a darkroom for the first time, I witnessed the miracle of photographic printing. Under the red light, I saw the chemistry unfold, the image projected through an enlarger onto fiber-based silver gelatin paper coated with silver halide crystals. The paper would enter the developer bath, and slowly the image would reveal itself, then the stop bath for less than a minute, then the fixer, always shaking those trays. I would wash it, rinse it, hang it, flatten it, and light would become form through chemistry. That was the miracle; pure alchemy and transformation, where the field would become visible through disturbance.

And to think that being a photographer and spending hours in a darkroom was an early practice that gave me the strength to become an artist skipping art school, again I was asked in photo school to contribute to crits, while other fellows pinned their work on the wall, I would speak from a felt sense with no edits and I would ask questions, that is when I knew that the power of my intuitions had been trained as a method.

I began journaling quite early. Journaling was my companion, I would write daily and treat it as a friend. At the same time, I made small prints and asked my mother if I could buy cork so I could cover an entire wall in my room, and I pinned the photographs there. I took pictures every day. I took the camera to school and photographed everything. Before I learned the darkroom process, I had the rolls developed and placed the prints on the wall so I could observe them. I was already establishing a relationship with my own life through a lens. I was observing myself through images. Later I realized I was learning how to edit. I would allow images and ideas to spur, pin them up, leave them there, and days later after observing them quietly, I would naturally edit things out. That process is still alive in me as I am looking for patterns in a practice of observation and correlation.

I discovered that my method is observation itself, consciously applied across realms. I have lived this method for decades, and I became aware of how observation operates inside my own methodology. There’s this incredible momentum when I realize that just b