Imagining A yo Z: Z is for Zooming Past the End

Keeping Watch (M.A. Reilly, April, 2012, Plymouth, England)

Z is for Zooming Past the End

I like to experiment and did so with this A to Z blogging challenge.  I wanted to write about imagination and thought the constraint of the alphabet and the use of verbs would help me to think.Out of that work, the idea of being a verb emerged and I think it is a big idea and I'm glad I had time to explore it.

In other ways though, the constraint of writing about a single topic for a month, has been a drag.  It has kept me from writing frequently about topics closer to my heart, and ones that emerge alongside living.  So with this lesson in mind, I bid farewell to A to Z blogging and return to my regular blog.

Thanks for taking time to stop in and view and now it's back to living and writing and making art. To get myself started below is a slideshow of images I made,mostly with my iPhone while in England last week.

Imagining A to Z: Y is for Yell and Be Silly

Y is for Yell and Be Silly

 At the center of this post is one word: verb.

I. Be a verb.
Yell.
Be silly.

Out of that, imagination rises.

Buckminster Fuller:

I live on Earth at present,
and I don't know what I am.
I know that I am not a category.
I am not a thing -- a noun.
I seem to be a verb,
an evolutionary process --
an integral function of the universe.

II. Find a new way to walk.

When my son was a toddler, I can remember we would play and replay this video any number of times and dance crazy around the house and often out the door.  As we lived at that time on a main road I suspect we were quite the spectacle. It was liberating: the silliness, the dancing, the joy, the being verbs, not nouns.




III. Find another way.



IV. Make your walk into a poem.



V. Take a stroll.

Imagining A to Z: X is for X-ray Intentions

X is for X-Ray Intentions

Reproduction (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

  “Never believe that smooth space will suffer to save us." D & G ATP.

Well this has been a week for interrogating intentions--getting beneath the surface so to speak and seeing what lurks there.  At PELeCON 12, Simon Finch (@sinfin) presented a keynote and used the film below.  Take a look.

So it has me wondering about how much I am willing to sell out myself--sell out what I deeply believe, sell out you and your children, or my own child--in order to secure or keep a job, or to be promoted? What's the price for economic security? 

The world depicted in the video is one that maintains its power by ensuring that it has no free thinkers, just followers.  It's a world I think we are coming to know--at least those of us who can still think, can still recall.

There can be no imagination inside a machine, be it a war machine or a school machine. The machine requires reproduction of an already established norm.  It's at best, a track one follows--a track one must follow. To release the imagination requires agency, self will, desire.  Allow yourself to be placed inside a box by being untrue to what you believe, and what you create will only be a simulacrum: a copy for which there is no original.

Imagining A to Z: W is For Walk About

W is for Walk About

Day after Day (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

I. Walk

Kind of simple, really.
Get yourself out the door.

And walk.

Poem by Monika Hardy, Image by M.A. Reilly, 2012.

II. A Walk

Translated by Robert Bly

Rainer Maria Rilke

My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance-

and charges us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave...
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

III. Capturing the Everyday

 While out walking, I make images of the people I see, meet.  Ansel Adams writes:

These people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on old dry plates of sixty years ago... I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. Any they in turn seem to be aware of me. 

Here are a few images of people I have met along the way, almost all while out walking.

Note: In this series of post during the month of April, I am participating in the A to Z blogging challenge, with each day focusing on a letter.  In order to bring some cohesion to this process--releasing the imagination is the focus of each post.

Imagining A to Z: V is For View (and Voyeur)

V is for View (and Voyeur)

Imagination can be (in)formed by viewing.  In this manner we act a bit like voyeurs, peering into place; eavesdropping on other. So much to be learned, inspired by.

So what does it take to view?


A rear window?






A camera?

Voyeur (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

Hope you'll post what you view. 

Note: In this series of post during the month of April, I am participating in the A to Z blogging challenge, with each day focusing on a letter.  In order to bring some cohesion to this process--releasing the imagination is the focus of each post.

Imagining A to Z: U is for Unlearn Master Myths

The Hob, Plymouth England (iPhone)

U is for Unlearn Master Myths

Keri Facer (2011) defines myth as that which

"comes to act as an unquestioned cultural resource, to function as a dominating narrative that allows educators, policy-makers, parents and designers, without too much reflection, to make decisions and take action in the present" (Kindle Locations 240-242).

Roland Barthes (1957) tells us that myth is

"a type of speech...a system of communication...Myth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way it utters this message" (p. 107).

James Gee (1996) describes master myths as prevalent stories we have internalized as truths, as the way it is, as what is normal.

Such mythologies are influential in our lives. They shape what we think is possible and not; truthful or false, and normal and abnormal. 

The imagination, oddly enough, may be limited by these mythologies that tells  us how to behave, how to be.  Last week I was in England and one of the things I wanted to do was to make images of people playing 'on the street'.  I did not want to capture images of organized play (football, etc.).  I spent a good portion of two days roaming about looking and I found just three accounts of public play:

• three boys on skateboards
• an elderly couple and their dog and a ball
• a mom and two small children each with a scooter

One of the master myths we live with is that as we age and mature we become more respectable, less likely to be silly, playful or messy--especially in public.  This myth makes me wonder how such a truth limits our imagination. For example, a friend tells me that she grew up in a home where making visual art was not done because it caused too much of  a mess.

"I couldn't leave anything out. Everything had to be put away right after playing. Our house had to be presentable at all times in case someone dropped in."

Not only did the house have to be presentable, but I imagine the inhabitants, especially girls and women needed to be presentable, neat, pretty at all times.

Take a look at the mythologies in this older advertisement aimed at girls. What is suggested as 'normal'? How is cleanliness and beauty aligned?



Or take a look at this more recent commercial:



Why is being clean situated as critical, essential?



So today I am wondering about what myths I need to unlearn?  I'm wondering which ones get in the way of creating? Imagining? Being?



Note: In this series of post during the month of April, I am participating in the A to Z blogging challenge, with each day focusing on a letter.  In order to bring some cohesion to this process--releasing the imagination is the focus of each post.

Imagining A to Z: P Is For Play for Change: World Peace

P is for Play for Change: World Peace

Three at the Beach (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

Yesterday on my way to Plymouth, I was in London at a bus station and met two women who were on their way to a Shaman's collective.  You should know they were joining others from around the world to pray for peace--world peace. I felt better for it.

Play. It is always more fun when you do it with others.
Listen to how people come together across the world to blend their voices. To play for change.
Perhaps you will want to join in.

Imagine and Dream.

Care and Connect.

Be the Change You Want To See in the World.

Look at all we can accomplish by being together, playing together.

Note: In this series of post during the month of April, I am participating in the A to Z blogging challenge, with each day focusing on a letter.  In order to bring some cohesion to this process--releasing the imagination is the focus of each post.

Imagining A to Z: I Is For Invent

I is for Invent (new uses for old things)

We Have Chosen Hope Over Fear (M.A. Reilly 2009)

Look at something common, something you see each day and ask: How might I transform this old thing into something new? The image above was made the evening Barack Obama was sworn in as President.  I was in a diner and there was a large flat screen TV.  It was set to a news channel and I snapped a picture of the screen that showed the President speaking.  I built the rest of the image around that central image of the President with the text superimposed.  The images of the faces are of former students.  I was thinking about how President Obama's presidency might represent a hope, especially for young people.


How we join things together--imagine new possibilities--read the landscape--listen to the city noises/country sounds/suburban drawl--remix ideas, images, sounds, and words: all of these actions trigger our imaginations.

Below is a 1-minute video in which point of view alters how we see the ordinary.  Enjoy. 



HP - invent from Films & Things on Vimeo.


Note: In this series of post during the month of April, I am participating in the A to Z blogging challenge, with each day focusing on a letter.  In order to bring some cohesion to this process--releasing the imagination is the focus of each post.