Some Thoughts (not entirely mine, product of a number of partnerships) on: A Collaborative Nature & Notions of Ownership

Even the environment of which we are part
is among our collaborators.

Even nature of which we are part
is among our collaborators.


So far, I've produced nothing in isolation. Not even a thought

when that thought has been about something, that subject (and all systems responsible for that subject existing so that it was available for me to think about it) collaborating in a thought system I call mine for the convenience, my mind an obvious host of the guest subject, but as a good host, I have certain obligations to my guest, among them, gratitude to the guest for bringing, for arriving as a subject for my thought system. I don't own the thought; it is not mine exclusively.

My relationship with information (and on some level, most things may be configured or expressed as information) is not owner of information. I assemble information, shuffle it, collect it temporarily, transform it as I am being transformed by it. It is through connecting and assembling information, through transformative processes that idea systems may be configured and understood as remixes. A more complex relationship with information configuration can lead to more complex policy regarding collaborators which include the environment, nature, (all of) space —none of which I own. And what many consider ownership is not permanent (ultimately, there's some form of ownership of chauvinistic illusion; a bit of palliative function since perhaps humans can't be cured of what may be configured as human nature systems); if anything, that ownership system is owned by time more so than anyone claiming ownership, though time is complex and not a single thing; as a system experiences co-ownership, or co-hosting of what it interacts with; belonging to time meaning having been hosted by a time system, having occurred. (Start Talking handbook from University of Alaska Anchorage)

But the idea system is talking to me in this moment that also becomes, as you experience this, a system talking to you.

You Don't Own Me comes to mind (interacts with/collaborates with a thought system in progress) as performed in The First Wives Club by Bette Midler, Goldie Hawn, and Diane Keaton; the you of the title and lyrics right now configured as idea itself, a migratory, a generic proxy for anything with which I collaborate, with which I interact without owning it; I like sharing the products I configure with contributors and collaborators who become collaborators by accepting an invitation to experience the poam (product of acts of making, acts that are systems of activity among collaborators), experience necessarily collaborative. (First Wives Club image from wikipedia):




Perhaps if I produced something while in complete isolation from any interaction or any other configuration of opportunity for influence, that something produced might be mine in a way that so far nothing else seems to be, my physiology itself proceeding as a collaboration of genetic contributions from two complex sources, two genetic systems. This is, however, a scenario I will not pursue, having no interest in establishing a pure ownership, a free and clear claim to being sole source of something. I mean, it is as if I stumbled upon a fork, as if, while falling, I reached out and was rescued by a tine that happened to be there, that was activated by my falling through it/as I fell through it —maybe.



It's all speculative. I find an absence of certainty refreshing, in many ways, for in that absence is something else, systems of transience, ebbing and flowing, waxing and waning, the exuberance of the hive, stunning, sometimes dizzying, sometimes subtle movement, so subtle that on some scales the movement bears well a label of motionless, but that range of movement suggest to me, that range collaborates with me into an idea that most things dance, somewhere in their atomic structure, most things dance —some of the dance hoped into fulfillment: