As a dancer I think about birds and brittle-stars.

In describing the kind of not-quite-conscious behaviour of bird flight, philosopher and magician David Abram refers to distributed sentience—an “intelligence of the limbs”. Abram describes an avian way of knowing and experiencing environment that is distributed diffusely across the muscles, bones, nerves and feathers of wings and body—as well as the central nervous system and head. This allows for the bird to respond in minute articulation to all kinds of meteorological and environmental situations?

Echinoderms are the group of organisms that includes starfish, sea cucumbers, sea urchins, and brittle stars. They do not have heads—though their nervous system is centralised as a ring-shaped organ, with a radial nerve chord for each limb. Within this group, Brittle-stars in particular embody a kind of distributed sentience, with each limb reaching, feeling, curling, palpating, and investigating its surroundings. The limbs do the thinking.

In the shadows, as a dancer for hire in gay nightclubs, I think about bird wings and brittle-stars. In durational dances I imagine my arms as furling and unfurling, and the hair on my forearms as feathers or bristles. In doing so I am learning about the distributed intelligence of the human body, its capacity to feel-out and respond, and its relationship to the substance of space, time, light and sound.

Object details:
Spirit specimen; Echinoderms, various species
Cape York, QLD
NHE.119