A bit of a thoughts trace:
Was considering my difficulties with rituals and why am sensually uncomfortable with Any ritual, even if its a nice one..
Rituals, by repetition and/or by sharing the sense of repetition with others, are on the face of it a sort of imagination – personal and/or communal/social – imagination embodied by sharing. Say there is a community that imagines an egg to be a flower. So long as that community imagines this as individuals, the embodiment is within each of them and has a sort of communal unclarity. One knows the other has the imagination but no way to negotiate that imagination, no way to have a friction with a single person. Now, suddenly, that community discovers that they can share the imagination via day of the flower eggs, when people make flower eggs to one another. To begin with, I think people tend to come From the sense of egg as a flower, and question their activities because there is a genuine unsureness of how to share and how the imagination might actually be embodied.
(I think this process is very audible in music genres and the history of their process of rituality. A process that propmts some to express stuff to the tune of: XYZ music is too commercial now, not what it was, etc..)
Once this practice of day of egg-flower is being repeated if enters an embodiment process that slowly loses the sense of Ifness about it because people begin to imitate one another, have conventions of how to make, share, and even rules. In a sense, a ritual practice emerges from the initial, questioning and perhaps even open to self-critique and questioning process.
In this sense, rituals are not just time repetition base, but also can be of sequences. If you do the sequence of flower-egg, then you ought to do X elements. That becomes a ritual because it generates its own spectrum of conventions and with them, power. They become activities for their own sake, that – crucially – do Not ask themselves. Do not contain the Ifness we had to begin with, because critique can be audipal, or just be dangerous for people that made lives dependent upon the day of flower-eggs.
Indeed, critique may seem arbitrary and violent to people. We do the flower egg day for 200 years now, nothing wrong, how dare you ask questions!
Hence the person that asks the questions, that attempts to perhaps bring back the if to the practice – re-generate – or evolve a new one, has to have a sense of bravity, a strength.. Here, it seems to me that brutality kicks in. A violence that somehow ironically emerges through the process cultivation is being done..
This is why, in a pouring of self critique, I think the art formulas i was working on are mistaken. They do the Rituals, not the Art. They do the embodiment of imagination, the sharing, the politics/power of sharing, but miss the If.
In some I added the if and it felt awkward, arbitrary.
However, I think now it becomes clearer why these art formulas require the if. Indeed, I think that now, to begin with, they should probably be able to have an abstracted sequene like:
if(equation}
Though this is an initial idea.. it fails, I think, by having an equation while needing to be a search sequence..
I think the elephant-gorilla in this sequence is the question of what if it becomes correct. What if there is a correct art sequence that is for itself, how can it not have a ritualistic process conversion?
I need to play with that on a piece of paper..
What I think might be interesting to elaborate more at some point is that historically we have a sort of binary friction between art and design.. Where people question sense of boundaries between the two strands. I think that here other art-like cultural practices come to ligt with their own equations.. Am thinking currently of religions, rituals and entertainment..