Learning Aesthetics

or at least makes it clear in its own way that we’re not as smart as we need to be

Here’s a link to the NYT article that comments on the above image, we won’t say explains it. What occurs to me in that what it really demonstrates is that things are way complicated. Arguably we have to something despite that complexity, and tools, particularly IT tools (assuming you count PowerPoint as IT) can help. The danger is that they can give you the illusion of understanding and control; if you can graph it or chart it you don’t have to think about it.

1.00  There’s an apocryphal story about John F. Kennedy  touring the Houston Space Center and being introduced to one of the employees who turned out to be part of the custodial staff and we assume somewhat obviously not one of the brightest crayons in the box.  “What do you do here?” the President ask. “I’m sending a man to the moon,” the janitor answered.

1.10  The pronoun is important here, not “we” as in “part of a team whose mission is space exploration,” but rather the naïve “I”  that assumes that in terms of the enterprise sweeping the floor is as important as rocket science. Not simply that we each have a part to play, but that in some important sense all parts are equal.

2.00  The core mission of educational institutions is creating citizens.

2.10  What exactly we mean by citizen becomes the question; “Americans” doesn’t really clarify much.  In fact that’s part of the job; deciding what our country should look like, believe, and do.

2.11  We can debate the specific but not the general.

3.00 Currently higher education is spending a lot of energy discussing  ePortfolios a central component of witch is the concept of Reflective Learning.

3.10  Reflective Learning means that you think about why you’re learning a thing, how you learn it, and the learning has and will affect your life and world.

3.20  A direct result of growth of interest in ePortfolios and Reflective Learning is  the development of individual Personal Learning Environments.

4.00  I’d like to propose a variation of the PLE; let’s call it the Personal Work Environment.

4.10  The provided PWE engine is WordPress Multi-User which can function as anything from a simple blog to a fairly robust CMS.

4.11  The provided community is the current  Answers Service Center Staff including the student staff.

4.20 What each of us does with these provisions is where the personal  comes in.

4.21  There is no right way to proceed; so far there aren’t even any real methods or best practices.

4.22  Perhaps there never will be.

5.00  Is this a requirement of continued employment?

5.01  Not exactly; at least not at the moment, but probably something like it sooner or later.

5.10  What is going to be required is Personal and Professional growth and learning, and an Active Participation in the Work Community.  At the very least this means keeping up with the evolution of technology and its potential uses, and sharing what you have learned and thought.

In an effort to set a good example for those who work with me it’s become necessary to start a blog, well something like a blog, that is primarily “work related”.  Following my own good advice to rely on Occam’s razor and resist the temptation to multiply entities, I’ve decided to re-purpose LA for a few months at the very least. Given the recent lack of activity this won’t be a big change, but just in case you notice a sudden rash of change. The next post should provide a bit more context.

Balinese say, “We have no art, we do everything as well as possible,” which is sometimes translated: “We have no art, we just do the best we can,” or occasionally, “…we just try to get by.” Of course “everything” undoubtedly had a smaller compass when they first said, “We have no art…etc.” And at the moment we might well wonder what “everything” or “anything” was truly worth doing as well as possible or even at all? Not to put too fine a point on it, commodity and spectacle with a seasoning of greed, intentional ignorance, and more than a dash of vanity appear capable of compromising anything. Art has become impossible, and not just in the Balinese sense. But everyone remains an artist, even without art (we am large, we contain multitudes.)

A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter (2009)

My own current form is suffering serious time constraints, which in part explains the lack of activity here, but hopefully things will pickup. Spring’s on the way which should mean some new image work, and there’s a new web-experiment in the works.it’s still in cloak mode at the moment, but should surface sometime in the next couple of weeks.

The Logic of Things

Having imagined sex and desire we assume the world.

I’m going to try and refocus here. While I make a lot of connections that are evidently difficult to explain, I’m operating on the theory that it will be useful to sort out and categorize some of the entities that catch my attention and let you make your own connections; or not. So LA is going to be devoted to the process of noticing things like concepts and trying to figure them out. Anomalous things like the previous post which seems to require only experience and not examination will wind up over on Sightwork. I’ve also started a sort of imageblog where I’ll be posting with some regularity the image work that I’ve been doing.

I’ve been reading Strieg Larsson, and the post title is his attributed dyke description of one of the more interesting characters in modern fiction. The reading encounter cropped up post a conversation wherein I found myself saying, “The cultural positioning of women, ‘be sexy; stay pure’ creates a classic double bind.” This isn’t exactly news, I’ve thought for years that guys just want to get laid and girls are instructed to entice and deny which is an odd kind of fun or more often than not not fun at all. It’s a little difficult to explain how we got from Gregory Bateson q.v. and double binds to Martin Heidegger so I won’t try.

And besides, we hesitate to call God a thing. In the same way we hesitate to consider the beast in the field, the stoker at the boiler, the teacher at the school things. A man is not a thing. It is true that we speak of a young girl who was faced with a task too difficult for her as being a young thing, still too young for it, but only because we feel that being human is in a certain way missing here and think that instead we have to do here with the factor that constitutes the thingly character of things. We hesitate even to call the deer in the forest clearing, the beetle in the grass, the blade of grass of thing.

This excerpt is one of those “things” that’s been following me around for years. The thing seems to me to be not merely accurate, but something that needs engaging, perhaps even changing. Related in some sense: I’ve also been reading about insomnia and Cognitive Behavior Therapy. In translation, “if you want to get off sleeping pills, stay out of bed until you’re damn well ready to go to sleep.” Obviously this is a little painful but over the long term it seems to prove effective. The thing is that It’s my general observation that things are getting better, though the behavior of mainstream media might argue otherwise. We are as a race, slow learners, and I sometimes think as Americans even less. “.. because we feel that being human is in a certain way missing here…”

Having imagined sex and desire we assume a world.

…and counting down to that 2012 thing. In the mean time I think it’s important to keep refreshing the knowledge pool:

I’ve been thinking about sharing lately. The impulse to make art is roughly congruent with the impulse to share. Probably there’s more ego in it; perhaps not. I like Bill Frisell a lot. So I checked out his album Disfarmer. That led me to The Project, and the project to Dan Hurlin‘s puppets:

I wanted to share all this with the world, because I was moved, astounded, blown away. Pretty much, but not altogether, speechless. But then Shel pointed out that I appeared to be on the edge. Put it together. It was a matter of taste. Pretty much everything was a matter of taste. So what was it about the puppets and before them the pictures? I saw the answer, pictures, the images, didn’t answer. Looking at them I knew only that these people had existed. They were real and full, but nothing more. Ani that is what art does. It presents the thing in itself and refutes explanation. It’s a sharing that, if your taste runs that way, arrests rather than explains.

I’ve been using the I Ching off and on since the mid-sixties. Of late it’s been a Sunday morning ritual. My iPhone has become an important part of that thanks to an app from Brian Arnold; it’s brilliant and I highly recommend  it.

This one will require a bit of context. 10 1/2 dog years ago I was teaching a media theory course about YouTube. As an opening assignment I asked the students to explore the top 10 most watched videos for a two week period. One of the group submissions which showed up with appalling frequency was “My Love Secrets to Seduce Me”. This turned out to be an offshoot of the Athene Wins channel; you can find the first submission here. At that time it required a bit of searching to figure out exactly what was going on, but if you were persistent, which most of my students were not, you would have discovered the Ipower Web, which turned out to be an evolution of me and the 40,000 Blow Jobs initiative (be sure to read the terms of service agreement). The Ipower crew is still creating complete cognitive dissonance. BTW if you’re not familiar with it you’ll want to check out Ning.com.

Re-Tweeted form Share This Course:

Imagine that you’d had one of those way-back moments and you’d Googled “Guy DeBord”. Once you’d finished with the Wikipedia obviousness you’d find the text of The Society of the Spectacle, sort of a book made up of overlong Tweets, but then if you became tempted by the backspace key you might find The Bureau of Public Secrets and then Nothingness. Well, at least you’d be Not Bored.

Extra points for figuring out the post title’s intertextal references.