Monolith, maze, interstice, the end of geometry, architecture like landscape, primordial shapes in motion, energy.
Avidya can be understood as the accumulated result of many unconscious actions, the actions and ways of perceiving that we have been mechanically carrying out for years. As a result of these unconscious responses, the mind becomes more and more dependent on habits until we accept the actions of yesterday as the norms of today.
Rich Silverstein of the celebrated advertising firm of Goodby & Silverstein may take the cake for the most audacious effort to win over a potential client when he pitched Isuzu Motors. Silverstein printed up flyers and had them placed in the windshields of Isuzus all over San Francisco, offering to pay fifty dollars to anyone who parked his of her car within a two-block radius of the advertising office at the foot of Telegraph Hill. Who could resist? The visiting Isuzu executives were amazed to enter a neighborhood that looked like a giant Isuzu dealership, and Silverstein got the account.
Cited in ‘The Art of Innovation’, Tom Kelley
I read an extremely interesting paper of Edith Ackermann Piaget’s Constructivism, Papert’s Construcionism: What’s the difference?. It seems some thoughts can be applied to anthropologists who go down into a radically different culture and have to build something (e.g. a report or a book). Can it be considered a sort of a constructionism form?
These are some extracts from the article:
“Constructionism — the N word as opposed to the V word — shares contructivism’s view of learning as “building knowledge structures” through progressive internalization of actions… It then adds the idea that this happens especially felicitously in a context where the learner is consciously engaged in constructing a public entity, whether it’s a sand castle on the beach or a theory of the universe (Papert, 1991, Mindstorms. Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas, p.1).”
“To Papert, knowledge, even in adult experts, remains essentially grounded in contexts, and shaped by uses, and the use of external supports and mediation remains, in his mind, essential to expand the potentials of the human mind — at any level of their development. Papert’s constructionism, in other words, is both more situated more pragmatic than Piaget’s constructivism.”
“Papert draws our attention to the fact that “diving into” situations rather than looking at them from a distance, that connectedness rather than separation, are powerful means of gaining understanding. Becoming one with the phenomenon under study is, in his view, a key to learning. Papert’s research focuses on how knowledge is formed and transformed within specific contexts, shaped and expressed through different media, and processed in different people’s minds.”
Edith Akermann concludes by saying: “I think of cognitive growth as a lifelong attempt on the part of the subject to form and constantly reform some kind of balance between closeness and separation, openness and closure, mobility and stability, change and invariance.”
This is a nice story about mathetics from a book I’m currently reading:
“Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Boston Philarmonic, has a unique strategy for getting the best out of his students. On the first day of class, he tells his first year students that they all get an A. There’s one condition. Their first assignment is to write a letter to him – dated on the last day of class – explaining why they deserved the grade.”
Kelley, Tom. The Art of Innovation. New York : Doubleday, 2001, p. 88
In a few years’ time, says author Bruce Sterling, the mobile phone will be our “remote control for life”.
This is a nice project: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4461265.stm
iA History of Communications 35,000 BC – 1998 AD:
http://www.nathan.com/projects/current/comtimeline.html
Culture is composed by different patterns (ideas, events, institutions and personal stories) that interact and change along the time. There is a great creativity inside the indeterminate, indefinite and not well structured social spaces.
Processual analysis analyzes culture from different point of views and studies the creativity (emotions, rithm and class consciousness) that doesn’t derive from the social structure. This means that culture is determined by the practices of people more than by predetermined structures.
Accuracy in social science (“Secondo gli antropologi cognitivi come Frake – in Rosaldo: 178 – un’etnografia dovrebbe essere una teoria del comportamento culturale in una società particolare, il cui grado di accuratezza può essere valutato in base alla possibilità che un individuo estraneo alla cultura descritta utilizzi le affermazioni dell’etnografia come istruzioni per aspettarsi con buone ragioni lo svolgimento delle scene che si svolgono nella società studiata”).
Researcher as situated subject.
Jesus Camp follows a group of young children to Pastor Becky Fischer’s “Kids on Fire Summer Camp”, where kids are taught to become dedicated Christian soldiers and in God’s army and are schooled in how to take back America for Christ.
http://www.jesuscampthemovie.com/
I guess it shows examples of some kind of experience enhancement techniques.