Has anyone seen Camp Runamuck, which has been growing right by South Main? http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/us/31land.html

 I couldn't help thinking that artists, designers, academics, students, all of us could have something to do or say about this. Impromptu industrial design? A record or memory of this city before eviction in a few weeks? A follow-up (where will they go)? The summer dampens our ability to react, but it seems so poignant to me that this tent city--involving so many issues of space, society, culture, design--would be right here so close to our campus, and yet in a way so far removed. Or not?

Evan Murphy (Furniture 2011) sent around a link to Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry's Sixth Sense presentation at TED:

This seems a case of research meeting demand.  Our fingers are already pressing surfaces expecting them to respond.  I'm not talking about sex, though our negotiation of digital environments, in terms of touch and exploration, seems to borrow from models of sexuality, female rather than phallic.  I'm talking about information.  For anyone who spends substantial parts of the day in digital environments, the real world can seem full of cul-de-sacs and dead ends.  It just seems to stop suddenly.  Either you have to physically go somewhere to continue.  Or the trajectory disintegrates.  You want to find something in the book you're holding?  Well, good luck!  Everything seems like so much work, with so little possibility of success.  I have to search through every page to find that word I half-remember?  Suddenly time, so fluid online, becomes weighty again.

I can see the attraction of Maes and Mistry's Sixth Sense.  My fingertips and mind want it already.  I have questions.  When any surface yields programmed information to the soliciting touch what will work mean?  What will space mean?  How will this affect time?  These concepts are already in flux, thinly anchored by hardware or workstation to traditional understanding.  Skin itself becomes less boundary than intelligent organ (which is what boundaries in general are becoming).

When surfaces respond in programmed ways to our touch will our interaction with our environment be more or less physical?  Our physical experience on earth gives rise to our metaphors and conceptual understanding.  What conceptual shifts will crucial shifts in physical experience produce?  When the outside comes in, physically and on an informational scale never before approached, i.e., the chip in the brain, inside and outside lose valence as concepts in relation to the body, their most basic seat.

And a lesser question: Poetry has had great fun gamboling with every technology thrown up.  Instead of experimenting at the exhilarating fringes of new technology will poetry, or art, ever become again the repository of the heart, i.e., raw, gristly human values?  And another lesser question: Teaching can no longer be concerned with the transmission of information which students can access themselves.  Teaching, to some extent, may be concerned with selecting or recommending information, i.e., it has an editing function.  But this generation of teachers is being brutally challenged because neither the what nor the how, as we learned it, can be reasonably passed on. 

Students are our teachers, in so many fields.  At RISD, the teaching of demonstrable skills, or the time to learn and practice them, has continued validity.  In addition to skills, there must be a range of meta-areas morphing into relevance as the definition of the disciplines weakens.  Some of them might be quite old-fashioned: conversation, discourse itself, rudimentary politics, ethics.  If we really thought about a visionary curriculum for artists and designers for these opening decades of the 21st century, what surprises could we ignite?

Laurence Sterne, whose Tristram Shandy 41 students and myself are currently reading in class, makes great use of aposiopesis, a rhetorical figure where the sentence suddenly breaks.  Sterne piles a carnival of devices into that break—dashes, asterisks, even the sudden snapping of a tobacco pipe.  His characters have too much to say and rarely a handy way of saying it. There’s always a mismatch between thought and word, or sense and word, or image and word, or intention and word, or even desire and word.  Laced through the nine volumes of Tristram Shandy—which my students think is already more than enough—there are further volumes, only the entry points of which are marked.

Aposiopesis implies more than breaking-off: there is a freight of energy in that dash. 

When a speaker or writer suddenly breaks off in aposiopesis, the air or the line vibrates with the unsaid—or unsayable.  

I suppose it’s like ejaculation, an overflowing of bounds, with exquisite energy attached.  Silence breaking the bounds of text. 

Aposiopesis can also be the loss of desire to speak.  The sentence implodes, all the blinds come down.

Auscultation is another interesting word: the conscious act of listening.  In the act of auscultation, we position ourselves to listen, coiling the noise of our own bodies into quietness to build an auditorium.

Aposiopesis and auscultation seem to meet at their edges: the jagged edge of aposiopesis and the curve of auscultation; the emdash, and the stilled breath.

You can balance on that long emdash, surfing on charged silence. 
You can unfold, larval, into the moment of full attention.

Aposiopesis: a javelin of silence slicing through noise.
Auscultation: a listening so meaty it is dimensional.

A speaker, or writer, can ride the emdash right out of language, abandoning the realm of the social.  A speaker, or writer, can consume the listening of those listening, feeding it out into talk.

In the act of online writing, there is both aposiopesis and auscultation.  The chain of command is gone.   The circles of editor, subeditor, peer reviewer, art editor, are gone.  You jump off the cliff.

It is almost like speaking to yourself.  But you are listening.

There still is the moment of the dive, when we are poised in silence, ready to send.

Kenneth Goldsmith (RISD BFA Sculpture ’84) said: “If every word spoken during one day in New York were a snowflake, there would be a blizzard.”  What is the density of the online word? 

Both aposiopesis and auscultation occupy infinitely small points in time.  They are moments of balance outside the communicative norm.

My third A is audience: the living space between the finger of Adam and the finger of God.

In class, we are also reading Henri Bergson’s “Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic”—“For the comic spirit has a logic of its own, even in its wildest eccentricities.” 

Poetry has its own economy too.  There is no market and it never crashes.

It is almost always true that the reader of poetry is the writer of poetry.  Online environments are like that: the reader is almost certainly the writer. Not that they are one and the same.  But each has the capacity of both and is likely to exercise it.

There are other As of course—argument, adjudication, authority.  These are defaults.  We have here a space of fragrant possibility.  George Lakoff has spent a lifetime demonstrating how our metaphorical systems derive from our bodily experience.  We communicate now in a culture of finger-tips. 

Our active creative audience is right here.

Often we hear the terms, designer or architect, not only referring to the traditional senses of those terms…individuals working in their respective fields of design and architecture...but as the “designer of a bill" or “architect of the treaty.” These usages acknowledge our contribution and the role of our disciplines as greater than aesthetic and technical ones. These usages acknowledge that a big part of what we do involves forming concepts, organizing information based upon those concepts and delivering this ordered information purposefully to others. Concepts deliver information with a point of view and clarity. Concepts are powerful and with power comes responsibility. 

The clearest way to make this point is by looking at maps. Think of all the many views of the world given in maps. Each projection has a bias…has accuracies and inaccuracies and each creates different perceptions of the world.
The Mercator projection (image 1) is accurate only at the zone surrounding the equator. Notice how it distorts the land mass towards the poles…that is because the longitudinal lines that normally converge on the globe at the poles, when flattened through the cylindrical projections of the Mercator…become parallel. Alternately, the Peters Projection(image 2) preserves size but distorts shape…look at India and Greenland…and their relative size on the Mercator vs. the Peters Projection. Clearly the Mercator Projection, which is one of the more commonly used projections, (which is why it doesn't look strange to us) favors North America and Europe. In the Peters Projection, which is accurate in terms of size, Africa looks huge compared to what we are accustomed ... compared to the conceptions that formed our perceptions of the world. Imagine how these different concepts of the world affect perception...the battles that are planned.. the policies made... and treaties that are signed. If we think of what we do that way…that our concepts of the world are powerful tools that can affect perception and policy and the human condition…would it change what we do, how we teach and what we make?

   

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