Thinking Through Drawing Symposium: Practice Into Knowledge
23 days ago
The Latest Issue of Ecogradients, "Territorialities," is live (and throwing a party)
11 months ago
Good Advice from the Howland family
13 months ago
Music Embodied: Effortless Learning and Performing
15 months ago
Education and the Rigorous Tying Up of Milk
18 months ago
When an adult took standardized tests forced on kids - The Washington Post
a month ago
Occupy the Classroom?
3 months ago
Unsold Supper: or I'll eat my sandal...
4 months ago
Virtual Velocities
5 months ago
Mediated Earth: Footprints & Shoemaking
8 months ago
Abandoned Toys
a month ago
Mindless Academics
3 months ago
Against Specialization
12 months ago
Confidence
14 months ago
The Wonder Wheel
16 months ago
Abandoned Toys
a month ago
Some reflections on coming together…
“…the possibilities of what drawing is and the contexts in which it flourishes. Farthing engaged in something of a taxonomy of drawing, pushing the audience to consider the “outer extremities” of the practice, as Burton describes it. Showing an image of a plane taking off and casting a shadow, Farthing asked, “Is the pilot drawing on the ground?” As Moffett (a pilot himself) extends it, “Imagine the pilot as drawing lines of flight through space. If we want to call flying drawing, do so and see what that allows.”
The most avidly questioned panelist was Neil Shah, a British surgeon who demonstrated how medical doctors draw out their operations. “Scientists work the forefront of imagination and investigation. They need to draw because sometime that’s the only way to represent a thought,” Burton explains.”
Here's an interesting article, in the Washington Post, about an adminstrator who took his school system's own test: When an adult took standardized tests forced on kids - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post. First, I'm way ahead of this, having written a while ago on that peculiar game show, Who's Smarter than a …
… As an artist friend of mine pointed out in response to this photo: On BBC crime shows, an abandoned children's toy is always a metaphor for "something horrendous happened to a child." Which got me thinking. What is it about this? If it were simply a question of restraint or reserve—a discomfort in showing …
If you think about this question for any length of time, it's blindingly obvious why we have a brain. We have a brain for one reason, and one reason only, and that is to produce adaptable and complex movements. —Daniel Wolpert I'll stop there before I transcribe the whole thing... Shortly after this, though, he …
Schools train people to be ignorant with style. As long as you are just smart enough to do a job, and just dumb enough to swallow what they feed you, you're going to be alright. Interestingly, I think this introduces something rather sophisticated. In order to learn how to do this, one would have to …
People make gestures: they gesticulate. —Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis & It follows that sight and touch could not have given us the idea of space without the help of the "muscular sense." Not only could this concept not be derived from a single sensation, or even from a series of sensations; but a motionless being could …
Sitting here, late at night, in a tower of Academe, I am writing about the occupation of Wall Street, thinking about how the trope of "occupation" has found such a strong resonance. I imagine it is in no small part because we have been raised on the images of education. Not the images within education, …
Like nesting boxes, we find strangeness inside of strangeness in the Met's exhibition Thinking Outside the Box. I have a thing for boxes, being one of the enduring forms of educational imagery, and as such, never quite what they seem. (Indeed, the secret compartment, or the intricate display or grand room on the inside, hidden …
Recently brought to my attention, this preview of the feature, The Shoe, by Saraiva's Cheeky, goes right to the heart of the matter. Long Weekend With André on Nowness.com. On the one hand, shoes seem to slip by our attention, too close to the ground, beneath our consideration. On the other hand, we would be …
Just a heads up on what should prove to be an illuminating symposium. I'll be presenting on my recent collaborations, exploring the kinesthetics of drawing: Here's the symposium website: Thinking through Drawing. Come on out.
This in the New York Times. Occupy the Classroom - NYTimes.com. “This is where inequality starts,” said Kathleen McCartney, the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, as she showed me a chart demonstrating that even before kindergarten there are significant performance gaps between rich and poor students. Those gaps then widen further in …
Žižek quoting Malibou in his essay, Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject: These figures are "not so much figures of those who want to die as figures of those who are already dead, or, rather, to put it in a strange and terrible grammatical twist, who have already been dead, who 'experienced' death." But what does …
One of the ironies of meditation is that something as simple as sitting can be so challenging. Faced with discomfort or pain, we do the best we can, perhaps invoking mind over matter. But behind the esoteric paradox that the path to enlightenment should itself be enlightened, is a practical hint: attending to our sitting …
I was just talking about line quality with a colleague, in preparation for an upcoming workshop. And I was reminded for a second time recently of a project that has literally been sitting on the shelf. Crochet is an interesting way of working with line, as well as being an elegant way of expressing hyperbolic …
In the spirit of this blog—of attending to things in their birthing pains rather than as polished certainties—here's a video study, in preparation for a series of projects in the works on using minimalist performance as a way of researching our embodied engagements with the cities we inhabit. The working question was how we can …
One of the things that always comes up when talk turns to the losses we suffer around education—our regrets at being of a certain age without having brought certain things with us—is drawing. (Languages being the other big one.) It has a kind of inevitability, just as a conversation about waning literacy will eventually turn …
Perhaps I'm in a Borges kind of mood. Of course, I think of courses all the time that would be interesting to teach. But recently I thought, why not just write the syllabus? That long dead form. What if we revived it as an art: syllabi of courses that will never be taught. Not content …
If you are in the hood this Saturday, Our Goods—the fine folk who brought you Trade School—is hosting a supper for barter in Union Square. I'll let them explain: HOW IT WORKS 1) Farmers contribute good produce that didn’t sell. 2) We cook a meal using human-powered, community-scale equipment. 3) Everyone maps their HAVES and …
So much of education comes down to speed. Timing. How do I get ahead? How do find time to teach while I teach to the test? How can I find time to slow down? To go faster? We might even imagine schools as elaborate mechanisms for regulating speed. The classroom chair is a time machine. …
One of the tragedies of the grownup is his loss of a sense of wonder, curiosity and playfulness, in short, of childhood. But these emotions are central to philosophical enquiry. Perhaps by starting philosophy earlier and seeing to it that it continues throughout school, grownups will rediscover suppressed reservoirs of playfulness and leisure. —Robert Mulvaney, …