A Tale of Two Spaces

 It was the best of spaces, it was the worst of spaces; it was the age of purchase, it was the age of survey; it was the epoch of longing, it was the epoch of indifference; it was the season of colors, it was the season of pale; we had everything on the shelves, we had nothing on the shelves; we were all going direct to check-out, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like shopping, that some of its most attentive authorities silently insisted on its custom; for goods or for services, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

A Tale of Two Spaces

My intention was to use the music and cinematography to communicate the feeling of said spaces. My experience was upbeat, sporadic, sensual, and in a way schizophrenic - like the music and motion picture. 

Wandering Through the Keymaker's Corridor

I would like to take the opportunity this week to use the module's project as the base for my bridge.

I chose Meijer and Walmart to experience and analyze. Both stores have a plethora of goods, across a variety of categories. Products are interwoven with advertisement and one is directed by both predetermined necessity and by the encouragement of spatial gestures. These gestures are what I would like to discuss.

A gesture is a way of saying something, without vocalizing anything. Waving with one's hand is a gesture - a way to say "Hi!" A shrug is a gesture - saying, more or less, "I'm indifferent in this regard." The placement of products, the overall floor plan, of these two shopping spaces in particular act as gestures of invitation for exploration and discovery: a product located at the back of the store invites you to explore all the space in between the front door and it, empowering the possibility that you will discover something else to buy along the way; this is a subconscious gesture, since it's not decoded as such consciously, whereas seeing someone wave is consciously read to mean "hello".

In my time at these stores I experienced something that I found rather surprising and quite startling. The first instance, which I didn't even recognize until the second occurrence, happened when I was invited to explore the ping pong and pool supplies. I cordially accepted and began looking over the stock. I came to find my mind fantasizing about playing the games, contemplating events that have never taken place, generating an impetus for purchase - a simple example of space affecting mind.

The second occurrence I consider to be more astonishing. I was walking an aisle-way and saw some shoes, in the shoe department, on the floor; so I placed them back on the rack. I returned to my original course - with no destination in particular - and saw a bucket on the floor in the cleaning supplies aisle; so I placed it back on the rack. I started again on my original course, thinking about the ramifications such actions have on my schooling - that is, thinking about how the way one approaches anything reflects on the way one does everything.

I had to retrace my steps when I experienced the forthcoming phenomenon. From the point I started thinking about school to the point I had a spatial correlate was 18 steps. I figured out that I traverse roughly 4 feet with each step, and thus in 72 feet I found myself, still thinking about school, staring at boots ornamented by the Michigan State 'S' in the foreground of my visual field, with University of Michigan and Michigan State University clothing in the background, some 15 yards beyond that. I graduated from U of M and I am quite obviously attending MSU. I stopped immediately at this scene and wondered if the symbols lead to my thoughts, or my thoughts lead to the symbols...

Upon approaching the aisle which had the shoes on the ground, I passed at a distance by the aforementioned boots and clothing. I do not recall glancing in that direction nor if I had any degree of peripheral sighting, thus I had no conscious recognition of the symbols. The path I took from the shoes to the boots was in the figure of a j (without the dot). From the shoes/bucket, where thinking spawned, I walked straight and made a right turn after about 25 feet, then 'randomly' took another right and cut through the shoe department, whence the phenomenon occurred.

I had no intention guiding my travels. There was no conscious direction of where I was going, much like the long-distance truck driver phenomenon that too many people experience while at the wheel (driving somewhere without knowing how one got there). I was quite focused on my thoughts and did not give much attention to where I was going, so long as I wasn't bumping into things or people.

Did I arrive at the boots by chance? Were the thoughts summoned by the symbols in my proximal surrounding? Were the symbols subconsciously noticed and fed upon by my mind? Why did I make a right turn and cut through the shoe department, heading in the direction from where I came rather than exploring the uncharted territory before me? What relationship is there between the thoughts of school and the symbols which represent the subject of those thoughts? What relationship is there between the symbols, the thoughts, and my walking pattern? Were the thoughts derivatives of reflecting upon my actions, independent of the symbols? Did thinking about school act as a magnet to the symbols and thereby attract me to them?

One thing is indubitably certain based on my observations: There is a co-incidence between the thoughts and the space in which the thinking took place. Traditionally, this 'coincidence' is deemed random at best and insignificant at worst. Yet, what does it mean for something to be 'random'? Is not a random occurrence one that unfolds against the odds, like the chances of winning the lottery, getting through to a radio station during a contest, or seeing an old friend on a vacation? Random happenings are thought to be just that: chance, unrelated to any prior activity besides the minimal requirements to experience said chance happening (such as buying a lottery ticket, calling the station during their contest, or going on vacation).

These considerations resounded in the chambers of memory and awoke a recollection: two days ago (February 21) my phone received a text message from a friend, instigating that I guess what she was doing. The first thing that came to mind was "fishing for salmon in the Northern Atlantic." What accounts for this random response? Where did the idea of fishing, of salmon, of the Northern Atlantic come from? Today (February 23) I was clicking through a few tabs on my browser, which have been open for several days now; I looked at one that I haven't reviewed since February 20th. The webpage is headed: Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An argument for multiple comparisons correction. (The emphasis is my own)

'Chance' is an employee of Dada.

Dada has roots in the work of Pablo Picasso. Picasso created what is considered the first collage in May of 1912: Still Life with Chair Canning. This work was part of an artistic dialogue between Pablo and his close friend, Georges Braque. A fruit of this dialogue is a style known as Cubism. Cubism is a means of expressing the recognition that objects are made-up of all views of it - not just one perspective. Cubist work, such as Picasso's Guitar and Sheet Music , shows many views of an object simultaneously and thereby changes its meaning by altering its spatial relationship. Picasso did this with implications: Guitar, Sheet Music, and Glass shows an implied wine glass, an implied guitar, and an implied sheet of music. Like the implied walls that Susanka mentions, there is merely suggestion of form - just enough information for the mind to fill-in the blanks.

Cubism was about changing the Renaissance mentality regarding images. Renaissance pictures are like windows to a world, and this was considered by the Cubists to be an illusion and a faking of space. Cubists embraced the flat surface of canvas and paper as something to pile things upon by creating what came to be known as collage. "Collage in its first and usual meaning involves the pasting-on of scraps that originated beyond the studio, in the department store or on the street."

Collage as indecency, paradox and perplexity - as impurity by any other name. Collage as invention. Collage as simple fact... the technique of pasted paper had a special and even profound part to play in the expression of modern sensibility: a sensibility attuned to matter in the modern city, matter under the regime of capital... Modernity's fragments, some collages suggest, are its history, its residue; they are what is left over when the great feast of consumption has ended for the day, when trading and exchange have ceased and the people have gone home for a rest...

...it was primarily through collage that the artist could maintain a relationship to commercial modernity that was philosophical and social in the broadest meaning of those ill-fated terms: sometimes satirical and parodic, but also reflective, aesthetic and above all experiential. And cutting and gluing belonged in this world as ordinary, domestic skills. On yet another level, collage deliberately evoked the cognitive and technical standards of the child, the playful, or the mad - suggesting that anyone can shape material this way, that anyone can practice in the field of the fine arts. (Taylor, 8-9)

This sensibility and relationship are part of what forged Dada. Dada started in the back of a caberet in Zurich, a communion of artists provoked foremost by WWI. Dada was anti-everything, a slogan they used to protest war and to move toward the occult. Dada was meant to express "trans-personal significance whose self-created nature was expressive of a 'cosmic' principle, a point of mergence between subject and object." To this end, Dadaists used stillness as a route to this different state of consciousness; to achieve this they rejected mimesis and description while embracing nonsense and sensory overload as a vehicle to stillness. Take for example Raoul Hausmann's Elasticum. Dada was meant to leave the psychology of the artist out of the work; rather than using collage as a diary, as Picasso and Kurt Schwitters did, Dada was anit-art and art followed a system of thought derived from the artist. To escape this technique of art, to achieve anti-art, Dadaists incorporated chance and randomness as a key element in their formulae.

Take for example Jean (Hans) Arp's appropriately titled Collage According to the Laws of Chance. This work was created by dropping cut-up pieces of paper onto a base sheet of paper positioned on the ground: the resulting arrangement is the final product, needing only to be glued. Dada is an act of critiquing and rejecting the traditional conception of art as an important, almost holy, enterprise of masterpieces created by the masters. Arp's collage did just that: It has no formal similarities or symmetry, its crafted out of inexpensive materials, and there is no need for craft-skills, all of which means that this art is available to everyone - not just something to be worshiped from a far, but art to involve and integrate the subject with the object.

Dada sought to destroy traditionalism. Symmetry, expensive materials, and high skill requirements were all part of the traditional view at the time, Dada was, by name, the antithesis of such an attitude. 'Dada' is a reference to pre-literate babbling and is the base of Surrealism.

The goal of Dada work was to dissolve any boundary between the subject and the object, between the viewer and the viewed. This artistic position is precisely congruent with Arthur Schopenhauer’s interpretation of art: “it stops the wheel of time; for it the relations vanish; it’s object is only the essential, the idea. We can therefore define it accurately as the way of considering things independently of the principle of sufficient reason.” (Schopenhauer, p. 66) Schopenhauer defined art as unique in its ability to communicate the revelations of pure contemplation. On the other hand is the consideration of things in terms of their relationships to other things and to one’s interests, following “the restless and unstable stream of the fourfold forms of reason or grounds and consequents… [unable to] find an ultimate goal or complete satisfaction, any more than by running we can reach the point where the clouds touch the horizon.” The rational method of consideration used by science is useful and valid in practical terms of everyday life, whereas art is a way to aesthetic experience, plucking things from ordinary conditions and facilitating conditions necessary for the comprehension of the Ideas. To understand what the Ideas are, it is necessary to review Schopenhauer’s metaphysics.

Schopenhauer argues that Will is reality presented to us in objectifications of it; therefore, the world we experience regularly is an illusion. Every natural phenomenon has an inner and outer aspect; this is related to one seeing one’s body as simply another physical object (Objectification) in contrast to one’s immediate awareness of one’s body, the intentional movements, and emotional states (Will). Similarly, every object has this representative quality (as physical object) and this quality of Will (subjective feeling). In this respect, body is an objectification of Will. Will is the inner quality of all, “an endless striving and blind impulse with no end in view, devoid of knowledge, lawless, absolutely free, entirely self-determining and almighty.” Thus, reality in itself is the inner, ordinarily perceived by people as the outer. To Schopenhauer, reality is meaningless universal striving represented in particular things.

Under the right conditions people may come to perceive Will in the form of “eternal Ideas”, through art. The art of architecture, for example, communicates the “Ideas of gravity, cohesion, and rigidity.” The eternal Idea is regarded by Schopenhauer as “the immediate and adequate objectivity of the thing-in-itself, of the will.” In other words, the Idea is the inner quality underlying things, often obscured by its outer aspects – the objectification. This obscuration occurs when one applies the principle of sufficient reason (e.g. everything happens for a reason) to experience and thus introduces logical concepts, mathematical structures, moral prejudice, and limits of space-time causality. When one refrains from applying the principle of sufficient reason, one may become absorbed entirely in the object of experience and thereby see through “the clear eye of the world”.

The Idea is comprehended in a state of pure contemplation in detachment from one’s personality, desires, interests, one’s willing, one’s goals and aspirations, and one’s relationships and connections to things. To reiterate, art plucks things from ordinary conditions and thereby facilitates the mergence between subject and object. Dadaism is all about this. Dada thinks in terms of unconscious meaning, in the language of non-appearance. That is to say, Dada is concerned with accessing the Idea, eliciting in a viewer an experience of the phenomenology underlying the object of contemplation. To do this, Dadaists used randomly selected items from magazines and trash bins to assemble their work. Thus, the primary material of Dada is cultural symbols, history, and memory.

Chance composition, for the Dadaist, enables content to generate its own meaning, to speak for itself, rather than being prescribed meaning by the artist. The random pairing between my thoughts and the symbols in my environment that represent those thoughts is such a chance configuration. Like Arp’s Collage, the pieces fell on their own accord and a congruence between my thoughts and the object of those thoughts emerged. In other words, I had entered a state of pure contemplation and not only dissolved the boundaries between the object and I phenomenologically, but spatially, according to the laws of chance. Carl Jung called this phenomenon ‘synchronicity.’

Synchronicity is nothing mystical, supernatural, or anything special at all. When you meet a friend for coffee, this is synchronized. It is scientifically explainable and progressively accessible. Biologist Dr. Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance is essentially a scientifically demonstrable basis for synchronicity. But it is pretty simple... Having a conversation is synchronous. Dancing and music are acts of synchronization. Art is a way of synchronizing mind, body, time, and space. What defines an artist is not the activity, not the garments, not the utensils, the rhetoric, nor the rites. What defines an artist is the artist; what defines the way is the way. The stillness that Dada ushers and that which I apparently achieved is no more nor less natural than listening to music.

For me as a martial arts teacher and a student of academia, it seems that nothing is more vital to learning and living than synchronicity. Your mind and body must be synchronized to a task for it to bare fruit; try and read while sick, hallucinating, and slouched over (an extreme example, but it paints the picture). Your time of presenting an argument in a paper (spatial positioning) must be synchronized with the other rhetorical constituents of that paper; and for that, the idea - the subjective feeling that manifests as an object - must be synchronized with one's awareness, if even minimally. Therefore, acting as a catalyst for this process of unfolding ubiquitous synchronicity of an individual - what Carl Jung called individuation - is the overarching aim, the scope, and the bullet in education; whether or not it is recognized by the educators.    

John Dewey’s understanding of the aim of education is synchronous with this idea: 

1.) The aim set up must be an outgrowth of existing conditions.
2.) The aim as it first emerges is a mere tentative sketch.  
3.) The aim must always represent a freeing of activities.

To correlate the different terminology: 1.) Synchronicity is either crafted or ‘random’ growth of a circumstance – my synchronicity of thought and symbol was an outgrowth of being in Meijer. 2.) Synchronicity, as it reveals itself, is understood as if looking at parts of an image like they were divorced – seeing merely blueprint (the sketch), instead of the house itself. 3.) Synchronicity signifies, or represents, periods of psychological liberation, which lead to clearer understandings and more efficient interaction between one’s self and one’s activities; thus, a freeing of activity – continual or congruent development of activity. Synchronicity is both a by-product and force of production for individuation: a continual process of psychological moulting, reciprocally generating and being generated by synchronicity.   

Whereas Dewey's progressivism entails 'learning by doing', education as the development of synchronicity involves living - not learning. Learning is an abstraction of living; it becomes a goal divorced from the means; as Dewey puts it: “Every divorce of end from means diminishes by that much the significance of the activity and tends to reduce it to a drudgery from which one would escape if he could.” Funny story actually: High school Junior year, 5^th period English class; two of my friends left school early. The teacher asked me where they were and my immediate response was “They escaped.” Quite a fine expression of words if I do say so my self. Yet, this is how school is for a lot of individuals. Learning is an activity compartmentalized away from other activities, learning is something a ‘student’ actualizes; and a ‘student’ is an archetype, or an image that a person acts to embody (or summon) - it is not who they are.     

A self-image is essentially a template for one’s behavior, one’s thoughts, and one’s attitude. The bricks and mortar of this template are cultural symbols; concepts imagined by groups of individuals. It is a subconscious choice which images are enlivened and which are shelved. For individuals who are able to enliven and synch their behavior, thought, and/or attitude to the ‘student’ image and thereby progress in education, then self-image actualization generates further synchronicity only to the degree that educational endeavors represent a freeing of activities from the conditions associated with said image. That is, individuals who are able to give themselves up to the ‘student’ template – to dissolve the boundaries between subject (self) and object (image) – yet maintain individuality are positioned according to their own intent, not the intent of the image; they will move in harmony with the momentum resonant of their own intention (signified by synchronistic events), rather than robotically assume the parameters of the rhythm of the image. The archetype is an abstraction of self and all too often becomes an end divorced from the means. The end is not the image, but what is done with the image; and how it is done constitutes the means. It is the image which, like a virus, possesses the self, impeding synchronization of the individual. It is learning which kills education.

Dada as inoculation against possession.

Dewey, John. "Chapter 8: Aims in Education." Education and Democracy. Simon & Brown, 2011

Schopenhauer, Arthur. "Art as Revelation: Arthur Schopenhauer." The Nature of Art: An Anthology. Ed. Thomas E. Wartenberg. 2nd ed. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth, 2007.  

Taylor, Brandon. Collage: The Making of Modern Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 2004. 

Space, Space, and... Space

Space... While it seems that everything we experience has some sort of spatial correlation, space is an easily neglected aspect when accounting for the nature of one's experience. Sure, everyone traverses space, acts within and upon space, and calibrates their activities according to distances between particular kinds of space. But when, in the intensity of activity, does one really attend to how the design of space is affecting them?

While space is, at first glance, such a simple part of daily experience, an agreeable description of space (as descriptions of pretty much anything) fails to be formulated in the philosophical community.

18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant says of space: "Space is not something objective and real, nor a substance, nor an accident, nor a relation; instead, it is subjective and ideal, and originates from the mind's nature in accord with a stable law as a scheme, as it were, for coordinating everything sensed externally."

Kant is saying that space is subjective and reflective of one’s ideas; space is created by one’s mind to graph or project what is sensed in one’s environment.

Nikolas Davies and Erkki Jokiniemi’s Dictionary of Architecture and Building Construction (1st ed. 2008) defines space as: “An area or volume bounded actually or theoretically; a continuous extension in three dimensions; a bounded area within a building.”

Regardless of one’s choice for articulating whatever ‘space’ is, the architect mindfully engages this thing and participates in its manifestation. Although a description of space itself may not be accurate, there is certainly accuracy in describing the way people are influenced in and of space, and this description helps guide the architect in transforming space.

Sarah Susanka has distilled this guidance into three categories: Space, Light, and Order. A principle called Ceiling Height Variety describes the way ceiling height affects a person’s experience of space: “…vary the heights of parts of rooms, as well as the connections between spaces, to define one activity place from another, without resorting to solid walls. This results in a house that’s more open from place to place but also has a greater sense of intimacy to it. So the whole house ends up feeling more comfortable.” Light is workable by an architect so that it “not only enlivens the space, but also somehow draws attention to the surfaces of the building in a way that makes you want to explore it more. Light is the great animator of space…” For example, the Reflecting Surfaces principle: Place a window/skylight adjacent to a perpendicular wall and the space is filled with light, “giving it a brighter, cheerier feel.” Architects are, says Susanka, “magicians of space and light, where magic is simply something that isn’t readily understood by just looking at it. They use the art of illusion to make less seem like more, and they use contrast, like the difference between a bright window and a darker surrounding wall, to make our senses take note.” Such note may be taken of the third category, Order. Order refers to “the way in which the elements in a design are arranged to give it an identity all its own… Most houses are lacking features like these that tell you, as you move from room to room, that they are all parts of a singular whole.” Theme and Variation is one way of communicating this wholeness: "when used thoughtfully, a house with a theme and variations is like a well-composed piece of music. From one movement to the next, you know it’s the same piece because themes will return as it proceeds, though never repeated exactly as before.”

So, an architect employs space as an agent of intention. An architect looks at a space and asks “What does this feel like?” Relative to the answer, or lack thereof, the place is altered or unaltered using space, light, and order to evoke the feeling an architect intends to convey.

‘Whereas “space” denotes the three-dimensional organization of the elements which make up a place, “character" denotes the general “atmosphere” which is the most comprehensive property of any place… Similar spatial organizations may possess very different characters according to the" treatment of the space-defining elements: light in relation to spatial order. Furthermore, "spatial organization puts certain limits to characterization, and that the two concepts are interdependent.’ (Norberg-Schulz, p. 129)

But these character limits are quickly dissolving. Technology “has dismantled the walls between spaces. As anyone who has ever checked e-mail from a bathroom stall or browsed eBay from a chairlift can attest, what once occurred in just one space now happens in practically every space. This has revolutionized design, media, most workplaces and especially the lives of children, who routinely tap into vast social and information pools outside school. Yet, generally speaking, it has hardly touched public education.” (Corbett, p. 3)

As an architect works their magic and uses the tools of space, light, and order to carefully construct places of comfort, places of commune, places of business, and places of play (obviously not an exhaustive list of places), people with no title (those considered “general” or “ordinary”) are exercising their inherited magic (technology) and in effect reforming the composure and imbued intent of arranged spaces. Consequently, or effectually, there is a depletion of any need for a fixed ‘learning place’, otherwise known as a school. Individual schools have discernible characteristics:

If one visits university campuses across the country [the U.S.], one is struck by both their sameness and their differences. Some universities monitor or attempt to monitor students' behavior in much the same way as some high schools. Others give the impression that within their hallowed walls reside the seeds of social revolution. Still others have a kind of cool intellectual pride, a sense of scholarly self-esteem that sets the institution aside from the more prosaic forms of cultural life. Such environments, developed through tradition, have selection procedures for staff as well as students that provide an implicit curriculum whose specific goals are not articulated and might not even be consciously recognized. It is something one senses. Many parents as well as students recognize such qualities and guide their children to places whose implicit curriculum is compatible with their values...

“Schools are educational churches, and our gods, judging from the altars we build, are economy and efficiency: Hardly a nod is given to the spirit.” (Eisner, p. 82) Yet the spirit of education – of enriching one’s self, one’s community, and one’s environment – is working through technology and transmuting the morphological properties of the dominator social structure. With the rise of technology there is a concurrent descent of fetal perspective: Humankind and technology have found themselves virtually in a womb, conjoining and co-creating one another: The perspective of strict spatial delineations – the attitude that learning takes place here and play over there, that government functions in this place and people in that place – is immature; fetal, like unbaked cookies.

This spatial understanding has found its way into, derives its origins from, or concurrently developed with our self understanding – as theorists assume and reason that there are all sorts of differentiations in the human mind that segregate one ‘process’ from another, like thinking and feeling. Hence, school curriculum has been divided between the “arts” for feeling and the “sciences” for thinking - spatially, temporally, and neurologically - and students are taught accordingly. “The idea that the arts deal with feeling and that” science deals with “thinking is a part of the intellectual belief structure that separates cognition from affect, a structure whose consequences are as deleterious for” education as for one’s psyche. (Eisner, 78)

“Cognition” refers to thinking. “Cognition is supposed to be contrasted with affect, which in turn is contrasted with psychomotor activity.” (Eisner, 83) Yet, cognition has come to refer to thinking with words/numbers by logical procedure for their organization and manipulation, rather than thinking in a broad sense. “What school programs tend to emphasize is the development of a restricted concept of thinking. Not all thinking is mediated by word or numbers, nor is all thinking rule abiding.”

“Many of the most productive modes of thought are nonverbal and alogical. These modes operate in visual, auditory, metaphoric, synesthetic ways and utilize forms of conception and expression that far exceed the limits of logically prescribed criteria or discursive or mathematical forms of thinking…" Feeling and thought have identifiable neurological structures: The left hemisphere of the brain associates with reason, calculation, and language (science, ‘cognition’) and the right hemisphere of the brain with creativity, emotion, and intuition (art, feeling; ‘affect’). The "neglect or absence from school programs of nondiscursive forms of knowing skew what can be known and expressed in schools, it also biases the criteria through which human competence and intelligence are appraised.” (Eisner, 84) “The neglect of such processes within schools, assuming they are not adequately fostered outside of schools, can lead to a kind of literalness in perception and thought that impedes the appreciation of those objects or ideas that best exemplify metaphorical modes of thinking.” Thus, in a fashion of classical conditioning, it divides the complementary mentalities of thought and feeling: Just as science is the realm of thought and art the realm of feeling, one space is the place of art (feeling) and another space the place of science (thought).

This division of self and the division of space have had a rogue marriage.

Account for state-dependent learning - that what one may learn and/or recall and reemploy depends on one’s neurological state, reverse engineer the concept of architecture – that spatial arrangements effect neural states (emotion - right brain hemisphere), and consider that the hippocampus has ‘”place cells” which play a role in spatial mapping’, acting like a compass and coordinating the individual in respect to their environment (Austin, p. 182), and it is reasonably inferred that space defines neurological programs (as architecture evidences by enabling space to be a measure of the neurological code being run, hence feeling X in space Z). In other words, the design of space reflects the composition of the neurological system; for it is the neurological state that the architect seeks to compose – space, light, and order are tools they use to make it happen.

Perhaps, then, Kant had it right; maybe space is a mirror of our subjective states, and architecture is one method (of many) for neurological navigation. “The nervous system is basically simple: it receives information, then translates it into appropriate action.” (Austin, p. 152) “No response is determined by one structure or even one system, and responses are not based on simple yes-no decisions but on the interactions of numerous yes-no decisions.” Synchronously, Susanka says of architecture: It “is the interrelationship between spaces, walls and ceilings, and windows that shape our experience.” Susanka’s examples of Varying Ceiling Height, Reflecting Surfaces, and Theme and Variation exemplify accurate descriptions of the way space may affect people, via their neurological response to spatial information. The arrangement of space acts like a language which speaks directly to the nervous system (rendering what is said an unconscious interaction), which deciphers and encodes the interrelationship of environmental information (spatial structures, light, patterning) – like Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas process human language - through the neural-circuity of the vestibular sense and exercises itself in such phenomenon as “field sense”.

The unconscious mind operates below the threshold of consciousness – meaning one is not directly involved in what is happening. But unconscious does not mean unaware. There is a certain degree of awareness, a subconscious awareness, of the impacts resonant with environmental design. After all, we do go to particular spaces for certain feelings, don’t we? Home for comfort and relaxation. A club or bar for excitement and socializing. A gymnasium or dance studio for physical enthrallment and exercise. The spatial structures that compose our social arrangements have thus robbed the individual of their own self worth. Comfort, relaxation, excitement, feelings of belonging, etc., etc. – all of these reside within, yet are sought without. The Tao Te Ching emphasizes:

The five colors blind the eye.
The five tones deafen the ear.
The five flavors dull the taste.
Racing and hunting madden the mind.
Precious things lead one astray.
Therefore the sage is guided by what he feels and not what he sees.
He let’s go of that and this.

To interpret: Your ability to see is taken by looking; hearing is given up by listening; tasting, lost to predilection. Decompetition and thrill-seeking disturb inner peace. The mindful individual does not move to move, but moves because it is necessary.

On the contrary, no robbery has been committed. The individual has sold their self to the gym, to the bar, to the church, to the government, to the school. The individual has sold their self for what they believe is their self: the culture – the society – the crowd. Carl Gustav Jung noted this (p. 10):

“The bigger the crowd the more negligible the individual becomes. But if the individual, overwhelmed by the sense of his own puniness and impotence, should feel that his life has lost its meaning… then he is already on the road to state slavery and, without knowing or wanting it, has become its proselyte. Under these circumstances it is small wonder that individual judgment grows increasingly uncertain of itself and that responsibility is collectivized as much as possible, i.e., is shuffled off by the individual and delegated to a corporate body. [e.g. sold to the institution] In this way the individual becomes more and more a function of society, which in its turn usurps the function of the real life carrier, whereas, in actual fact, society is nothing more than an abstract idea like the state. Both are hypostatized, that is, have become autonomous. The state in particular is turned into a quasi-animate personality from whom everything is expected. In reality it is only a camouflage for those individuals who know how to manipulate it. Thus the constitutional state drifts into the situation of a primitive form of society, namely the communism of a primitive tribe where everybody is subject to the autocratic rule of a chief or an oligarchy.

The man who looks only outside and quails before the big battalions has no resource with which to combat the evidence of his senses and his reason. But that is just what is happening today: we are all fascinated and overawed by statistical truths and large numbers and are daily apprised of the nullity and futility of the individual personality, since it is not represented and personified by any mass organization.” Conversely, those personages who strut about on the world stage and whose voices are heard far and wide seem, to the uncritical public, to be born along on some mass movement or on the tide of public opinion and for this reason are either applauded or execrated. Since mass suggestion plays the predominant role here, it remains a moot point whether their message is their own, for which they are personally responsible, or whether they merely function as a megaphone for collective opinion.

Under these circumstances it is small wonder that individual judgment grows increasingly uncertain of itself and that responsibility is collectivized as much as possible, i.e., is shuffled off by the individual and delegated to a corporate body. In this way the individual becomes more and more a function of society, which in its turn usurps the function of the real life carrier, whereas, in actual fact, society is nothing more than an abstract idea like the state. Both are hypostatized, that is, have become autonomous. The state in particular is turned into a quasi-animate personality from whom everything is expected. In reality it is only a camouflage for those individuals who know how to manipulate it. Thus the constitutional state drifts into the situation of a primitive form of society, namely the communism of a primitive tribe where everybody is subject to the autocratic rule of a chief or an oligarchy.

The dictator state has one great advantage over bourgeois reason: along with the individual it swallows up his religious forces. The state has taken the place of God; that is why, seen from this angle, the socialist dictatorships are religions and state slavery is a form of worship. But the religious function cannot be dislocated and falsified in this way without giving rise to secret doubts, which are immediately repressed so as to avoid conflict with the prevailing trends towards mass-mindedness. The result, as always in such cases, is overcompensation in the form of fanaticism, which in turn is used as a weapon for stamping out the last flicker of opposition. Free opinion is stifled and moral decision is ruthlessly suppressed, on the plea that the end justifies the means, even the vilest. The policy of the state is exalted to a creed, the leader or party boss becomes a demigod beyond good and evil, and his votaries are honored as heroes, martyrs, apostles, missionaries. There is only one truth and besides it no other. It is sacrosanct and above criticism. Anyone who thinks differently is a heretic, who as we know from history, is threatened with all manner of unpleasant things. Only the party boss, who holds the political power in his hands, can interpret the state doctrine authentically, and he does so as suits him.

Even a dictator thinks it necessary not only to accompany his acts of state with threats but to stage them with all manner of solemnities. Brass bands, flags, banners, parades and monster demonstrations are no different in principle from ecclesiastical processions, cannonades and fireworks to scare off demons. Only, the suggestive parade of state power engenders a collective feeling of security, which unlike religious demonstrations, gives the individual no protection against his inner demonism. Hence he will cling all the more to the power of the state, i.e., to the mass, thus delivering himself up to it psychically as well as morally and putting the finishing touch to his social depotentiation. The state, like the church, demands enthusiasm, self-sacrifice and love, and if religion requires or presupposes the “fear of God,” then the dictator state takes good care to provide the necessary terror.

As I have already pointed out, the dictator state, besides robbing the individual of his rights, has also cut the ground from under his feet psychically by depriving him of the metaphysical foundations of his existence. The ethical decision of the human being no longer counts- what alone matters is the blind movement of the masses, and the lie has thus become the operative principle of political action. The state has drawn the logical conclusions from this, as the existence of many millions of state slaves completely deprived of all rights mutely testifies.”

Austin, James H. Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1999.

Eisner, Elliot W. The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs. New York: Macmillan.

Guiley, Rosemary. The Encyclopedia of Magic and Alchemy. New York: Facts On File, 2006.

Teaching and Healing

Goodman, in Filmmaking and Research: an Intersection, discusses the use of storytelling in research and in filmmaking. He notes that research is presented in a "pretty standard and sometimes bland way. The format of problem, theory, method, results, and discussion is common across most journals." Of research, Goodman states there are 'critical incidents'; he ponders if these may be captured and shared with the reader of research. "For example, in our study on medication errors in hospitals, it might be useful to capture some detailed stories about incidents and make these available to supplement the specific findings in the study. These could be in a video interview format."

I wish to connect this idea of storytelling as it pertains to my experience as an educator and a practitioner of energy healing.

Briefly, energy healing refers to the conscious projection of some form of bioelectricity, known to the ancient Chinese as chi (life-force), which results in enhanced emotional states and thereby optimizing consciousness to generate efficient actions that preserve the wellbeing of an individual. One 'form' of energy healing is what is known as Shamanism. Shamanism refers primarily to tribal cultures of South America, but has been and may be applied to other geographies as well. Where as arts such as Reiki or the ancient Egyptian Seichim are 'hands-on' approaches to energy healing, Shamanism approaches this endeavor imaginatively, journeying as they like to call it, with a person to undergo an experience which dispels negative energies that cause harm or disease. Both the Shaman and the person they're working with undergo a shared dream-like experience that unfolds like a story - http://homelands.org/worlds/shaman.html

This same story-structure may be used by the Reiki or Seichim practitioner as exemplified in the following manner: A women told me she was trying to give up smoking but could not manage to do it. I told her of an experience (story) I had with a friend who, in the middle of smoking a cigarette, looked at it and revolted - declaring 'this is disgusting' and consequently throwing away his pack of cigarettes and never touching them again. I used this story as a medium for the energy behind it, which was intended to be the fuel she needed to make her move.

Such a method of healing combines both approaches and derives a more direct emotional and energetic investment from the person being worked on, since they are being guided through imaginative space at your direction.

To me this is teaching in its essence - helping bring people to life, and enabling them to cherish, protect, and express that life as best suits them.

The Art of Film & Television Module Project

https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=2736702741891&saved

Commentary

The intent of this project is to create in a viewer an experience of suspense, humor, and inspiration. To create this experience I worked on producing a visually stimulating motion picture. Much of the work beyond filming, falling, and composing was in editing. I have come to find that the slightest adjustment of time relative to any given imagery - as it relates to the music, the wording, and other imagery - utterly redefines the experience evoked by the image(s). For example, the placement of the parts of Coolidge’s quote altered the time of their presentation; hence, if a viewer is unable to read the full quote then they probably experience some sort of frustration or mild upset, rather than the intended inspiration.
I am rather pleased with the way the experience turned out. The video brings forth the audio slightly prior to the visual – encouraging suspense. The figures are not exactly discernible until the perspective pulls back and resets. The black and white of the images renders it a somewhat foreign mystique and the introduction of “Like a hologram…” renders ambiguity. The ambience picks up as “What you do…” pronounces itself with animation and dynamic coloring, fading into a more concise exhibit of what the first scene left in shadows – enabling a degree of resolution and simultaneous increase in suspense. The exercise being performed is itself foreign to most individuals, which provides a looming intrigue or curiosity, which makes an untraditional marriage with fear for the safety of the character. This curios fear or anxiety increases as the following scene depicts a failed attempt and a call from gravity. “You do to...” coincides with the piano and the tone changes with the singing and colored imagery. At this point the character falls and humor is called forth. Or, for some, this visual may generate sorrow or worry – again, for the safety of the character. An inner conflict presents itself in the viewer as one expects injury or at least discouragement; but the character picks himself up and gets right back to work. This encourages a feeling of inspiration and some reflection upon the presented morals relative to those of the viewer.
As the viewer tries to put their tongue on the virtues demonstrated it is visually manifest in the Coolidge quote. Rather than show the character simply putting their station back together, this segment is spiced up by the division of the quote, nourishing intrigue and suspense. As the quote unveils its entirety the viewer is taken by the rhythm of the music and the succession and demand of visual events. The chorus breaks into verse as the character makes his last and somewhat surprising attempt, where he finally succeeds. Based on the history that the viewer has been exposed to, this is a very relieving event and similar relief is provided by Coolidge’s concluding statement… The quote and the visual bound by the spirit beneath their form.
Beyond this, and far more astonishing to me, is the tangible flow underlying a piece of artwork. As quantum physics has brought to the table, everything in the universe is energy. Art is a process of transmuting and reforming energy – this energy is unconsciously attended to by most people, but is directly accessible to everyone. Consider working on any given project - say, for your occupation. I am sure you have either heard or said yourself “work the kinks out” in some way or another. To this the inquisitive mind asks: what kinks, where? This ‘metaphor’ is a subconscious reference to the energy of your work. With heightened awareness of this capacity, you can literally feel these kinks and are intuitively gifted with clues for the remedy of the problem.

This week’s discussion exercise alone did a lot for the creation of my imaginative bridge. Although some of what came upon me from the exercise showed up in the discussion, I would like to expand upon those questions.

Just because an experience is compelling, is one necessarily learning or at all enriching one’s self? This question, for me, generates a following question: Are learning and enrichment of self one and the same enterprise? No, they are not – they may be, but one is not a necessary requirement for, or a necessary result of, the other. Consider, for example, an education under Nazi rule; of course, this would be self-enrichment if one examined it from a Nazi perspective. To take this consideration of learning v. self-enrichment into the classroom, I begin to ponder the implications that therefore lace or load an experience’s hidden or unintended curriculum. To illustrate what is meant by hidden or unintentional, Stephen Spielberg once said of movies: “you make a movie to get the audience to stand up and cheer”, which places cheering as the intention of the event – as learning is the intention of curriculum. But what of the patron leaving the movie theater after viewing Star Wars who did not stand up and cheer, but sat there and pondered “In what direction is mankind’s collective habits taking me and my species?” What of the student who, rather than learning skills from endeavors in school, learns that they are worthless in the eyes of their peers? This later learning is the hidden curriculum –as the term is used here. So, while the intended experience may be sincerely compelling, leading the experiencer to learn something, the unintended experience may compel the individual to limit their own capabilities and potential. This automatically raises the question in my mind: is there is any way to consciously and effectively deal with such an unfortunate outcome?

How does the design affect the delivery of some knowledge? In other words, how do the defining components of a learning experience contribute to the formation of a learned individual? This question, in part, assumes that the outcome of a learning experience is part of that learning and that experience. This question picks up exactly where the discussion of the last inquiry left off: How does the engineer of an experience go about predicting, approximating, or anticipating the subjective reactions of an individual exposed to that experience? This measurement will guide the process of engineering to create an experience that results in the engineer’s intended outcome.

Does one’s experience affect how one views the design of that experience? Even if one is creates an experience that generates an intentional manifestation, will any given individual see the design as it was intended to be seen, despite individual concerns related to their personal life - unique to their psychological development and particular genetic layout? This question addresses or anticipates the following question’s concern of “as relative to temporally coinciding concerns of the individual”.

And what influences the effect a design has on an individual, as relative to temporally coinciding concerns of the individual? An individual’s momentary temperament may override the impact which perceptibles have up them - their emotional state or their attitude, possibly their mental or physiological condition, has the potential to enable or inhibit the reception of perceptual information and thus allow thei impact intended by the engineer – regardless of how perfectly designed (not to mention as well updated with methods of individual and social control) it may be. Following the cognitive formulae lain before us, it is quite compelling in and of itself to find that all of one’s efforts available to them in their world are still overridden by an intention all its own… echoing a Gung Fu meditation:

"The high wind does not last all morning.
Neither does a sudden rain last all day.
Heaven and Earth are not able
to make things last forever,
So how is it possible for man?"

To put this in perspective, no matter how much we care and how hard we try, nor the power of our teaching abilities paired with our capacity to engineer an experience, there remains a superseding essence of an individual or interaction that may render the potential of the experience inconsequential.

To me, this is quite humbling.