What started as a small student protest in one of Vienna’s Art Academy a week ago, has spread like wildfire (sic!) through Austrian unversities, with up to a thousand students squatting in lecture halls, organizing work groups and task forces, and their own learning. There was a large protest march with 10.000-40.000 (depending on the sources) people marching through the streets of Vienna last week. The hub of action is Austria’s largest lecture hall, the Audimax in the Univerits of Vienna, the very place where fourty years ago student protests and subsequent political and cultural changes originated. Now the grandchildren of the bearded 1968 generation, a generation of young people habitually accused for not being interested in politics is taking action.
Every day there is a full programme of talks, discussions, plenary sessions, music concerts and occasional flashmobs organized by the students, and after a full week it looks like they are here to stay for a while, unless the state will intervene with police force.
Not surprisingly the movement is using Web 2.0 technologies in organizing themselves and in gathering external support. They have set up wikis for the organisation, blogs, a press office. You can read their first press release in English here. Photos are posted on unibrennt pool on Flickr and there is a life stream were you can follow the daily plenary sessions. Last night there were 1700-1800 people watching online, when the people in the hall issued a call for university students in Gemany to join the movement. The faceegroup support group has accumulated over 23.000 fans, and it is all over twitter #unibrennt or #unsereuni #audimax. Comparisons with the grassroots campaign for Obama are being drawn in mainstream papers.
On Transcrypt.de by Frank Baranowski you can find a description for exercises in designing mysterious fonts, derived from known latin scripts, which do not mean anything, see Kryptic 1 and Kryptic2.
Meanwhile I read on Popular Mechanics that the poster for Lost’s final season contains hieroglyphics. Dr. James Allen, Wilbour Professor of Egyptology and Chair of Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies at Brown University analyzed the symbols and had this answer: “The hieroglyphs spell out two Egyptian words, meaning ‘Who is the guide?’ or ‘Who is the leader?”
I have introduced ComicLife to a group of primar school teachers, and it will be interesting to see what they will be coming up with in their classrooms. In the meantime I found this comic.
Edupunks, meddlers in the middle, teaching as subversive activity – where is my research leading me to next?
Brian Sutton-Smith wrote “The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression. To play is to act out and be willful, exultant and committed as if one is assured of one’s prospects.” in The Ambiguity of Play (1997) which I read a while ago and now I found it cited in Unlearning How to Teach, Creativity or Conformity? Building Cultures of Creativity in Higher Education by Erica McWilliam. And a brief further search brought up the image above here.
This is great, bringing back childhood memories: watching records spinning on the turntable and dreaming about being a hippie when I would grow up, living in a world of love and peace . :-)
Keri Smith’s blog is always an inspiring place to drop by, which got me to buy some of her books. Promoting her new “This is Not a Book” book she posted these illustrations on the penguingroup blog:
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She sums up very well what sadly, is many children’s experience. It certainly reflects to a large extent what my son had to go through. I might use this in some teacher training course!
Interestingly the Austrian Minsitry of Education has recently issued an edict demanding “holistic-creative learning culture in schools” outlining how creativity should be a guiding principle for learning across the curriculum. This is great in principle, yes, but it beats me how educational authorities think creativity can be ordered on demand. As if a whole national school system developed over centuries, designed to stifle creativity will change with the issue of a five page statement. It will take some substantial backing in the form of funding, appropriate teacher training, dedicated and supportive groups of people in key positions, well planned long term strategies, the freedom to take risks and lots of patience to see some real change. Otherwise it will just remain one more edict which teachers, in reality, are free to ignore.
Which leads to Keri Smiths second drawing in her post on “how I discovered my secret powers: Plot to infiltrate the system.” I think hers is a very good plan – I could do with some more superpowers though :-)
This reminds me of Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, first published in 1971. While the book sometimes is polemical and sketchy and has to be understood within the context of its time, it is still an interesting and thought provoking read. It was also published in German, but is now out of print.
On July 7 20o9 the “Internet Research Group” from the University of Vienna presented YouTube Cinema with a programme called “Fake!” at the Museumsquartier in Vienna. Everybody had ten minutes to show and talk about some favourites. It was a fun evening with some lively discussions. Here is our playlist: YouTube Kino: Fake!
Here the New York TImes have a fascinating report about Carl Jung’s private notebook with personal reflections as well as drawings, which has been kept from the public until now. He worked on the Red Book for a period of 16 years, and ever since his death it has been locked away. Now, for the first time it is going to be published.
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Carl Jung said the Red Book stemmed from his “confrontation with the unconscious,” during which visions came in an “incessant stream.”
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“I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can — in some beautifully bound book,” Jung instructed. “It will seem as if you were making the visions banal — but then you need to do that — then you are freed from the power of them. . . . Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church — your cathedral — the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them — then you will lose your soul — for in that book is your soul.”
Wow, this is intriguing. I might have mentioned before, that many years ago I researched the visonary writings of Jakob Boehme, a German mystic, who had visions, and who is thought of as the first German philosopher, e.g. by Hegel. > On my Christmas Wish List!
How do you visualize a concept, which implies a complex theoretical discourse and is also embodied in our experience, something such as structural violence?
Sometimes an image search will bring up a series of useful visualisations. Sometimes it is hard to find something that works, so you have to think laterally and that search may bring up new ideas of how to think about a phenomenon.
Here is what I have come up with for structual violence related to an educational context:
I am not sure yet, if this is what I really meant to say, but it is what I found to be expressive and telling so far. For some reason the images all include writing. Now I wonder, is this a concidence? Or does it say something about how language and literacy is used in power relationsships? Note to self: Read Bourdieu’s Language and Symbolic Power and Foucault’s Diszipline and Punish.
My son is in the process of applying for universities, the whole family involved in the game. I am happy that he sucessfully completed school, and that he is clever and mature for an eighteen year old. But I cannot help worrying about his first steps into this strange world of academia. This pie chart from graphjam.com makes me laugh, as there is some truth in it. It could be turned into a tool for teaching students how to write essays:
You cannot brag if you don’t know something about your subject, which you can show off, so do it. Ass Kissing means that you have to know the important players in the field, who said relevant things. You should acknowledge, what you have learned from them. You don’t have to be sycophantic, though. Sometimes clever Name Dropping is enough, to show that you know what you are doing, and that should be included in the chart. And well, the slice of Relevant Content could be bigger.
Of course there is also the other side, the bitter truth about the essays you get from students. No comment on this chart, it speaks for itself:
Last but not least I kept coming past the fourth plinth at Trafalgar square and watched a few people presenting themselves to a cheering audience. I had expected more cynical reactions. People seemed to really love and enjoy it all, although the stuff I saw that afternoon was not especially great. I could not help thinking, how small and mundane real people look on the plinth, unlike the majestic Lord Nelson on his tall column, when a guy turned around to me. “I luuve watching life just going by. I’ve been up there, and me mate ‘ere too. We are Plinthians!” he said proudly. Meanwhile, around the corner, at the National Portrait Gallery you can watch a live stream, which provides a different perspective and arguably a better view, than standing on the ground. So instantly the performance, the actual experience is turned into a mediated ‘portrait’. As to be expected there are thousands of photos uploaded to Flickr documenting the ongoing show. I cannot think of an art project which enables more participation than this, including the Plinthians, the photographers, even the hecklers.
Another exibition I saw earlier summer in London, which left a lasting impression: “Heaven & Earth” by Richard Long at the Tate Britain. I did not bring a camera so here are images found on FLickr . I particularly liked some of the massive installations and large wall painings like this “Mud Wall”. I felt they had to be experienced by walking around the exhibition space, rather that standing or sitting, as usual. This gave me a better understanding also of his other work about walking landscapes, embodied expierences of land, earth and sky. There are hundreds of photos – more of Richard Long’s work on Flickr.
The exhibition “Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur” was a real treat, although I came quite late and therefore did not have enough time to see it all. I bought the catalogue though. Many of the paintings are really stunning. I love the tryptichs like the one above “The Emergence of Spirit and Matter from the Shiva Purana.” The first panel – the world before creation is just a square of gold – pure abstraction, predating Western abstract art by several centuries. Another one showed the “Cosmic Oceans” – just abstract silver swirls. I like this one too: “The Equivalence of Self and Universe”.
This summer I went to see a few great exhibitions in London. Last week I went to the National Portrait Gallery for the first time. I found it a strange experience, in particular the galleries and long corridors with paintings and busts from the Tudors to the Victorians. Long rows of extremely ugly, joyless, nasty people people staring down on you. But I did love some like the portrats of William Blake and William Shakspeare for their graceful simplicity and the lovely expression of their eyes, and Harold Pinter’s and Neil Kinnock and his wife’s for their storytelling and gentle humour. And I heard Larry Friedlander talk about Portraits from Durer to Facebook at the Transforming Audiences 2 Conference at Westminster University. (see here) Of course, doing all this research on Flickr I cannot help getting more and more interested in visual portraits. Last term my colleague Selma Koric and myself did a mini research project: “International exchange students using of digital photography to keep in touch with friends and family”, where we studied the use of photos for self representations on social media sites such as StudiVZ and the Russian version of Facebook. One tentative conculsion was, that a substantial level of media literacy is necessary for people to feel they are in control of their presence online, if not they are not happy and don’t know even exactly why.
I have made another version of this quote from the Blade Runner, this time with an image of Orion found on Wikipedia. Why do I bother? Because I am curious about many things, painting, filmmaking, writing, craftwork and more. Experiencing the process of making things adds another layer to my understanding of certain cultural practices. And I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe. At the same time I don’t know if this will avail anything. So here we go, this is my first shot at digital remix, or fan art.
Recently I have been thinking about the scene of the final showdown between Deckard (Harrison Ford) and the replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) in the Blade Runner, and its poetic ending. This film had a powerful impact on me when I saw it in a cinema in New York’s Lower East Side, when it first came out in 1982 and when I watched it several times after that in the following years. Fast forward to over twenty years later, when I started reading film theory and realized that it was not only me who thought highly of the film, but that it is considered a film classic.
This scene can be found in multiple YouTube versions, however watching the brief clip online seems a bit sad and cheesy. Not at all the same experience as watching it at a time of the cold war, on a big cinema screen. Time, place and medium of distribution make a difference on the reading experience.
I also like this simple explanation. I would like to put that in my PhD thesis, instead of some complex definition! It seems to come from Scott McCloud, whose book “Unterstanding Comics” is on my shopping list.
