A Circle to a Line:

2011-03-04T06:31:00.000-08:00

"Five Question, Twenty Minutes"

In a brief exchange with colleagues yesterday: playing a game of snakes and ladders.

After the exchanged I was cautioned by the thought: where and when did my line of thinking start paying attention to "designing change?"

This morning I remembered it was listening to Bill Drayton tell the story of the Ahsoka Foundation at the 2005 AAC&U Pre-Conference Symposium: Working Convergences: Liberal Education, Creativity, and the Entrepreneurial Spirit.
http://www.aacu.org/meetings/annualmeeting/AM05/symposium.cfm

Drayton began his social capitol research and establishing this alternative economic model as an Harvard undergrad. His thinking was driven by facts: he mapped that many aspects of capitolism's growth had peaked. He arrived at an alternative model coined social capitol.

Social capitol's bottom-up agency and feed back loops are the qualities that interest me the most. Use informs meaning, hegemony remains but simultaneous alternatives gain root and feed alternative cultures.

"A dictionary of Received Ideas" is an allegory theme employed by Flaubert in his novel Bouvard et Pécuchet published posthumously in 1881.

Flaubert's satire directs us to the imperfections of man's knowledge, to what is knowable from science and art. In the Modernist era of art and design the embrace of technology aesthetic -as-agency is challenged by many: Ruskin, Morris, Whistler, the Symbolist poets and artists. The Dadaist take up this critique after World War I.

Jonathan Swift also critiques western foundations of knowledge in Gulliver's Travels. The inhabitants of Laputa invent a writing machine [a proto-computer] that manufactures nonsense.

My personality is genuinely positive, but inclined to question the origins of organizing principles that direct the individual, social groups, societies.

The intention of this Dictionary is to publish my thinking regarding how art and design investigates aspects of "what is knowable." Linking these ideas to my portfolios in pictures and in words. And when opportunities arise linking my work into the rhizome of Internet resources.

Lori Rubeling's Dictionary of Received Ideas

A Circle to a Line: