# data[].attributes.body
Talker series

# data[].attributes.body
Just saw this in the local newspaper which allows me to see a potential context for my project to sit within beyond the RCA.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Yanwath School embraces outdoor learning - Cumberland and Westmorland Herald

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A Cumbrian school has officially opened a nurture garden so it can embrace more outdoor learning.

# data[].attributes.headline
On the Necessary Labor of Thinking With by Nora N Khan (Deem Journal) — Notes

# data[].attributes.subject
On the Necessary Labor of Thinking With by Nora N Khan (Deem Journal) — Notes

# data[].attributes.body
"Being online makes less room for non-verbal and non-written communication' intellectual spaces are mediated through official scripts, bureaucratic rules of engagement, timelines. Obligation, fear, and shame seem poor if effective motivators."

"Teaching's deep responsibility is to think with the complexity of personal history that goes on inside and outside the classroom. It is to understand what goes often unseen, to name all the other kinds of intelligence one can enact in life, that can inform a life".

"The art school classroom, the studio, is still a place you can speak with someone about a kind of impulse like Radigue's, to pursue the sound or sight of the world that eludes, to find mediation of an infinite, to train oneself to capture a sensation, a thought, an insight. Here there's no perceived naïveté or shame in speaking of the infinite, of hidden sensations, of the unimaginable. These are moments that really need to be fought for."

"I hope to suggest that this disembodied education moment is an opportunity to slow down, to listen to what's being unsaid, in order to forge the artistic life that universities insist is on offer to us all, in the same way, with just enough effort. Moving into my final semester, I will be trying my best to unlearn and to invite others to unlearn with me. I will keep trying to think with, as a way to hold that space of unknown language, unknown sights, unknown sounds".

# data[].attributes.headline
Learning About the World at the Grocery Store by Harrell Fletcher

# data[].attributes.subject
Learning About the World at the Grocery Store by Harrell Fletcher

# data[].attributes.body
What can you learn about the world in a supermarket?

Similar spirit to my project

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I was asked by a non-profit art center in Indianapolis, Indiana called Big Car to come up with a project that would happen in conjunction with a city-wide festival which was focusing on food systems. The director of Big Car, Jim Walker, took me around to various neighborhoods that he thought might be good spots for a potential project. The last stop was an older somewhat vacant shopping center that contained in it a thriving international grocery store called Saraga. I was immediately excited by the Saraga environment. Indianapolis is not a place that you normally associate with ethnic diversity, but Saraga was an unexpected exception or maybe just an example of the incorrect assumption that the midwest is only white and homogenous. The grocery store is set up so that most of the aisles are identified by geographical areas-India, Mexico, Venezuela, Iraq, etc., and contain food products from those places. As I walked around the store I observed various shoppers who appeared to connect with the geographical locations named on the aisles. I couldn't help but think how interesting it would be to hear from them directly talking about various topics related to their countries origin-politics, histories, personal stories, and of course cuisine. Over the years I've created a number of projects that allow me to tap into local knowledge in the places where I have been commissioned to do work. I choose to do that primarily to satisfy my own desire to learn about new things, and then I try also to extend that experience to larger publics as well through exhibitions, events, publications, etc.. Reading and watching films offers an important but mediated form of knowledge acquisition, so I really enjoy the opportunity for first hand experience and learning from primary sources. In the case of the Saraga project the way that I set things up was that I worked remotely with the people at Big Car, Jim, Shauta, and Tom, and they found local volunteers to go to Saraga and approach customers and workers to see if they would be willing to make presentations at the store about their country of origin. The volunteers then worked with the participants to create display boards depicting aspects of their countries of origin. We then held an event at Saraga called Learning About the World at the Grocery Store. It took place for several hours on a Saturday afternoon. The participants set up their display boards in a row at the front of the aisles in relationship to the geographical areas that they were representing. The event was advertised, so some people came specifically for it, others were just there shopping and experienced the presentations spontaneously. Many of the participants did cooking demonstrations or had sample foods that they had prepared in advance. After people mulled around and talked casually for about an hour we went down the row and each participant took a turn talking to the crowd about their country of origin. It is amazing how well people do when given the opportunity to present something that they know and care about, and how much can be learned from the people that are all around us.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Learning About the World at the Grocery Store

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I was asked by a non-profit art center in Indianapolis, Indiana called Big Car to come up with a project that would happen in conjunction with a city-wide festival which was focusing on food systems. The director of Big Car, Jim Walker, took me around to various neighborhoods that he thought might be good spots for a potential project.

# data[].attributes.headline
Blah Blah Blah: The Lack of Small Talk is Breaking our Brains

# data[].attributes.subject
Blah Blah Blah: The Lack of Small Talk is Breaking our Brains

# data[].attributes.body
"Without small talk, we are boring ourselves at best. At worst, we’re homogenizing our exposure to different thoughts and world views."

Just found this article which sums up a lot of my thoughts on the importance of spontaneous conversation.

Reflecting on this and my project when it was focusing on conversation, I can see how the interest for me is in the opportunity to learn spontaneously. This comes back to rejecting hierarchical forms of knowledge (planned structures/curriculums/books/industry leaders) in favour of learning from life and from one another on a more democratic/equal level.

I've been feeling as though there was a connection between my interests in conversation and walking but I've struggled to articulate why. I think I can realise the connection now and it's wider connection to my position.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I never thought I'd say this, but I miss small talk. I miss those fifteen-second exchanges with strangers at the gym. I miss asking acquaintances about their significant others or dropping an "I like your shoes" to a woman in the elevator before hopping off.

In our pandemic world, casual conversation has been all but eliminated. The closest thing I get these days is saying "thank you" to a delivery person or greeting a grocery store clerk. Even then, I'm hesitant to linger-every unnecessary moment with a stranger feels taboo, every breath a hazard. And, now, in the absence of chit-chat, I feel isolated and unenergized. This has led to a potentially controversial revelation: small talk gets an unfairly bad rap.

Science backs me up on this. "Small talk functions as a crucial social ritual," says Jessica Methot, a behavioural scientist at Rutgers University who studies social networks. "It's a way to grease the wheels." Methot has co-authored a number of papers that have found several benefits for small talk in work settings-work being one of the most common venues for chit-chat. In one study, she and her team found that, on days employees had more small talk with coworkers or supervisors, their mood improved, they had more energy, and there was a decrease in burnout.

There are a number of things at play here, but before we can go any further, it's important to define what exactly small talk is. Methot says her study defined it as "lighthearted, superficial, polite, scripted conversation." It's "scripted" in the sense that it's predictable: everyone knows the appropriate default phrases, so participants are rarely caught off guard. Someone might ask, "How are you?" so you respond, "I'm well," or something of that ilk, before bouncing the question back to the asker. It's rote, it's a bit boring, but the data show it's terribly important.

It's no wonder that, more than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, so many of us feel detached and disoriented. In the world of quarantine and remote work, one in which we've been robbed of opportunities to gather publicly, most conversation has been replaced by emails, texts, and an endless queue of scheduled calls. The pandemic has revealed how fleeting those transient interactions really are. And, as our circles shrink and isolation reigns, the absence of small talk may be harming us much more than we know.

O ur professional and personal networks are collapsing. Marissa King and Balázs Kovács, writing in Harvard Business Review, report that, during the pandemic, our personal and professional circles have decreased by 16 percent. For men, it's even worse-as much as 30 percent.

And it's not just work small talk that we're missing out on. Chatting with strangers out in public can also prove valuable-though it's now increasingly rare. Gillian Sandstrom, a psychologist at the University of Essex, conducted one study that found that, when people engaged more with a barista-smiling, making eye contact, conversing-they felt a greater sense of community belonging. In another, her data showed that, the more people mingled with acquaintances or strangers in a day, the better their mood and sense of connection. Sandstrom observed that, in a normal prepandemic day, people interacted with an average of eleven acquaintances; university students interacted with sixteen. But, now, talking with more than two or three people a day seems inconceivable.

The monotony of automated dialogue is a common reason people claim to dislike small talk. But Methot says this superficiality is what makes it unique. "It doesn't require a lot of thought, it doesn't require a lot of energy, and it doesn't require a lot of self-disclosure," she says. The fact that you can start chit-chatting on autopilot makes it easier to acknowledge those you don't know very well, if at all, and be acknowledged in return. "That brief acknowledgement is really meaningful," Methot says. "Not because it's deep . . . but it makes you feel seen."

Small talk is also an equalizer. Andrew Guydish, a PhD student of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, found in his research that, without space for off-task communication, people in "directing" roles at work spoke much more than those in "following" roles. But, once they introduced opportunities for off-task chatter, followers started to make up for that dialogue imbalance. "The more folks were able to speak in a balanced way, the more they reported enjoyment on the task," he explains. Today, in virtual workspaces devoid of small talk, Guydish says, "we're literally just letting conversation imbalances go."

The quality of conversations has also changed. Every dialogue feels transactional because, now, our conversations are based on our work roles, says Methot. And, without chit-chat, there's no relief. Small talk, it seems, is reenergizing: a palate-cleansing moment of respite when you can prime yourself for whatever's next.

Of course, there are ways to inject some semblance of chatter into a digital work meeting, like setting aside the first ten minutes for "off-task communication," as Guydish calls it. But anyone who's tried knows that it doesn't feel quite the same as normal premeeting gab. Small talk should be spontaneous and nonpurposeful, Guydish says, and it's that spontaneity that is so difficult to replicate virtually. When we schedule time for chit-chat, he says, we turn it into yet another item on the to-do list, thereby defeating the purpose. Factor in bad connectivity or lag times and chatter hardly flows easy.

So how do you facilitate serendipitous conversation when many of us are working from home? Methot is trying to investigate, but there's no easy answer. It's ironic, she says, that something we normally do so thoughtlessly is so hard a phenomenon to replicate. But, if you can't duplicate spontaneous encounters, like standing around a water cooler or bumping into an acquaintance on the street, Methot says the next best thing is creating an intentional one. This can be through setting up virtual lounges that allow users to pop in and say hi or even reaching out to a loose acquaintance or colleague: it may feel a bit awkward, but shooting someone an email or text to check in is meaningful. Plus, it will feel spontaneous-to them, at least.

"I guess the question is, Is losing the spontaneity better or worse than losing the interaction altogether?" asks Beth Schinoff, an organizational-behaviour researcher at Boston College. Scheduling personal chats can feel contrived and inauthentic, but otherwise, she says, they may not happen.

In addition to the number of connections lost, Sandstrom says it's also important to consider the diversity of those missing connections. In a pandemic, of course you'll make more of an effort to stay connected with your closest friends and family-but, as Sandstrom points out, those are also the people you're likely most familiar with. Small talk with acquaintances and strangers is an "important source of novelty" that adds unpredictability and variety to the everyday and gives all parties an opportunity to find commonality on neutral ground. Without small talk, we are boring ourselves at best. At worst, we're homogenizing our exposure to different thoughts and world views.

Some people are turning to social media to get their fix of interactions with strangers. A November paper published in the journal Human Arenas commented on the boost in parasocial relationships-one-sided connections or personal obsessions, like between a fan and a celebrity. The authors say that "parasocial interactions through digital media allowed us to have a sense of togetherness during the quarantine." The Daily Beast reported that visits to Chatroulette, a website that randomly connects strangers via webcam, more than doubled between the beginning of 2020 and last April.

Small talk with strangers online can also offer a low-stakes opportunity to be vulnerable. One study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, suggests that people prefer to disclose embarrassing and personal details to a stranger than to a close friend. In the same way a stand-up comedian can be freer to try out new bits at small open mikes rather than experimenting in the middle of a Netflix special, people can test others' reactions to news without it feeling quite so scary. Chatting with strangers, even briefly, can be a liberating act of calibration.

An inability to chit-chat means an inability to connect-the detriments of no small talk are really the detriments of isolation. "There is a lot out there that suggests that people aren't only lonelier but they also feel less respected by their colleagues and they feel kind of forgotten," says Schinoff. Methot adds that "these feelings of social exclusion can actually make us age faster" and that "not being acknowledged at work creates a sense of workplace loneliness that can actually be detrimental to our health."

To Sandstrom, initiating small talk is a prosocial act-something done for the good of all involved. People enjoy it more than they predict: they feel more anchored, trusting, and even more optimistic about the general population after having interactions with strangers. Whether this applies vice versa-if having fewer interactions with strangers results in a less trusting and more pessimistic population-remains to be studied. "I don't have data," Sandstrom says. "But I think that's the worry, right?"

Sandstrom still talks to strangers all the time: she'll engage people on walks or at the store, all from a safe distance of course. "The opportunities are fewer, and I think we might not be taking them when they do present themselves," she says.

Part of me worries that, by the time everyone is vaccinated, I'll reenter the world clumsy and stilted. Is small talk a skill that can be lost, a muscle that atrophies into nothingness when left idle for too long? Sandstrom is unconvinced. Chit-chat will never disappear, she says, because we'll never be able to help running into people, not completely. Sooner or later, we'll emerge from our homes and rediscover the joys of awkward greetings and drawn-out silences. We'll learn to connect again, clumsy as we may be.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Blah Blah Blah: The Lack of Small Talk Is Breaking Our Brains | The Walrus

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I never thought I'd say this, but I miss small talk. I miss those fifteen-second exchanges with strangers at the gym. I miss asking acquaintances about their significant others or dropping an "I like your shoes" to a woman in the elevator before hopping off.

# data[].attributes.headline
Bridging Contradictions by Emiel Heijnen and Melissa Bremmer (Notes)

# data[].attributes.subject
Bridging Contradictions by Emiel Heijnen and Melissa Bremmer (Notes)

# data[].attributes.body
— “By robustly compressing an assignment into a short sentence, it turns into “an anchor”. This makes it easier for arts educators and learners to relate additional explanations and demands to the assignment.”
— "From the perspectives of authentic arts education, to make arts assignments meaningful they should both challenge students or participants to work and think as conceptual, critical arts practitioners, and provide space for their fascinations, skills and opinions. Such meaningful assignments allow students to draw on their existing knowledge while at the same time having to expand their knowledge".

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Beginning Thursday, October 21, 2010, do a design operation that you are capable of repeating every day. Do it every day between today and up to and including Friday, January 28, 2011, the last day of the project, by which time you will have done the operation one hundred times.

# data[].attributes.body
— Invitations to turn everyday experiences into art.
— "Intended as coping strategies for individuals in a globalising and individualising society" (Wicked Assignments)

Feels like embodied practice to me.

# data[].attributes.body
Events made with local people and materials, based on artists instructions.

A home edition was launched due to covid. Usually exists/tours different museums internationally.

"Each do itexhibition is uniquely site-specific because it engages the local community in a dialogue that responds to and adds a new set of instructions, while it remains global in the scope of its ever-expanding repertoire. This also means that the generative and accumulative aspects of do it’s ongoing presentation are less concerned with notions of the “reproduction” or materiality of the artworks than with revealing the nuances of human interpretation in its various permutations and iterations. In this way, do it is able to bridge the gaps between the temporalities of past, present and future."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
About

Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist
Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, do it began in Paris in 1993 as a conversation between Obrist and the artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier. Obrist was concerned with how exhibition formats could be rendered more flexible and open-ended. This discussion led to the question of whether a show could take "scores," or written instructions by artists, as a point of departure, each of which could be interpreted anew every time they were enacted. To test the idea, Obrist invited 12 artists to send instructions, which were then translated into 9 different languages and circulated internationally as a book.

Nearly 20 years later after the initial conversation took place, do it has been featured in at least 50 different locations worldwide, including Australia, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Mexico, Costa Rica, Slovenia and Uruguay. The driving force behind the exhibition is aptly summarized in the words of Marcel Duchamp, who states that "art is a game between all people of all periods." He is only one of several predecessors to have shaped the modus operandi of this exhibition, which also draws from Conceptual and Minimalist art of the 1960s and 1970s as well as Fluxus practices. Each do it exhibition is uniquely site-specific because it engages the local community in a dialogue that responds to and adds a new set of instructions, while it remains global in the scope of its ever-expanding repertoire. This also means that the generative and accumulative aspects of do it's ongoing presentation are less concerned with notions of the "reproduction" or materiality of the artworks than with revealing the nuances of human interpretation in its various permutations and iterations. In this way, do it is able to bridge the gaps between the temporalities of past, present and future.

This open exhibition model has become the longest-running and most far-reaching exhibition to ever take place, giving new meaning to the concept of the "Exhibition in Progress." In addition to the production of an on-line version of do it created by Obrist in conjunction with e-flux in 2004, other versions that do it has grown to encompass include do it (museum), do it (home), do it (TV), do it (seminar), do it (outside), do it (party), as well as some anti-do its, a philosophy do it and most recently a UNESCO children's do it.

In building off the 1997 collaboration of ICI with Obrist to create a do it that took place in 25 cities across North America, a new version of the exhibition, which marks the 20th anniversary of this landmark project, presents the largest selection of instructional works to date-including 50 newly commissioned pieces from artists selected by Obrist and ICI. Organized around the instructions submitted by artists, venues will select at least 20 instructional works to present from a list of 250.

do it is a traveling exhibition conceived and curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, and organized by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York. The exhibition and the accompanying publication were made possible, in part by grants from the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, and with the generous support from Project Perpetual and ICI's International Forum and Board of Trustees.

Updates

On July 12, 2020 Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries, hosted a marathon live interview via Zoom, with 17 of the 18 artists and creative practitioners who contributed to Kaldor Public Art Project 36: do it (australia).
July 12, 2020 @ Online FIND OUT MORE "

A benefit to support curatorial practice and independent thinking.
June 25, 2020 @ ZOOM FIND OUT MORE "

Hans Ulrich Obrist and the ICI traveling exhibition do it are profiled extensively in the current issue of The New Yorker magazine.
December 2, 2014 FIND OUT MORE "

An animated short about Hans Ulrich Obrist's ongoing exhibition do it, narrated by Reggie Watts.
April 28, 2014 - May 5, 2014 @ Everywhere FIND OUT MORE "

In 1996, three years after the inception of do it, curator Robert Fleck interviewed Hans Ulrich Obrist on the impetus for organizing the generative exhibition. Obrist shares his thoughts on the first iterations of the exhibition and the unending potential for future versions.
March 17, 2013 FIND OUT MORE "

January 16, 2012 FIND OUT MORE "

Curator

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968, Zürich, Switzerland) is Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, and Senior Artistic Advisor of The Shed in New York. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show 'World Soup (The Kitchen Show)' in 1991, he has curated more than 300 exhibitions.

Obrist has lectured internationally at academic and art institutions, and is a contributing editor to the magazines Artforum, AnOther Magazine, 032C, a regular contributor to Mousse and Kaleidoscope and he writes columns for Das Magazin and Weltkunst. In 2011 he received the CCS Bard Award for Curatorial Excellence, and in 2015 he was awarded the International Folkwang Prize for his commitment to the arts.

His recent publications include Mondialité, Conversations in Mexico,Ways of Curating, The Age of Earthquakes with Douglas Coupland and Shumon Basar, and Lives of The Artists, Lives of The Architects.

Artists

Marina Abramović, Etel Adnan, Sophia Al Maria, Pawel Althamer, Amalia Pica, Carl Andre, Kathryn Andrews, Uri Aran, Cory Arcangel, John Armleder, Robert Ashley, David Askevold, Ed Atkins, Tarek Atoui, Lutz Bacher, Darren Bader, Nairy Baghramian, John Baldessari, Matthew Barney, Yto Barrada, Robert Barry, Gianfranco Baruchello, Jérôme Bel, Kim Beom, Bernadette Corporation, Gerry Bibby, Dara Birnbaum, Mel Bochner, John Bock, Christian Boltanski, Iñaki Bonillas, Louise Bourgeois, Geta Bratescu, Joan Brossa, Daniel Buren, Waltercio Caldas, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Mircea Cantor, Antonio Caro, Maurizio Cattelan, John Chamberlain, Paul Chan, Boris Charmatz, Chu Yun, Jay Chung, Hélène Cixous, Lygia Clark, Amy E. Cohen and Francisco J. Varela, Douglas Coupland, Meg Cranston, Critical Art Ensemble, Minerva Cuevas, Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij, Tacita Dean, Wilson Díaz, Diller + Scofidio, do it tv, Trisha Donnelly, Jimmie Durham, Maria Eichorn, Olafur Eliasson, Elmgreen & Dragset, Tracey Emin, Ayse Erkmen, Cerith Wyn Evans, Mathias Faldbakken, Cao Fei, Feng Mengbo, Fischli & Weiss, Claire Fontaine, William Forsythe, Simone Forti, Hreinn Fridfinnsson, Yona Friedman, Simon Fujiwara, Theaster Gates, Paul-Armand Gette, Jef Geys, Gilbert & George, Simryn Gill, Liam Gillick, Édouard Glissant, Leon Golub, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Douglas Gordon, Dan Graham, Rodney Graham, Konstantin Grcic, Joseph Grigely, Ulrike Grossarth, Gu Dexin, Marie-Ange Guilleminot, Shilpa Gupta, Anna Halprin, Richard Hamilton, Harsha NS, Mona Hatoum, Federico Herrero, Anthony Hill, Maria Teresa Hincapie, Roger Hiorns, Damien Hirst, Shere Hite, Nicholas Hlobo, Carsten Höller, Jonathan Horowitz, Hu Fang, Huang Yong Ping, Pierre Huyghe, Fabrice Hybert, Cristina Iglesias, Joan Jonas, Ilya Kabakov, Stephen Kaltenbach, Allan Kaprow, Mike Kelley, Hassan Khan, Ben Kinmont, Ragnar Kjartansson, Alison Knowles, Aaron Koblin, Terence Koh, Jiří Kolář, Julius Koller, Koo Jeong-A, Surasi Kusolwong, Suzanne Lacy, David Lamelas, Adriana Lara, Bertrand Lavier, Xavier Le Roy, Kemang Wa Lehulere, Sol LeWitt, Klara Liden, Erik van Lieshout, Lucy R. Lippard, Liu Ding, Liu Wei, Thomas Lommée, Aníbal López, Lee Lozano, Lu Chunsheng, Sarah Lucas, David Lynch, Jorge Macchi, Tobias Madison, Mark Manders, Christian Marclay, Enzo Mari, Eva Marisaldi, Chris Marker, Helen Marten, Paul McCarthy, Cildo Meireles, Jonas Mekas, Annette Messager, Olaf Metzel, John Miller, Andrei Monastyrski, Robert Morris, Valérie Mréjen, Otto Mühl, Eileen Myles, Jean-Luc Nancy, Deimantas Narkevičius, Ernesto Neto, Rivane Neuenschwander, Max Neuhaus, Albert Oehlen, Roman Ondák, Yoko Ono, Füsun Onur, Damián Ortega, Fernando Ortega, Clifford Owens, Nam June Paik, Pak Sheung-Chueng, Charlemagne Palestine, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Lygia Pape, Nicolás Paris, Philippe Parreno, Marko Peljhan, Cesare Pietroiusti, Adrian Piper, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Marjetica Potrč, Cedric Price, Raqs Media Collective, Casey E. B. Reas, David Reed, Tobias Rehberger, Pedro Reyes, Jason Rhoades, Pipilotti Rist, David Robbins, Adrián Villar Rojas, Ugo Rondinone, Martha Rosler, Ed Ruscha, Claude Rutault, Anri Sala, Eszter Salamon, Tomás Saraceno, Julião Sarmento, Dimitar Sasselov, Peter Saville, Tomas Schmit, Thomas Schütte, Tino Sehgal, Sejima Kazuyo, Hassan Sharif, Jim Shaw, Rupert Sheldrake, Shimabuku, Gabriel Sierra, Alexandre Singh, Andreas Slominski, Michael Smith, Michael E. Smith, Nancy Spero, Bruce Sterling, Mladen Stilinović, Sturtevant, Hugo Suter, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tone Yasunou, Mario Garcia Torres, Ryan Trecartin, Rosemarie Trockel, Agnes Varda, Anton Vidokle, Tris Vonna-Michell, Franz Erhard Walther, Wang Jianwei, Wang Wei, Hannah Weinberger, Lawrence Weiner, Ai Weiwei, Richard Wentworth, Franz West, Emmett Williams, Gil Wolman, Erwin Wurm, Xu Tan, Xu Zhen, Yang Fudong, Zheng Guogu,

Booking Info

Number of artists or artists groups: 250
Number of works: 250
Space required: extremely flexible, though at least 1,000 square feet is recommended
For additional information, as well as to check specific dates of availability, contact Becky Nahom at 212.254.8200 x 205, or becky@curatorsintl.org.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, do it began in Paris in 1993 as a conversation between Obrist and the artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier. Obrist was concerned with how exhibition formats could be rendered more flexible and open-ended.

# data[].attributes.body
Collections of written scores carried out in real time. They didn't require specialist skills / anyone could do them.

# data[].attributes.body
While the experimental mindset of the 1960s that Grapefruit was first released into might be a world away from 2020’s Covid-19 crisis, the space which has opened up for our imaginations to play in this moment of pause feels like a small blessing. We finally have an opportunity to focus on the process over the end product, to give ideas precedent over tangibility, and find new neural pathways which are absurd, banal, or even normal. Whether that’s to “Listen to the earth turning”, “Make music only with overtones” or “Throw a stone into the sky high enough so it will not come back”. When all we have for certain are our imaginations, perhaps there’s no better time to embrace Grapefruit – or, dare I say, conceptual art – than right now.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The many reasons why it's time to revisit the conceptual art book which inspired John Lennon to pen 'Imagine'

Since the introduction of Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" in 1917, which - despite being labelled by the artist himself as a readymade - is arguably one of the first examples of conceptual art, the movement has long been misunderstood or denounced entirely. As a practice based on ideas rather than materiality, aesthetics, or technicality, it's understandably the Marmite of the art world. Writing in The Art Newspaper in 2009, Ben Davis levelled, "Conceptual art is no different from 'traditional' art: There is plenty of interesting painting and sculpture today; there is also plenty of boring, derivative painting and sculpture." Artists whose conceptualism followed in Duchamp's footsteps are also some of the most boundary-pushing artists in history, from John Baldessari to Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, and Yayoi Kusama. However, it's Yoko Ono - whose late husband John Lennon once described as "the world's most famous unknown artist" - who is one of its most important, and pioneering, associates.

Born in Tokyo in 1933, during the frightening years of World War II, Ono took refuge in art as a child and has cited starvation as the spark for her earliest artistic contribution. Speaking to the Guardian in 2013, she described how, after being evacuated in the aftermath of the heavy bombing of Tokyo during World War II, Ono's brother was "really unhappy and depressed and really hungry because we did not have very much food." Her solution was to turn to their imaginations. "I said, 'OK, let's make a menu together. What kind of dinner would you like?' And, he said, 'Ice cream.' So, I said, 'Good, let's imagine our ice cream dinner.' And, we did, and he started to look happy. So, I realised even then that just through imagining, we can be happy. So we had our conceptual dinner and this is maybe my first piece of art."

In 1953, a 20-year-old Ono moved to New York City. Having withdrawn from her studies at Tokyo's Gakushuin University, she applied for New York's Sarah Lawrence and soon found herself entwined with New York City's burgeoning art scene. On a trip to London in 1966, Ono met John Lennon when he attended her exhibition opening at the Indica Gallery. The pair married in 1969 and by the time The Beatles had broken up in the mid-70s, any of Ono's artistic contributions had been overshadowed by her new role as the woman who broke up The Beatles. Although recognised as an artist in the mainstream press thanks to the pair's 1969 Vietnam War protest, Bed-Ins for Peace, which was performed in both Amsterdam and Montreal, Ono had in fact been independently creating groundbreaking art for well over a decade.

While Ono never claimed loyalty to a particular movement, she has long been associated with fluxus and conceptual art - the former which embraced change ('flux') as an important part of life and ultimately laid the groundwork for the latter. Existing at the axis of these is her 1964 book, Grapefruit - described as a "one of the monuments of conceptual art of the early 1960s". Originally released as an edition of 500 copies while Ono was back living in Tokyo with her second husband Anthony Cox, Grapefruit was reprinted in 1970 with an introduction from Lennon himself. Following the instruction from Ono to "Burn this book after you've read it", Lennon wrote: "This is the greatest book I've ever burned."

"Many of the Grapefruit pieces were written for my sake, to save me. They were my therapy in a way" - Yoko Ono

Titled such because Ono considered herself to be a hybrid of Japanese and American, just as the grapefruit is a lemon and orange, Grapefruit is composed of what the fluxus movement dubbed "event scores" - a performance script which consists of actions as opposed to speech. The original 1964 edition featured instructions, poems, and drawings categorised under five headings; Music, Painting, Event, Poetry, Object. It was expanded for its 1970 reprint to include Film, Dance, and Architecture Pieces, as well as a Letters section, which publishes correspondence with gallerists and Ono, and Information, to provide details on when, where, and how Ono herself performed the event scores.

Calling upon the four elements, water, air, sky and earth, the event scores occasionally involve obtaining mundane materials such as a canvas, glass, a telephone, stones, clothing, etc. But what is most intriguing about Ono's Grapefruit - and perhaps appropriate in our current state of isolation - is its dependence on pure imagination.

In terms of what to expect from the event scores, Ono, naturally, makes the options infinite. There's the slightly unnerving "Stay in a room for a month. Do not speak. Do not see. Whisper in the end of the month", the maddening "Keep laughing for a week", the banal "Take the first word that comes across your mind. Repeat the word until dawn", and the downright dangerous "Smoke everything you can. Including your pubic hair". There are ethereal additions that are zen-like and potentially borrowed from Buddhism. "Stand in the evening light until you become transparent or until you fall asleep", "Light a match and watch til it goes out", "Put your shadows together until they become one", and "Imagine the clouds dripping. Dig a hole in your garden to put them in". And there are some which will have to be shunned entirely during the quarantine. "Steal all the clocks and watches in the world. Destroy them", "Carry a bag of peas. Leave a pea wherever you go", and - the ultimate Covid-19 crisis no-no - "Touch each other".

While it's seemingly a book reliant on the reader's actions, in 1971, Ono stressed to the International Times that it is simply an imagination which is most needed to unlock the potential in its pages. "To understand the pieces, you must do them. Even doing them in your mind is making a step part of the way along the road to better communication with yourself."

That same year Lennon also gushed to NME about Grapefruit's ability to remedy a chaotic mind. "I think this is an important book to help people act out their madness. If you do some of the things in it, you stop going crazy in a way. This Yoko book has changed some people's lives." In fact, he was so moved by Grapefruit, that he wrote one of the greatest songs in history, "Imagine". In a 1980 interview with the BBC two days before his death, Lennon had said "Imagine" "should be credited as a Lennon-Ono song, because a lot of it, the lyric and the concept, came from Yoko", especially from Grapefruit. He continued: "But those days I was a bit more selfish, a bit more macho, and I sort of omitted to mention her contribution. But it was right out of Grapefruit, her book." It would be 46 years until Ono received her songwriting credit.

Just like the ice cream dinners she imagined with her brother when they were hungry children, using "the powers of imagination to survive", Grapefruit provided Ono her escape. She told Vogue in 1971, "At Sarah Lawrence, I was often very desperate and many of the Grapefruit pieces were written for my sake, to save me. They were my therapy in a way."

But reflecting on Grapefruit to the Guardian almost 40 years after its original publication, Ono revealed that it was also about having a laugh - of not taking everything so seriously. "It's important to be mischievous," she said. "I think Grapefruit is very much a mischievous book for now."

While the experimental mindset of the 1960s that Grapefruit was first released into might be a world away from 2020's Covid-19 crisis, the space which has opened up for our imaginations to play in this moment of pause feels like a small blessing. We finally have an opportunity to focus on the process over the end product, to give ideas precedent over tangibility, and find new neural pathways which are absurd, banal, or even normal. Whether that's to "Listen to the earth turning", "Make music only with overtones" or "Throw a stone into the sky high enough so it will not come back". When all we have for certain are our imaginations, perhaps there's no better time to embrace Grapefruit - or, dare I say, conceptual art - than right now.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why Yoko Ono's strange art book Grapefruit is a welcome remedy for crisis

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The many reasons why it's time to revisit the conceptual art book which inspired John Lennon to pen 'Imagine'

# data[].attributes.body
Entire exhibition of written directions/instructions. Some feasible, some definitely not.

“To understand the pieces, you must do them. Even doing them in your mind is making a step part of the way along the road to better communication with yourself.”

# data[].attributes.headline
Scores, Instructions, Prompts and Briefs by Emiel Heijnen and Melissa Bremmer (Notes)

# data[].attributes.subject
Scores, Instructions, Prompts and Briefs by Emiel Heijnen and Melissa Bremmer (Notes)

# data[].attributes.body
— Assignments having a strong personal signature, signifying a connection between artistic ideas, values, pedagogical view, and local practice of the arts teacher or artist.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
About

How to use design to speculate about possible futures?

Speculative design practice questions the practice of design and offers some alternatives that are essential for the world of today and more importantly, the world of tomorrow. Based on the urgent need for an upgrade related to speculative design educational practice, the SpeculativeEdu (Speculative Design - Educational Resource Toolkit) project is oriented towards novel educational skills and practices for the 21 st century, especially those focused on the critical relations between technology and people (society). Today, design practice often focuses on making technology easy to use, practical, even sexy. In speculative design, however, the curriculum proposes a practice engaging with a social context, using design as a means of speculating about how things could be, examining also the possible negative implications of introducing a new product into everyday life - imagining possible futures.

SpeculativeEdu is an educational, project funded by ERASMUS+, the European Union programme for education, training, youth, and sport, with the aim of strengthening speculative design education by collecting and exchanging existing knowledge and experience whilst developing new methods in the field of speculative design. Its scope is to collect, exchange, reflect upon, develop, and advance educational practice in the area of speculative design and its self-critical approach. This project, which will last 24 months (1 October 2018 - 30 September 2020) will bring together the leading European academic/research institutions, SMEs, and an NGO from speculative practice, education, and research. The consortium will be led by the University of Split (Croatia), and consist of Edinburgh Napier University (UK), Goldsmiths, the University of London (UK), the Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute (Portugal), the Human Ecosystems Relazioni (Italy), and the Institute for Transmedia Design (Slovenia), and based on four events: two international students workshops held in Croatia and Firenze, a conference in Slovenia, and a symposium, accompanied by an exhibition, to be held in Split. The project will host renovated speculative design practitioners from around the globe to carry out a concept of open/free education resources producing three outcomes: State of Speculative Design Study, a collection of best practices and case-studies; Speculative Design Textbook, a textbook for students and practitioners; and Speculative Design Open Toolkit, an open access online repository.

Stay tuned and join us on one of the following events.

Read more about partners.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
SpeculativeEdu is an educational, project funded by ERASMUS+, the European Union programme for education, training, youth, and sport, with the aim of strengthening speculative design education by collecting and exchanging existing knowledge and experience whilst developing new methods in the field of speculative design.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The shared institute is located in the centre of the city of Porto, Portugal. Both the metro stations of Marquês and Campo 24 de Agosto are a 12 minute distance from the institute. The train station of Campanhã is a 20-minute walk. Porto Airport is a 30 minute ride from the closest metro station.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The shared institute is located in the centre of the city of Porto, Portugal. Both the metro stations of Marquês and Campo 24 de Agosto are a 12 minute distance from the institute. The train station of Campanhã is a 20-minute walk. Porto Airport is a 30 minute ride from the closest metro station.

# data[].attributes.body
— Parallels to position taken on this project.
— "Life is learning" —> Embodied practice

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
- A proposal to radically change education through creativity
- Explores core values and key concepts to create future-proof attitudes and perspectives

Editors: Ilse Ouwens, Fabiola Camuti, Betje Stevens
Contributors: Matthijs Andriessen, Martijn Aslander, Erik op ten Berg, Danae Bodewes, Heidie van den Brink, Fabiola Camuti, Matthijs van Cruijsen, Steven Dorrestijn, Berty Feijen, Jan Erik Fokke, Ron van Hal, Richard Hassink, Simone Heij, Danny Jeroense, Selma Jonkers, Jeanny Kaethoven, Cor de Koning, Kim van Laanen, Jeroen Lutters, Saskia van den Muijsenberg, Josine Neyman, Laura Nieuwenhuis, Ben Oligschlager, Ilse Ouwens, Olga Potters, Bart Schouten, Betje Stevens
Design: Marius Schwarz

2020, Valiz in collaboration with Cibap, Zwolle; SintLucas, Eindhoven; ArtEZ Arnhem-Zwolle-Enschede; No School | paperback | 228 p.p. | English | size 22 x 15 cm (h x w) | ISBN 978-94-92095-85-5 | € 19,90

No School Manifesto is a book that serves as a key reference and inspiration for people working in (creative) education, ranging from teachers and school leaders at informal, secondary and vocational education and academies to museum educators, artists (in the broadest sense of the word), policy makers, and everyone who supports education and has an interest in developing new perspectives through creativity.

No School is a movement that wants to open up the meaning of learning and fundamentally questions traditional education, through creativity. Curiosity, experimentation, unrestricted thinking, making and developing-by yourself and in collaboration with others-are basic elements of all forms of learning and living together. In the current educational system these values are regularly overshadowed by rules, legislation, bureaucracy, a unitary approach, and little attention to the intrinsic inquisitiveness of both the student and the teacher.

No School is a growing movement that together with the creative field wants to provide space for experiment, flexibility, cooperation, 'wild' thinking, looking ahead; experimenting off the beaten track with different forms of learning, in which creativity is the key concept.

No School Manifesto opens up possibilities for thinking how to go about this, and to start experimenting. It is not an exhaustive analysis of the approach - this would not be possible, as No School is not static, but constantly evolving and continually reassessing its place vis-à-vis standardized educational frameworks. Key concepts, values and attitudes such as 'Curiosity', 'Magnetism' and 'Zigzag' are explored through an A-Z Lexicon, and are complemented by illuminating examples of students' work. An explanation of the urgency of No School, and an essay on the fundamental value of creativity provide introductory context to the book. The overarching Manifesto summarizes what the No School movement and the book stand for.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A proposal to radically change education through creativity - Explores core values and key concepts to create future-proof attitudes and perspectives Editors: Ilse Ouwens, Fabiola Camuti, Betje StevensContributors: Matthijs Andriessen, Martijn Aslander, Erik op ten Berg, Danae Bodewes, Heidie van den Brink, Fabiola Camuti, Matthijs van Cruijsen, Steven Dorrestijn, Berty

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Independent School for the City's community of learning on Superdiversity and the Anthropocene in parallel to the Dutch contribution to the 17th Venice Biennale of Architecture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Independent School for the City is a Rotterdam based one-year educational program for post-graduate students from all over the world, in the field of design, planning, sociology, history et cetera. The school is rooted in Crimson's and ZUS' practice of combining a critical, activist approach to the city with effecting real change through architectural and planning projects.

# data[].attributes.body
From food in RDP to Walking

# data[].attributes.body
Gathered responses

# data[].attributes.body
— Quick, simple briefs
— Responses collected on website
— A space to share assignments

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Wicked Arts Assignments are bold, unusual, contrary, funny, poetical, inspiring, socially committed, or otherwise challenging.

# data[].attributes.body
Useful Arena on workshops

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Are.na is a platform for connecting ideas and building knowledge.

# data[].attributes.body
Embodied research into place through exploration and image collection

# data[].attributes.headline
Scenarios: Scripts to Perform by Richard Kostelanetz

# data[].attributes.subject
Scenarios: Scripts to Perform by Richard Kostelanetz

# data[].attributes.body
Anthology of instructions/graphs/prompts by various artists interested in performance.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This massive anthology collects scripts in the form of notes, instructions, drawings, graphs, charts, and more from artists of varied backgrounds and styles whose shared interest is in the performative. With contributions from Marina and Ulay Abramovic, George Brecht, John Cage, Peter Frank, Philip Glass, Dan Graham, the Living Theater, Claes Oldenburg, Rachel Rosenthal, Gertrude Stein, and Robert Wilson to name only a few. Over 700 pages: a how-to manual, an historical survey, a work of art, and a must-have for any avant garde bookshelf.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
inc. is the world's largest non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of publications made by artists - artists' books or artists' publications. founded as a for-profit alternative arts space in 1976 by artists and artworkers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
printed matter reincorporated in 1978 to become the independent non-profit organization that it is today. originally situated in tribeca

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
printed matter moved to soho in 1989 where for twelve years the book displays and artists¹ projects in the large storefront windows contributed to the artistic and intellectual vibrancy of the neighborhood. in february 2001 printed matter relocated to its current space in chelsea

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
where it continues to foreground the book as an alternative venue for artists¹ projects and ideas. recognized for years as an essential voice in the increasingly diversified art world conversations and debates

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
printed matter is dedicated to the examination and interrogation of the changing role of artists¹ publications in the landscape of contemporary art.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This massive anthology collects scripts in the form of notes, instructions, drawings, graphs, charts, and more from artists of varied backgrounds and styles whose shared interest is in the performative. With contributions from Marina and Ulay Abramovic, George Brecht, John Cage, Peter Frank, Philip Glass, Dan Graham, the Living Theater, Claes Oldenburg, Rachel Rosenthal, Gertrude Stein, and Robert Wilson to name only a few.

# data[].attributes.body
Mind (Conversation)
Body (Health)
World (Culture)

But if it's about a conversation between them then maybe that doesn't make sense... I'm splitting them up.

# data[].attributes.headline
How can I instigate learning from walking through prompts?

# data[].attributes.subject
How can I instigate learning from walking through prompts?

# data[].attributes.body
— Assignments can give instructions, present a problem, set out rules, describe an exercise, initiate an activity, propose a game, stimulate a process, or simply throw out questions.

— No assignment can be reduced to only one thing, one subject, one purpose, or one ideology. An assignment about colour theory can also be an assignment about research. An assignment about visual identity can also be an assignment about performance. An assignment about giving feedback can also be a form of institutional critique.

— "Experiencing place allows insights to be gained through the subject’s immersion in that landscape. This is to claim that place has agency in relation to persons. Place has a profound effect on our thoughts and interpretations because of the manner in which they are perceived and sensed through our bodies” Chris Tilley, Interpreting Landscapes

— An object, such as a book, may suffice as a teacher. P31

Walking as a teacher

— Chloe Briggs — islington mill — Instructions for a drawing class

Bangui assignment-publications

— A means to instigate a conversation or an investigation. They are not intended as examples for how the students should solve or approach the assignment. They do however exemplify his idea of “documented research” in which materials are intuitively assembled and arranged before undergoing more rigorous inquisition.

— encourages students to develop and interest in enquiry and a pleasure for discovery

— Student and teacher forming an investigative partnership

*** UNDETERMINED OUTCOMES *** I don't want to be too prescriptive

# data[].attributes.body
Adapting my practice to recognise my health

Not necessarily fitting with traditional methods anymore. But that works for me and how I want to speculate on methodology

# data[].attributes.headline
Instructions for a Drawing Class by Chloe Briggs

# data[].attributes.subject
Instructions for a Drawing Class by Chloe Briggs

# data[].attributes.body
Posted briefs to Islington Mill

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Chloe Briggs

Dear Participants in "Instructions for a Drawing Class" Project,

I am an artist and a teacher and this is an introduction and invitation to take part in a project that I devised as a result of ideas that I have about drawing, art school, and teaching. After reading Maurice Carlin"s letter published in Art Monthly (September 2008) about the philosophy behind Islington Mill Academy, I began to consider further what actually comprises an Art School apart from students, a building, and a reason to be there.

The "Instructions for a Drawing Class" are being offered as an experimental form of art school syllabus that I will send by post once a week. The course will be six weeks long with the ÒInstructions" sent from Paris on Fridays to arrive by Tuesdays, starting on the 6th March 2009. I am interested in the potential for a written set of "instructions" to activate a meaningful class/educational experience directed from a distance and without a teacher present. Each envelope twill be posted simultaneously to your spaces in Manchester, Berlin, Marseilles and Glasgow and will include a literal set of instructions and an appendix elaborating on the ideas behind each project.

The "classes" that I have designed evolved out of my interest in how to engage students in a creative process that involved risk-taking rather than a limited focus on the assessed end product required by the institution; work that interests me most is often deemed a "failure" by the students. My research involves how the bodges, the unintended, the off-beam, the "mistakes" can be reconsidered positively by the fine art student as integral, if not defining, to the development of their work.

My reasons for offering a drawing class in particular are that:

Drawing is cheap, light and transportable

Art takes any form but most artists draw in some way to work out their ideas, if not as the end result,

I believe learning how to draw is useful, not least for working out dimensions or drawing a map

Drawing is pre-historic and still a persistent and relevant way of making images

Tools for and definitions of "drawing" are constantly re-invented and surprising

I think that it is important to spend time looking. To suspend time. To focus on the moment. To slow down.

The results of this project are open-ended and unpredicted. I want to learn from accounts of your experiences and the work that you make. I look forward to meeting you all in April,

All the Best,

Chloe Briggs

In preparation for the class please see the materials list below. Quantities for the group depend on the amount of students.
Personal
Box of Charcoal (mixed lengths)
Un-perfumed hairspray supermarket brand
Masking tape
Rubbers
Tape measure
Brushes different sizes
Large paint brush
Collective
Ream of A1 paper
Staple gun
Bottle of black ink
Rolls of lining paper (B&Q)
Plastic cups to decant ink
White emulsion paint
Big sponges
Box of drinking straws

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Dear Participants in "Instructions for a Drawing Class" Project, I am an artist and a teacher and this is an introduction and invitation to take part in a project that I devised as a result of ideas that I have about drawing, art school, and teaching.

# data[].attributes.headline
WALKING AS TEACHING / TEACHING AS WALKING

# data[].attributes.subject
WALKING AS TEACHING / TEACHING AS WALKING

# data[].attributes.headline
Instead of pointing the finger, come up with a solution

# data[].attributes.subject
Instead of pointing the finger, come up with a solution

# data[].attributes.body
How to use untextured worlds to share physical worlds

# data[].attributes.body
Local Practice.

# data[].attributes.body
As the children depart, generation after generation, the place loses its memory of itself, which is its history and its culture. And the local history, if it survives at all, loses its place… Apart from its local landmarks and occasions, the local culture may be the subject of curiosity or of study, but it is also dead.

# data[].attributes.body
A network of walking routes that connect all of Great Britain’s towns and cities.

Project created during/born out of Covid pandemic.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Slow Ways - a network of walking routes connecting Great Britain

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Slow Ways is a network of walking routes that connect all of Great Britain's towns and cities. Created by you.

# data[].attributes.headline
"The world outside the school becomes the site of potential"

# data[].attributes.subject
"The world outside the school becomes the site of potential"

# data[].attributes.body
What is nature study? By Esther McManus (in Extra-Curricular)

# data[].attributes.body
Collections

# data[].attributes.body
Phones
Drawn

# data[].attributes.body
As voice recordings

# data[].attributes.headline
And what can we learn from each others walking practices?

# data[].attributes.subject
And what can we learn from each others walking practices?

# data[].attributes.body
Diagrams are my way of working through and understanding

# data[].attributes.body
e.g. Taking a line for a walk, Extra-Curricular

# data[].attributes.body
This work (considering what walking can teach) is effectively an education model. This situates it. It could be designed for designers, communities, etc. Want to make it applicable to lots of scenarios.

# data[].attributes.headline
A speculation on what walking can teach / communicate

# data[].attributes.subject
A speculation on what walking can teach / communicate

# data[].attributes.headline
WHATS GOING ON IN MY AREA OF RESEARCH? AND HOW AM I ADDING TO IT?

# data[].attributes.subject
WHATS GOING ON IN MY AREA OF RESEARCH? AND HOW AM I ADDING TO IT?

# data[].attributes.body
Fictional audio walks discussing the loss of Portland stone on the Isle of Portland

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Isle of Portland off the south coast of England has been shaped and hollowed out over centuries by convicts and quarrymen to provide stone for some of London's best-known buildings. A sculptural excavation of this elemental island, marked by unsettling absences, and a writer who has gone missing, generated a series of narratives for listeners, readers and walkers.

Central to End Matter was an audio walk made for Portland. It began in an empty office in Easton on the island. Visitors headed out past a cemetery and towards a quarry, where they heard narratives about the primal forces of the island's geology; a young offender turned gravedigger; and the Horrocks sisters: daughters of a quarryman who live in two huts on the edge of the island.

The narrative is accompanied by field recordings from Portland - the swell of the tide, the banging and cutting of quarry work - and, as they walked, listeners might have experienced some of what they heard seeping out into reality.

Parental guidance: some material is of a sexually explicit nature.

Audio Walk: The Loss Adjusters (Part 1)

The first track concerns the spectral figures of the Loss Adjusters themselves, and a mysterious writer who lives in the flat above their offices. Although it can be listened to anywhere in the world, this track was intended for experiencing inside 52 Easton Street on Portland.

All three tracks are available to stream or download directly from Soundcloud (34 minutes 28 seconds). Following a fifteen-minute introduction, a special radio adaptation of this work, with the title The Quarryman's Daughters, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 23:00 on Tuesday 5 May 2015. An excerpt (20 minutes 38 seconds) is still available to hear.

Image: Inside 52 Easton Street, the Isle of Portland, April 2015. Photograph: Brendan Buesnel

Audio Walk: The Loss Adjusters (Part 2)

It's a big gutted male corpse that tips out of the tray and tumbles out heavily into the hole. The young man shudders. Working fast he shovels stoney rubble over the remains and then pulls the steel lid over the top of the grave. It's done, he says. Tomorrow there'll be a coffin on top of the rubble and the hole will be filled to the ground. There's a large mound of earth next to him: The displaced overburden that will no longer fit back into the cavity.

The second track follows the story of Ash, a convict turned gravedigger. Although it can be listened to anywhere in the world, this track was intended for experiencing at Bowers Quarry in Easton, Portland.

Also available to stream or download via Soundcloud.

Image: Bowers Quarry, Portland April 2015. Photograph Brendan Buesnel

Audio Walk: The Loss Adjusters (Part 3)

They said they were interested in sensually engaged absences and that they were trying to uncover any evidence of explicit bodily encounters on the island. Their suggestion was that these experiences are some kind of compensation for the displacement of the island's physicality.

The third track is a reading by a narrator interwoven with the voices of characters known as the Horrocks sisters, the eccentric daughters of a deceased quarryman, who occupy huts on the edge of the island. Although it can be listened to anywhere in the world, this track intended for experiencing when leaving St. George's Cemetery and walking up Wide Street in Easton, Portland.

Also available to stream or download via Soundcloud.

Quarried Portland stone at Bowers Quarry, the Isle of Portland, April 2015. Photograph: Brendan Buesnel

Interview with Katrina Palmer

How does it feel to live on a space like that, where the ground's been taken away beneath you? What sort of experiences can be sustained on that sort of landscape?

Katrina Palmer is interviewed by film director Sam Blair about how she came to be interested in Portland and the way it has been shaped by quarrying to become something like a sculpted form.

Also available to view on Vimeo and YouTube.

Director: Sam Blair
Camera: Edward Edwards

End Matter
£10 from Book Works

Irregular ground under your feet, young man. You veer from side to side, unsteady. Step lightly. Keep moving...Come back with food.

A book of stories, investigations and photographs, this publication accounts for the loss of Portland's stone, through the mysterious work of The Loss Adjusters who are responsible for accounting and balancing the material and historical shifts of the island's being. Reporting these losses, their work is disrupted by the presence of a writer and her unreliable narratives set in the tunnels, paths and hollowed out quarries of the island.

Co-published by Artangel and Book Works, as part of Book Works Co-series, no. 9

Edition of 1,500

96pp

Soft, with debossing

Design: James Langdon

120 x 180mm

ISBN: 9781906012731

End Matter (special edition)
£185 from Book Works
The special edition has black end papers and a hard cover bound in warm grey Fine Buckram, with bright orange foil blocking outlining the island of Portland, and house in an ebony black slip case. The edition also contains two black and white C-type matt photographs wrapped in a glassine cover.

Co-published by Book Works and Artangel

Edition of 50 inc. 5 artist's proofs, signed and numbered by the artist.

96pp

Hardcover with debossing

Presented in a slip case

Design: James Langdon and Book Works Studio

124 x 184mm, photographs each, 164 x 115mm

ISBN: 9781906012731 (SP)

Katrina Palmer

Katrina Palmer was selected as part of the 2013 Open call for proposals from Artangel and BBC Radio 4 which resulted in her 2015 work, End Matter.

Palmer lives in London, where she studied sculpture at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art. Through published stories, live readings and installed recordings, she proposes extended forms of writing as sculpture. The Dark Object, published by Book Works in 2010, narrates a series of power relations in a fictional art school. Palmer's work was included in 'Mirror City' at the Hayward Gallery, London in 2014. In 2015 her work was included in the group show The Weight of Data at Tate Britain and at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds where she has a solo-show. Her short story Relief (A Remote Object of Thought) is in the catalogue for 'Modern British Sculpture', Royal Academy of Art, London (2011) and The Fabricator's Tale was published by Book Works in 2014.

Both images: Katrina Palmer in front of Portland stone, March 2015. Photograph: Dominic Turner

Selected Press

Palmer regards this Loss Adjusters project as working with found object. She wants to point up the holes in Portland, the gradual absence of the stone, a beautiful, natural, sculptural material. - Miranda Sawyer, The Observer, 26 April 2015.

The idea of fiction as a hallucination arising out of emptiness is intrinsic to the landscape. - Karen Whiteson, 3:am Magazine, October 2015

It is imperative to read, listen and walk the narratives proposed by End Matter in order to understand the way it performs its absences sculpturally, something it does deftly through describing the peripheries of an absent whole. - Jamie Sutcliffe, Art Monthly, issue 387, June 2015.

There is the death of Hazeline Horrocks, crushed by a boulder so completely her body cannot be separated from the rock. There is Palmer fastidiously underwriting her own erasure within the Loss Adjusters' investigations of the absent writer. And, always underfoot, the perforated island that has surrendered itself to so many of the UK's major public buildings, memorials, window sills, headstones. - Holly Corfield-Carr, winning entry, frieze writer's prize 2015

Production Credits

For audio work The Loss Adjusters and radio production The Quarryman's Daughters.

Voices: Shaun Milton, Katrina Palmer, David Williams
Writer voice: Katrina Palmer
Hazeline Horrocks voice: Lucy Watkins
Celestine Horrocks voice: Linda Martin
Additional voices: Keeley Beresford, James Cameron-Stewart, Naomi Frederick

Music: Katrina Palmer
Additional music: Kakehole (Martin Hand, David Lockwood)
Edit: Katrina Palmer

Producer (The Quarryman's Daughters) Joby Waldman, Somethin' Else.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An artist's audio walk made for the Isle of Portland, Dorset, England, but available online to be listened to anywhere

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
t is a sunny spring Sunday and - joy! - I am off to Paris to go for a walk. Not any old walk, but a walk with a man who really knows about walking: Frédéric Gros, a professor of walking. A philosopher of walking.

Strictly speaking, he's actually a professor of philosophy who writes about walking, but this is nitpicking. What do I care? I love walking. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than walking uphill, for hours, in order to sleep under some flimsy piece of nylon fabric and then do it all again the next day.

This particular walk is not up a mountain, it's in the Bois de Vincennes, Paris's largest green space, but still. I am looking forward to a lungful of fresh air and the kind of insightful aperçus that possibly are available only to a Frenchman with a secure academic position and a command of one of the more expressive Latinate languages.

Walking is not sport, he says, in the first line of his book, A Philosophy of Walking. Sport is a discipline, "an ethic, a labour". It is a performance. Walking, on the other hand, "is the best way to go more slowly than any other method that has ever been found". If you want to go faster, he says, don't walk. Do something else: drive, slide, fly.

I am looking forward to going more slowly. Though I am worried about my footwear. I am wearing Nike trainers. Are they too sporting? Gros seems as if he might be more of a leather brogues sort of man. He makes a jibe at those who try to commodify walking and sell it back to us as "trekking". Who insist on "incredible socks". And special trousers with too many pockets.

My trousers have the usual number of pockets. And reading his book has made me long to be in a wild place with nothing to do but walk. I want to discuss the observations from his book: that walking is an escape from the idea of identity; that there is a kind of serenity that comes with simply following a path; that walking is a form of pure living.

This is the plan, though the first indication that things may not go exactly as I imagine comes as I wait in line for the Eurostar. Ping! An email lands in my inbox: "Carole, could you send me some questions you will ask before we meet? If I could prepare some, I would be less stressed."

Stressed? This doesn't seem right. Gros's book, a surprise bestseller in France, talks of walking as a form of "life scoured bare"; as a way of "experiencing the real". Its pages are filled with calm reflections on the joys of moving slowly. He just doesn't sound as if he should be the stressy type.

"It is the English," he says when I finally meet him in a cafe opposite the Bois de Vincennes. He has a sheaf of printed out pages - answers to questions I sent him earlier, a glass of rosé on the go ("I am nervous. Coffee will not help") and an amused PhD student who he's brought along for what he calls "translation help", though I suspect "moral support" may be closer to the mark.

Don't be stressed, I tell him. I loved the book. It's an examination of the philosophy of various thinkers for whom walking was central to their work - Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Kant, Rousseau, Thoreau (they're all men; it's unclear if women don't walk or don't think) - and Gros's own thoughts on the subject. It's a passionate affirmation of the simple life, and joy in simple things. And it's beautifully written: clear, simple, precise; the opposite of most academic writing. But, when I say this to Gros, he waves his hand. "I think it is probably the translation. I don't think it was so well written in French." And he takes a nervous swig of his rosé.

Why are you nervous, I ask. You must have done interviews before. "They were in French," he says. "And also... Um... I'm not so sure I am interesting."

It seems Gros hasn't got to grips with playing the sort of media-academic demi-god that these situations require. He's one of the world's leading authorities on Foucault, and later Arianna, his PhD student, lets slip that he became a full professor at 30, which is practically unheard of, especially in the arts. And he has the sort of looks - tall, dark, Gallic - that could easily lend themselves to playing the older love interest in a TV medical drama. But there he is, nervously glugging his wine and looking across the table at me in a state of mild terror.

The cafe is noisy, and we decide to head out on our walk. I am desperate to deflect him from his pages of carefully prepared answers, and I figure interviewing him on the hoof might be the best way. But the Bois is busy. The Sunday strollers are out in force.

"This is the problem with walking in the city," says Gros. There are clouds of midges and gaggles of children and we end up circling a small patch of scrubby ground with overflowing litter bins. "I like to walk for several hours," he says. "But in Paris..." We end up retreating to a bench.

As a philosopher, his interest is in "ordinary things", he says. In Britain, academic philosophy is, largely, analytical philosophy. It's concerned with logic, with language. Whereas in France, he belongs to "a new generation that is concerned with the... quotidien. The everyday."

And you see the philosophy of walking as part of the philosophy of the everyday?

"Yes. It is still looking at the questions of eternity, solitude, time and space... But on the basis of experience. On the basis of very simple, very ordinary things."

He'd always enjoyed walking but it was only when he started his philosophical studies that Gros started noticing how many great philosophers were also great walkers. "That is, it was not just that walking was a distraction from their work. It was that walking was really their element. It was the condition of their work."

And it was from this that he started to think about a book. Each philosopher leads to a reflection on different subjects. So Rimbaud is the starting point for Gros's thoughts on escape. Nerval on melancholy. Rousseau, who claimed to be unable to work, or even think, when not walking, on the idea of being in a state of nature. And, my favourite, Thoreau, the author of the first philosophical treatise on walking, whose writing Gros quotes on simplicity and frugality and wilderness and the difference between profit and benefit.

Walking is of no profit, it is only benefit, he says. Though the best quote of his is about when considering any course of action, one should ask: could someone do it in my place? And if the answer is yes, give it up.

"Yes. You can be replaced at your work, but not for your walk. Living, in the deepest sense, is something that no one else can do for us."

Walking, says Gros, is "exploring the mystery of presence. Presence to the world, to others and to yourself... You discover when you walk that it emancipates you from space and time, from... vitesse."

Speed?

"Yes, speediness. It emancipates you from speediness. And Rousseau says in his Confessions, when you walk all is possible. Your future is as open as the sky in front of you. And if you walk several hours, you can escape your identity. There is a moment when you walk several hours that you are only a body walking. Only that. You are nobody. You have no history. You have no identity. You have no past. You have no future. You are only a body walking."

The 18th-century Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau claimed to be unable to work, or even think, when not walking. Photograph: Roger-Viollet/Rex Features

It's the kind of observation that, possibly, works better with a French accent. But I buy it. I love everything about walking. The meditative state that it induces. The dog tiredness at the end of the day. The simply being in beauty. Or, as Gros would have it: "The sedimentation of the presence of the landscape in your body."

Is there a school of philosophy that thinks that walking is not a fit subject to study? "Yes! Yes, I do not think my colleagues would consider this a serious academic book. It is too transparent.

"And I tried to evoke some very serious philosophers such as Nietzsche but the questions I wanted to ask were not, 'What is the soul?' or, 'What is the relation between body and space?'

"My questions were, 'Where have they walked?' 'How have they walked?' 'How many hours per day have they walked?' I tried to see if their style of walking could be a manifestation of their thought. So, for example, you have Kant with his stroll. Every day the same stroll. The same time, the same place..."

He comes across as a very boring man.

"He is!"

Does that also come through in his philosophy?

"We can say that there is a discipline at the forefront of it, yes."

Nietzsche, on the other hand, is very unboring. He was the first philosopher Gros discovered. And the one who persuaded him to study philosophy.

What prompted you to start reading Nietzsche? Were you a teenager?

"Yes!"

Were you a depressed teenager?

"Yes!"

What effect did Nietzsche have?

"There is an energy in Nietzsche's works and this helped me. You have the same energy in the act of walking. You need energy when you have to walk for several hours."

Have there been points in your life where you've found walking helpful to your mental state?

"Absolutely. There is an element of repetition in the act of walking where you can forget. And there is a tiredness. A peacefulness. I think that when you are really alone you have a fragility. The feelings are more intense. You have more of the feeling of the eternity of things. There are moments of vibration between your own body and the landscape."

You're sounding like a hippy now, Frédéric, I say.

"I am!"

Now the Earth is vibrating.

"You are right!"

Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. I love the bit in the book where he writes about the act of packing a rucksack and the perpetual question that you find yourself asking. "Is it necessary?" On my last hiking trip, I tell him, I weighed my T-shirts to find the lightest ones. I weighed my knickers. I sawed my toothbrush in half with a bread knife. (I admit it: this was a step too far.) But thinking about putting something in a rucksack and schlepping it up a mountain on your back is quite a good test for thinking about whether you really do actually need something, isn't it, I say?

"It is."

Do you manage it? Does that lesson come through when you're at Ikea?

"I try to have that same mental attitude every day. But it is difficult. The problem is that I..."

"Forget?"

"No, I don't forget. I lie. I say, 'Oh yes, this is very necessary?'"

What? Like a sports car? You say, 'Yes, it's essential. I need that Ferrari?'

"Not a sports car but... Other things."

One of the things that comes across most strongly in the book is a sense of escape. The freedom of leaving things behind. It sounds as if an academic philosophy department is a place to get away from. Is that true?

" Quoi?" He looks confused and then Arianna, the PhD student, translates and they nearly fall off the bench laughing.

"Yes! I'm not sure you have to write this. But I have a serious problem with academics. I think that I have imposter syndrome. I feel myself an imposter in philosophy. I think this book about walking is the first way to discover it. I'm writing another book about disobeying. I think there is a link between walking and disobedience. I am writing about disobedience and preparing myself to disobey."

Disobey what?

"Academia."

To leave it?

"If I have the courage, yes."

Gros didn't set out to become an academic. He went to Mexico City for two years and taught French. "And then I came back and I tried to find some interesting things in my own life... But I didn't know any! Nothing. It is very embarrassing for me."

So you thought you'd read about the interesting lives of others?

"Yes. When I tried to write this book I wrote chapters about these elders because I think their lives are interesting. If my life were interesting, I think I wouldn't have to write. If you write, it's because your life isn't important." He looks at me embarrassed. "Maybe it is different for you?"

Immanuel Kant took the same stroll at the same time every day. His route through the park in Königsberg, Prussia (now Russia), later came to be called 'The Philosopher's Walk'. Photograph: Alamy

I enjoy meeting people who are more interesting than me, I tell him. And then I ask him about the apogee of his book, his definitive walking experience, when he talks about how, in the mountains of the Cévennes, his favourite spot, in a period of fine weather, he simply abandoned his rucksack. He spent two days walking, alone, carrying absolutely nothing.

"It was this feeling of lightness. This fragility. There is nothing between you and nature."

Except being a bit hungry?

"A bit."

There is a quote from Thoreau in the book, where he says that it is not the tyranny of public opinion that traps us. Instead, we are shackled by our own judgments of ourselves. Do you believe that?

"I do."

So what is the judgment that you have of yourself that shackles you?

"This is difficult. Yes, yes. No, no, no. Just one moment. I have a judgment. Yes..."

And he rolls his eyes and for a long minute he just stares into space and thinks. Arianna and I sit and watch him.

"No, no, no, I am thinking."

We wait for another long minute. This is great, I say. I interview lots and lots of people and they very rarely ever think before giving an answer. I think this may be a first.

"It is a terrible question."

"It is a terrible question. But you're a philosopher, Frédéric. You're supposed to be thinking about this stuff. It's your job."

"Yes, it is my job. So... Yes, the problem for me is that the books I have written have allowed me to learn to know, but the problem is what they have masked. You see. I know that the books I have written allow me to learn lots of things. But they have masked the problems."

You mean that they have masked your real thoughts or feelings? Or they have masked you from living life.

"Yes. From living. From living life."

So, do you think that you personally would have been better off going for a walk than writing a book about walking?

"Yes... But... I had not sufficient courage."

Oh dear! Maybe you need to go for a really big walk. Three months or something. Is that something you'd like to do?

"Yes. Of course. But life is... complicated."

Isn't that the thing, I say - that there are probably a lot of people who will read the book and say, 'Oh, it's all very well to talk about communing with nature, but I've got three kids and a mortgage and a wife.'

"Yes, and me, too."

In fact he has two children, now teenagers, and "they used to love to walk. I tried to teach them the joie de la marche. They walked seven, eight, nine hours. I led them everywhere. But now... they refuse."

They will come back to it, I say. But then I've started saying all manner of comforting things to the philosopher of walking, including telling him that he needs to go for a walk. "Are you going somewhere nice this summer?"

"No. I don't think. No."

Maybe walking can be a state of mind in your head, I suggest. Maybe the idea of going for a walk can be as powerful as actually going for a walk?

"No, no, no. I think that the act of walking... stays essential."

He has started to look depressed. So, you don't manage to walk much on a day-to-day basis? He shakes his head. Maybe you ought to get a dog, I say. Then you have to walk even on a wet Tuesday in February.

We sit in silence for a bit.

So, Frédéric, you've written a whole book about the simple life and joy of walking because your life is too complicated to actually go walking? Is this what happened?

"Yes... But it is more complicated than that."

We finish the interview and go and drink wine. Gros looks done in. Arianna looks amused.

"You see," he says. "I was right to be nervous! French journalists do not ask these sort of questions. I... feel maybe I have a crise tomorrow."

Oh dear. I hope not. Just read your book, I tell him. Go for a walk. Disobey.
Frédéric Gros will be talking at the Bristol festival of ideas on Wed 14 May, 6-7pm

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Frédéric Gros: why going for a walk is the best way to free your mind

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Some of the finest thinkers in history were also enthusiastic walkers. Philosopher Frédéric Gros tells Carole Cadwalladr why we should fall in step with Nietzsche and Kant

# data[].attributes.body
Victor and Edith Turner (Anthropologists) "discuss the pilgrimage as a liminal state — a state of being between one's past and future identities and thus outside the established order, in the state of possibility." p51 Wanderlust

# data[].attributes.body
A philosophy school founded by Aristotle in Ancient Greece. Lectures taught while walking.

# data[].attributes.body
"When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities." p13

# data[].attributes.body
"Walking has created paths, roads, trade routes; generated local and cross-continental senses of place; shaped cities, parks; generated maps, guidebooks, gear, and, further afield, a vast library of walking stories and poems, of pilgrimages, mountaineering expeditions, meanders, and summer picnics. The landscapes, urban and rural, gestate the stories, and the stories bring us back to the sites of this history." p5

# data[].attributes.body
— "The time inbetween" pxiii: The time spent walking to and from places has been framed as a waste of time "to be filled with earphones playing music and mobile phones relaying conversations". "The very ability to appreciate this uncluttered time, the uses of the useless, often seems to be evaporating, as does appreciation of being outside — including outside the familiar; mobile phone conversations seem to serve as a buffer against solitude, silence and encounters with the unknown."

# data[].attributes.body
Krijn Christiaansen and Cathelijne Montens (KCCM)

# data[].attributes.headline
Setting a brief for walks (Lulu Van Dijk)

# data[].attributes.subject
Setting a brief for walks (Lulu Van Dijk)

# data[].attributes.body
Maps are often constructed for tourists, omitting vast amounts of knowledge. Constructing it for a particular purpose. What if tourists want to know the local map?

# data[].attributes.body
p.18 Walking as Research Method

An interesting prompt/approach for assessment potentially

# data[].attributes.headline
WALKING A RESEARCH METHOD IN ART + DESIGN

# data[].attributes.subject
WALKING A RESEARCH METHOD IN ART + DESIGN

# data[].attributes.body
— Body as an archive. Landscape as an archive. p14
— Walking as a conversation of mind, body and world. (Solnit) p16
— Bring your body to the research. p120
— Walking enables us to observe, not only see; to decide, not only think; to research, not only presume. (Avina Livadari) p176
— Sit as little as possible; do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement – in which the muscles do not also revel (Friedrich Nietzsche). p194

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On December 17, 2020, the Lectorate Design at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK), The Hague launched their publication 'Walking: A Research Method in Art and Design".

This publication is part of the Lectorate Design's initiative KABK ART AND DESIGN RESEARCH PRACTICES . The aim of this initiative is to identify and share a range of research methods practiced at the KABK, that use the tools, approaches, and capacities of art and design to create and surface new knowledge. The publication contains Q&A's, essays, and contributions by students, tutors, and researchers active at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK), The Hague.

Visual identity & publication design by Niels Schrader and Martijn de Heer

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
and researchers on 'walking as a research method'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Publication 'Walking A Research Method... | Royal Academy of Art (KABK)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On December 17, 2020, the Lectorate Design at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK), The Hague launched their publication 'Walking: A Research Method in Art and Design". This publication is part of the Lectorate Design's initiative KABK ART AND DESIGN RESEARCH PRACTICES .

# data[].attributes.headline
WALKING AS RESEARCH / WALKING AS PRACTICE

# data[].attributes.subject
WALKING AS RESEARCH / WALKING AS PRACTICE

# data[].attributes.body
How could I use writing within my work? It's something I touched upon last year that I want to bring into this. There's something about the pace of walking and thought and thought and writing.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Meet me under an arch, and I'll read you this:

After I read, then we go for a walk,
around the canal and into the garden,
or at least just in front of the gate.
And then you have a choice.
One of these texts, to read aloud or silently, or to listen to:

What are you stepping on?

What are you holding on to?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Meet me under an arch, and I'll read you this: After I read, then we go for a walk, around the canal and into the garden, or at least just in front of the gate. And then you have a choice. One of these texts, to read aloud or silently, or to listen to: What are you stepping on?

# data[].attributes.body
Performance Art/Theatre/Poetry/Visual Art

Her work draws on themes of home and heritage;
space, place, and (not) belonging;
storytelling, re-telling, fiction, and non-fiction;
connections between people and a live moment;
the land, the landscape, history, and ownership.

Bog of Allen project recalling memories of walks near her home.

# data[].attributes.headline
Reclaiming Conversation by Sherry Turkle

# data[].attributes.subject
Reclaiming Conversation by Sherry Turkle

# data[].attributes.body
"When we invest in conversation, we get a payoff in self-knowledge, empathy, and the experience of community." p.27

Appetite comes from eating, ideas come from speaking (Von Kleist). "Conversation as a crucible for discovery". p.37

"Before technology allowed us to be anywhere anytime, conversation with other people was a big part of how we satisfied our brains' need for stimulation." p.39
I think this is the context I find myself in.

"Conversation cures" p.39

"Studying conversation suggests that it is time to rediscover an interest in the spontaneous". p.54

# data[].attributes.body
— Conversation as the negotiation of difference (P.8)
— What kinds of knowledge is aesthetic experience capable of producing?

# data[].attributes.headline
How are we sharing, collecting and creating knowledge atm?

# data[].attributes.subject
How are we sharing, collecting and creating knowledge atm?

# data[].attributes.body
1. Articulate
2. Produce (Process etc)
3. Demonstrate: Position in relation to relevant audience and contexts

# data[].attributes.body
Research is always a work in progress. But there are points of closure within it. However these often open up new points of departure/questions. It's continuous.

When you do arrive at a point of closure, what are the signposts to what you might do further?

# data[].attributes.body
I feel as though I'm attempting to develop a model of teaching and learning through education from below. In the same way that RDP used food (something universal) to open up conversation around heritage. Walking is opening up conversation about locality through a non-hierarchical process.

# data[].attributes.body
Is it for me? Creating tools to take further in my practice. A process of learning for myself. And expanding my practice.

People involved.

The communities/areas discussed.

Those wishing to learn from a horizontal model.

# data[].attributes.body
Positioning: Your position, where are you positioning your research? Where are the gaps? Locate it
Questions: What do I want to know? (+ Sub Questions)
Scoping
Framing: Perspective (e.g. feminist)
Tools: Methods, strategies, how are you critically exploring the questions you've asked?
Ethics: Who is impacted? How does it impact you?
Practice: Integrated theory and making
Dissemination: How do others access it? How do people build on it?

# data[].attributes.body
Collective thinking, learning and speculation

# data[].attributes.headline
Practice as Research / Research as Practice

# data[].attributes.subject
Practice as Research / Research as Practice

# data[].attributes.body
PHD Talk this morning clearly framed research which, combined with revelations of NG, solidifies the idea of my practice as research.

# data[].attributes.body
"Informed by informal pedagogical traditions that have roots in a critique of enlightenment as practices of liberation, EfB questions fixed categories in education, as well as the idea of learning as an accumulation of knowledge or for the preparation of professionals, challenging the hierarchies of what can or cannot be learned and where. Learning from popular education and epistemologies of the South are crucial to these practices."

# data[].attributes.body
"Exploring collectivity as a crucial element in learning processes, looking at historical and innovative forms of radical education, and shared utilizations of public resources, action and experiments. The spaces of academia and the gallery can be used as pedagogical sites devoted to the analysis of artistic forms interconnected with actual or desired social relations."

# data[].attributes.body
"Art that is centred on and through human interaction, engagement and social discourse. The creation of social change through collaboration between individuals, communities, and institutions in creative processes. EfB will test and share ways of embedding social interaction more centrally in the work of the partners."

# data[].attributes.body
The development of my practice

# data[].attributes.body
This feels like the question at the heart of my research project. I suppose I'm considering the idea of an embodied practice of walking and what that can teach. How can it be used? What can we learn? How can we connect etc etc. Beyond formats that don't invite as much participation/experience.

# data[].attributes.body
I came across this the other week. And it perfectly articulates what I'm trying to say. It combines the theory of history from below but applies it in an educational context. My interests in 'history from below' is what can be learned and shared horizontally yet I'd never thought to consider it as 'education from below'.

It complements the ideas introduced by Hooks about life practice and what is learned through being and living. This relates to rituals of living. And by extension what walking can teach.

# data[].attributes.body
Education from Below explores art as a place for dialogue, collective learning and imagination. Education doesn't belong only in institutions, but it can be horizontal and come from below, from communities.

The project recognises that art practices can dislocate the usual hierarchies of what should or should not be learned and traditional divisions between theory and practice, and that knowledge does not have to be based on accumulation, but rather on sharing and mutual learning.

The partners will explore new models of art practice based on collective learning and will generate a network of institutions and professionals for sharing methodologies.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Every act of communication is an act of tremendous courage in which we give ourselves over to two parallel possibilities: the possibility of planting into another mind a seed sprouted in ours and watching it blossom into a breathtaking flower of mutual understanding; and the possibility of being wholly misunderstood, reduced to a withering weed. Candor and clarity go a long way in fertilizing the soil, but in the end there is always a degree of unpredictability in the climate of communication - even the warmest intention can be met with frost. Yet something impels us to hold these possibilities in both hands and go on surrendering to the beauty and terror of conversation, that ancient and abiding human gift. And the most magical thing, the most sacred thing, is that whichever the outcome, we end up having transformed one another in this vulnerable-making process of speaking and listening.

Why and how we do that is what Ursula K. Le Guin (b. October 21, 1929) explores in a magnificent piece titled "Telling Is Listening" found in The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (public library), which also gave us her spectacular meditations on on being a man and what beauty really means.

In the spirit of Kurt Vonnegut's diagrams of the shapes of stories, Le Guin argues that "our ruling concept of communication is a mechanical model," which she illustrates thusly:

She explains:

Box A and box B are connected by a tube. Box A contains a unit of information. Box A is the transmitter, the sender. The tube is how the information is transmitted - it is the medium. And box B is the receiver. They can alternate roles. The sender, box A, codes the information in a way appropriate to the medium, in binary bits, or pixels, or words, or whatever, and transmits it via the medium to the receiver, box B, which receives and decodes it.

A and B can be thought of as machines, such as computers. They can also be thought of as minds. Or one can be a machine and the other a mind.

But the magic of human communication, Le Guin observes, is that something other than mere information is being transmitted - something more intangible yet more real:

In most cases of people actually talking to one another, human communication cannot be reduced to information. The message not only involves, it is, a relationship between speaker and hearer. The medium in which the message is embedded is immensely complex, infinitely more than a code: it is a language, a function of a society, a culture, in which the language, the speaker, and the hearer are all embedded.

Paralleling Hannah Arendt's assertion that "nothing and nobody exists in this world whose very being does not presuppose a spectator," Le Guin points out that all speech invariably presupposes a listener:

In human conversation, in live, actual communication between or among human beings, everything "transmitted" - everything said - is shaped as it is spoken by actual or anticipated response.

Live, face-to-face human communication is intersubjective. Intersubjectivity involves a great deal more than the machine-mediated type of stimulus-response currently called "interactive." It is not stimulus-response at all, not a mechanical alternation of precoded sending and receiving. Intersubjectivity is mutual. It is a continuous interchange between two consciousnesses. Instead of an alternation of roles between box A and box B, between active subject and passive object, it is a continuous intersubjectivity that goes both ways all the time.

In a sentiment that calls to mind Nikki Giovanni's magnificent ode to what amoebas know about love that we don't, Le Guin writes:

My private model for intersubjectivity, or communication by speech, or conversation, is amoebas having sex. As you know, amoebas usually reproduce by just quietly going off in a corner and budding, dividing themselves into two amoebas; but sometimes conditions indicate that a little genetic swapping might improve the local crowd, and two of them get together, literally, and reach out to each other and meld their pseudopodia into a little tube or channel connecting them.

This, too, she illustrates with a diagram:

In an exquisite passage at the intersection of biology, anthropology, and sheer literary genius, Le Guin elaborates:

Then amoeba A and amoeba B exchange genetic "information," that is, they literally give each other inner bits of their bodies, via a channel or bridge which is made out of outer bits of their bodies. They hang out for quite a while sending bits of themselves back and forth, mutually responding each to the other.

This is very similar to how people unite themselves and give each other parts of themselves - inner parts, mental not bodily parts-when they talk and listen. (You can see why I use amoeba sex not human sex as my analogy: in human hetero sex, the bits only go one way. Human hetero sex is more like a lecture than a conversation. Amoeba sex is truly mutual because amoebas have no gender and no hierarchy. I have no opinion on whether amoeba sex or human sex is more fun. We might have the edge, because we have nerve endings, but who knows?)

Two amoebas having sex, or two people talking, form a community of two. People are also able to form communities of many, through sending and receiving bits of ourselves and others back and forth continually - through, in other words, talking and listening. Talking and listening are ultimately the same thing.

Reminding us that literacy is an incredibly nascent invention and still far from universal, Le Guin considers the singular and immutable power of spoken conversation in fostering a profound mutuality by syncing our essential vibrations:

Speech connects us so immediately and vitally because it is a physical, bodily process, to begin with. Not a mental or spiritual one, wherever it may end.

If you mount two clock pendulums side by side on the wall, they will gradually begin to swing together. They synchronise each other by picking up tiny vibrations they each transmit through the wall.

Any two things that oscillate at about the same interval, if they're physically near each other, will gradually tend to lock in and pulse at exactly the same interval. Things are lazy. It takes less energy to pulse cooperatively than to pulse in opposition. Physicists call this beautiful, economical laziness mutual phase locking, or entrainment.

All living beings are oscillators. We vibrate. Amoeba or human, we pulse, move rhythmically, change rhythmically; we keep time. You can see it in the amoeba under the microscope, vibrating in frequencies on the atomic, the molecular, the subcellular, and the cellular levels. That constant, delicate, complex throbbing is the process of life itself made visible.

We huge many-celled creatures have to coordinate millions of different oscillation frequencies, and interactions among frequencies, in our bodies and our environment. Most of the coordination is effected by synchronising the pulses, by getting the beats into a master rhythm, by entrainment.

[...]

Like the two pendulums, though through more complex processes, two people together can mutually phase-lock. Successful human relationship involves entrainment - getting in sync. If it doesn't, the relationship is either uncomfortable or disastrous.

This entrainment, Le Guin argues, occurs organically and constantly, often below our conscious awareness and beyond willful intention:

Consider deliberately sychronised actions like singing, chanting, rowing, marching, dancing, playing music; consider sexual rhythms (courtship and foreplay are devices for getting into sync). Consider how the infant and the mother are linked: the milk comes before the baby cries. Consider the fact that women who live together tend to get onto the same menstrual cycle. We entrain one another all the time.

[...]

Listening is not a reaction, it is a connection. Listening to a conversation or a story, we don't so much respond as join in - become part of the action.

[...]

When you can and do entrain, you are synchronising with the people you're talking with, physically getting in time and tune with them. No wonder speech is so strong a bond, so powerful in forming community.

In a complement to Susan Sontag's terrific treatise on the the aesthetics of silence, Le Guin considers the singular nature of sound:

Sound signifies event. A noise means something is happening. Let's say there's a mountain out your window. You see the mountain. Your eyes report changes, snowy in winter, brown in summer, but mainly just report that it's there. It's scenery. But if you hear that mountain, then you know it's doing something. I see Mount St. Helens out my study window, about eighty miles north. I did not hear it explode in 1980: the sound wave was so huge that it skipped Portland entirely and touched down in Eugene, a hundred miles to the south. Those who did hear that noise knew that something had happened. That was a word worth hearing. Sound is event.

Speech, the most specifically human sound, and the most significant kind of sound, is never just scenery, it's always event.

This event of speech, Le Guin argues, is the most potent form of entrainment we humans have - and the intimate tango of speaking and listening is the stuff of great power and great magic:

When you speak a word to a listener, the speaking is an act. And it is a mutual act: the listener's listening enables the speaker's speaking. It is a shared event, intersubjective: the listener and speaker entrain with each other. Both the amoebas are equally responsible, equally physically, immediately involved in sharing bits of themselves.

[...]

The voice creates a sphere around it, which includes all its hearers: an intimate sphere or area, limited in both space and time.

Creation is an act. Action takes energy.

Sound is dynamic. Speech is dynamic - it is action. To act is to take power, to have power, to be powerful. Mutual communication between speakers and listeners is a powerful act. The power of each speaker is amplified, augmented, by the entrainment of the listeners. The strength of a community is amplified, augmented by its mutual entrainment in speech.

[...]

This is why utterance is magic. Words do have power. Names have power. Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.

In a sentiment that calls to mind Anna Deavere Smith on the art of listening between the lines, Le Guin argues that this entrainment and our intuitive expectations around it are at the heart of how and why great art compels us:

In the realm of art ... we can fulfill our expectations only by learning which authors disappoint and which authors offer the true nourishment for the soul. We find out who the good writers are, and then we look or wait for their next book. Such writers - living or dead, whatever genre they write in, critically fashionable or not, academically approved or not - are those who not only meet our expectations but surpass them. That is the gift the great storytellers have. They tell the same stories over and over (how many stories are there?), but when they tell them they are new, they are news, they renew us, they show us the world made new.

[...]

So people seek the irreproducible moment, the brief, fragile community of story told among people gathered together in one place. So children gather at the library to be read to: look at the little circle of faces, blazing with intensity. So the writer on a book tour, reading in the bookstore, and her group of listeners reenact the ancient ritual of the teller at the center of the circle. The living response has enabled that voice to speak. Teller and listener, each fulfills the other's expectations. The living tongue that tells the word, the living ear that hears it, bind and bond us in the communion we long for in the silence of our inner solitude.

The Wave in the Mind, which borrows its title from Virginia Woolf's timeless meditation on writing and consciousness, is one of the most intelligent, insightful, and profoundly pleasurable books you can ever hope to read - the kind guaranteed to far surpass any expectations seeded in this very sentence.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
the wave in the mind: talks and essays on the writer

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Telling Is Listening: Ursula K. Le Guin on the Magic of Real Human Conversation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Every act of communication is an act of tremendous courage in which we give ourselves over to two parallel possibilities: the possibility of planting into another mind a seed sprouted in ours and watching it blossom into a breathtaking flower of mutual understanding; and the possibility of being wholly misunderstood, reduced to a withering weed.

# data[].attributes.headline
"The Problem of Communication" David Bohm

# data[].attributes.subject
"The Problem of Communication" David Bohm

# data[].attributes.body
Thus, in a dialogue, each person does not attempt to make common certain ideas or items of information that are already known to him. Rather, it may be said that the two people are making something in common, i.e., creating something new together.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"Words," Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her abiding meditation on the magic of real human communication, "transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it." But what happens in a cultural ecosystem where the hearer has gone extinct and the speaker gone rampant? Where do transformation and understanding go?

What made, for instance, James Baldwin and Margaret Mead's superb 1970 dialogue about race and identity so powerful and so enduringly insightful is precisely the fact that it was a dialogue - not the ping-pong of opinions and co-reactivity that passes for dialogue today, but a commitment to mutual contemplation of viewpoints and considered response. That commitment is the reason why they were able to address questions we continue to confront with tenfold more depth and nuance than we are capable of today. And the dearth of this commitment in our present culture is the reason why we continue to find ourselves sundered by confrontation and paralyzed by the divisiveness of "us vs. them" narratives. "To bother to engage with problematic culture, and problematic people within that culture, is an act of love," wrote the poet Elizabeth Alexander in contemplating power and possibility. Krista Tippett calls such engagement generous listening. And yet so much of our communication today is defined by a rather ungenerous unwillingness to listen coupled with a compulsion to speak.

The most perennially insightful and helpful remedy for this warping of communication I've ever encountered comes from the legendary physicist David Bohm (December 20, 1917-October 27, 1992) in On Dialogue (public library) - a slim, potent collection of Bohm's essays and lectures from the 1970s and 1980s, exploring the alchemy of human communication, what is keeping us from listening to one another, and how we can transcend those barriers to mutual understanding.

Decades before the social web as we know it and long before Rebecca Solnit came to lament how our modern noncommunication is changing our experience of solitude and communion, Bohm cautions:

In spite of this worldwide system of linkages, there is, at this very moment, a general feeling that communication is breaking down everywhere, on an unparalleled scale... What appears [in the media] is generally at best a collection of trivial and almost unrelated fragments, while at worst, it can often be a really harmful source of confusion and misinformation.

He terms this "the problem of communication" and writes:

Different groups ... are not actually able to listen to each other. As a result, the very attempt to improve communication leads frequently to yet more confusion, and the consequent sense of frustration inclines people ever further toward aggression and violence, rather than toward mutual understanding and trust.

Suggesting that the difficulty might arise from our "crude and insensitive manner of thinking about communication and talking about it," Bohm sets out to restore the necessary subtlety by reclaiming the true meaning of communication and its supreme mastery, dialogue:

"Communication" ... is based on the Latin commun and the suffix "ie" which is similar to "fie," in that it means "to make or to do." So one meaning of "to communicate" is "to make something common," i.e., to convey information or knowledge from one person to another in as accurate a way as possible.

[...]

Nevertheless, this meaning does not cover all that is signified by communication. For example, consider a dialogue. In such a dialogue, when one person says something, the other person does not in general respond with exactly the same meaning as that seen by the first person. Rather, the meanings are only similar and not identical. Thus, when the second person replies, the first person sees a difference between what he meant to say and what the other person understood. On considering this difference, he may then be able to see something new, which is relevant both to his own views and to those of the other person. And so it can go back and forth, with the continual emergence of a new content that is common to both participants. Thus, in a dialogue, each person does not attempt to make common certain ideas or items of information that are already known to him. Rather, it may be said that the two people are making something in common, i.e., creating something new together.

But of course such communication can lead to the creation of something new only if people are able freely to listen to each other, without prejudice, and without trying to influence each other. Each has to be interested primarily in truth and coherence, so that he is ready to drop his old ideas and intentions, and be ready to go on to something different, when this is called for.

Such communication in the service of creating something new, Bohm argues, takes place not only between people but within people. He illustrates this with an example that calls to mind Alan Lightman's beautiful reflection on the creative sympathies of art and science, and writes:

Consider, for example, the work of an artist. Can it properly be said that the artist is expressing himself, i.e., literally "pushing outward" something that is already formed inside of him? Such a description is not in fact generally accurate or adequate. Rather, what usually happens is that the first thing the artist does is only similar in certain ways to what he may have in mind. As in a conversation between two people, he sees the similarity and the difference, and from this perception something further emerges in his next action. Thus, something new is continually created that is common to the artist and the material on which he is working.

The scientist is engaged in a similar "dialogue" with nature (as well as with his fellow human beings). Thus, when a scientist has an idea, this is tested by observation. When it is found (as generally happens) that what is observed is only similar to what he had in mind and not identical, then from a consideration of the similarities and the differences he gets a new idea which is in turn tested. And so it goes, with the continual emergence of something new that is common to the thought of scientists and what is observed in nature.

In a sentiment that affirms the importance of the uncomfortable luxury of changing one's mind, Bohm adds:

It is clear that if we are to live in harmony with ourselves and with nature, we need to be able to communicate freely in a creative movement in which no one permanently holds to or otherwise defends his own ideas.

He observes that these ideas are rooted in assumptions we hold about various aspects of life - from politics to economics to religion - and those assumptions are what we call our "opinions." Four centuries after Galileo admonished against the folly of believing one's preconceptions, Bohm argues that this tendency to cling to our existing opinions is a kind of self-protective "block" we use as a hedge against our fear of uncertainty. But in blocking uncertainty, we also block our ability to listen. Fertile dialogue, he points out, requires that we first become aware of our own "blocks," then be willing to surmount them. He writes:

When we come together to talk, or otherwise to act in common, can each one of us be aware of the subtle fear and pleasure sensations that "block" his ability to listen freely? Without this awareness, the injunction to listen to the whole of what is said will have little meaning. But if each one of us can give full attention to what is actually "blocking" communication while he is also attending properly to the content of what is communicated, then we may be able to create something new between us, something of very great significance for bringing to an end the at present insoluble problems of the individual and of society.

In a passage of swelling timeliness today, Bohm considers the crucial difference between dialogue and discussion:

"Dialogue" comes from the Greek word dialogos. Logos means "the word," or in our case we would think of the "meaning of the word." And dia means "through" - it doesn't mean "two." A dialogue can be among any number of people, not just two. Even one person can have a sense of dialogue within himself, if the spirit of the dialogue is present. The picture or image that this derivation suggests is of a stream of meaning flowing among and through us and between us. This will make possible a flow of meaning in the whole group, out of which may emerge some new understanding. It's something new, which may not have been in the starting point at all. It's something creative. And this shared meaning is the "glue" or "cement" that holds people and societies together.

Contrast this with the word "discussion," which has the same root as "percussion" and "concussion." It really means to break things up. It emphasizes the idea of analysis, where there may be many points of view, and where everybody is presenting a different one - analyzing and breaking up. That obviously has its value, but it is limited, and it will not get us very far beyond our various points of view. Discussion is almost like a ping-pong game, where people are batting the ideas back and forth and the object of the game is to win or to get points for yourself...

In a dialogue, however, nobody is trying to win. Everybody wins if anybody wins. There is a different sort of spirit to it. In a dialogue, there is no attempt to gain points, or to make your particular view prevail. Rather, whenever any mistake is discovered on the part of anybody, everybody gains. It's a situation called win-win, whereas the other game is win-lose - if I win, you lose. But a dialogue is something more of a common participation, in which we are not playing a game against each other, but with each other. In a dialogue, everybody wins.

True dialogue, Bohm argues, not only leads us to question the very assumptions upon which our opinions are built but invites a continual act of self-revision at the level of the thought process itself - the process of which our opinions are a product. This self-revision takes place both on the individual level and on the collective level. He considers the difficulty of rethinking thought itself:

You cannot defend something without first thinking the defense. There are those thoughts which might question the thing you want to defend, and you've got to push them aside. That may readily involve self-deception - you will simply push aside a lot of things you would rather not accept by saying they are wrong, by distorting the issue, and so on. Thought defends its basic assumptions against evidence that they may be wrong.

Noting that we engage in two kinds of thought, individual and collective, Bohm points out that most of our individual assumptions are the product of our cultural conditioning and our "collective background." He writes:

Language is collective. Most of our basic assumptions come from our society, including all our assumptions about how society works, about what sort of person we are supposed to be, and about relationships, institutions, and so on. Therefore we need to pay attention to thought both individually and collectively.

Writing in the same era in which evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme," Bohm adds:

Assumptions or opinions are like computer programs in people's minds. Those programs take over against the best of intentions - they produce their own intentions.

Those intentions operate on what Bohm calls the "tacit level" - not the level of our conscious awareness but someplace deeper, more intuitive, and almost automatic, of which we only have a vague conscious sense. He explains:

"Tacit" means that which is unspoken, which cannot be described - like the knowledge required to ride a bicycle. It is the actual knowledge, and it may be coherent or not. I am proposing that thought is actually a subtle tacit process. The concrete process of thinking is very tacit. The meaning is basically tacit. And what we can say explicitly is only a very small part of it. I think we all realize that we do almost everything by this sort of tacit knowledge. Thought is emerging from the tacit ground, and any fundamental change in thought will come from the tacit ground. So if we are communicating at the tacit level, then maybe thought is changing.

The tacit process is common. It is shared. The sharing is not merely the explicit communication and the body language and all that, which are part of it, but there is also a deeper tacit process which is common. I think the whole human race knew this for a million years; and then in five thousand years of civilization we have lost it, because our societies got too big to carry it out. But now we have to get started again, because it has become urgent that we communicate. We have to share our consciousness and to be able to think together, in order to do intelligently whatever is necessary. If we begin to confront what's going on in a dialogue group, we sort of have the nucleus of what's going on in all society.

But Bohm's most crucial point - which is also the point most disquieting to our present customs of communication - is that true dialogue must be aimed not at some immediate or practical solution but at the higher-order objective of meaning. A quarter century before physicist Sean Carroll made his beautiful case for "poetic naturalism" as our supreme source of meaning in a universe otherwise devoid of purpose, Bohm writes:

It is not an arbitrary imposition to state that we have no fixed purpose - no absolute purpose, anyway. We may set up relative purposes for investigation, but we are not wedded to a particular purpose, and are not saying that the whole group must conform to that purpose indefinitely. All of us might want the human race to survive, but even that is not our purpose. Our purpose is really to communicate coherently in truth, if you want to call that a purpose.

[...]

It is necessary to share meaning. A society is a link of relationships among people and institutions, so that we can live together. But it only works if we have a culture - which implies that we share meaning; i.e., significance, purpose, and value. Otherwise it falls apart. Our society is incoherent, and doesn't do that very well; it hasn't for a long time, if it ever did. The different assumptions that people have are tacitly affecting the whole meaning of what we are doing.

Echoing his magnificent conversation with philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti about intelligence and love, Bohm adds:

Love will go away if we can't communicate and share meaning... However, if we can really communicate, then we will have fellowship, participation, friendship, and love, growing and growing. That would be the way...

And perhaps in dialogue, when we have this very high energy of coherence, it might bring us beyond just being a group that could solve social problems. Possibly it could make a new change in the individual and a change in the relation to the cosmic. Such an energy has been called "communion." It is a kind of participation. The early Christians had a Greek word, koinonia, the root of which means "to participate" - the idea of partaking of the whole and taking part in it; not merely the whole group, but the whole.

On Dialogue remains an illuminating and acutely timely read. Complement it with Einstein on widening our circles of compassion and Carl Sagan on moving beyond "us vs. them," then revisit Bohm on how our beliefs shape our reality.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Legendary Physicist David Bohm on the Paradox of Communication, the Crucial Difference Between Discussion and Dialogue, and What Is Keeping Us from Listening to One Another

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Words," Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her abiding meditation on the magic of real human communication, "transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it."

# data[].attributes.body
Words transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.

# data[].attributes.body
Living through the pandemic has shown that people need relationships, people need people.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
herry Turkle, 72, is professor of the social studies of science and technology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was one of the first academics to examine the impact of technology on human psychology and society. She has published a series of acclaimed books: her latest, The Empathy Diaries, is an enthralling memoir taking in her time growing up in Brooklyn, her thorny family background, studying in Paris and at Harvard, and her academic career.

It's quite unusual for an academic to put themselves central to the story. What was your motivation for writing a memoir?
I see the memoir as part of a trilogy. I wrote a book called Alone Together in which I diagnose a problem that technology was creating a stumbling block to empathy - we are always distracted, always elsewhere. Then I wrote a book called Reclaiming Conversation, which was to say here's a path forward to reclaiming that attention through a very old human means, which is giving one another our full attention and talking. I see this book as putting into practice a conversation with myself of the most intimate nature to share what you can learn about your history, about increasing your compassion for yourself and your ability to be empathic with others.

I also wanted to write this book because I've wanted to read this kind of book. That is to say a book where you learn about the backstory of somebody whose work life has truly been animated by the personal story. Many people have this book to write but daren't because they think their work life should be pristine, that it should come from a purely cognitive place. And I knew that in my case, that wasn't true.

So is there an academic whose yet unwritten memoir you'd like to read?
I'm not going to tell you who I think has an interesting backstory, but I admire the work of Oliver Sacks. In his book Uncle Tungsten he shows how chemistry saved his life after he was so damaged by the war. The periodic table helped him organise his thoughts.

My deepest concerns really come out of my own story. I felt that not enough people are saying: my personal life and my profession are really mixed together and that's what makes my professional life rich. I wanted to say that. There's nothing in my personal life that I'm ashamed of. I've made mistakes that had false starts, but there's nothing in this book that I disown.

In The Empathy Diaries you often write about putting yourself in the shoes of someone whose behaviour has been troubling in an attempt to understand their point of view. When did you become conscious you had that kind of capacity?
Before empathy was a virtue for me, it was a survival mechanism. That's because my family was trying to embed me in a tissue of lies. And I knew for my sanity, I had to have a little bit of distance. The periodic table wasn't going to do it for me - I was trying to find peace in the world by putting myself in other people's shoes.

One of these lies is explained after your mother died of cancer. You find out that she divorced your father because when you were very young he was conducting psychological experiments on you. How did that feel when you found that out?
I don't remember anything about the experiments, but when I found out about them in my late 20s, a remarkable thing happened. Which is that years after her death, I had a reconciliation with my mother. Because I'd been so angry that she had taken my father away from me. And now I realised that she had saved me. That was really a moment of great tenderness and empathy towards her because I understood for the first time that she did what she did with great love, empathy and compassion. As a child, I would have had no way of knowing this.

Eventually you tracked down your father.
When I met him I was able to give up the fantasy of him. So I was able to realise that's done now and you can stop turning him into Prince Charming - he was a flawed guy. There was a deep shift as I reconciled with my mother because although I loved her, I had showed her little cruelties - cruelties that darted out because I was so angry at her for depriving me of this father.

When you were researching your memoir, did you have new insights?
Yes. There's one event in particular - a story I don't tell in the book because I didn't have the realisation until after it was finished.

I'm around eight and a half, my mother comes to pick me up from my grandparents, hands me a white hat and says: "I knitted this for you." I know this hat is from a store near the subway station. I don't know why my mother is lying to me again; I can't figure it out. Years later I spend a lot of time in psychoanalysis and it never gets resolved.

Steve Jobs walked in, looked at my vegetarian dinner and said this is the wrong kind of vegetarian - and walked out

But when I'm writing the memoir, like the character in , I've placed index cards on the wall, with strings linking them, to make sure the timeline adds up. I figure out that my mother got her diagnosis of cancer at exactly this point.

So perhaps she was coming back from the doctor to pick me up from my grandparent's house. And she's decided not to tell me. She must have felt so alone, but wanting to connect with me, on the spur of the moment, she bought me this cap and, wanting to be more the perfect mother, hands it to me and says she knitted it. I could not empathise with her until I pinned where she was that afternoon.

In 1977 as a young professor at MIT you were asked to host a dinner at your home for [Apple co-founder] Steve Jobs, rather than spend the day with him on campus with your male colleagues. Was it typical of the sort of patriarchal attitudes in academia at that time?
Unfortunately, yes. I was the only woman in the department but more than that what I was actually studying - people's infatuation and feelings about computers - was of interest to him.

His essential insights were that computers shouldn't be these grey boxes sitting on tables. They should be beautiful things that people could identify with. I called it an intimate machine, I called the computer a second self - that was his kind of thing. So I deserved to be talking to Jobs. And of course, Steve Jobs walked into my apartment, looked at my vegetarian dinner and he said, this is the wrong kind of vegetarian and walked out.

So I was even a failure as the little woman. So I couldn't even succeed as the lady professor who could make the dinner for Steve Jobs. I am so late to see the sexism in my own career and feel the appropriate anger.

The internet enables us to block, ghost and troll people. Yet it can help us feel less isolated. Are there two sides to the relationship between empathy and technology?
The answer to that question is yes, which is why this is no simple story. Look at the pandemic. It has made us so dependent on forging relationships and maintaining relationships onscreen.

It's a miracle, but there are limitations. Let's not get into the following problem. You start out saying the internet is better than nothing, then suddenly you start saying maybe it is better than everything. When I was researching Reclaiming Conversation, one 18-year-old said to me: "I tell you what's wrong with conversation that takes place in real time. We cannot control what you're going to say."

I've been in Zoom meetings where things get difficult and some people just disappear. Then they reappear after the difficult part of the conversation has ended. You turn off your screen and put it on mute. The problem we face as this pandemic is ending, God willing, is that some people are going to be tempted not to reappear. The thing about human contact is that we're vulnerable.

In your years of studying technology, has there been a turning point, feature or service that has accelerated its unwelcome side-effects?
There are two things. The point when Facebook and social media in general discovered its business model - that's when the connection between democracy and privacy became my subject. After two manipulated US elections and the Covid misinformation, we are now seeing there's a higher level of public consciousness about what's going on here - 10 or 12 years ago I couldn't get people to engage.

Number two is pretend empathy. AI programs that say they are listening, pretend they are your friend... more people are saying if they help an old or lonely person, that's great. But this is my line in the sand. Living through the pandemic has shown that people need relationships, people need people. We can write programs that mimic us, but I don't want to talk to a robot, something without a body, that isn't a child, that didn't have a mother.

If Silicon Valley changes its business model and we don't have pretend empathy any more, I will put down my pen.

The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir by Sherry Turkle is published by Penguin (£23.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Sherry Turkle: 'The pandemic has shown us that people need relationships'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
herry Turkle, 72, is professor of the social studies of science and technology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was one of the first academics to examine the impact of technology on human psychology and society.