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What’s Black and White and Pink All Over? Lesser Flamingo Nocturnal Behaviour Captured by Remote Cameras
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Socrates on Trial project
No full textThe project arose from the publication of the book Socrates On Trial in 2021. The book, written as a dialogue, offered a vision of what Socrates might ask if he were to return today and experience the modern city (society). It includes new dialogues, a new trial, a new cave and a new republic … and a new verdict on whether Socrates should live or die.The wider project offers different resources that are related to this return. They include some reflections from the author about the book Socrates On Trial, a snapshot of the book in a short dialogue called The Return of Socrates, some New Socratic Dialogues on current issues, and manifestos for the Socratic vocation.For those seeking a more comprehensive challenge, there is a lecture series exploring the way inequality and prejudice are ingrained in the history of Western philosophical thinking, and even in the idea of ‘logic’ that accompanies it.Above all, the book and the project share the view that the examined life which Socrates initiated is in need of retrieval and renewal in today’s city
Ignorance: Aesthetic Unlearning
Get PDFThis article proceeds from a consideration of what John Baldacchino calls ‘viable ignorance’, attempting to take leave from the critical and pedagogical obligations of certain elements of Barbara Johnson's ‘positive ignorance’. It considers Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-François Lyotard and the composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen's reflections on modes of experience, and the cultivation of complementary dispositions, where the knowing, egocentric subject is transformed into, or undermined as, what Nietzsche calls ‘a medium of overpowering forces’. The disposition itself is outlined through close readings of key elements of Nietzsche's notebooks, Lyotard's final chapter of Libidinal Economy (1993), and Stockhausen's lecture, ‘Intuitive Music’ (1971) and developed through supplemental practice-as-research activity in sound. The intention of this paper is to explore the space of aesthetic ignorance as committedly as possible, without reverting constantly to positive ignorance
Embodying Ubuntu:Staying Alive Is a Co-Creative Performance
No full textIn Southern African cultures, the word ‘Ubuntu’ has come to mean, in the words of the Christian African philosopher J. S. Mbiti, ‘I am because we are; since we are therefore I am’. This chapter will refer to today’s largely cerebral education that principally feeds an anthropomorphic culture. I aim to offer a more self-reflexive and embodied framework for learning that embodies the existential autopoietic processes of Ubuntu. Future metadesigners could assist design thinking by rethinking their traditional emphasis on products, services and objects that disregards the semiotics of the Ecocene. They could instead consider a more relations-based idea of embodied-wisdom that is sensitized to eco semiotics. This process of oscillating reciprocity applies to my idea of the Return beat, which is derived from a pan-African metaphysical experience pertaining to a rhythmic aesthetic sensibility. I will use this circular perception of reciprocal rhythm to exemplify a more holistic approach to learning and design thinking