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Corporate Social Networking Platforms As Cognitive Factories

The day comes to an end. Tired of abiding to the rules of productivity you sit back, relax and prepare yourself for some hours of dolce fare niente on your social network of choice – you log into Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and are now ready to catch up with your friends, acquaintances, family et al. An advertisement for something vaguely familiar steals your attention. And then another one. You install AdBlock but still are bombarded with friendly requests to vote on some contest which requires you to like some company's page in order to proceed, or with delicious instafood from the fast food chain down your street. Oh wait, what is this? ‘23 surprising ways M&M's make your sex life better’? What fresh hell is this? Why do you find yourself unable to relax, exhausted from all the stimulus, feeling pushed from one hyperlink to the other as if a sudden gush of digital wind unearthed you from the comfort of your sofa?

Reference points

We need mental and physical reference points. We need physical reference points such as signposts to show us which way to go, for example to the airport or the hospital, and we need reference points to show us where we are. Why? If you don’t know where you are, it’s quite a difficult job to find your way, thus landmarks and “lieux de memoire” play an important role in our lives.

At the Heart of Art and Earth

In today’s technological world, human intertwinement with the rest of nature hasbeen severely diminished. In our digital culture, many people hardly have any direct experience of and sense of connection with “the real” of the natural world. The author assumes that when we want to find ways to mend this gap, arts-based environmental education (AEE) can play a meaningful role. In AEE, artmaking is regarded as itself a way of potentially gaining new understandings about our natural environment. As a reflective practitioner, the author facilitated three different AEE activities, at several times and at diverse locations. On basis of his observations, memories, written notes, audio-visual recordings and interviews with participants, teachers and informed outsiders, he interpreted the experiences both of participants and himself. To this end he employed interpretative phenomenological analysis paired with autoethnography.The artmaking activities researched here aimed to bring about a shift in focus. Participants were encouraged to approach natural phenomena not head-on, but in an indirect way. Moreover, the artmaking process aspired to heighten their awareness to the presence of their embodied self at a certain place. The research questions that the author poses in this study are: (1) What is distinctive in the process of the AEE activities that I facilitate?; (2) Which specific competencies can be identified for a facilitator of AEE activities?; and (3) Does participating in the AEE activities that I facilitate enhance the ability of participants to have a direct experience of feeling connected to the natural world?In this explorative study, the author identifies facilitated estrangement through participating in AEE as an important catalyst when aiming to evoke such instances of transformative learning. In undergoing such moments, participants grope their way in a new liminal space. Artmaking can create favorable conditions for this to happen through its defamiliarizing effect which takes participants away from merely acting according to habit (on “autopilot”). The open-ended structure of the artmaking activities contributed to the creation of a learning arena in which emergent properties could become manifest. Thus, participants could potentially experience a sense of wonder and begin to acquire new understandings – a form of knowing that the author calls “rudimentary cognition.” The research further suggests that a facilitator should be able to bear witness to and hold the space for whatever enfolds in this encounter with artistic process in AEE. He or she must walk the tightrope between control and non-interfering.The analysis of the impacts of the AEE activities that were facilitated leads the author to conclude that it is doubtful whether these in and of themselves caused participants to experience the natural environment in demonstrable new and deep ways. He asserts that most of their awareness was focused on the internal level of their own embodied presence; engagement with place, the location where the AEE activity was performed, seemed secondary. The findings show that AEE activities first and foremost help bring about the ignition and augmentation of the participants’ fascination and curiosity, centered in an increased awareness of their own body and its interactions with the natural world. The present study can be seen as a contribution to efforts of envisaging innovative forms of sustainable education that challenge the way we have distanced ourselves from the more-than-human world.

Tools for self-supportive mobility interventions: a handbook [Deliverable D3.1].

Noise vs. control

Over many years we’ve been looking at the emergence of “organized networks” as an alternative concept that could counter the social media platform a priori of gathering (and then exploiting) “weak links.”[1] Organized networks invent new institutional forms whose dynamics, properties, and practices are internal to the operational logic of communication media and digital technologies. Their emergence is prompted, in part, by a wider social fatigue with and increasing distrust of traditional and modern institutions such as the church, political party, firm, and labour union, which maintain hierarchical modes of organization. While not without hierarchical tendencies (founders, technical architectures, centralized infrastructures, personality cults), organized networks tend to gravitate more strongly toward horizontal modes of communication, practice, and planning.

Artful Empiricism and Improvising with the Unforeseen

Arts-based environmental education (AEE) denotes an emerging field of pedagogy wherein facilitated art practice intersects with and informs learning about our natural and cultural environments. In it, artmaking is appreciated as a form of coming to knowledge, of making meaning, in its own right, on par with other approaches such as inquiry-based learning in the science classroom. In this article, the author, himself a practitioner, foregrounds two different orientations in learning about nature through art that he considers both as being expressive of AEE. The first one, here called “artful empiricism”, is more established and has its footings in “the Goethean approach”. Participants investigate natural phenomena through direct observation and experience of the world. This is then complemented by intuitive perception. Yet, for the most part, they are absorbed in what Dewey would call a receptive sense of “undergoing”. Aesthetic sensibility is foregrounded, encouraging participants to fine-tune their senses in order to perceive the phenomenon in nature with “fresh eyes”. The second orientation is hardly articulated as an epistemology yet. Here it is called “improvising with emerging properties” and it features an element of working with unforeseen properties that emerge in and through an artmaking process that thematises natural phenomena. It is intrinsically open-ended and an active “acting upon” the world takes centre stage. Through artmaking, participants explore the relationships between themselves and their environs. In his discussion, the author analyses these approaches as two modalities both expressive of a Deweyan cycle of alternating between a receptive undergoing of and active acting upon the world, in different phases of a reflective experience.