Faint evidence and delicate traces at the borders of nothingness ...

Notes from Michael Shanks on collaborative authoring, co-creation, wikis, blogs and agile data management

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For some years my lab (http://metamedia.stanford.edu) and I have been experimenting with personal content management environments, cocreative and social software, collaborative authoring

• we have built web sites

• managed large research projects - [DaimlerChrysler 2015] Performing presence [The Three Landscapes Project]

• run large classes - Human and Machine in the IHUM (Introduction to the Humanities) Program at Stanford

• composed "site reports" - dossiers on place-events - [Monte Polizzo], Three rooms ...

I am fascinated by the kinds of accounts produced of the past, of things, fascinated by the emergent insights that come with collaborative research that operates with a flat management hierarchy - with no one effectively in charge.

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My basic interest is in building rich encounters with sites, collections, materials, texts, narratives - rich empirical encounters that are open because they do not pre-order the object of interest by presuming categories, narratives, structures.

This is an heretical empirics

• empirics - the rich attention and retention of detail and texture

• heretical - because of the denial of orthodox categories and accounts

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Premises and arguments for this heretical empirics -

• information is a verb - an argument for dynamic documentation [link]

• heretical empirics and historiography [link]

• agile information design and archaeological authorship - [link]

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Elsewhere I describe some basic operating principles for blogs, wikis, and broadly for this heretical empirics -

Basic functions - wikis

Wiki guidelines

Design principles

also - http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiDesignPrinciples

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Wabi Sabi

It is also clear to me now that this new way of organizing data, encounters, writing, publishing involves a distinctive philosophy of design - one that relates in very interesting ways to "wabi-sabi" - the zen philosophy of design.

values

• impermanence

• transience

• imperfection

• the incomplete

• organic decay and ruin

• absence as much as presence

• negative space and void

• relational value - that things come to have value in their specific relation/juxtaposition (momentary and site specific) with other things

attitude

• attention to small details

• site specific, located encounter - and so self-effacing, denying panoptic control beyond the particular

• "I have nothing to say" - having no a priori pretensions to make grand statements

• listening to things and others

experiences

• actuality - the intersection of two local present moments

• getting lost in the details

• process and flow as much as the end destination

• connection and emergence

• agile adaption to local interest

• aleatoric encounter

• multiplicity and mutability

forms

• imperfect, unfinished

• irregular, inconsistent and asymmetrical

• corroded and contaminated

• mutable dynamic approximations

• repurposed forms - reworked for the local task - bricolage

• devolved and entropic

• blurred

• things not as bundles of properties and attributes, but relationally distributed

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The irony is that such a design philosophy is far from remote and abstract, but profoundly grounded and holistic.

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Have a look at the ceramics of Helen Shanks

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Links to wabi sabi

• http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WabiSabi

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi

• http://www.hermitary.com/house/aesthetics.html

• http://www.art.unt.edu/ntieva/artcurr/asian/wabisabi.html

• http://www.resurgence.org/resurgence/issues/koren203.htm

• http://users.exis.net/~jnc/nontech/wabisabi.html

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