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
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
- managed large research projects - [DaimlerChrysler 2015] Performing presence [The Three Landscapes Project]
- 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.
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
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]
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
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
- absence as much as presence
- 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
- agile adaption to local interest
- multiplicity and mutability
forms
- irregular, inconsistent and asymmetrical
- corroded and contaminated
- mutable dynamic approximations
- repurposed forms - reworked for the local task - bricolage
- things not as bundles of properties and attributes, but relationally distributed
The irony is that such a design philosophy is far from remote and abstract, but profoundly grounded and holistic.
Have a look at the ceramics of Helen Shanks
Links to wabi sabi
