I love the days after projects. Having that big open space
that can be filled by anything. I know that it may sound odd, but until the
projects are presented I generally have no idea what we will focus on for those
open days. This allows me to shape the conversation around what emerged from
the projects. Its not as if I have no idea why I asked the project question,
but increasingly I am interested I where the questions will take us. Since for
this class the subject is chaos theory I am content to sort of wander around in
projects based on “systems,” “balance,” “space,” and a list of randomly
generated items. So – I ask the questions for a reason, but leave them open
enough so that my reason need not be the student’s reason for completing them.
As I told the students today – how they answer each of the project prompts
determines how the next set of questions will be framed.
I was struck by the fact that the first projects gave us a
chance to talk about natural laws or rules – things like gravity and friction.
The second projects were presented as interesting little logic problems.
Weaving together the five disparate items the students had to wrestle with – at
some point – how they all fit together. That each answer presented a dynamical
system more driven by the whole rather than the individual parts was quite
amazing. Each of the projects tried to forge a connection between all the
items. In some cases this was an image, in others an action.
Since this emerged from the projects it was an opportunity
to discuss the notion of internal and external logic (or structure). What I
mean by that is there are certain structures visible on the outside of a
system. The well-made play format, for example. The arc of exposition to climax
to dénouement is graphable independent of the details of the individual story.
Pieces that work this way have an external logic or an external structure that
are independent of the pieces that comprise the whole. There was really only
one of the projects that I felt had this kind of structure.
The rest were driven by an internal structure – one that was
hard to see from the outside. What I mean by this is that each of the items was
bound together by a logic specific to that student. They each had reactions to
or ideas about all of the five pieces. In discussing the process some talked
about what choices they made or how they conceived of the images as a whole. So
– to them – the work had a kind of coherence a kind of logic. But it is a logic
that we can only really see by exploring the interrelation of the parts adding
up to the whole. With the external structure the parts add up to a whole, but a
whole that is predetermined before the interaction of the parts. Internal logic
works exactly the opposite.
So, in order to bring this idea to the surface for our
conversation about the second projects I had the students do an exercise based
on rules. Using the card game Mao (Eleusis) I had them develop one rule that
was not too simple or too complex to direct an action. The rest of the class
watched the group execute the action according to the rule and then figure out
what the rule is. Like Mao it is built on inductive reasoning. Since we don’t
know the rule at the outset we can only figure out what it is as the parts interact
according to the rule. By watching the activity eventually, in most cases, we
could figure out the rule. We then made the leap to the internal logic of the
second projects.
I have mentioned that I am still trying to find a rhythm
with this class and I think I finally figured out why. Although this course has
the same framework as the other courses, the subject matter suggested a
different pattern. For this class we seem to be moving from the abstract toward
the specific, whereas in the other courses it was the other way around.
Although we really haven’t gotten too deeply into the course material yet I
feel that the students already have a good idea about a lot of the terms we
will come to simply by executing the first tow abstract projects.
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