Day Seven: Somewhat ironically I find that I am in the same position as the students

I honestly don’t think I have found a rhythm with this class yet. I realize that some of the construction of course is designed to prevent a too regular rhythm from establishing – but I still feel like I am struggling to figure this particular class out. In the past when I taught Chaos it was fairly straight forward in that it was a one to one understanding – we read articles and talked about the ideas. Here with the projects taking the lead it is looking for chaotic ideas that have been established by the projects that are then woven back into the readings. I did feel that the first project offered quite a bit to discuss – but I only really saw this as we got deeper into the readings. My hope is that the same thing happens with the second projects.

In a way the structure of this piece reminds me of a project that we did in the Symbolist/Absurd class where we generated a list of “truths” and then had to fashion a culture out of them. It produced some interesting projects, but I wondered if there was a better way to frame the question. I am wrestling with that a bit on the second chaos projects. We generated a list of five terms or ideas to be used in creating a project that exists in “space.”  I resisted the urge to contain the project more specifically since in looking for a rhythm for the class I didn’t want to push it too far in one direction or another. I found the results to be along the same lines as the Symbol/Absurd project in that I wonder if there was a better way to frame the question.

Somewhat ironically I find that I am in the same position as the students were in answering this prompt – I have a bunch of disparate pieces I need to weave together into a whole. The part/whole dynamic has become much more of an issue that it was in other chaos classes. We saw it in the first project and certainly saw it again in the second project. It really was quite amazing how much variety there was in these presentations, and yet how bounded they were by the five items. One of the questions I want to explore is the similarities and differences in the approaches. To me, this is the key to these projects – 25 or so different combinations.

Two things that caught me off guard in the presentations were 1) how many of the solutions were performance based. I wonder if this was due to the list – had “tomato sauce” not come up would the solutions have taken a different approach. 2) the internal logic of the pieces. This is another question we need to return to and develop more fully. We will see this idea again and again in that chaotic systems often appear to have no logic from the outside, but underneath there is an internal logic driving the system. So – we will pick up on this next class and discuss how this logic was created. We may need to focus the warm up exercise on this idea.

I found it interesting that of all of the project very few had an external logic – what I mean by that is a logic we could predict or see in advance. The idea of knowing where something is headed or a predictable outcome. The one piece that was built this way had the quality of an acting exercise in which all of the pieces are synthesized into a logical whole. This may be another issue to address – logical wholes and seemingly illogical wholes. Reflecting on these projects I am finding that there are any number of ideas we can develop that will fit nicely into the chaos discussion. I need to remember that we are really just in the first part of the class and that unlike other project courses that a built to reach this kind of chaotic presentation by mid term or the end of the term this is where we are starting. Perhaps the trajectory should be from chaos to order rather than my more typical implosion metaphor where I tear the class apart three quarters of the way through. Hmmm. I never really saw that as the structure – but that seems to be what is emerging.

One of the things that I forget with these project driven courses is how much of the direction of the course relies on the work of the students. Even with two sections of the same class in the same term the outcomes could be widely different. The material covered is the same, but the pieces that are offered to discuss that material vary. I am interested to see where this class will take us. The end result doesn’t seem to be producing work, but analysis – using these pieces as a way of tearing apart other works and discussing structure that appears random or chaotic.