Somewhere before and after fall break: I just didn’t see it due to the structure

Heinlein’s All You Zombies offers a good example of iteration as it is drawn out in a narrative. If you follow the logic of the story it actually suggests that there is no beginning and no end – more of a rhizomatic type structure. The logic of the time frames as well as duplications of character don’t allow for a linear process. Like the film Primer it is built on loops within loops within loops. Having the students bring in images to represent this structure gave us a good way into the story. The loops were prevalent in many of the images, but there were a handful that found a different way to represent the structure of the story. My hope is when we get to fractals and phase space that these images come in handy.

The same is true for the iteration projects. Part of what I like about this course structure is that it gets me outside of my own examples. I have specific iterative examples I use – and have used – again and again. So – we listened to Steve Reich’s Come Out today – which I think is a fantastic example of iteration that develops in time – so the postmodern idea of sameness with difference. Listening to this piece is – to me – the same as Ed Lorenz computer model of the weather – the two paths begin to diverge and something else is created. We saw that today with the robot bug drawing in that it traced a similar pattern, but still somewhat different.

So – as always – I am impressed by the variety that students bring in as answers to the prompts. We need to explore what type of systems we saw, what the variables were, and how these elements affected the projects. We do see a number of projects that involve volunteers – perhaps more so this time than with the other two projects. So clearly social systems were at work as well as sound and movement and digital applications. We will certainly revisit these in the next class and then build on the ideas with the Reich essay. Since we listened to Come Out today we can listen to Lucier’s I am Sitting in a Room next time – an iterative example that strips away rather than builds up. We can then revisit the projects with these ideas in mind.

What I find odd about the structure of the class as it has developed is the deferral quality – as if we are always getting to the point, but never quite there. Each project is a good example of where we are headed – I just have to wonder if we will ever get there. In mentioning this to Bob his point was to document this process a bit more. It is not something I have seen with the project classes yet – they always felt like they had a clear direction and a clear building up of ideas. Strangely this one has a more chaotic structure – which was totally unintentional on my part. But I suspect it was always lurking there when I taught the class in the past – I just didn’t see it due to the structure.

Days n days n days: All Project-Based Courses are not the same

The last few class periods sort of blur into each other due to the material – Lorenz on the Butterfly Effect, Bradbury’s Sound of Thunder, The film Run Lola Run, and then a discussion of the film. I realize as I think about the connections between these elements that my thinking about the rhythm of the class is directly connected to the course material. I know that sounds like a fairly benign comment, but it does help me examine why this class seems to be working differently than other project based classes. I have used this structure about five times now and I have just assumed that the type of driving toward an understanding by moving from one element to the next was part of how these courses worked – and it was for those subjects. The chaos class seems to be working differently.

Some of this comes out of the fact that even when I taught this material as more of a seminar course that it felt like similar ideas simply presented in a different way. So each of the organizing topics – things like sensitive dependence on initial conditions, the butterfly effect, iteration, feedback, fractals, strange attractors, non-linearity, indeterminacy – all seem like different words for the same thing. So rather than move from topic to topic acquiring a greater breadth of knowledge on a subject this course seems to work to gain a deeper understanding of these ideas. What I mean by that is the difference between a horizontal and vertical structure – one moves forward in time whereas the other freezes time and moves deeper into the subject. Rather than a well made play, this course seems to be working more like a slowly developing picture. This was not planned, but rather discovered as the class developed.

What this means is that projects and readings and conversations we have had prior to this point may not reach maturity until we add more material. We have been cycling back to discuss both projects more than in previous project courses. It is interesting since chaos theory suggests this kind of non-liner structure that the course would develop this way.

The point with the past few class meetings has been to start applying these ideas to stories, to film, to structure. So we bounced Lorenz off of Bradbury and basic chaos ideas off of Run Lola Run. The point is to see these elements in these stories with the eventual leap to structure stories this way ourselves. I find that due to this structure that the course is more about narrative than I had intended. For that reason I feel like I need to make a change for the next in-class projects in which text and language are not part of them. But, there are a million different ways to tell a story – so – who knows.