If You Listen Closely

‘To manifest simplicity’ is the literal translation of the Chinese characters for the word ‘Zen’. This phrase captures the essence of what constitutes Zen Buddhist practice, namely the process of eradicating self-centred intellectual constructions and judgements that we project onto life. These unnecessary additions to life add complexity that causes suffering for ourselves and others. Through the dissolution of our self-centred thinking, the capacity to see and live life just as it is in the experience of the present moment arises naturally and effortlessly, and our true nature reveals itself. The document If You Listen Closely is both a record–and the practice–of manifesting simplicity itself, from the perspective of the author and his Zen Buddhist training, investigating how this can be embodied by a Western artist in contemporary culture as well as his own art and design-led practice. Acknowledging that many figures and movements in the creative fields of art and design have been informed by Zen Buddhism throughout history, the author recognises that there are unresolved notions about what this influence actually consists of. In particular, the author examines a cultural misconception that the reduces this link to the aesthetic influence of traditional Japanese culture. By contrast, the author of this text attempts to disband this historical construction in a claim that this link is forged more accurately on the basis of the underlying principles of Zen Buddhist practice, from which its characterised aesthetics flow subsequently. Throughout this text, the author extrapolates these principles firstly in the historical context of traditional Japanese culture through an analysis of seminal texts including Zen and Japanese Culture (1959) by D.T. Suzuki and The Unknown Craftsmen: A Japanese Insight Into Beauty (1989) by Soetsu Yanagi. He then proceeds to examine how these principles are being consciously— and unconsciously—applied in the context of contemporary art and design. His examples are, amongst others, the artists and designers Kenya Hara (b. 1958), Naoto Fukasawa (b. 1959) and Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948), as well as related figures associated with Modernism and the Bauhaus movement. The author simultaneously applies these insights to his accompanying body of work, where he situates himself at an intersection between non-objective art and design. These principles of Zen Buddhist practice are corroborated with research into recent developments at the intersection between Buddhism, psychology and neuroscience, beginning with the influence of seminal Zen Buddhist teacher Charlotte Joko Beck (1917-2011) and her dharma heirs, many of whom, such as psychiatrist Barry Magid (author of the 2002 publication Ordinary Mind: Exploring the Common Ground of Zen and Psychoanalysis) are working in this field. The author has collaborated with Joko’s dharma heir (and his personal Zen Buddhist teacher) Geoffrey Dawson, a registered psychologist and co-founder of the Australian Association of Buddhist Counsellors and Psychotherapists (AABCAP), to validate this research. Expanding upon a text the author wrote previously, where the author conducted an interview with himself as a way of establishing the self as a materiality that was part of a much larger whole, If You Listen Closely has similarly been written in a creative format, employing first-person perspective and an autobiographical mode of writing that serves to synthesise his art practice and personal history within the context his research. In doing so, the author establishes a figurative kind of conversation that illustrates and embodies interconnectedness, weaving together hitherto unacknowledged lineages and lines of influences in his field of research. The format also enables dualities between ‘past’ and ‘present’, ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’, and ‘personal’ and ‘historical’ to be dissolved, and this process is at the heart of a practice of manifesting simplicity. Arising out of this practice and these conversations are analyses of the author’s own work, contextualised in the process by which they are brought to fruition. As the author’s work does not always take on a resolved form, and instead is often presented at a stage within a process of collection and redistribution, this contextualisation is integral in demonstrating how the work embodies impermanence and interconnectedness. The thesis uses as its title the name of one of the author’s work in which cartoon footage is appropriated to remove sound, action and characters resulting in a compilation of background scenery that depict the stillness of an empty desert landscape. The poetic nature of the title is integral to the thesis serves as a kind of Zen Buddhist Kōan, a “matter to be made clear”, and exists as a question or provocation in which the reader is asked what they are able to hear if one listens closely

The BG News November 9, 1984

The BGSU campus student newspaper November 9, 1984. Volume 67 - Issue 43https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/bg-news/5319/thumbnail.jp

Speaking on the record

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2005.Includes bibliographical references (p. 258-273).Reading and writing have become the predominant way of acquiring and expressing intellect in Western culture. Somewhere along the way, the ability to write has become completely identified with intellectual power, creating a graphocentric myopia concerning the very nature and transfer of knowledge. One of the effects of graphocentrism is a conflation of concepts proper to knowledge in general with concepts specific to written expression. The words 'literate' and 'literacy' themselves are a simple case: their connotations sometimes focus on the process of reading text and sometimes on the kinds of knowledge that happen to be associated in our culture with people who read many books. This thesis has a conceptual and an empirical component. On the conceptual side a central task is to disengage certain concepts that have become conflated by defining new terms. Our vocabulary is insufficient to describe alternatives that serve some or all of the functions of writing and reading in a different modality. As a first step, I introduce a new word to provide a counterpart to writing in a spoken modality: speak + write = sprite. Spriting in its general form is the activity of speaking 'on the record' that yields a technologically-supported representation of oral speech with essential properties of writing such as permanence of record, possibilities of editing, indexing, and scanning, but without the difficult transition to a deeply different form of representation such as writing itself. This thesis considers a particular (still primitive compared with might come in the future) version of spriting in the form of two technology-supported representations of speech: (1) the speech ·in audible form, and (2) the speech in visible form.(cont.) The product of spriting is a kind of 'spoken' document, or talkument. As one reads a text, one may likewise aude a talkument. In contrast, I use the word writing for the manual activity of making marks, while text refers to the marks made. Making these distinctions is a small step towards envisioning a deep change in the world that might go beyond graphocentrism and come to appreciate spriting as the first step--but just the first--towards developing ways of manipulating spoken language, exemplified by turning it into a permanent record, permitting editing, indexing, searching and more. The empirical side of the thesis is confined to exploring implications of spriting in educational settings. I study one group of urban adults who are at elementary levels of reading and writing, and two groups of urban elementary school children who are of different ages, cultures and socioeconomic status, and who have appropriated writing as a tool for thought and expression to greater or lesser extents. One effect of graphocentrism in our culture is the very limited and constrained developmental path of literacy and learning. This has not always been the case. And it does not need to be so in the future. This thesis discusses some small ways in which we might re-value modes of expression in education closer to oral language than to writing. This thesis recognizes three ways in which spriting is relevant to education: (1) spriting can serve as a stepping stone to writing skills, (2) it can in some circumstances serve as a substitute for writing, and (3) it provides a window onto cognitive processes that are present but less apparent in the context of producing text.Tara Michelle Rosenberger Shankar.Ph.D

Educators engaged in meaning-making about their work : using an expanding circles model of governance, grounded in sociocratic principles, to improve the work educators do

The early part of the 21st century saw a dramatic shift in Western cultures away from representative democracy to a more participatory or deep democracy. Advocates of this new democracy consider that finding solutions to the problems that confront our world, on a global scale, are too complex to be left in the hands of elected officials. As a result, public participation, or community engagement, has become a way for organisations to dig deeper in order to find more resilient and sustainable solutions to difficult problems. This form of democracy presupposes informed citizens who are communicatively competent to take their place as fully participating members of a democratic society. As schools are considered by some experts to be the best place to develop the skills required for democratic participation it made me question the reality of making such a claim. Overwhelmingly, schools continue to function under endowed, autocratic leadership where there is little opportunity for democratic participation.In undertaking my research I took on the role of co-participant in two primary schools to explore the question: What happens when teachers are given greater opportunities to deliberate and make decisions about the work they do? How and why it happened became the focus of an auto-ethnographic study with co-participants from the two schools over a period of two and a half years (2008-2010). As the researcher, I coached, mentored and guided individual teachers, principals, teams of teachers and leadership teams through a restructuring and reculturing process that began with the introduction of a new governance model, sociocracy, where decisions are made by the socios, people in close social proximity to one another, rather than the demos, the general populace. The complex and emerging nature of this research determined that I use a multi paradigmatic design, as espoused by Guba (1990), in order to respond to the turbulent nature of the research field. My design allowed me to continually shift focus to reveal multiple perspectives, my own and “Other”, as I mined the rich underlay of data that emerged out of my interactions in each school. The quality standards used to measure the worth of this project are aligned to the methodologies chosen; they shift throughout the project as I consciously choose the best way to reveal the knowledge gained from my interactions in the field. I have interwoven theory, practice and multiple voices throughout the text as a way of balancing the reported disconnect that teachers feel between policy and practice.The outcome of this research is a holistic, scalable organisational framework for schools to use as a way of creating resilient learning organisations that adapt and improve in a constant state of be(com)ing

Lovington Leader, 06-01-1917

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