Arts, Letters & Numbers: Situating Engagement with Material and Experiential Geographies

The ubiquitous observation of our time is transformation: cultural, technological, social, political, economical, and geological. We are in the midst of unprecedented re-alignments and re-articulations of every aspect of our lives. There are people and institutions across all disciplines and across the globe that are increasingly confronted by the need for new models of asking the extraordinarily complex questions of our time. The challenges, possibilities of our moment are extraordinary; they call for creative urgency, considered stewardship, and new spaces bringing together diverse voices.

Arts Letters & Numbers, a workshop conducted in summer 2012, involving 30 participants from 12 countries, is just such a space. It offered a new approach to constructing alternative pathways of interaction among a wide range of individuals, disciplines and geographies.

Education, by definition, is a transformative pursuit; individuals come together and engage in transformative interactions and experiences. Today, education in the broadest sense holds the capacity of developing new pathways of interaction and forms of knowledge that address the challenges of our increasingly complex world. Each discipline affords us distinct modes of thinking and acting, of articulating: light, substance, space, energy, voice, and thought; they provide elements of perception, comprehension, and engagement. While each discipline presents unique means of comprehending and acting, together they have a shared capacity to, at once, provide the instruments to create transformation and the principles to measure and withstand its consequences. Like many complex structures, such as language or molecular configurations, disciplines are polymorphic. That is to say they can exist in more than one form, they can take on different meanings and organizations depending on their context and environment. In this sense, to gather disciplines within a geographic and intellectual proximity is to create potential for a dynamic disciplinary geography.

One of the core ideas of the Theory of Evolution is this: when individual agents are brought into proximity they interact, building new linkages. Under the right circumstances, these interactions create transformation, developing new forms. Knowledge evolves; creating circumstances of proximity and interaction among a great diversity of agency is fundamental to the emergence of new forms of knowledge. Building new linkages between our spatial, temporal, material, and disciplinary geographies where diverse agencies interact will undoubtedly develop new thought processes and new questions.

The workshop developed as a dynamic series of situations engaging multiple disciplinary, material, and experiential geographies. Taking place outdoors in a large open field, it set up conversations between space, substance, time, light, gravity and memory, people, their work, and the open field. This conversation took place with an acute appreciation of the field itself as a part of the continuous geography of the solar system. The hope was for individuals to sense the ineffable reality of being within this vast space and time, and to build connections and new linkages between their questions and the spatial temporal geography of the universe.