a Trojan horse without any Soldier

"I think the technology serves as a Trojan horse all right, but in the real story of the Trojan horse, it wasn't the horse that was effective, it was the soldiers inside the horse. And the technology is only going to be effective in changing education if you put an army inside it which is determined to make that change once it gets through the barrier.

Unfortunately, the easier way to get the technology to the school, if you're a vendor, for example, is to open it up and say, "Look, there's no army inside here. It's fine. It suits your purpose. It's not going to be subversive, and so it's a Trojan horse without any soldiers, and that's not a very effective way of doing it.""

Seymour Papert

lost-in-space workshop

A one and a half day interdisciplinary workshop, to be held on 2nd and 3rd December 2010,

in which participants will debate and cross-fertilise ideas and notions of space. The purpose is to provide a platform from which typically disparate disciplines considering spatial issues may ‘find’ one another in order to discuss, debate and develop ideas on space.

The event is aimed towards research and PhD students studying in the UK, focusing on how they think about space, how space influences their work and on what properties of space they draw to shape their work.

It is organised by a PhD student group spanning departments in UCL from the Bartlett School of Architecture, the Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience and the University of East London.

Participants will be PhD candidates from across the UK and a panel of invited guests.

for more details please visit:

http://www.lostinspaceworkshop.co.uk/

thirst for servitude!

"I hear myself experiencing what might have been, what could have happened, if it weren't for this bunch of alienate cretins that you!

- you! there in front of me, were so willing to identify with

if it weren't for that fear, that pathogenic fear of the unknown of anything really unprecedented and new, that you hide behind and use as an excuse for your own passivity- and thirst for servitude!"

as Deleuze would remarkably asked "Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?"

I've heard about! Francois Roche

His talk at the Tate on 26th of October will be postponed

thoughts on Constructivism

this is not an elaborated explanation of the terms constructivism but it is more a clarification of the term that nowadays bifurcates in two.

from one side we have

the Social Constructivists that support the view that reality is always social mediated and mind-dependent and

Radical contructivists that argue that mind-independent entities exist and they are knowable.

thus

[Social] Constructivism is concerned with the social construction of reality

[Radical] Constructivism is concerned with the construction of reality

however it will be really dangerous to support that view that the social reality is mind independent

Manuel Delanda will clarify this point: "in the case of social ontology though this definition (of mind independence) must be qualified because most of the social entities, would disappear althogether if human minds cease to exist. In this sense social entities are clearly not mind independent but [as he adds later] the reality is conception-independent" (Deland 2006, p1)