Themes
In addition to the usual strategies for reading this blog; chronologically, reverse-chronological, or via the search function, the reader may also wish to track some of the themes which can be identified in the writings.
- Story - Some of the earliest postings in the blog introduce the conceit of a fictional narrative involving a delegate at a fictional academic conference. This theme pulls together the posts which advance this narrative until it peters out.
- Conference Papers - This collates the fictional ‘papers’ that are supposedly presented at the conference. (These papers have been repurposed as an Outcome artwork HERE).
- Exercises - These ‘exercises’ draw from a range of traditions, from the ’spiritual exercises’ of Loyola and the Western Mystical Tradition of Douglas Harding and others, theatre games, Neurolinguistic Programming exercises, and Cognitive Psychology experiments. They represent attempts to find ways of embodying and experiencing the epistemology arising from some of the critical ideas explored, together with experiments at finding applications.
- Verticality - The reflective document which is one of the ‘Outcomes’ emerging from this blog makes extensive use of spatial metaphors associated with the horizontal dimension. This resolves to a series of posts which use the height entailment of the space image schema.
- Light - A set of postings which draw connections between the concepts of knowledge, consciousness, creativity, and enlightenment (and to a certain extent theatrical presence) as revealed through a shared set of metaphors to do with illumination.
- Knowledge Objects - The ideas being navigated here refer to the common metaphor which present knowledge as a series of more or less solid objects.
- Substance - Related to the previous theme, this set of posts begin an exploration of substance metaphorsof knowledge, and how the varying properties of substances maps onto, and provides structure for, variations in the ontology of knowledge.