User Manual
— Daniil Charms
One morning of the summer vacations when I was six my parents sent me to the baker to buy bread rolls for breakfast and a loaf of bread for the next day. It was the first time I would go there alone. The three minutes of walk were sufficient to get me horrified: How would the baker understand that I wanted to order something else when I could only start with asking for the bread rolls? How would she not think that that was everything and close the sack and cash up? What a terrible situation would that be! But how would I make clear that there was another thing to be said? I felt that I would have to say the two things, bread rolls and loaf of bread at the same time. This wasn’t possible, so I tried to say them as quickly one after the other as I could manage, shaking my fingers in a way that I thought would express that she should wait. Having practiced that on my way I finally stood in front of the baker who asked me what she could do for me. Out of my mouth came something that didn’t even clearly contain syllables, and only after she had patiently structured the time by asking me what was the first thing, if there was a second thing and if there was something else, I managed to bring my order into order. People thought I was shy but in fact I was struggling with the limitations of the all-too-linear device that transports things from brain to brain: Language.
It feels somewhat similar here. The practice of acting is nothing that could easily be cut into piece-meal portions for comfortable cognitive digestion without losing the relevant information about how things interact with each other. In order to understand one point fully you would also already have to know this specific other point which can only be understood if you have knowledge of a third point. And so on. A grand theory of acting can, if anchored in the overall human knowledge project, moreover be nothing else than a grand theory of how humans see humans, and must therefore be a subject of the overall human knowledge project and not something that could, beyond hopefully useful small contributions, be built within the field of acting. That is why I think that for my purposes the essay form, or even its predecessor, a sketch along a line of thought, is the most honest form to go. I will pick out a point from the provisional map that I started to built on the blurry grounds of practice, I will try to sharpen it a bit in the perception of the smart reader and therefore also in mine, and then I will let it slide back into the map, this net where it is one among many possible other points in a sea of everything. That is what I am able to do for the moment. More elaborated writing should follow and I am aware that the material should become less, not more. For the moment the essay form allows for excessive use of means, it allows for storytelling, for untamed use of analogy and for hooking in all sorts of human knowledge vehicles, from songs over anecdotes to research articles. It is important to say though, that this Organum is not a presentation of knowledge, it is more of an invitation to enter into dialogue with open and therefore unfinished thought from an observational point one might not too often get note of.
Reasons
Things that you do for one reason are probably not yet grounded in reason. There is a sufficient amount of reasons to publish these articles:
1. Human Acting contains claims far beyond the common claim of “arts education is super important, just please don’t ask me exactly why”. I think we have good stuff to offer, but we are from the arts, so I also think it is good common sense to mistrust our claims for relevance. I want to offer some taste of what it might be all about, or better said: That it might actually be about something.
2. The term “value” has somewhat become an uncovered currency in our days. It has become so usual to carry it around in wheelbarrow dimensions that we manage to do that in complete absence of shame. I am convinced that the reconstitution of meaning that so many of us would so desperately need can only be done bottom-up: We have to re-start to insist that our smallest units of shared meaning, words, have to be anchored in what is. This can’t be done by “agreeing” on what words mean. Replacing groundedness in reality and shared observation with consent on the basis of “how it feels” has already destroyed a lot and will continue to destroy much more as long as we don’t stop it. This can only be done by the thorough and slow work of rebuilding the meaning of words. Rebuilding the meaning of the word “value” must be grounded in the observation of importance. Importance means cost, cost means high cost, and high cost can only mean cost that hurts: One’s own calories, time, effort, sacrifice, pains and all the risks of the deed. The building of a cathedral might be a sign of religion, although the older I get, the more I ask myself to what portion it actually is. But it is one thing for sure: A sign of importance, in the height of its towers, in the richness of its sculptures, in the specificity of its mosaics in the entrance area and in all the risks of falling that were taken by its builders. Speaking one’s mind in our days heightens the risk for falling as well and in order to add that as a measure of importance, I will do my best to climb high.
3. I have seen institution after institution, person after person, fall for the knowledge-opposed ideologies of our times as soon as they have entered the public sphere. I am a social being like any other, it is highly improbable that I of all people would be able to resist. It is easy to be against tendencies of one’s own time as long as one lives in a cave, if one enters the public sphere one will have to take measures. I have taken quite some, one is to pass my case into the hands of the enemy and ensure, by exploiting their much more than mine reliable mechanisms, that they will never accept me as one of them. I have taken not unconsiderable efforts to articulate and expose myself so unequivocally, that any future act of renouncement I might attempt cannot but look like a ridiculous act of fake. It is a matter of self-preservation to enable the world to nail you down to your importances.
4. And there is another reason for publishing these texts in the form of a blog: I would actually want them to be read, and who the hell would buy a book about acting? The blog form offers to the reader who might not be too interested in the overall topic of acting but may be caught by specific aspects of it, the option to be selective. The idea that each essay should be capable of standing on its own has led to some redundancy across the essays, but I think that the same topic in not exactly the same context offers a great opportunity for questioning and understanding also to those who will read more than one. There is another benefit of the blog form: As I already wrote, acting is a system, so writing about it in the linear one-after-the-other form of a book might not really provide an adequate image. A blog form offers the opportunity to link between articles, corresponds much more to the multi-dimensionality of the field and leaves the decision which path to follow to the smart reader. You can start wherever you want, it is a map in the making and maybe also a step towards what a modern book could once become.
Accessibility
— Gustav Gründgens
The strange idea that it would be something good to “lower thresholds” in the name of something that is called “inclusion” has inflated so much that I am only waiting for somebody to come up with the idea to flatten out the Alps because it is unfair that their peaks can not be reached by everyone. Most people don’t seem to be clear that, from a simple technical point of view, you can include people into groups but you cannot include people into knowledge, no matter how many doors you open. Knowledge is not personal, it is beyond personal, you cannot become a member of knowledge, knowledge can only become a part of you. That is why it is knowledge. Best you can do is give people access to knowledge, but inclusion has to be done by them themselves and it is the knowledge which they have to include in themselves and not some other way round. That is why I think that the concept of inclusion is wrong for the fields of knowledge and education, and that is why I want to replace it with a more modern concept, that of accessibility. Accessibility puts effort in developing the means to allow for access, it doesn’t mean to enforce reachability for everyone by lowering standards. No peaks in the world are as unreachable as those of the flattened out Alps, because they actually don’t even exist anymore, they are just lowland and the one who sells them as peaks is at least an idiot but also possibly a con-person. If we want more people to become part of the human knowledge project we must develop the tools that allow them to do so, we must put effort in formulating knowledge in a way that is perceivable by how their brains are and that will allow them to learn, which includes that they would want to learn and would come to learn. But they have to grasp for the knowledge themselves, and there is, of course, work to be done. We have to make the mountain peaks high again. What else should we do with our lives than start to climb them, have some adventures and see how far we get? That is why I decided neither to link to nor to explain topics that are available in close to endless redundancy only one click away in the database of rubbish & knowledge called the internet. You don’t even have to buy a book.
I am aware that the field of acting has neglected its anchoring in the overall human knowledge project so long that even the most low-hanging fruit of the human knowledge project might seem astonishingly new to it. But I will neither prove that the laws of gravity are as equally valid on stage as everywhere else nor will I provide any evidence that everything that happens on stage must be measurable by the knowledge of biology or that the way an audience builds its image of what it sees in a performance can only be grounded in how humans build their images of the world and in nothing else. This might sound quite an outrageous claim to some people from my field, but this is not my problem, it is a problem of the field and its baseless, arrogant, decadelong “paradigm” to be a “cultural system” “sui generis” with “codes” of its own, as it is the unquestioned claim of the field of theatre studies (, in German it is actually theatre “science” and I am not sure if I don’t think that this should be forbidden,) namely of one of its unquestioned luminaries, Erika Fischer-Lichte, professor at Freie Universität Berlin, who is, just a fun fact, author of an article with the to my ear quite ambiguous sounding title “The Rise of Theatre Studies as an Academic Discipline in Germany”. I will not waste my time in entering such a ridiculous discussion, will calmly apply the quick razor named after a fun guy named Christopher Hitchens and dismiss without evidence what was claimed without evidence. I want to spend my lifetime with more interesting stuff.
A Quest
When the Russian pedagogue Makarenko got the order to build an orphanage for street kids in an expropriated manor in the Russian province in the year 1923, the well-meaning Stalinist bureaucrats forgot to provide him with the means to feed his protégés, so that they would of course, as they had always done, go stealing where they could, which in this case meant at the farms around. Makarenko searched for solutions in the books of famous pedagogues like Rousseau or Pestalozzi, found a lot of well-meant advice but nothing that would relate to what he had to deal with. I felt a bit of a resemblance of the situation when I started to teach acting to students who had not been selected for talent and brought with them higher densities and co-occurences of problems: There was nothing about them in the acting books. But they had the motivation only the underdogs of this world can possess and being able to want something might be a talent that should not be neglected. I started my search for problem solutions. I had started some readings from pure interest, but now it was a different approach. I was carried from behavioural biology to evolutionary psychology, met some biomechanics of movement and some neurophysiology along the way, touched on some aspects of the neurosciences, mainly on the interplay of perception and action, found, as I was often lost, orientation in the philosophy of science and, as all concretizations somehow seem to lead to math, landed with vector geometry, cybernetic models, Gaussian curves, Bayesian probabilities, some attractors, an ounce of fuzzy math and quite a bit of information theory. I made it a compulsory habit to have a look at the state of research on everything I could somehow manage to relate to my teaching problems (which in 99,9% I had to find outside of my field) and over the years the amount of articles I read accumulated to a magnitude of thousands. And I always went back to practice to see if my new understanding would be of use.
Unknown Giants
The development of my teaching was only possible through the work of an engineer and a physicist, Moshe Feldenkrais and his assistant and colleague Yochanan Rywerant, who were both outstanding educators of the human. Feldenkrais had, from the 1920s till the 1980s, developed “a theory that can be put into practice”, first-person applicable principles based on psycho-physics (Weber/ Fechner), cybernetics, auto-imagination and the neuro- and cognitive sciences of his days for carefully improving functional aspects underlying human action and to gain better control over them. He used primitive movement patterns like grasping, bending, jumping or turning to monitor the quality of the underlying processes of self-organization and self-control that are necessary to do them. By intentionally communicating simple, superconcise and targeted cues, mainly via touch or via language, and creating heuristic awareness of small differences in an otherwise noise-, complexity- and uncertainty-reduced artificial environment that would allow the student to perceive of them, he built a path to offering an alternative image to the predictive brain and to improve overall self-organization within the process of improving the organization of the primitive movement patterns. His assistant, Yochanan Rywerant, had in the 1980s accomplished the work by formulating it into a model, including a handbook of the practical tools and principles that would allow to teach it professionally. Their work has unfortunately only to minor degrees become part of the overall human knowledge project. It should have, as much as electricity has, regarding the fact that they actually had offered a practical and completely secular path for better self-conduct oriented at the potential of the individual and in the most differentiated interpretation of the word I have ever encountered and I could ever imagine. Many good things could have been built from it and, as electricity has, it should have arrived in every household. A historical investigation for the reasons why this hasn’t happened and a clear articulation of the mistakes that were made, would, regarding the overall heap of shards the educational systems present in our days and the necessity to learn from the past in order to do better in the future, be crucial. The history of the human knowledge project is usually told in terms of its progresses, maybe we could add a history of its omissions. I will write about Feldenkrais and Rywerant again. Part of my work, besides using their method as genuine as possible to build the functional grounds for everything else, was that I applied their principles to successively larger and more complex behavioural sequences, up to multi-agent social behavioural scripts. But this is quite inherent in their model, it is, in their terminology, simply a higher degree of integration and a broadening of the factor “environment” (although a rehearsal stage is still highly artificial and noise-, complexity- and uncertainty-reduced compared to the world outside). It is clear that without their knowledge I wouldn’t have been somebody who could even have thought of doing that.
No Method
There are people who have adviced me to sell an “Anne-Frütel-Method”, as it is the usual procedure for every pony with a trick or two on the market of teaching acting. But I have no method. I can offer some probabilistic tools or call them rules or call them algorithms, but the basic thing I can offer is an attempt of a path, based on knowledge that was found by others, aiming to develop an as functioning as possible way of human communication to build within-human improvement of functionality that allows to reach for artistic achievement in the practical co-work of building meaningful human images in a theatrical play. Ok, I will have to simplify that. Besides that I think I made, still make, and hopefully will continue to make some first attempts to bring together knowledge strands that have not or not sufficiently encountered each other.
Incompleteness
I am anyway convinced that what the world for sure does not need is another one who will start to explain “how it is”. Much has been written about the common human bias called Dunning-Kruger effect, but it is seldom considered that to mistake minimal knowledge for knowledge might also have its origin in how knowledge is presented. If you have never served chicken in another form than strange nubbles, then of course people will happen to mistake the nubble for the chicken. That is why I try to avoid even the slightest impression of completeness, instead I try to throw as many hooks to the world as possible and, in the sense of the elastic curriculum that I also teach in my classes, leave it to the smart reader’s interest which ones he will decide to follow. This also makes sense if the smart reader decides not to follow any of them. The most important thing to know is that there are many things we don’t know.
I am also convinced that in order to learn one does not always have to have understood one thing in order to move on to the next. Learning is the building of a map on the blurry structure called the world and, as things relate to each other, it might provide a lot of insight if you come back to some half-understood point after having passed some others. That is why it makes much more sense to go in loops than to progress linearly. This is reflected in the structure of the blog format where the smart reader can start reading from personal preference and come back to points as he wishes.
Hooks
My strategy of throwing hooks reflects in the many quotes that you will find in the essays. They are not meant to strengthen my arguments, the fact that somebody else with a name has also said something does actually strengthen nothing. But the human knowledge project was built by people and I consider it a question of honoring the achievements of the knowledge project and the sacrifice people made for it to remind us of a few names that had part in building it. They should be our heroes and those who never heard of them should be ashamed of their ignorance. That is why I chose quotes by people who I find, considering our all limited time capacities here on earth, to remarkable degrees more worth reading than others. I invite to take their quotes as inspirations for further reading, and I take personal delight in the fact that the symposium of people you might get to hear actually represents quite the Third Culture I think we could have needed in the last 100 years.
A Theory of a Practice
The one who denies the role of theory for practical work is usually one who is not aware of the theories that underlie his own practice. Some readers might get the impression that the topics here move quite far away from the practice of learning acting. But everything here is derived from problems that arrived in the daily work of acting class and my search for solutions. I have selected the problems by relevance, heuristically measured by reoccurence of the problem and I have further dealt with those which occurred in such sufficient resemblance that I would be able to give the problem a name. I then went trial and error and what slowly emerged were tools on what you could call a behaviour engineering level of understanding. This includes the engineering of perception, which is also behaviour, which is important because it is what the rest of behaviour will act upon and which can, sufficiently, be made an object of self-experiential reverse-engineering, better re-building, learning and new habituation.
It might be good to know that I usually don’t hold lectures. I do dialogue teaching structured along a building process and the very specific problems that occur in it. My students and I build scenes, sometimes we build the functions/ tools/ behavioural sets that we will later need to build scenes, sometimes we build the functions/ tools/ behavioural sets that we will later need to build other functions/tools/ behavioural sets. But it is always doing, making. Talking is to get steps clear. When it becomes necessary for proceeding, we jump into reflection a little bit or more, but we always go back to practice to see if the thought done might serve some purpose. I hope this makes clear, that what you can read here may be theoretical, but is a sort of theoretical that is part of a much larger practice and serves practice as a tool, a function and maybe, if you are willing to follow me, a behavioural set itself. But this means that I actually don’t know how these texts work if they don’t immediately relate to the practical. I would expect to have missed a lot of tacit knowledge, and personality factors in teaching might be much stronger at play than I myself am able to perceive. It is a test, we will see if something works here.
Status Issues
I think it is important information that I have a minor academic degree for theatre and no further official qualification. Had there been an academic path for what I have done the last twenty-five years, I would maybe have been delighted to pursue it, or maybe not, because I have always done best in moving on in my own pace on my own paths, following what interests me. But anyway, there wasn’t. I take this as an occasion to make the probably presumptuous-seeming point that the academic system is per claim and not per definition the place where knowledge will be best obtained. It is, at least in the formation as it presents today, actually neither very old nor very proven. In our times, when on the one side gigantic strands of knowledge have become accessible for all, and when on the other side large parts of the academic system are in a process of decay, people could actually start to avoid the conditions they will find there, and the case of the self-learner could maybe be carefully reconsidered: They have always existed, both in the arts and the sciences, and looking at the history of both disciplines and especially at that of the arts, one might even ask if they haven’t contributed more to relevant achievements of their fields than whole academia ever has.
The smart reader will still be clear that I can’t have any relevant expertise in any of the above mentioned fields, simply calculable by the limitations of the most precious resource we all have in life, time. Additionally my thought is built by a lot of not so clear intuitions that come from weak sources as personal observation and experience in class. And many of the people I have negotiated my thought with were actually dead people and I could only meet them through the brain extensions called books, what, no matter how sharply one defines the processes of how to interact with a book, always tends to become a bit one-sided, because it is solely left to the reader to force the writer to object. So, right, there is no reason at all to take me seriously. It also seems reasonable to me that the actress that pronounces herself publicly should anyway be expected to talk rubbish. This brings me into somewhat of a fool’s position. If I had the choice between being ignored or verbally attacked for what I write I would clearly prefer being attacked, but at the same time I want to remind the potentially outrageous reader who wants to put me back in my place when I once again write about things I have no university stamp for, that, come on, this is a blog. There are at least rubbish-equivalent PhD theses in my field and its surroundings that you, smart as you are, could, for reasons of intellectual integrity, maybe attack first? That you have never heard of them doesn’t prove they don’t exist, it only gives first slight impressions of their relevance. Go for them, only the coward attacks downwards.
It might though be a disadvantage for me that there is not much of a reputation to gain by proving me wrong. That is why I decided to write as sharply as possible to hopefully at least annoy one or two readers as much as that they will search for flaws. I also try to write in falsifiable language and the smart reader might excuse if I often fail. Human action is blurry and problems are not clear and obvious. Most of the time one circles around them in fuzzy unclarity and, considering the effort put into that, in the moment when they finally become clear enough to put them into language, the problem should actually be considered as already half-solved.
On the other side I cannot escape the fact that as an acting teacher I have meanwhile gained some not only productive authority. Aggrandization of the teacher is a huge problem in the field of acting and it is counter-productive if the aim of your teaching is to teach the students to think independently. I have taken quite some precautions to prevent that to happen but I have the impression that, although hopefully the quality of my teaching might also play a role, the simple fact of age might play a role as well. As my age will further rise and so the problem is to be expected to grow, I feel I need to take additional precautions. Everything I write is some form of experience-accompanied working hypothesis based on probably only half-understood self-taught knowledge, so I think that factually there is no reason at all to trust me besides observable outcome. But factuality is not how aggrandization of the teacher, this mechanism that actually serves the student to aggrandize himself by having walked in the shadow of the alleged grand, works. That is why I have every now and then on purpose inserted some complete rubbish into the texts. I pass the task to separate the wheat from the chaff to the smart reader, who will now only be able to walk in the shadow of the alleged grande if he submits to that game. I think that a lot of smart people actually do it this way. Psychologist Jordan Peterson does it when he talks about nutrition and philosopher Slavoj Zizek does it in an exact 50:50 ratio in his texts. I want to keep up with the big ones.
Language Issues
I expect that some readers will be irritated by the technicality or degrees of abstraction I use for descriptions of something that ought to be considered human and in their opinion should be treated with much softer human-friendly language, by which they usually mean the sort of 19th to 20th century ego-centered, empathy-based and state-oriented folk psychology language they happen to be habituated to. There is a well-established tendency of the humanities towards aversion against technical language and it becomes quickly loaded with insinuations as that those who use it are somewhat hostile towards humans. I couldn’t disagree more: If you consider loving a behavioural set of actions and not some unprovable claim of an inner state, you will understand that it will be dependent on resources, and you will be able to see that those who create the resource of the best possible understanding of the human will be able to love humans best. “Accepting somebody as what he is” is quite a common description of loving someone, I don’t see why this shouldn’t include the full acceptance of human functionings and dysfunctionings. That is why I talk from the viewpoint of somewhat an engineer. It is engineering on the level of information and communication but, as humans have neither keyboards nor data cables, we have to enter the building process by imposing some sort of sharpened environment concisely targeting the functional systems of human perception that would act on the nervous system in such a way that the nervous system would, at least with significant probability re-act and build in the intended way. We do that mainly by 1. visual, 2. auditive 3. haptic and 4. kinetic means. The fact that these 4 are part of our everyday life does neither deprive them of their functional grounds nor does it hinder us to approach them in a professional way, which requests operable terminology. I would anyway expect that people will get used to the new language as soon as it becomes fashionable. 19th century language used to be new and strange some time ago as well.
Some other readers, especially those who have some preference for the communicational means of the model, the graph and the equation, might on the other side be quite irritated by the unsharpness that results from using the softer communicational means of the narrative, the analogy and the image. Some thoughts on that: 1. Sometimes it is the most exact description of a thing if you describe it in fuzzy terms. 2. Pattern searching across domains requires to temporarily blur your sight in order to seek for what only starts to stand out if you look at several domains, and may remain unnoticed when you observe one domain with sharp eyes. 3. Entropic tendencies of knowledge inevitably become a topic as soon as knowledge is communicated from human to human. The further you move away from the core of the human knowledge project the more this tendency increases. If you want to reach people, it becomes a trade off that has to be taken into account. If we want to insist on the idea that knowledge can be passed on from brain to brain, we must find the means and work with probabilities instead of losing knowledge by pretending sharpness of human communication it can not, by the basic conditions of how it is transmitted and by what sort of apparatus it is perceived, possess. As long as we don’t clarify these things, they will keep on playing with us instead of us with them. That is also why I, although for very different reasons than many others who do so, will insist that the last word on human learning has not been spoken yet and that every open question is still a piece of hope. We need to develop a theory of education formulated on what information and communication are and how they work in the human. This theory must consider the human as what the human is, an all-time-biasing multi-layer information-grasping machine that will actually act things out based on the information from which its perception-action systems (and not its declarative systems) are genetically built and will be, to the degree they can be, further built by learning and habituation. I try to deal as responsibly as I can with the problem, but for the moment I can only do that with the quality of a beginner and will remain an observer of the problem.
Non-Theatrocentricity
What I write might sometimes seem surprisingly non-theatrocentric for an acting blog. I don’t want to make one of the usual moral claims about the arts and the world, I keep it as personal as it is: Acting and theatre have become the way I manage to cope with the world each and every single day of my life. It is my place of making sense, where even each pain gains the potential of becoming a building brick of the shared dreams that we call theatre performances. If acting doesn’t emerge from an ongoing feedback process with the human world, if it is not a multiple method way to ask and maybe, in some moments even find some tiny answer to the question how we can live, I for my part am not interested.
A 21st Century Look Back
It might also surprise the reader that, despite the 21st century claim and all its future orientation, a lot of essays actually look back into history and deal with old materials. But, you know, acting is 150 years behind in adjusting to overall human knowledge, so books from the 1960s are actually quite from the far future for us. I also think that some things have gone wrong in what has become historical common sense of my field and what hasn’t. Smart people have been pushed into strange corners, knowledge has been deflated and things have been deformed ideologically in remarkable ways. The knowledge they created still is somewhere, but if knowledge is not in the heads, to what degree does it then actually exist? When we think of loss of knowledge we use to think of what happened in the Middle Ages, a distant occurence. It might be worth asking if the same hasn’t happened during our lifetime. To make that claim credible I will introduce some strands from my field that were either completely dropped or have deflated so much that what remains from them in the knowledge circulations of our days contains almost no information at all. Edvard Gordon Craig, Konstantin S. Stanislavski, Vsevolod Meyerhold or Bertolt Brecht are some names of those in my field who invested their lives in finding the principles on which our art works. The knowledge path from Stanislavski, who introduced a teleological model to the practice of acting 100 years ago, to Lee Strasberg who claimed to work with Stanislavski’s method but went for “dreams of passion” probably deserves its place among the most infamous knowledge distortions of modernity. Maybe it’s a good idea to write a historical case study and then to start to look for similar patterns elsewhere. I think it is good to clarify a bit in order to proceed. And, as the artistic avant garde have repeated themselves in leaving the past behind them and looking forward again and again, I think this has become quite a conventional stance and it is now quite an avantgardistic move to have a look back.
Art can’t be Science
There are substantial reasons to remain hesitant with the application of the term “art”, and for most instances I find the engineering formulation much more productive for what I do, but sometimes “art” is useful for distinctions: This is an artistic endeavour and not a scientific one. The artistic can never be a subset of the scientific, it does not submit to the procedural rules those who do it agree upon. But, as the artistic can by definition have no other rules than those it voluntarily imposes on itself, there is no reason why the arts should not allow for a bit more of a scientific worldview, a bit more of a technicality of method or the choice of different artistic material like the building of human-applicable algorithms.
Biases, Flaws and Errors
Doing things one considers of importance one will have to walk on shaky knowledge grounds in order to be able to proceed. I expect to be wrong in many things. Here is my defence: There is work that should have been done during the last 100 years and wasn’t. As a teacher who tries to give her best at the forefront of what can be taught, I am dependent on a functioning human knowledge project in order to be able to do my work. If the human knowledge project fails to provide such knowledge, please tell me where I err, but maybe resist to mock me too much when I’m wrong. In return I offer to do my best to at least be wrong in the most interesting way possible.
I want to close with the remark that everything here is deeply subjective, that even the inclusion of a bit more of scientific or sub-scientific thought claims no objectivity but is simply due to personal preference and interest, it’s just me. I might also often be polemicising and straightly unjust. The smart reader might still manage to understand this as an expression of a sense of justice. The friend of equilibrium has to jump full force on her side of the seesaw if too heavy weights have glued themselves to its other side.