An idea for a blackboard

6’52” – 8’21” (Ingold Thinking Through Making)

In “thinking through making” we can no longer regard making as a projection, as the projection of a ready made thought or concept on to raw material, or a projection of thought on matter as the traditional hylomorphic[1] model of making proposes.   Rather, making is an ongoing binding together of material flows and sensory awareness. This is to think of making as a kind of weaving and to think of every artifact as a knot, something bound together out of lots of materials that all get scrunched up together or come together and all get tied up. That incidentally, is why I don’t use power point. There is a rational for this: I don’t believe in PowerPoint. When we use PowerPoint we project images on the screen; PowerPoint is the epitome of the logic of projection which I am arguing against. The reason why I like black boards is that the black board is the epitome of the process of creativity that I am arguing for. You stand at the black board and you scrape a line. Then your movement, your awareness, the trace of the materials are all bound up in that one performance and what you see is the outcome of that performance. That’s why I like blackboards” (Ingold, T)

In thinking through making Ingold suggests that the artifact cannot be understood as an idea simply projected on to a material.
Does this support our thinking that the learning resource cannot be a tool for projecting knowledge onto an artwork?

[1] Hylomorphism from the greek hyle (matter) and morphe (form).  Whenever we read that in the making of artifacts, practitioners impose forms internal to the mind upon a material world ‘out there’ hylomorphism is at work.

 

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