You have to assume this was learned by doing. Embodied cognition at it's best.
Learning by doing
Learning by doing
A big thing for me regards art is that it is a doing thing. You learn by making something and doing something. Call it embodied cognition, experiential learning, craft, performance or spritual technology, this post just shows how clever bodies are. Art, craft, cookery, whatever this is, it is amazing. Knowing through doing.
Nature connectedness and noticing nature: Key components of a good life.
For the past six months or so we’ve been working with the National Trust exploring how being connected with nature relates to pro-nature behaviours …Nature connectedness and noticing nature: Key components of a good life.
Quote – Kiki Smith on art making
Pool of Tears 2 - 2000 - Kiki Smith has often turned to fairy tales in search of dramatic female personae and alter egos.
A Brief Guide to Embodied Cognition: Why You Are Not Your Brain
Coming from the world of outdoor and experiential learning and then the arts and the arts therapies, it seems clear that we think with our bodies as well as our brains. Dancers and climbers both do this. As do joiners and sculptors, painters and decorators and artists. Art as research or art a way of exploring and expressing personal experience connects directly to embodied cognition, but the output of exploration or research is art and experience. If we are seeking models for understanding art making experiences and or outdoor experiences, embodied cognition is a kind of conduit to shift ideas from one context to another.
A Sense of Direction – BBC Radio 4
Very interesting radio show, particularly for any outdoor educators. It explores animal and human ability to sense direction and evidence of magnetic sensitivity in the brains of animals and whether it is present in humans. Our brain can sense magnetic fields but this is reduced by radio signals. Whether this sensitivity allows some people to sense north is not yet proven. But anecdotal evidence suggests that they are but only in times of physical stress, ie when the cognitive function is compromised by fatigue or stress. This could be interesting to people doing extreme sports, or undergoing rigorous activity needing a sense of direction ie lost on an expedition. It also confirms that when lost we walk in circles.
Richard Long in Mexico
Richard Long changed my life. I was doing an urban outdoor programme in Liverpool, England, and went to see the first ever show at Tate Liverpool, called Starlit Waters - British Sculpture. An International Art 1968 - 1988. Saw Richard Long, Anish Kapoor, Alison Wilding, Hamish Fulto, Barry Flanagan, Tony Cragg, Art and Language, Ian Hamilton Filay, on and on... The man who walked into that show was a different man to the one that walked out. I did hiking for my job and here was a guy who made hiking into art. I was renderd speechless. It was the sheer physicality of it and that it was objects I would have never thought of as 'sculpture'.
What if we stopped buying stuff and started making it?
About the recent growth in ‘making’. A trend towards being engaged in the world of doing things for yourself, linked to crafting and DIY. Again lots of stuff about learning from mistakes and learning from learning. From the BBC Listen here What do we really understand about the stuff we own, what does it mean …
Continue reading "What if we stopped buying stuff and started making it?"
What has Sat-Nav done to our brains?
Interesting programme suggests that our sense of identity and our memories are linked to a sense of place and connect the capacity to tell stories about ourselves at a physiological level through the hippocampus. If we learn to know where we are in space by using a map (as opposed to sat-nav) we have develop …
Air-Mountain: A Translucent Inflatable Structure Blurs the Boundary between Interior and Exterior Spaces
"Visitors to this year’s OCT Phoenix Flower Festival in Shenzhen, China encountered an unusual inflatable pavilion by Aether Architects. The translucent structure, called “air-mountain,” served dual functions as a protective exhibition space and a surface for people to climb up and over." Read More...