Arthur Zajonc, Prof. Emeritus at Amherst College, discusses "contemplative science" -- a philosophical, attention-based approach to scientific understanding.

Experiential approach to scientific-spiritual understanding

Zajonc discusses Goethe's proposal that science is not only about finding the mechanisms behind the "theatre of the senses," rather to understand being from an experiential point of view.

Scientific insight comes in a flash, it is a moment of transcendence -- a moment of perception -- what is the sensory-moral.  Poetry is at the heart of science.

"Knowledge is not an object that you acquire, it's not a mechanism that you provide to the human mind. It's actually an epiphanal moment." Which is true to the arts,  science, and faith.

The Search for King Richard III - Identifying the Remains

STEAM

The STEAM concept explained (tech/science/art research and education interdisciplines -- curriculum I'm working on at City Tech).

Nao d'amores "misterio del cristo de los gascones"

Segovia resident company reenacts the rites of Depositio, Elevatio, and Visitatio as recorded in the medieval Liber Ordinarius de Essen. Their puppet is designed after the Romanesque articulating Christ from the church of San Justa, Segovia (XI century).

Misterio del Cristo de los Gascones

a love letter

How to make accidents and contingency part of knowledge production: A) throw away all course descriptions. How to make accidents and contingency part of knowing a thing or being: A) cook a stir fry over the burning course descriptions. Give it to someone. Eat together. 

Sensus means to understand. To hear, taste, smell, see, and feel. Sense the world and you become the world. The world becomes you. Build a new definition of tragedy and form where Aristotelian progression collapses in on itself: mimesis, anagnorisis, and katharsis become in the same instant. Things are falling all the time and things are rising simultaneously. Falling and rising things pass each other on their opposite ways, occasionally bumping into the other and flying off in third directions. Death is only finite to the Kantian soul – it is not finite to the beetle and worm that consume the energy stored in flesh. 

Body skin is not impermeable; it is not an emblem or seal. It may proclaim "Bob" to some adjacent receptive body; to other receptors it is "purchase" or "food" or "portal." To another receptor it is "Bob" and "purchase." Purchase/portal. Bob/food. Through the skin and eyes, into the blood and out again into the earth, the material world circulates. Humans are not creatures as much as vessels that are filled and leak with matter and combustion, once held in other containers.  In a constant state of simultaneous decay and rebirth. From conception, we are always emerging and dying. Feel the precariousness of fluid movement by being in it. 

As if ash did not dust the wings of the flight of the Phoenix. Or the Anka -- whose life/wing span is unimaginably long:

"They say that the Anka lives to the age of one thousand five hundred years; and when it has come to the age of five hundred years it begins to sing; and when the time for the female to lay its egg is come, the male Anka comes with his beak full of sea-water, and sprinkles her till the egg is laid; and when it is laid, he sits upon it, while the female goes out for food. In one hundred and twenty-five years the young bird is hatched; and when it is grown up, if it be a female, the female Anka gathers much wood, and the male and female rub their bills together, from which comes a great fire and falls among the wood; into this the female goes and is burnt, and the young one becomes the mate of the male bird. And if the young is a male, the male Anka goes into the fire, and the young one becomes the mate of the female. Many other things are related of the Anka, but as they rest on no good authority, I have not thought it well to insert them here." - al-Ghazālī

And in that very long, nearly unimaginable time, chronology no longer matters. There is no more waiting.

Back from the Dead: An Eidophusikon for Richard III

Poster of the project I'm doing with Irina Nechaeva (Entertainment Technology student), funded by an Emerging Scholars Grant. Memory Machine indeed!