Holotopia

From Knowledge Federation
Revision as of 11:59, 24 July 2020 by Dino (talk | contribs)
Jump to: navigation, search

Imagine...

You are about to board a bus for a long night ride, when you notice the flickering streaks of light emanating from two wax candles, placed where the headlights of the bus are expected to be. Candles? As headlights?

Of course, the idea of candles as headlights is absurd. So why propose it? Because on a much larger scale this absurdity has become reality.

The Modernity ideogram renders the essence of our contemporary situation by depicting our society as an accelerating bus without a steering wheel, and the way we look at the world, try to comprehend and handle it as guided by a pair of candle headlights.

Modernity.jpg Modernity ideogram


Our proposal

In a nutshell

The core of our knowledge federation proposal is to change the relationship we have with information.

What is our relationship with information presently like?

Here is how Neil Postman described it:

"The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it."

The motivation of our proposal is to restore agency to information; and power to knowledge.

Postman.jpg
Neil Postman

In detail

What would it take to restore the connection between information and action? What would be the practical consequences of such an act?

What would information and our handling of information be like if we treated them as we treat other human-made things—if we adapted them to the purposes that need to be served?

What would it mean, practically and academically, if instead of assuming that when our ideas are published in a book or an article they are automatically "known", we treated the other half of this picture with the thoroughness and attention that characterize our technical work? If we asked What do people actually need to know? If we turned the massive volumes of information we own into something that the people can comprehend and make use of? If we developed the "social life of information" in a similar manner as the nature developed our brain and nervous system—to allow us, and our society, to adapt to the complex reality we have created, by changing our perception of it, and our behavior? To empower us to comprehend our world correctly?

What would the academic field that develops this approach to information be like? How would information be different? How would it be used? By what methods, what social processes, and by whom would it be created? What new information formats would emerge, and supplement or replace the traditional books and articles? How would information technology be adapted and applied? What would public informing be like? And academic communication, and education?

The substance of our proposal is a complete prototype
that provides detailed answers to these and other related questions. (A prototype is a model that is already embedded in practice, so that it not only embodies and exhibits solutions, but also acts upon practice to change it—while showing to its creators what works and what needs to be changed.) The Knowledge Federation prototype is conceived as a portfolio of about forty smaller prototypes, which cover the range of questions that define an academic field.

We use our main keyword, knowledge federation, in a similar way in which "design" and "architecture" are commonly used—to signify both a real-world praxis (informed practice), and an academic field that develops and curates it.

Technically, we are proposing a paradigm. (We adapted this keyword from Thomas Kuhn, and it stands for (1) a new way to conceive a domain of interest, which (2) resolves the reported anomalies and (3) opens up a new frontier to research.) The proposed paradigm is not in a specific scientific field, where paradigm changes are relatively common, but in "creation, integration and application of knowledge" at large.

Our call to action is to institutionalize and develop knowledge federation as an academic field, and as a real-life praxis.

To be continued...


</div> </div>



Before we begin

Before we share the "tactical assets" we've put together to prime the Holotopia project, a couple of notes are in order to explain how exactly we want them to be understood and received.

A 'cardboard city'

While each of these "assets" is created, to the best of our ability, to serve as a true solution, we do not need to make that claim, and we are not making it. Everything here is just prototypes. Which means models, each made to serve as a "proof of concept", to be experimented with and indefinitely improved.

Think of what's presented here as a cardboard model of a city.

It includes a 'school', and a 'hospital', a 'main square' and 'residential areas'. The model is complete enough for us to see that this 'city' will be a wonderful place to be in; and to begin building. But as we build—everything can change!

One of the points of using this keyword, prototype, is to consider them as placeholders. A city needs a school, and a hospital, and... The whole thing models a 'modern city' (an up-to-date approach to knowledge).

Another important point: design patterns. The prototypes * model * a multiplicity of challenge–solution pairs. With provisions for updating the solutions continuously. The point here is that while solutions can and need to evolve, the design patterns (as 'research questions') can remain relatively stable.

This will all make even more sense when one takes into consideration that the core of our proposal is not to build a city; it is to develop 'architecture'!

A 'business plan'

No, we are not doing this to start a business, or to make money. But a 'business plan' is still a useful metaphor, because we do "mean business". The purpose of the Holotopia project is to make a difference. In the social and economic reality we are living in.

These "tactical assets" can then also be read as points in a business plan—which point to the realistic likelihood of it all to achieve its goals.

The point here is not money, but impact. Making a real difference. From the business point of view, perhaps a suitable metaphor could be 'branding'. And 'strategy'. There are numerous movements, dedicated to a variety of causes. Can we unite under a single flag and mission, not as a monolithic thing but a 'federation', or a 'franchise' of sorts, so that the holotopia offers these resources.

Peccei wrote in One Hundred Pages for the Future (the boldface emphasis is ours):

For some time now, the perception of (our responsibilities relative to "problematique") has motivated a number of organizations and small voluntary groups of concerned citizens which have mushroomed all over to respond to the demands of new situations or to change whatever is not going right in society. These groups are now legion. They arose sporadically on the most variend fronts and with different aims. They comprise peace movements, supporters of national liberation, and advocates of women's rights and population control; defenders of minorities, human rights and civil liberties; apostles of "technology with a human face" and the humanization of work; social workers and activists for social change; ecologists, friends of the Earth or of animals; defenders of consumer rights; non-violent protesters; conscientious objectors, and many others. These groups are usually small but, should the occasion arise, they can mobilize a host of men and women, young and old, inspired by a profound sense of te common good and by moral obligations which, in their eyes, are more important than all others.

They form a kind of popular army, actual or potential, with a function comparable to that of the antibodies generated to restore normal conditions in a biological organism that is diseased or attacked by pathogenic agents. The existence of so many spontaneous organizations and groups testifies to the vitality of our societies, even in the midst of the crisis they are undergoing. Means will have to be found one day to consolidate their scattered efforts in order to direct them towards strategic objectives.

An obvious problem is the lack of a shared and effective strategy that would allow the movements to really make a difference. As it is, they are largely reactive and not pro-active. But as we have seen, the problems can only be solved when their systemic roots are understood and taken care of.

But there is a subtle and perhaps even more important difficulty—that our efforts at making a difference tend to be symbolic. We adapted this keyword from political scientist Murray Edelman, and attribute to it the following meaning.

Real impact, we might now agree, is impact on systems. They are the 'riverbed' that directs the 'current' in which we are all swimming. We may 'swim against the current' for awhile, with the help of all our courage and faith and togetherness—but ultimately we get exhausted and give up.

The difficulty, however, is our socialization—owing to which we tend to take systems for granted; they are the "reality" within which we seek solutions. And so our attempts at solution end up being akin to social rituals, where we symbolically act out our "responsibilities" and concerns (by writing an article, organizing a conference, or a demonstration) and put them to rest.

The alternative is, of course, to restore agency to information, and power to knowledge—i.e. to create a clear guiding light under which efforts can be effectively focused.

The five insights, which we'll list as our first "tactical asset", are our prototype placeholder in that role.

So here we have a design pattern: The challenge is How to create a shared strategy, so that efforts can be coordinated and meaningfully directed? The holotopia is offered as a prototype. As all prototypes do, here too the solution part has provisions for updating itself continuously—with everyone's participation


They provide us a frame of reference, around which the city is built. They serve as foundation stones, or as 'five pillars' lifting the emerging construction up from the mundane reality, and making it stand out.

In our challenge to come through the sensationalist press and reach out to people, each of them is a sensation in its own right; but a real sensation, which merits our attention.

In our various artistic, research, media... projects—they provide us building material.



The mirror

POINT: Bring in the fundamental element. CHANGE of WORLDVIEW begins with FOUNDATIONS—and here we orchestrate it carefully. BRING ACADEMIA ALONG! LIBERATE the enormous creative potential it contains. WE DO NOT NEED TO "PUBLISH OR PERISH".

The appeal here is to institutionalize a FREE academic space, where this line of work can be developed with suitable support.

A 'magical' way out

That there is an unexpected, seemingly magical way into a new cultural and social reality is really good news. But is it realistic?

We here carefully develop the analogy with Galilei's time, when a new epistemology was ready to change the world, but still kept in house arrest. All we need to do is to set it free.

The discovery of ourselves

The mirror symbolizes the ending of reification (when we see ourselves in the world, we realize that we are not above it and observing it "objectively"); and the beginning of accountability (we see the world in dire need for creative action; and we see our own role in it).

This insight extends into ending of the reification of our personal preferences, feelings, tastes... What we are able to feel, think, create... is determined, to an astounding degree, by the degree in which our "human quality" has been developed. And our ability to develop it depends in an overwhelming degree on the way in which our culture has been developed.

The academia's situation

The mirror symbolizes also the academia's situation, just as the bus with candle headlights symbolizes our civilization's situation. The point is that the hitherto development of the academic tradition brought us there, in front of the mirror.

An enormous liberation of our creative abilities results when we realize they must not be confined to traditional disciplinary pursuits and routines.

Especially important is the larger understanding of information that the self-reflection in front of the mirror brings us to; information is no longer only printed text; it includes any artifacts that embody human experience, refined by human ingenuity.


Occupy the university

Who holds 'Galilei in house arrest'

We don't need to occupy Wall Street. The key is in another place.

We really just need to occupy our own profession—by continuing the tradition that our great predecessors have created.

A sand box

On the other side of the mirror we create a 'sandbox'; that's really the holotopia project.


Note: on the other side of the mirror the contributions of Jantsch and Engelbart are seen as fundamental (they were drafting, and creating strategically, a new 'collective mind').

See the description of 'sandbox' in our contribution Enabling Social-Systemic Transformations to the 2013 conference "Transformations in a Changing Climate"



The five insights, and the ten direct relationships between them, provide us reference—in the context of which some of the age-old challenges are understood and handled in entirely new ways.

How to put an end to war

Consider, for instance, this age-old question: "How to put an end to war?" So far our progress on this all-important frontier has largely been confined to palliative measures; and ignored those far more interesting curative ones. What would it take to really put an end to war, once and for all?

When this question is considered in the context of two direction-changing insights, power structure and socialized reality, we become ready to see the whole compendium of questions related to justice, power and freedom in a completely new way. We then realize in what way exactly, throughout history, we have been coerced, largely through cultural means, to serve renegade power, in the truest sense our enemy, by engaging our sense of duty, heroism, honor and other values and traits that constitute "human quality". We then become ready to redeem the best sides of ourselves from the power structure, and apply them toward true betterment of our condition.

Religion beyond belief

Or think about religion—which has in traditional societies served to bind each person with "human quality", and the people together into a culture or a society. But which is in modern times all too often associated with dogmatic beliefs, and inter-cultural conflicts.

When religion is, however, considered in the context provided by socialized reality and convenience paradox, a whole new possibility emerges—where religion no longer is an instrument of socialization—but of liberation; and as an essential way to cultivate our personal and communal wholeness.

A natural strategy for remedying religion-related dogmatic beliefs and inter-cultural conflicts emerges—to evolve religion further!

The ten themes cover the holotopia

Of course any theme can be placed into the context of the five insights, and end up being seen and handled radically differently. To prime these eagerly sought-for conversations, we provided a selection of ten themes (related to the future of education, business, science, democracy, art, happiness...) that—together with the five insights—cover the space of holotopia in sufficient detail to make it transparent and tangible.


The dialogs

The dialog is an art form

We make conversation themes alive through dialogs.

We turn conversations into artistic and media-enabled events (see the Earth Sharing prototype below).

The dialog is an attitude

The dialog is an integral part of the holoscope. Its role will be understood if we consider the human inclination to hold onto a certain way of seeing things, and call it "reality". And how much this inclination has been misused by various social groups to bind us to themselves, and more recently by various modern power structures. (Think, for instance, about the animosity between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, or between Sunni and Shia Muslims in the Middle East.)

The attitude of the dialog may be understood as an antidote.

The dialog is an age-old tradition

The dialogues of Socrates marked the very inception of the academic tradition. More recently, David Bohm gave the evolution of the dialogue a new and transformative direction. Bohm's dialogues are a form of collective therapy. Instead of arguing their points, the participants practice "proprioception" (mindfully observe their reactions), so that they may ultimately listen without judging, and co-create a space where new and transformative ideas can emerge.

We built on this tradition and developed a collection of prototypes—which holotopia will use as construction material, and build further.


We employ contemporary media

The use of contemporary media opens up a whole new chapter, or dimension, in the story of the dialog.

Through suitable use of the camera, the dialog can be turned into a mirror—mirroring our dysfunctional communication habits; our turf strifes.

By using Debategraph and other "dialog mapping" online tools, the dialog can be turned into a global process of co-creation of meaning.

The dialog as spectacle

The holotopia dialogs will have the nature of spectacles—not the kind of spectacles fabricated by the media, but real ones. To the media spectacles, they present a real and transformative alternative.

The dialogs we initiate are a re-creation of the conventional "reality shows"—which show the contemporary reality in ways that need to be shown. The relevance is on an entirely different scale. And the excitement and actuality are of course larger! We engage the "opinion leaders" to contribute their insights to the cause.

When successful, the result is most timely and informative: We are witnessing the changing of our understanding and handling of a core issue.

When unsuccessful, the result is most timely and informative in a different way: We are witnessing our resistances and our blind spots, our clinging to the obsolete forms of thought.

Occasionally we publish books about those themes, based on our dialogs, and to begin new ones.

The dialog is an instrument of change

This point cannot be overemphasized: Our primary goal is not to warn, inform, propose a new way to look at the world—but to change our collective mind. Physically. The dialog is the medium for that change.

We organize public dialogs about the five insights, and other themes related to change, in order to make change.

Here the medium in the truest sense is the message: By developing dialogs, we re-create our collective mind—from something that only receives, which is dazzled by the media... to something that is capable of weaving together academic and other insights, and by engaging the best of our "collective intelligence" in seeing what needs to be done. And in inciting, planning and coordinating action.

In the holotopia scheme of things everything is a prototype. The prototypes are not final results of our efforts, they are a means to an end—which is to rebuild the public sphere; to reconfigure our collective mind. The role of the prototypes is to prime this process.

The elephant

Elephant.jpg
Elephant ideogram

The elephant

Imagine the 20th century's visionary thinkers as those proverbial blind-folded men touching an elephant. We hear them talk about things like "a fan", "a water hose" and "a tree trunk". But they don't make sense, and we ignore them.

Everything changes when we realize that they are really talking about the ear, the trunk and the leg of an imposingly large exotic animal, which nobody has yet had a chance to see—a whole new order of things, or cultural and social paradigm!

A spectacle

The effect of the five insights is to orchestrate this act of 'connecting the dots'—so that the spectacular event we are part of, this exotic 'animal', the new 'destination' toward which we will now "change course" becomes clearly visible.

A side effect is that the academic results once again become interesting and relevant. In this newly created context, they acquire a whole new meaning; and agency!

Post-post-structuralism

The structuralists undertook to bring rigor to the study of cultural artifacts. The post-structuralists "deconstructed" their efforts, by observing that there is no such thing as "real meaning"; and that the meaning of cultural artifacts is open to interpretation.

This evolution may be taken a step further. What interests us is not what, for instance, Bourdieu "really saw" and wanted to communicate. We acknowledge (with the post-structuralists), that even Bourdieu would not be able to tell us that, if he were still around. We acknowledge, however, that Bourdieu saw something that invited a different interpretation and way of thinking than what was common; and did what he could to explain it within the old paradigm. Hence we give the study of cultural artifacts not only a sense of rigor, but also a new degree of relevance—by considering them as signs on the road, pointing to an emerging paradigm

A parable

While the view of the elephant is composed of a large number of stories, one of them—the story of Doug Engelbart—is epigrammatic. It is not only a spectacular story—how the Silicon Valley failed to understand or even hear its "giant in residence", even after having recognized him as that; it is also a parable pointing to many of the elements we want to highlight by telling these stories—not least the social psychology and dynamics that 'hold Galilei in house arrest'.

This story also inspired us to use this metaphor: Engelbart saw 'the elephant' already in 1951—and spent a six decades-long career to show him to us. And yet he passed away with only a meager (computer) mouse in his hand (to his credit)!


The holoscope

Seeing things whole

Peccei concluded his analysis in "One Hundred Pages for the Future":

The arguments posed in the preceding pages [...] point out several things, of which one of the most important is that our generations seem to have lost the sense of the whole.

In the context of Holotopia, we refer to knowledge federation by its pseudonym holoscope, to highlight one of its distinguishing characteristics—it helps us see things whole.

Different from the sciences that have been "zooming in" (toward finer technical details); and promoting a fixed way of looking at the world (a domain of interest, a terminology and a set of methods being what defines a scientific discipline); and the informing media's focus on specific spectacular events, the holoscope allows us to chose our scope –"what is being looked at and how".


Stories

We bring together stories (elsewhere called vignettes)—which share the core insights of leading contemporary thinkers. We tell their stories.

They become 'dots' to connect in our dialogs.

They also show what obstructed our evolution (the emergence of holotopia).

Ideograms

Art meets science

Placeholder. The point is enormous—federation of insights, connecting the dots, not only or even primarily results in rational insights. It results in implicit information; we are undoing our socialization!

H side.png
A paper model of a sculpture, re-imaging the five insights and their relationships.

The ideograms condense lots of insights into a simple image, ready to be grasped.


As the above image may suggest, the pentagram—as the basic icon or 'logo' of holotopia—lends itself to a myriad re-creations. We let the above image suggest that a multiplicity of ideas can be condensed to a simple image (the pentagram); and how this image can be expanded into a multiplicity of artistic creations.

Keywords

The Renaissance, and also science, brought along a whole new way of speaking—and hence a new way to look at the world. With each of the five insights we introduce a collection of keywords, in terms of which we come to understand the core issues in new ways.

The keywords will also allow us to propose solutions to the anomalies that the five insights bring forth.

Prototypes

Information has agency only when it has a way to impact our actual physical reality. A goal of the Holotopia project is to co-create prototypes—new elements of our new reality. We share the prototypes we've already developed, to put the ball in play.



These titles will change

Art leads science

How the action began...

Seeing differently

Up and down

The vault

Precious space for reflection—where the stories are told, and insights begin to take shape.

Holotopia is an art project

The Holotopia is an art project. We are reminded of Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and in the heart of the old world order planting the seeds of the new one.

Duchamp's (attempted) exhibition of a urinal challenged what art may be, and contributed to the legacy that the modern art was built on. Now our conditions demand that we deconstruct the deconstruction—and begin to construct anew.

What will the art associated with the next Renaissance be like? We offer holotopia as a creative space where the new art can emerge.

KunsthallDialog01.jpg
A snapshot of Holotopia's pilot project in Kunsthall 3.14, Bergen.

Henri Lefebvre summarized the most vital of Karl Marx's objections to capitalism, by observing that capital (machines, tools, materials...) or "investments" are products of past work, and hence represent "dead labour". That in this way past activity "crystalyzes, as it were, and becomes a precondition for new activity." And that under capitalism, "what is dead takes hold of what is alive"

Lefebvre proposes to turn this relationship upon its head. "But how could what is alive lay hold of what is dead? The answer is: through the production of space, whereby living labour can produce something that is no longer a thing, nor simply a set of tools, nor simply a commodity.

As the above image may suggest, the holotopia artists still produce art objects; but they are used as pieces in a larger whole— which is a space where transformation happens. A space where the creativity of the artist can cross-fertilize with the insights of the scientist, to co-create a new reality that none of them can create on her own. Imagine it as a space, akin to a new continent or a "new world" that's just been discovered—which combines physical and virtual spaces, suitably interconnected.

Going online

Debategraph was not yet implemented. But David was there!