Month: August 2014

There’s a les­son here. The great­est thing I learned from my for­mal­ist train­ing in paint­ing was actu­al­ly not about paint­ing. It was about the nature of knowl­edge itself: what it means to define a cre­ative prac­tice as a craft, or as a dis­ci­pline, or as a set of ideas, and how such a prac­tice relates to cul­ture at large. In oth­er words, the impor­tant thing to ask is not What is paint­ing? or What is game design? Instead, the real ques­tion is: What is gained and what is lost when we define it in a par­tic­u­lar way?

(via How I Teach Game Design. (Les­son 3: Games and Rules) | being play­ful)

Super­sti­tion, myth, and reli­gion offer ratio­nales that fill in the emp­ty spaces between per­for­mance and results. Their sor­cery acts as a mor­tar that plugs the gaps between the phys­i­cal and men­tal bricks that form the walls of our per­for­mances. With­out that glue, the edi­fice would crum­ble. For peak per­for­mance, super­sti­tion isn’t a defect but a necessity.

(via Swing Copters: The Ran­dom­ness of the Uni­verse, Cap­tured in Pix­els — The Atlantic)

“Play­ing a song changes your under­stand­ing of it. Play­ing music changes how you lis­ten to it. Doing changes knowing.”

Great piece on how the inter­net is facil­i­tat­ing a new lit­er­a­cy of media pro­duc­tion. Doing def­i­nite­ly changes know­ing. How­ev­er, I dis­agree old struc­tures of pow­er and access are no longer in place on the inter­net. And I also dis­agree learn­ing to play a song on a gui­tar is the same as “learn­ing” to post a tweet. There’s a dif­fer­ent rela­tion­ship between the tool, the media and the per­son going on there.

(via Doing is know­ing: “Sweet Jane” and the Web — Word­yard)

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)