Week 8: A School of Decreative Methodologies
[0:00:00]
Scott: Hi there. Okay so let me go ahead and add some other people for the chat. I’m going to try to make this as smooth as possible this week but Greg, I think I mentioned, got violently ill just a few hours ago. He was actually planning on coming to run a bunch of stuff here. So I’m going to try to both be present and add people technically.

Stephen: Okay.

Scott: I’ll try to make it smooth for you but if you need anything from me maybe just—and don’t feel like letting other people know you can either give me a single or flag me in a text message or something.

Stephen: You bet.

Scott: Okay great. I’ll start adding other people now.

Stephen: Yep

Speaker 3: Can you see the chats afterwards?

Scott: Yes

Speaker 3 You can. How do you…?

Scott: Usually I save the chats and we make them available although we haven’t really made any of these available this year yet.

Speaker 3: I see

Scott: Yeah generally we’ll add it as an HTML file or whatever to our list. Then somebody can just click it and it’ll open in their browser and they can see everything just the way this looks.

Speaker 3: But eventually you’ll save a bunch…

Scott: Yeah we have them all saved it’s just they haven’t been uploaded—we have been adding the audio after it’s been cleaned up.

Speaker 3: Oh got ya, oh cool.

Scott: Really as of just this past week. There was a bug in embedding the audio. Initially we were just linking to that but anyway. Start adding people to the call and move on. Maybe we can get in a few minutes…

 Hi there everyone, whoever’s on, we’re still adding other people to the chat, and it’ll take just a moment here.

 Hello Jessica and the Chattanooga folks.

Jessica: Hey Scott.

Scott: Hey. Just hang tight for a second; we’re still adding people to the chat.

Jessica: Okay

Scott: Okay great. I think everyone that, besides Kathryn, who wanted to be on the call, is on now. Maybe since there are not that many people on just yet maybe we’ll wait.

Stephen: I hear a ringing sound, I don’t know.

Scott: Do you?

Stephen: That’s Kathryn Carl ringing.

Kathryn: Hi hello.

Scott: Hello Kathryn.

Kathryn: Hey how are you doing?

Scott: Excellent.

Kathryn: Great, okay I’m on, I’ll mute now too.

Scott: Okay super. So today we’re happy to welcome Stephen Wright and some of his cohorts.

Stephen: I’m not sure if my cohorts are here yet but they perhaps will join as we move along.

[0:05:00]

Scott: Great. And we’re going to be talking about A School of Decreative Methodologies. I’m pronouncing that right, right?

Stephen: Pretty much, I guess that’s how it’s pronounced.

Scott: Okay. Today, as another example of a Plausible Artworlds, one of many Plausible Artworlds that we’ll be highlighting this year during these weekly chats I just wanted to let everybody know ahead of time in case you get any terrible audio, please let us know or just let me know in the text chat or just flag me down one way or another because our audio setup is sub par this week. It’s been really great the past weeks, I think anyway, and this is not so great. So please just let me know and we’ll see what we can do about it if that happens.

 Anyway, to get past the technical, welcome Stephen and I’m personally really looking forward to talking with you about this group.

Stephen: Okay. It’s being talked about tonight under the name A School of Decreative Methodologies, it’s not really the name of the organization it’s just sort of what it is, it’s a school of decreative methodologies. The name is still up in the air, it’s still being debated. It’s actually being debated whether it will have a name or whether it will have a sort of a random name generator or whether it won’t have a name at all. Its being in the world hasn’t been anchored yet to a specific name but it is definitely a school of decreative methodologies. Can you guys hear me okay, am I…?

Scott: Yeah we can hear you pretty well here even though we have very tiny speakers this week, the built-in ones on this laptop, but we can hear you just fine.

Stephen: Okay. When I presented the—when I thought of a couple of sentences to sort of contextualize this school of decreative methodologies I thought the best way to go about it was to quote the charter. Because when the group of us came together in late 2008 to think about creating a sort of alternative knowledge construction project or knowledge decreation project we were actually—the link was that we were all in one way or another linked to the Paris Biennale. The Paris Biennale which is of course a biennale that came from the biennale started by Andre Malraux in the 1950’s, but which went intellectually, artistically and financially bankrupt in the ‘80s and then was reinvigorated at the beginning of this millennium, in 2004, 2006 and 2008 had its 13th, 14th and 15th additions.

[0:10:00]

Stephen: But it’s a biennale without an exhibition, without artwork, without authorship and without spectatorship and that was kind of the common bond which we had to try and imagine what we at that time called an extension of the biennale. The biennale has different extensions and the knowledge production school was to be one of them. But we have subsequently—ah here’s one of my colleagues now; Eric Laturno.

 We subsequently took our distance from the biennale and asserted the autonomy of this school of decreative methodologies but when we were establishing what it is we wanted to do we decided that rather than writing a manifesto we would write a founding charter. A sort of fundamental expression of what we wanted to do and we wanted to make it as tight, as precise but also as concise as possible. So I thought maybe one of the best ways to sort of talk about what it is we do and why would be simply to do a sort of a gloss informally on that rather precisely worded structure.

 Scott can you add Eric Laturno because I hope he’s calling because I can’t…

Scott: Yes we just added him to the chat and we’ll call him in just a sec.

Stephen: Okay great, thanks.

 So I don’t know if everyone has the charter…

[0:15:00]

Stephen: Mabel has also just pointed out that she is also a colleague and she’s also connected. So anytime, Eric if you’re there and Mabel, if anytime you guys want to jump in and correct me and contradict what I’ve just said please feel free to do exactly that.

Eric: Can you hear me?

Stephen: Yeah I hear you Eric. How are you doing? You can hear me?

Eric: I can hear you.

Stephen: Yeah we’re only using audio, there’s no video. If that’s okay I’ll just continue looking at this, what we call our founding charter.

Scott: There’s a charter…sorry the audio is a little bit feedbacky and I think Eric may need to mute temporarily.

Stephen: Okay. Do you want me to tell him that?

Scott: Yeah I’m trying to…but anyway I don’t want to keep going with that but it would be great Eric if you could get a sense of—you may not know where the mute button is, but in the lower left hand—actually maybe you did already. No? In the lower left-hand panel of your call window there are 2 buttons, the left-most button is the pause button and the one just to the right of that is the mute button. It looks like a little microphone with a circle and slash through it. Anyway, hope that helps.

 Here’s is the link to I think the charter. Is this right Stephen, is that the most updated version, the sort of numbers 1 through 5?

Stephen: Yeah it’s the one that’s on the Basecamp website basically.

Scott: I can paste it in as well.

Stephen: Yeah let me do that that will be easier. Let me just grab that.

Eric: Are we communicating with Mabel too or are we alone?

Stephen: Who is where?

Eric: Like Stephen is in Paris and…?

Stephen: No I’m in Vancouver actually.

Eric: You’re in Vancouver and the class is in the US right?

Stephen: Yeah there’s no class exactly. Well there is a class, there’s a class in Tennessee but we’re kind of all over the world.

Eric: We’re in Tennessee, Vancouver and Madrid now. I am in Madrid.

Stephen: Okay. And Mabel is in Paris, she’s our Paris anchor here.

Eric: Who is in Paris?

Stephen: Okay so…

Scott: So I guess we should probably continue and just try to step past some of the technical stuff. But yeah Magda and David are also in the UK and I think—I’m not sure where Kathryn—oh okay.

Stephen: What I just did now was I posted the charter to everyone on the chat. So maybe I should—if that’s okay I think I’ll just comment on that and then…

Scott: Yeah Stephen I’d really be appreciative of that. I’m actually really interested in that charter. I kind of want to ask how it came about and that process but I think maybe the best thing first would be to just talk about each of these five points a little bit.

Stephen: Okay let’s do that. So basically it originally had the name, which was very stable, which was the Paris Biennale College and I think we’re very—the subtitle was A School of Decreative Methodologies.

[0:20:00]

Stephen: This is why I’m presenting it as a school of decreative methodologies because that remains constant and I’ll come back to that notion of the decreative because it’s one of the three, in my opinion, key components of the initiative. The preamble is one sentence and it reads “As this, a collegial moment without students, without teachers, without walls, without curricula in rupture with all notions that institute art and how it is taught. The initiative of company’s forms of usership disposes to sundering art from itself.” So in those two sentences I think we underscore as radically and as economically as possible the notion that we are a school which does not exist in space but exists in time which is why we emphasis this notion of a collegial moment. Because you might say a moment is like a situation except a situation tends to be linked to a sight and we wanted very clearly to separate the initiative which we had in mind from any sight, hence the notion of without walls. So it’s a school without a school house and without any anchored site of any kind. It’s a moment so it’s something which—it’s a school in time, it exists in time but the type of time we have in mind is an immeasurable amount of time, a moment. Because a moment is at once indivisible and infinitely divisible so it can be—it’s elasticity allows it to take any sort of dimension whatsoever. But the type of dimension which we’re particularly interested in is the collegial dimension. So it’s a moment which exists collegially, so in the profound sense of the college. There’s a question that I ask, is it similar to Neue Slowenische Kunst State in Time? In a sense it’s not unlinked to that because NSK was trying to create a state that wasn’t linked to territory and certainly were trying to create a school which was not linked to a territory. But we’re particularly interested in it being—it’s not so much that it’s in time because we could have said a school in time, but it’s an immeasurable kind of time, measurable only through its collegiality. In other words the fact that it’s—collegial I think is stronger, it goes beyond the notion of collaboration or of collectivity, and it’s a particular form of collaboration. And this kind of collaboration is linked specifically to what we emphasis a great deal as being based on usership.

[0:25:00]

Stephen: Because we felt that art in its 20th century variant was very largely bound up with the meda institution of spectatorship and beyond that with a form of expert culture and we wanted to break both with the regime of spectatorship and the regime of expertise. So we sort of took advantage of the emergence of a new form of political subjectivity which seems to have emerged powerfully in the last 15 years which is that of usership, which is something very much associated with the rise of the web, but not exclusively because it’s also linked to just a form of knowledge and knowledge production based on a form of use value. In other words not a kind of knowledge which is projected from without but a type of knowledge which is generated from within.

 David says there’s no more audio.

Scott: The audio is here I think David actually has been dropped. It seems to happen with his connection for some reason. I’ll add him again. But real quickly I wanted to also—I have a pretty good sense of a lot of your ideas on usership Stephen, I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind—I think I’m curious about this idea of collegiality. I don’t think I really fully understand what you mean yet by it.

Stephen: That’s for sure something which my colleagues would have something to comment on as well but I think it certainly is linked to the concept of usership because we wanted to get—as we point out in Article 4 of the charter this school is based on usership alone. So impugning as we say, binary opposition between teachers and students and experts and non-experts. So the type of collegiality which we have in mind is not one which is based on a cohort of specialists transmitting knowledge in a linear fashion to a group of people who don’t know yet. In fact the reason we have this charter in the first place is that anybody can take up, providing that they endorse all the points which are laid out in this very short charter, they could be considered to be colleagues within this collegial moment and are free to activate it no matter where they are in the world with no matter who. It’s a school which is—I mean there is a core group of colleagues if you like in Paris, but there is also colleagues all over the place and the idea is that these decreative methodologies, the decreative is also another thing I need to come back to, can be sort of performed or triggered, unleashed is probably a better word, basically anywhere.

[0:30:14]

Stephen: Yes, what it is. For sure that’s of course the crux of it. Well one thing—I think when we started we were wondering what we could do with art. We were wondering if it was good for something, if there was something that—if there was something specific and exclusive to it that we could use to decreate or to construct knowledge. And the college is actually made up of a series of collegial moments. So we say that the college itself is a collegial moment but in fact we have a list of collegial moments, we sometimes call them satellites because they function independently from the college itself, but in fact we think of them more as collegial moments. I can give you a list of them or let me just see here, let me just post some of them up. Mabel and Eric; maybe you want to comment while I’m looking for the list of collegial moments do you want to talk about them?

Eric: Are you talking to me?

Stephen: Yeah go ahead Eric.

Eric: Okay what was your question?

Stephen: Well for example you could talk about your collegial moment, the one that you’ve proposed and the one that you did.

Eric: Yeah well I think all the ideas that you are mentioning are so fascinating especially because we are still working on ‘how can we apply them?’ So I think working on that project which is on the, what we call in Canada an, Indian Reserve, Canadian Indian or we call it a reservation in Canada or any other communities where there is a high rate of criminality. But first nation reservation, this characteristic where the criminality rate is really high, I think 1/3, even sometimes more, 1/3 of the population in prison Canada is Canadian Indian. So on the reservation the crime rate is quite high.

[0:35:00]

Eric: So I started to work with the Museum [indiscernible] [0:35:09] which is a museum devoted to Indian art and contemporary Indian art which is in the community of [indiscernible] [0:35:24] in [indiscernible] [0:35:26], the community [indiscernible] [0:35:31]. On this collegial moment where—because I already started to the process where I worked with the healer of the village; the healer worked at a prison, this healer worked with the local police forces, the police officer is the singer for the healing ritual; so I’ve been involved with these people I started seeing about 6 months ago or a year ago. So I started to develop a collegial moment where I want to explore with the participants what specific skills and abilities are being developed by them by living within such a community where the crime rate is so high. So in other terms is the presence of high criminality in the community would be able to create for participants or for people in general live in this community some special skills that they can use. So I think the people who live in the community is I think the people have been some criminals. So the collegial moment is basically to try with the museum to make a meeting and share the specific consequences that they’ve developing in the community. So the collegial moment hasn’t happened yet, I’m still working on it. From the point where we will be able to understand these abilities, what they are. We want to use these abilities to create something different from what they use to be. So these abilities are considered as a kind of symbolic capital or symbolic force and it’s also a practical power that can be used in many ways within the community or by each individual. The idea is still abstract but that’s basically the idea of my collegial moment. I don’t know if you hear me though.

Stephen: Yeah we hear you perfectly. There’s a question Eric and that is “the collegial moment you were talking about, is that part of a project that people can find out more about or is it something which exists within the context of the college?” I’ll let you answer that.

Eric: Well it can exist in other context on the reserve, I’ve been working with them so I decided to do that there because I’m interested in the issue, but this can be done in prison.

[0:39:50]

Eric: The problem in doing this process in a prison for example would be that first you have to be approved by the directors of the prison and then the directors of the prison will want that to become a kind of [indiscernible] [0:40:20] thing for the prisoners, for the criminals as a rehabilitation thing which is not the point of my process, it’s not about rehabilitation from the offender into the society, it’s more about exploring what crime can create a creative process within the community or the individual. So yes the moment can be moved in different context, but according to the context the issues are different and it’s really easy to be manipulated or we call this in French être instrumentalisé, to be instrumentalized. So that’s the danger I think of my collegial moment, it’s also danger probably for others civilzied, when you shift them to another complex there’s always new issues appearing. These issues would be like you’ve been manipulated by institutions in power.

Stephen : Exactly.

Eric : Viola

Stephen : Okay. To continue, there are currently I think about a dozen collegial moments which are on offer, which are under discussion, which are activated. From time to time not all of them have been translated into English but I could make some of them—I could put some of them up here. Some of them are in English, here’s one just proposed by our friend Bob the Builder. Bob’s not with us tonight but we will actually be talking with him subsequently in Plausible Artworlds in a few weeks.

Scott : I’m sorry, Stephen, is he part of—in addition to context of au trovail is Bob part of the... ?

Stephen : Yeah Bob is also a founding user of the—because he was also part of that group that descented from the I guess Paris Biennale so he is one of the founding users along with Eric and I and Mabble and I don’t know if any of our other colleagues are with us right now. So basically Bob has proposed a collegial moment which is extremely open-ended.

[0:45:07]

Stephen: Which in fact doesn’t involve necessarily any kind of formalized pedagogy, which is to use ones place of work as a place of artistic residency, production and exhibition. Eric you have a question there, while I dig up another collegial moment maybe you want to look at that. Eric?

Eric: Yeah?

Stephen: Did you see that question? Do you have an idea?

Eric: I don’t see the thing…

Stephen: So the question is “Do you have an idea of those new ends to which to apply those new ways?” Or actually “Do you imagine the ways in which that might go?” Actually Magdalena it might be easier if you ask that question to Eric.

Eric: Yeah I think I’m still working on that so I don’t exactly know what will happen because it really belongs to the participant and I am not coming myself from a community where the criminality is really high. The reason I’ve been thinking of this is because one of my projects, an older project, I decided to do a PhD in criminology. So from that point I started to study crime and I started to be fascinated first by how the criminal can be so creative and so their methodology sometimes can be cool, some methodologies you can find in art in some way. I say that [indiscernible] [0:48:07] with the reserves but you know it’s controlled. But then I was thinking of visiting the Indian reserve that people have a certain way of behaving, they’re what we call in general [speaking French] and all these tools that are developed by people to protect themselves, to try to predict crime and stuff like that; how can these tools be used in other ways. So it really depends on who will be in the process or in the “workshops”. If they’re a member of the community that is closer to the cops that switches abilities; if the member of the community who is in the “workshop” is more like people that have different kinds of jobs and they’re not specializing, it will be completely different. So I think with each group the dynamic and the issues that will be raised will probably be different and I can not really answer because probably in one year when I will do this process I will have more answers.

[0:50:00]

Eric: And I try not to imagine anything to keep myself open to what will happen with the people, to not suggest or induce anything in the process but let the process by itself reveal the true essence of what will be important to this community. Viola

Stephen: Excellent. So in the meanwhile Eric I’ve been busily pasting up the short descriptions of some of the other collegial moments, to give a sense of the rather extreme heterogeneity of what could be understood by a collegial moment. Some of them are much more traditional in terms of the format; the one I proposed in terms of examining and flushing out a new terminology for artistic production in this century. The one I just put up just a moment ago and perhaps the one that’s been most active so far was proposed by Jean Baptiste [indiscernible] [0:52:10] which has to do with downsizing, downsizing not just within industry and elsewhere but downsizing in art itself. Mabel has just pointed out, yes it was a question a moment ago; the Paris Biennale College website no longer exists because the Paris Biennale College no longer exists and there will soon be a new website which reflects this new as yet unnamed entity but it’s not yet online but soon will be. Let me grab another one here. Just to give a certain, not overlook but a certain sense of a collegial moment proposed by Gina Badger on the ecological erotic’s of learning; so a certain number of collegial moments that focus on learning itself as a form of creative endeavor. In doing all that kind of what I wanted to suggest is that of course a school of decreative methodologies emerges within a context of what has been called the educational—the pedagogical turn and it’s clear that there’s a general crisis in terms of transmission and production of knowledge around art related practices and certainly we’re part of the general movement.

[0:55:00]

Stephen: But I also kind of wanted to emphasis that the objectives of our structure are linked to art practices whose finality is not art and I think that is something which we inherited from the Biennale and it’s something which we try to express in a word like decreative. The decreative is obviously…Hello?

Scott: Yeah I think we may need to have some of them turn down their volume. Eric if you can hear me if you could mute your audio when you’re not speaking that would helpful. Thanks!

Stephen: Okay. Yeah this word I talked a little bit about usership and certainly Eric’s example really shows how broad that understanding can be but the notion of the decreative on the one hand is a kind of refusal to be assimilated into that creative class, these creative types who have more or less infested our life world so it’s a refusal of that but at the same time it’s an attempt to go beyond that. The decreative is not the destructive so that’s the idea that something can both be art and something else at the same time. It can be what it is an a proposition of the same thing is basically, to put it really quickly, is one of the specificities of the stuff that we took from the Paris Biennale and the stuff that we’re working on now.

Eric: Stephen can I ask you a question?

Stephen: Yeah

Eric: When you talk about the decreativity is this about questioning the conditioning of the creative process or is it more about deconstructing the creative process, which I still think that can go together but can you maybe comment about that a little?

Stephen: Sorry Eric the two options were the deconstruction and?

Eric: Yeah the deconstruction of the creative process and/or about the conditioning of how we’re use to creating or what we think is creating.

Stephen: I think it’s absolutely both.

[1:00:00]

Stephen: As you know Eric, one of the things that I think is most urgent for us to do is to organize a symposium around the notion of the de-, of D-E-dash. I think it’s one of the major questions that has not actually been raised. We’re interested in deconstruction more than rather construction but it’s not the opposite of construction it’s the other construction and when you talk about des amon it’s not the opposite of amon but it’s the other of it. It’s the same emotion with the decreative; basically we don’t want to, to use Jean Baptiste’s example, we don’t want to add something more to the already existent. We want to take things away but we want that taking away also be a not purely negative experience but an enriching one. Enrichment through a subtraction if you like. Does that make sense Eric?

Eric: Yep

Stephen: Tell me who you think of it, I don’t know.

Eric: I think it’s—I like the idea but I’m still trying to find a way to do it because in the system we I think one of the starting points of this idea was to really try to free art from how it’s language is conditioned by the market…

Stephen: Absolutely

Eric: And the sentiment value but now we try to step further by not adding cultural value object or project but it’s very hard to do in a certain way. It’s kind of utopia because even though we create art that is absolutely without object, without anything that is marketable as you mentioned there’s still the symbolic value of the experience that’s there to sell. I not against or for that, but it’s just there, it just exists. So how can we subtract if we create situation and experiences? Kind of hard for you to solve that issue.

Stephen: For sure it’s kind of like squaring the circle but that’s why—I just think it’s part of the reason why we’ve had a hard time picking a name in a certain respect.  Because of course we don’t want to find a creative name, we have to find an absolutely decreative name or no name at all.

Eric: Yeah

Stephen: Because otherwise it will end up—and even a non name could end being a name so it’s not about splitting hairs into four and then into eight it’s about imagining how to do things by undoing them.

[1:05:00]

Stephen: Did I comment enough on the Charter or do we need to look at some other specific aspects of it? I think the Charter really—I insist on that, it really does define the specificity and the heterogeneity of our undertaking. Scott am I…?

Scott: We are with you; I actually completely agree that you guys need to find an extraordinarily boring name.

Stephen: Well it has to be one which we didn’t even really find in a certain sense, it has to be a ready-made name. Because a ready-made is an excellent example of the decreative.

Scott: So what’s wrong with The School of Decreative Methodology, I mean it’s sufficiently generic isn’t it?

Stephen: Well we have some other good ones too but some of them are too creative, this is the problem. I’ll tell you one of the reasons that some of our colleagues are not comfortable with the notion of decreative methodologies is they’re not comfortable particularly with the notion of the decreative. They feel that it may have a nasty side to it which is unpleasant but it may be excessively determining us into a particular direction which hasn’t been flushed out yet which is why I just said to Eric that I feel that one of the things that we need to do most urgently is to raise the question as a collegial moment, “What is the decreative?” I mean there was talk of calling it and I think it was even posted on the Plausible Artworlds site for a moment that it was going to be The Usual College and that gained a fair amount of support. These kinds of antic dotes actually tell sort of the story about how we function. It was favored by some because the notion of the collegial was present in the title and that’s something which I think we all are very sensitive to and because the notion of the usual. So it made it at once sort of ordinary and oriented toward use and of course use value is one of the things that we’re most attentive to in terms of the types of practices we’re looking at. But then others felt that this was once again pushing it too much in one direction and not enough in another so then it became The Usual College of the Academy of Decreative Methodologies and then that became the notion of academy became very off-putting for some because even if it was used ironically it was pushing it, but anyways. I won’t go through the whole thing but we do need something extraordinarily boring and extraordinarily open.

Scott: David Goldenberg has a…

[1:10:00]

Scott: Sorry I’m just looking at some of these comments, they’re really good. Before you address them I’m curious who the ‘you’ is. I realize that there are users and I know that you’ve mentioned some of them, do you guys work through a kind of consensus process or what’s your usership structure like, how are decisions made is I guess a more straightforward way of asking this. So even the decision about the name, you brought up various points mentioned but I guess I’m just kind of curious does everyone need to go through a process where there are…

Stephen: I think I lost audio there.

Scott: Oh, hello can you hear me okay?

Stephen: I can’t hear anything anymore.

Scott: Uh oh

Stephen: Scott, you still there?

Scott: Yeah I’m here.

Stephen: Okay.

Scott: Yeah I’m here Stephen; can you hear us now, better?

Stephen: Yeah I can hear fine now.

Scott: Okay great. Do you want me to ask that again real quickly or did you catch the gist?

Stephen: Well it’s based on consensus. If there’s one thing that the college or the school is not based on its consensus. It’s absolutely based on discensus. At first it appeared to be a sort of frustrating sort of stumbling block for us but as it turns out it’s kind of what preserves us from I don’t know one-way thinking. So there’s an incredible amount of discensus and the one thing which we agree on is that Charter which was the fruit of many months of hard and very dissensual labor to get it hammered out. But basically what it’s worked as now is that everyone is autonomous within the collegial structure to manage and carry out their collegial moments as they see fit but I think the practice is everyone has a veto power about the name that we will have or not have and so far that has left us very open-ended which of course will be a challenge when we get the website finished because it will actually have to have a name. So we are working on that but it’s not the only thing and it’s probably not the most interesting. It probably takes a lot of our energy but it’s not the most interesting thing which we do. So I would say yeah the decision making structure is collegial.

Scott: So actually Anthony just made a similar comment to I think what you just said, I don’t know if you saw that or basically he’s saying it seems like the naming is in his opinion the least important of the tasks.

Stephen: Yeah it’s the least important for sure.

Scott: But interesting, especially to people who are interested in language, who are deeply suspicious of language.

[1:15:00]

Stephen:  I don’t know if you guys can hear me because I hear only pings.

Scott: We hear you. I hear you there’s just Kung-Fu above our heads so I’m muting whenever not necessary that I speak.

Stephen: Randall, are you there now?

Randall: Yes

Stephen: Okay I wanted to wait until you were back before trying to answer your question. The link between decreation and slacking. Sorry?

 Okay the sound is kind of weird so I’m not sure if anyone…

Scott: Is the sound really terrible on your end Stephen because it’s fine on ours?

Stephen: Okay I can continue it’s just that I hear sounds but they’re not articulated language sounds so I was kind of wondering but I can continue. I wanted to address, if I can, Randall Shot’s comment about the relationship between the decreative and slacking. Yeah of course there’s a link particularly, I mean in a certain understanding of slacking and I think to a large degree that’s where the notion or the inspiration for the notion of the decreative came from. Because I think we see that there’s a clear link between productivism and creativity, in our era of the so-called creative capitalism.

[1:20:00]

Stephen: So we wanted to think how less was more in a certain respected terms of—I think we felt that basically education is premised also on a productivist model and that we needed to rethink the roads to—which is why we talked about knowledge decreation rather than knowledge production for example. We may also use the notion of knowledge production just because we don’t…

Scott: Oh man, well our signal is great. You have got to be kidding me.

Lisa: Hello?

Scott: Oh hi there. Hello we’re still trying to reach everyone so the few people who’ve connected so far just hang tight. Geez…

Stephen: Hello?

Scott: Hey Stephen. And we’re back. I’m just going to start adding people to the conference. Can you hear us okay, I hope?

Stephen: Yeah hey Scott.

Scott: Okay great, super. Alright just adding everyone back now. For real?

 Hey Lisa; are you there? I’m going to have to try calling you back, actually I’ll—maybe we’ll stay here. Okay you’re here so let’s keep the call on and I’ll try adding Stephen again and everyone else.

[1:25:00]

Scott: Hey Stephen; are you there?

Stephen: Yeah, hey.

Scott: Okay well if you can hear us we heard you for a second there can you try saying something again and see?

Stephen: Okay?

Scott: Okay great so you’re on, let me try continuing to add, maybe it’s just our Skype icon; it went nuts for a second.

 By the way Stephen; where is King right now, is he…?

 Hi there Stephen; are you there? We’re going to try this one more time; if we get disconnected from you again we’ll just go to text only.

[1:28:17] End of Audio