Took a break from New School history to participate in a "futuring" workshop run by our cutting-edge MFA program in Transdisciplinary Design offering tools for imagining
100 Year Visions at The New School. I may have been the only liberal arts person there but, at least in the group I was assigned to, what people hoped the New School would represent in 2119 sounded like a return to liberal arts. Less speed, less consumption, less careerism, less computerization, more of the human, of the analog, of life, of philosophy. Not quite today's humanities, though! There was a space where, by touching fuzzy objects, humans might develop "empathy" for AI, which would presumably be feeling most put upon by then... and a course taught by a sea turtle, the ideal instructor for human lives at a time when more of our lives will, presumably, have to take place at
sea... and a constructed environment where students might get "stuck," forced to slow down and engage each other. My group imagined a project where students designed instruments to exchange vibrations with other forms of life - dolphins, trees, slime molds. Not bad for two hours spent with random strangers! And yet the Transdisciplinary Design students I spoke to complained New School wasn't "radical" enough!
Took a break from New School history to participate in a "futuring" workshop run by our cutting-edge MFA program in Transdisciplinary Design offering tools for imagining 100 Year Visions at The New School. I may have been the only liberal arts person there but, at least in the group I was assigned to, what people hoped the New School would represent in 2119 sounded like a return to liberal arts. Less speed, less consumption, less careerism, less computerization, more of the human, of the analog, of life, of philosophy. Not quite today's humanities, though! There was a space where, by touching fuzzy objects, humans might develop "empathy" for AI, which would presumably be feeling most put upon by then... and a course taught by a sea turtle, the ideal instructor for human lives at a time when more of our lives will, presumably, have to take place at
sea... and a constructed environment where students might get "stuck," forced to slow down and engage each other. My group imagined a project where students designed instruments to exchange vibrations with other forms of life - dolphins, trees, slime molds. Not bad for two hours spent with random strangers! And yet the Transdisciplinary Design students I spoke to complained New School wasn't "radical" enough!
