Make Good Choices

Part II of our Ubiquitous Imaging seminar moves to focus on "The Accident" - Cabot Koppers Superfund in Alachua County Florida.  For almost 100 years, Cabot Koppers has been making pine tar - the same stuff used to coat Columbus' ships in his voyage to 'The New World' of spices and shiny silks (whoops, wrong turn).  Yet the process of making Pine Tar produces Creosote, a deadly poison that has been seeping into the soil and groundwater of Gainesville Florida.  Our desire of spices, a sensory experience, has inadvertently poisoned one of the most beautiful areas in the world - a place Coleridge called 'Xanadu.' 

While the first section of our course emphasized individual perspective, defining our approach, shifting perspective, capturing our Moments and defining our Einstellung - we now move to incorporate the community - moving from individual to collective, part to whole - and try to figure out how that happens!  How can we use our aesthetic 'sense-abilities' to connect to the community - to challenge the Accident and learn more about it?  How can we learn from Cabot Koppers and incorporate the community in recognizing our participation?  How can we use and define Prudence in our community?  What part do we all play?

When I was in college, I had a friend named Vivian.  Vivy was the most beautiful, graceful, sassy, Southern belle who actually got her hands dirty.  She could use the right fork at a delicate garden party and then go out to the woods and camp for days.  Her balance aways struck me as a bit miraculous.  Regardless of where you were going or what you were doing, when Vivy parted ways with you, she would always say "Make good choices!" with a bright smile and a wave.  Her way was not necessarily to judge, but to joke - be it somewhat instructional.  For a long while I adopted her farewell, albeit with a bit of sarcasm, and reminded myself, as well as others, to have a great time by 'making good choices.' Regardless of how the day or night went, there was an echo of perspective, of reverberation, and mostly of balance - knowing that we are constantly making choices and that those actions have affects and effects beyond my personal scope.


 

Vivian's words come back to me now as we attempt to refocus our ideas towards the community.  Our work in Part II emphasizes Wellbeing - Dr. Ulmer calls it 'Konsulting the Community" - looking to figure out how we as electrate scholars can use smart technologies, smart environments, and the smart people within them to 'make good choices' for the Environment and the People within in it.  The Konsult idea uses a heuretic to experiment with re-connecting and re-articulating ourselves in relation to the community, using 'aesthetic reasoning' to employ the senses in the cause of Wellbeing.  We want to understand how to use our aesthetic attitude - Einstellung - to konsult with Prudence/Limit - and 'make good choices' - to feel our capacity and possibility while understanding our impact and limit.  As we build a kind of aesthetic knowledge/reasoning we hope to reconnect the micro-causm to the macro-causm - to bridge the individual and the community while fostering an awareness of our own impact in the world of Wellbeing.

An investigation into awareness and balance...