Satinder P. Gill
Centre for Knowledge and Innovation Research
Visiting Scholar, CSLI
"Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now that I have got the very substance I am at rest. For it is just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters."As an undergraduate specialising in Aesthetics, this quotation from Ch'ing Yuan in Danto's 'The Artworld' (in Dickie and Sclafani 1977) stuck in my mind. I thought about how we experience the world, and, how we express our experience and our self. The commitment to engage and the relation between the physical and the imagination, all make for an aesthetic emotion. The body and the imagination is embodied in the words uttered. The tacit and the explicit are part of each other. Many years later, my work with landscape architects show how interaction of their bodies interplay in this dynamic of tacit and explicit to constitute the sharing of a judgment of an aesthetic view. Hence when one person points to a specific colour blue and says, "use this kind of shade" in context A, the other person understands what 'kind of shade' means.
I study knowledge as dialogue, and wish to understand how our bodies shape this. By considering rhythms in body motion in interactive settings, I'm investigating some basic level of the tacit. I see two fundamental rhythms, one sequential and one parallel. The former maintains our communication and moves it along; the latter allows for new possibilities of knowledge, and for an awareness of difficulties and possible solutions to difficulties in the communication. I will speak upon these rhythms, drawing upon case studies.
Further, and importantly, we will go over some key issues brought up during the previous seminars by the speakers and in the discussions in order to find out what ground we have covered so far and to consider ideas for further seminars.