As an ongoing experiment in digital documents, James P. Ascher took these notes during the October 8, 2015 Praxis class meeting. He used the org-mode of GNU Emacs. The file is available as the original org file: 2015-10-8-class-minutes.org.
Eric Rochester helped convert the org file into Markdown using Pandoc which is pasted below. The .org file includes more structure and metadata than the below, which we might learn how to convert too, on day.
#Meeting Notes
Present at the meeting
Scott, Lydia, Bremen, Ethan, Eric, Ammon, Purdom, Laura (Purdom’s sister), James, Gillete, Clair (not participating) began at 9:10 am
Check-in
P: Jekyll check-in, is everyone getting it?
Catch-up for Purdom who wasn’t here last week
Bremen: discusses overlap and conversations
Gillete: into Lydia’s Gogo plans
Lydia: we have broad areas of convergence, including ethics
James: some nonsense about “the carp in the stone”
Gillete: stressors, overlap between categories and Scott relates
Lydia: perhaps we should all form small groups to discuss articles with directed reading; Bremen, Purdom, Scott concur
G: interested in how do we distill information from the meeting? Who will post notes?
P: keep it loose and self-appoint when we do meet; keep slab staff in the loop; print tiara for everyone? suggests that she will post instructions?
S: says they’re there already
TODO P: will review and decide if something needs to be added
SCHEDULED: <2015-10-09 Fri>
S: explains how the image folders work, Ethan’s, Scott’s, or James’s post to put images
J asks about the plugins on github, S explains the nature of the plugins on the website (various ones supported by github, some are compiled locally)
Case studies
B: we were still hashing things out
J: posted a memo of his case study
S: reading more about time perception and people with terminal illnesses, “entering a world with no future”
Three conclusions: no future, no ability to plan, disjunction between planning with friends while healthy
many didn’t want information about the prognosis, but the sense of the lack of future remained
friends remained future oriented, so they felt outside of time, no idea how much longer they’ll last
Discussion
La: nurse for oncology, everything rings true to her experience
A: children function like this too, and “a sec” is very confusing to them because it’s not a second, but could be 20 minutes which feels longer for children
S: they only talked to people over 18 in the study; A: Alzheimer’s?
talking about caregivers, asking for help: felt like taking time from someone else, so if people gave time it felt more comfortable for the patient
S: asking about the gift and the philosophy of the gift; but the language seems to be one of the economics of affect
P: we’re future oriented, so being terminally ill crystallizes: time shifts from a vague possibility to something that IS
B: thinking about policing, parallel: time as trust; how people understand their obligations to others; connects to S in feeling out of time with others, with a chronic instability of life it becomes complicated and important for representation; can we understand how people are in time
S: compare people with term. ill with people in prison: “imprisoned by the illness” or “Locked in”; monasteries might connect to imprisoned people
P: when someone is ill in the hospital, there is so much alone time in a room
La: “literally an 8 year old and they are in a room smaller than this for 45 days” the kind only has a few visitors; being specific about the time on the clock because “she is aware of how precious those moments are” and wants to help make time pass faster for the kids; teenagers are more difficult because they need entertainment
S: is the order and structure the same?
La: various things can impact the day, one can hope to have it consistent, but may-or-may-not be
S: icon set set of small drawings for regular events throughout the day to be oriented, you can see the structure of the day; make an icon set for a normal person and look for repetitions, do the same for different types of illnesses; is it still repetition or pure chaos?
Er: tying in several comment: medieval- 2 groups occupied: younger nobility or minor English King who retired; different conceptions of time- same as nurses and teachers and different people; the icon set may also communicate between teachers and students; different groups occupying the same space
Ly: “Towards an Ecology of Time…” will post, broadly about music as a way to bind us into time;
rhythm is what binds us; categorizes sounds to give a rhythm;
Bachelor (?) philosopher: social cohesion is people able to think at the same time;
when something is out of time or out of tune; we enact agency by choosing how to cohabitate in time;
grandmother had cancer, but was not told because it was inoperable and she didn’t want to know; she knew something was wrong, but never knew;
there is a way that time is shortened or prolonged by awareness of illness
Discussion
G: aunt had pain and it turned out she had cancer; once it became clear her body couldn’t handle it, she went right into hospice
A: mother’s passing, she felt that she had way-extended her time already
P: understandings of time while others are dying around you connects to B’s topic of crisis time; really little when AIDS hit Jacksonville, many men died very quickly, not much effect on them as children, but mother has a different relationship to time
A: grandparents 80s and 90s, amazed at they are still alive and enjoying it in contrast to those who are waiting
G: All the King’s Men: time is a force that operates of its own accord- an active and literal force; A: a gravity?; G: yeah, pushing down on you
P: embodied time versus time as an external force
S: clocks are interesting because they are an external measure of time, but if you actually perceive it in a radically different way; technologies of objective time can be so affectively changed that they are no longer objective time keepers
G: what do drugs do to time? e.g. once on “dilotin” time went fast
P: on morphine, timed with the Price is Right: he wanted colors to meditate on?
La: some people feel like illness is an attack on their time because the kid is sick, others support; 10 year olds don’t have a concept of death; proactive families vs. embittered families: that week can feel very differently given the emotional aspect; some families are demanding, others wait patiently, but changes how time feels
B: resilience and response to a brain aneurysm; she responded well and it effected the progression of the illness; resilience seems to be a key term
J: some nonsense on note-taking; observes that it can show someone’s point of view in a profound way
Ly: horrified that someone will see notes after someone’s death; people will go through stuff after death, she’ll be bugged; she hides books with marginalia because she’s worried people will know how her brain works; other professors will share notes
P: mark of a person in time: notes in books; some people are good personal-archivists; Salman Rushdie’s computers, did a case study about his papers, became very intimate with how his brain worked; what he remembered and what he forgot about: revealed so much of his system of thought; the notes become a pace in time and reviewing the notes people die again
Et: notes persist way longer than the person does; anticipation is part of them; Kafka, he’s like not going to burn everything- nothing he can do; “the future is really public“
P: Immortality: Beethoven is trying to form his own, but in conflict with; oh wait it’s Goethe, but his love interest has a different interest; follows into the afterlife and Goethe picks a different representation
B: ethnography about Young People in Philadelphia running from the law On the Run; G: wants to talk about it with B; really controversial as to whether or not it’s true; all the ways that people destroy their archives to avoid the law; ways that people are forced to lie to loved ones to protect them; material stuff becomes really important in the way that relationships are maintained; “the future is very public“
Et: objects and how we consume things in his drawings–orals!–brought in Marx Capital specific technical definition of labor time: value of commodity produced by this labor time, as exchange values all commodities are “definite quantities of congealed labor time”
J: labor time congealed into ethics
Et: limits of thinking about commodities this way; a jar of peanut butter, so many hours of work; what are the limits of E’s labor
Ly: labor time buys stuff and labor time makes stuff, it’s hard to trace; capitalism in music, cost $0.99, what is the labor that went into this; a mass market system hides this; what are you buying?
G: thinking of people as commodities- how does labor go into that? enslavement? athletes? putting in labor time and getting so much less out of it; how does that work when its people? Or when people are being exploited?
B: efficiency experiments, time-motion studies; how workers relate
La: looking at wrongful death suits, younger people are viewed as more valuable commodity; families get more money in wrongful death for younger people
G: slavery in America, people were valued very highly as was their labor; the enslavers wouldn’t represent that to the person who was enslaved; if someone got injured
La: language of worth and value becomes conflicted in this occasion of slavery
P: difficult article on doctors who are physicians to enslaved peoples… posting if possible?; more likely for a blacksmith, but less likely for a child; grappling with worth vs. value
G: more concerned as we get closer to the civil war, they become more valuable
TODO Ly: will blog?: Lomax Archives online, recording in the 1920s of people around the world; recording African American men in prisons, songs available online for free; copyright owned by Lomax family, the slaves aren’t even named (prison laborers?); there’s another archive of the Lomax notes, of its time, but doesn’t get the creators of the songs; copyright is meant to privilege the author: systematic flaw; commodification of actual labor; J: ethical audits of archives; Ly: look at Lomax? fun to fiddle with, but might not be ethical- ethics of a database, commodity, enslavement, Marxist
G: congealed labor and experiences: going to a fair- ride a Ferris wheel, what goes on to make that happen? time to set the fair up? what were people paid before you arrived? what is the value relation
S: Hardt and Negri model in Empire movement from industrial to production of affect; their example is flight-attendants: you use the right smile and manners, that’s what you’re paid for; harnessing of your own emotional and physical being; carnival or the fair: what are the actual labor practices that go into it; Disney employees are docked for being glum
P: everyone in the park has to be a “imagineer” which is documented in a book, there exists an underground path of space out of time in Disney world; you don’t have to follow protocol
TODO G: article about Williamsburg, will find and post; B: who wrote it? was it a prof here?; G: Marlon Ross made me read it; P: would love to read it
P: lord mayor of the Renaissance fair, lord mayor toad, trying to connect with the kid; representation at the fair- how it’s strange; dino time
Ly: it’s like Futurama the 90s people look like 20s people
What are we working on this week?
Continuing on Inktober
Continuing to develop case studies
TODO All: seeking areas of convergence, start sketching out representations of time? super-compelling, what does time sound or act like?
DEADLINE: <2015-10-15 Thu>
TODO Purdom: will prepare Makespace activity for next week to help continue to think
DEADLINE: <2015-10-15 Thu>
TODO All: come in with something you will share with the group which you have also posted
DEADLINE: <2015-10-15 Thu>