Learning to Work Together
As a short-and-sweet way to begin examining and developing methodologies for working together, this session will consist of an extradisciplinary surveying exercise. The guiding questions for this exploratory session will be “how do we sense time in relation to site?” and “how can we record and translate our observations in order to make sense of where we are, how we got here, and where we are going?” In the process, we will try on the term extradisciplinary, as proposed by Brian Holmes, as a way to describe our collective surveying method.
We will split into five smaller groups, each based on one of the five senses (sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste). Each group will set its variously disciplined observational skills on a particular object/site along a pre-determined route. A custom-assembled toolkit will be provided to each group for purposes of observing, translating, and recording. Our survey area will be idiosyncratically determined in advance, based on the inclusion of objects/sites that are suited to each sense-based toolkit.
The goals of the exercise - besides simply getting a better feel for where we are - will be to develop our capacities to experience sites as historical processes, to become more familiar with each others’ ways of observing and learning, and to collect material and observations that could be useful for further study and work.