“Directing Energy: Gordon Matta- Clark’s Pursuit of Social Sculpture” by Cara M. Jordan

“Multimodality, multisensoriality and ethnographic knowing: social semiotics and the phenomenology of perception” by Sarah Pink

Mind blown: our use of determining and casting judgement on environments,objects and people  based on our five senses is a modern western construct!The use of five senses is not necessarily applicable in other cultures.  Due to the fact that the fives sense have been normalized in my life, it is so hard for to imagine a way of looking at the world without necessarily relying on the five senses. In my freedom dreams project, students were asked to answer, “What does freedom look like, smell like, feel like and sound like?” I wonder what other questions I can ask to children  to elicit another part of their imagination to express what freedom means for them beyond the five senses.

For my personal knowledge in keeping track of concepts I learned for reading, the part of the reading that was illuminating to me was: “ …affordances are not fixed in objects or events to be perceived uniformly. Rather they are determined through the nature of the ‘action’ in which the perceiver is currently engaged’ (Ingold, 2000: 166). Paul Priors’s (2005) critical essay offers a way to think about the differences between Ingold’s and Kress’s approach through the notion of ‘affordances’. Prior identities ‘… Kress’ treatment of “affor-dances” as highly determinative, mutually exclusive, and binary.’ By contrast, he points out that ‘Gibson’s (1979) basic notion of affordances was, in fact, intended to avoid turning objective properties of things into such hard categories’ and ‘stressed that affordances are relational, ecological, and tendential (not determinative)’ and recognized the ‘fuzziness of categories.’ (p. 267).

What I appreciated about the Gordon-Matta- Clark article is the recognition and, “belief that art could include the entire process of living-thoughts, actions, dialogue, and objects- and therefore could be enacted by a wide range of people who were not professional artists,” (p. 42; Jordan, 2017).  I think about my beautiful black and brown children and imagine a world that values their potential and possibilities. I imagine a time and place where  black and brown children are given the time, space, resources, but most importantly the inspiration to direct their energy toward bringing about positive changes in their daily lives through art. . My 7, 8 and 9 year old students are deeply aware and conscious of their social surroundings and the oppression that is physically manifested in their neighborhoods. How do we push our students beyond awareness? How do we push their awareness into to social action- in using art and creativity to give back to the community, reshape/rebuild their surroundings, attend to the needs of their own  community, and inspire the uninspired. Imagine the imagination of change of children of color, imagination of plans, structures, and art that would clash, mesh, blend, connect, disconnect, uphold, let go, inspire, and make the world a better place.

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