Yesterday a former colleague of mine, Dain Olsen, came by to help me get this site going, and we had a fascinating conversation about the diminished role of aesthetics in the conceptual underpinnings of western culture.  Dain is a media arts teacher and has agreed to write something for this site.  His thinking is dense and complex, but essentially, if I understand it, his argument is that ever since Plato, aesthetics – the processing of experience and knowledge through the senses rather than through pure reason – has been undervalued.  John Dewey addresses this in his writings, and Dain also recommended a book called The Meaning of the Body, by  Mark Thompson.  Re-visioning the role of aesthetics would require a radical re-thinking of our educational systems and would greatly increase the role of arts engagement.  Dain sees media arts as a potential catalyst for this needed transformation.

One connection I made as he explained this was a passage that Barbara Kingsolver wrote as an addendum to her novel The Lacuna.  She points out that in Mexican culture (and in many world cultures) the arts play a much more significant role, even in politics.

Dain is hoping to write a book but struggling to carve out the time in his life.  My hope is that this site will eventually be a place where people can post their exploratory thinking for feedback from others in the field.  We need to keep each other inspired.