Entered: 30 Nov, 2003  Modified: 30 Nov, 2003
Using Dissanayake's language and concepts to characterize what we have seen and experienced brings out these dimensions. When Compendium has 'worked' right, both participants and practitioners have experienced a heightened sense of specialness and signficance added to the elements of 'reality' to which the discussion and mapping ostensibly is done in reference to. For example, creating a business process model takes on heightened significance; it seems to matter more, to be more important, to do the modeling in that manner than a more quotidian or functional approach. Sometimes this has seemed due to the various kinds of 'magic' that the tools allow, being able to see a large number of things happen at once that could not happen with other forms (such as creating catalogs on the fly, bringing in complex templates rapidly that seem to allow the representation to grow 'organically').

Participants acknowledge that this specialness is added to 'reality' through the intent and deliberateness of the artist, and this seems to help the sense that the proceedings are in a different realm than the everyday.

Constructed with this degree of 'specialness' and invested with concentrated meaning and significance by the participants, the constellations of nodes, links, views, transclusions -- and more to the point, the actual use of these in the context of live sessions, where they are pointed at, talked about, moved around, argued over -- can become emotional and sensual, not just cognitive. They can seem to move along this spectrum -- sometimes purely 'cognitive' or rational, sometimes much more of a fluid focus of emotional meaning. The size, depth, and breadth of the representation as a whole can be the source of pride, can become a reflection and felt symbol of the community's engagement and progress. The Compendium representation can become the symbolic focus of the community's concerns.

[Note: It feels necessary to say, again, that what I am trying to write about here is what I have experienced at the 'peak' moments of Compendium practice; I am not argiubng that it is somehow always or inherently this way. Yet these moments have happened frequently, and deeply enough to count, for me, as phenomena worth closer investigation -- and certainly the ways in which Dissanayake characterizes art and people's interactions with it come closest among the literature I've reviewed so far to describing them.]

Dissanayake speaks of people's craving for an "intensified reality," often (unfortunately) experienced in violence -- that people throughout time have not been satisfied with simply mundane experience, they want the emotional (and physical) intensity of deeply immersive, even violent engagement, that such moments can even be thought of as providing the "truest sanity," beyond all pretense. I can't say that Compendium sessions have reached anywhere near this level of intensity (or violence), but the kind of immersive engagement that we have experienced at times at least points in this direction. At least, it feels important to acknowledge that this sort of embodied engagement can and does exist in analogous communal engagements with symbolic media (such as some rituals), and that Compendium sessions could exist somewhere on the continuum from rational, mundane "meetings" to something quite a bit more intense and engaged.

What people respond to in art is not an explictly stated meaning "said" by the artwork, but, at least in part, the hidden meaning behind the work's apparent structure. In some ways it is this property that makes art "work" -- that the meaning and the form it is embodied in does not completely resolve, that there doesn't need to be a one-to-one mapping between meaning and form. People seem to want or need this half- or partial saying that conceals deeper levels of meaning, that they can sense or resonate with without the levels being explicit. For Compendium, this speaks to the the idea that the representations can be symbols or shorthands for deeper levels of implicit meaning, they do not have to be "recordings" or "captures" of exactly what has been said to be effective on an artistic level. Dissanayake explains how what enables people to respond to these indirect, implicit meanings (which may or may have been intentionally "encoded" by the artist) is their awareness (through enculturation) of the "code" that provides the symbolic keys to understand, or resonate to, those meanings. We have seen this with Compendium, where people seem able to understand the purpose of a Compendium effort without having detailed knowledge of the specific tools and techniques being used. There is enough "code" in the culture(s) of the groups that have experienced Compendium that (if the practitioner does not get in their way too much) the representation and techniques can be effective and resonant without such explicit knowledge.

Dissanayake describes how music has a particular ability to provide the means to erase the boundary between self and others (artist and audience), to become part of a 'common consciousness'. I have often wondered if framing a Compendium practice as "knowledge music", might describe this phenomenon, which we have experienced at times; both practitioners and participants experience the manipulation of the formal elements in a synergistic and synaesthetic manner.

Although Compendium's node and link representation can be thought to unnaturally carve up the "stream" of conversation, we have experienced that they also allow for possibilities of complex multifaceted response to and involvement in what before just streamed by... leading itself to greater "profundity of expression."

Entered: 30 Nov, 2003  Modified: 30 Nov, 2003
"Discussion" as the frame seemed too narrow, rational, and limiting, and did not capture the elements of fun, exploration, sponteneity, let's-move-this-around that happened at the best moments. Even more, the taking on of roles not found in ordinary life -- I'm the explorer, let's pretend this representation *is* the problem domain...

And the elements of ritual that seemed to count: That we group our chairs in a particular way, that we pay regularized kinds of attention to the representation, that there is a person playing the role of the "priest" who orchestrates the activity and has a certain kind of authority (calling that role a "facilitator" always thins it out too much for my taste, though of course "priest is overstating...), that there is a taking-out-of-the-ordinary authority given to the event when it includes, that there is an numinous authority given to ordinary speech by the communal seeing of it captured, represented as a graphical node with a type and linked to others on a shared display...

Entered: 30 Nov, 2003  Modified: 30 Nov, 2003
A key theme of my work this fall has been attempting to fan the glowing ember of an idea that has floated through my Compendium work for the past five years or so: That there is a new medium, or a new use of a medium, trying to be born, and that in order to midwife this birth it is necessary to recast the setting and activities associated with Compendium sessions as I have thought about and practiced them to date. The dimensions of "art as a core human behavior" as it has been experienced and enacted through the ages provide some directions this could take:

- Emphasize the "personal and involved" oral communication dimension (in the context of an always-available "textual" analytic resource).

- Make the experience more explicitly about oral communication -- using the symbols to talk with, from, and about.

- Find ways to "embody" the events -- to make them physical, felt, not just "mentation", not just people sitting in chairs looking at a screen, talking at each other

- Think about to what extent Compendium could be part of some kind of "rite of passage"

- Mix in more "media" -- music particularly -- can it be made a direct part of the proceedings; narrative; movement

- Recognize and foreground the place of "poetic knowledge" -- that there do not have to be exact correspondences between the Compendium representation and some level of verbalizable, particularized reality

Entered: 30 Nov, 2003  Modified: 30 Nov, 2003
Rather it means seeking ways to create touchstone objects used in an exploratory and emotive coming-together of people in a context of shared purpose, that enables a "local" telling and understanding of stories that build toward further action and understanding, that can be revisited both for a reintegration into what's been built previously -- a re-embedding into a collection of dense local symbolism -- that helps to create and enhance a spirit of communal exploration of what has been meaningful and needs to become meaningful towards the sustenance of the community.