Wendell Berry Recollected Essays 1965-1980. p.34. North Point Press, San Francisco, 1981.

And, as I think of it now, school itself was a distraction. Although I have become, among other things, a teacher, I am skeptical of education. It seems to me a most doubtful process, and I think the good of it is taken too much for granted. It is a matter that is overtheorized and overvalued and always approached with too much confidence. It is, as we skeptics are always discovering to our delight, no substitute for experience or life or virtue or devotion. As it is handed out by the schools, it is only theoretically useful, like a randomly mixed handful of seeds carried in one's pocket. When one carries them back to one's own place in the world and plants them, some will prove unfit for the climate or the ground, some are sterile, some are not seeds at all but little clods and bits of gravel. Suprisingly few of them come to anything. There is an incredible waste and clumsiness in most efforts to prepare the young. For me, as a student and as a teacher, there has always been a pressing anxiety between the classroom and the world: how can you get from one to the other except by a blind jump? School is not so pleasant or valuable an experience as it is made out to be in the theorizing and reminiscing of elders. In a sense, it is not an experience at all, but a hiatus in experience.

Joseph Weizenbaum "Once More: The Computer Revolution". p.445. From: The Information Age. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979.

The use of large-scale computer-based information systems induces an epistemology within which reigns an extremely poverty-stricken notion of what constitues knowledge and what is to count as fact. Unfortunately, this same notion — a kind of pragmatic positivism bordering on scientism — dominates much of the thinking of modern intellectuals and political leaders. It has also, in my view, profoundly infected the thought of ordinary people. It has no necessary relationship to the computer; it existed, after all, long before there were computers. But the computer is its starkest symbolic manifestation. It is the instrument that, more than any other force, reifies it.

Screening of Why We Fight (2005)
A Film By Eugene Jarecki
About the anatomy of the American war machine, combining personal stories with commentary by military and political insiders.
98 minutes

Carl von Clausewitz
[War is the] continuation of politics [Politik] by other means.

Victor Margolin, "The Struggle for Utopia," University of Chicago Press (1997)

The triumvirate of artist, scientist and industrialist becomes the model for collaborative social action. The artist's role is to envision the future of society and lead, as part of the avant-garde.

Art is not separate, not isolated to the interior artistic vision, but is linked to the real world and to the social life. The artist exploration of inner meaning has new potency when externalized as social action.

The role of the artist thus becomes a participant of the social and political life, a significant player.

The utopian proposal as articulated by the artist functions as a model for new ways of seeing and new social and political structures.

Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media," MIT Press, Boston, MA (1964)

The artist is a barometer of the social condition. In regards to technology, the artist provides "immunity" from the impact of technology by nature of his sensitivity to the social transformations brought about by the changing media.

The artist perceives himself as a significant player, not locked up in the studio or the academy. The artist, perhaps more than anyone, grasps the implication of his own time, through the analysis and critique inherent in the artistic process.

How does the artist enter into the mainstream of social activity? By inventing new forms which place him in the dialogue, raise the appropriate questions, and further stimulate the dialogue.

Stewart Home, "The Assault on Culture," AK Press, Stirling, England (1991)

The integration of art and politics (and art and life) has tended towards the utopian, by nature of its yearning for extreme modification   of existing conditions. This form also has a tendency towards the totalization of art, the blurring of boundaries of genre and media, tending towards the theatrical and the transformative. This form often takes shape as the gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork).

Utopianism is thus a striving for the unattainable, the creation of impossible models to which mankind aspires in its idealism.

NANOTECHNOLOGY could become the most influential force to take hold of the technology industry since the rise of the Internet. Nanotechnology could increase the speed of memory chips, remove pollution particles in water and air and find cancer cells quicker. Nanotechnology could prove beyond our control, and spell the end of our very existence as human beings. Nanotechnology could alleviate world hunger, clean the environment, cure cancer, guarantee biblical life spans or concoct super-weapons of untold horror. Nanotechnology could be the new asbestos. Nanotechnology could spur economic development through spin-offs of the research. Nanotechnology could harm the opportunities of the poor in developing countries. Nanotechnology could make the molecules in ice cream more uniform in size. Nanotechnology could enable a digital camera to work in the dark. Nano- technology could clean up toxic waste on the atomic level. Nanotechnology could change the world from the bottom up. Nanotechnology could become an instrument of terrorism. Nanotechnology could lead to the next industrial revolution. Nanotechnology could transform the food industry. Nanotechnology could repair the ozone layer. Nanotechnology could change everything. (Source: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001459/145951e.pdf)

Merchants of Cool
PBS Frontline documentary

An Inconvenient Truth (2006)
Documentary film directed by David Guggenheim

Screening of The Code (2001)
A film directed by Hannu Puttonen

Student teaching - Ricardo

Student teaching - Rita or Jaime?

The Society of the Spectacle
A Film By Guy Debord