The Imaginal Makers Salon 2009 updated Feb 2009
A six week on-line group for people who want to be in the virtual company of others who are making things in the Spirit of the Imagination. It emphasizes accident, coincidence, dreams and things lost and found.
Imaginal Researcher Daniel Mack is the host and organizer. www.danielmack.com
Salons are action-oriented. We are makers. We will be making one of two kinds of objects: Imaginal Trading Cards-- small (2 ½” x 3 ½”) collages and Imaginal Tools—found object assemblages which resemble common tools: handles, heads, purposes. Each has a different rhythm which reveals over the six weeks.
A key feature of The Imaginal Maker’s Salon is that we all are working from a similar body of shared materials. This allows us each to see and learn about the amazing variety of meaning within a collection of objects.
A few days before the actual salon begins, we circulate email introductions to each other and we all join the free www.fineartamerica.com as our visual exchange platform.
http://fineartamerica.com/groups/working-with-natural-materials.html
In the first week, we all collect materials to share with others. These materials are sent to the organizer who then assembles packages of shared materials for all in the Salon.
In the next five weeks: we work on the Cards or Tools, sharing thoughts, concerns, and uploading photos on-line at the Working with Natural Materials Group at fineartamerica.com
In response to the developing work, the Organizer comments on, shapes and re-shapes the themes of the collective work as expressed in a sets of cards or set of tools. The Organizer continues to provoke ongoing discussion and evolution of the work for the duration of the workshop.
Contact Dan for what courses are forming and when
Cost: $190 ... that’s $30/week + $10 postage for each workshop
More Information http://danielmack.com/oldsite/ATC.htm http://danielmack.com/oldsite/CreativeFitness.htm
Requirements: Ability to scan or photograph work and upload in moderate size jpegs
Join the free site www.fineartamerica.com
Collect and send materials to the Organizer
What we learned from the last Salon in January, 2007:
This is an Imaginal Environment and not a curriculum. People will react to it differently. People will work at different speeds and intensities and side projects and discussions between people will appear. Some people will just want to watch what’s happening; others may engage very actively. It all depends… see a record of that course at http://www.imaginalinstitute.com/imaginalcards.htm
We encountered the indirect nature of virtual community.Virtual community is built in spirals, twisting up and down, in and away. Nobody is standing still in front of you for very long. The geometry is not the line, the rectangle with its sides, not the circle. Ach, that spiral. The coffee keeps spilling!
Virtual community is built in real time, not linear time. If we all convened at a room for two hours a day for four weeks, that's one kind of community. That's a kind we've all grown up with. Clear requirements and obligations... and probably some shared rules on how to behave when we were there.
In virtual community, that's not the way. We are released from that slightly medical model of behaving... "Oh, sick Students, Come Here and I will diagnose and prescribe. You shall see yourself reflected in the sickness of others and ye shall get well. Just do what I tell you. 12 steps... homework, sponsors..."
Virtual community thrives on misbehavior, on pathology. (Have people really read all the course materials?) So virtual community honors the complexity of soul-time. where nothing is really a pathology and time is not measured
Virtual Community is viral. Beacuse the rules are altered, violated, things seep in and linger, not unlike Lyme disease. From my own on-line seminar experience in 2006, I had intense reaction to another person and it stayed with me in a way that I have found very supportive... but only a year later.
Again, it reflects a shift in expected time frame. Everything does not start and end in The Course. Actually, nothing really starts in the course... it already has... and nothing really ends with the course. It can't. So the Course is a imprinted experience, waiting to become more or less active at another time.