Category: sketches

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Layout back to normal.

But what it looked like  was something like the Socio site.  My image, also on Thousand Sketches is used as the masthead.

The encounter symbol.  Nice.  It does draw my attention to the difference between up and down as opposed to left & right.  Horizontal implies equality, or perhaps more neutrally, it implies similarity.  The up/down  in this encounter symbol seems like different entities interacting.

Up /down has some power implications, or is that just cultural? Maybe it is OK!  Maybe it is always good to know, who is earthy, who is airy.   Maybe every encounter is a meeting of earth & sky. The “masculine” aspect is the top one it would seem, but the overvaluing of that is probably cultural.

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Kurt is up in heaven now.

Scoop: Vonnegut Dies Without a Country or Religion:

As it happens on that very day 13 April, I bought two Vonnegut books on Amazon, they are on their way, but I only just heard he died.

image

The sketch is from the wonderful: Writer’s Mugs

And here are some quotes from: Quotations Page

Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand

~

I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.

~

There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

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2007

The year has found some footing. Years of course have a place in space not just time. This one is in cyberspace but as the one tending it I see a New Zealand summer outside my window. I have returned to work after a summer break and so the feel for me that 24 January is bringing has that sense of a new start and this feels like an early moment in that.

Psychotherapy Online – I have opened my book for new clients – it has been closed for most of 2006 as I had a full case load.

Thousand Sketches – This is still the “year of the sketch” it will be until Spring 2007. I am about a third of the way through doing the 1000 digital ones I am committed to. it is a project in psyberspace!

The Psyberspace Podcast – I am quietly continuing this project and have been chatting about the sketches.  However there are more brewing on purely psychological matters too.  Subscribe to the podcast.

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OnlineGroups.Net

In the last post I wrote about my Thousand Sketches project – and how it has its roots in many things I have done. One of those projects was “Psybernet” it predates my involvement with the Internet – it began on Fidonet. That project hit me with a bang just like the Thousand Sketches just has. It was the realisation that the online communication I was involved in (in CompuServe at that time) was intrinsically psychological. I was familiar with Psychodrama and knew – from experience – how groups could be an incubator for psychological transformation.

Cyberspace was full of groups! I wanted a group that was consciously exploring this online space in a psychological way and Psybernet was it. That original group began on the Psybernet BBS, then moved to L-soft mailing list, and then to eGroups which were bought out by Yahoo groups.

While my focus has been on the dramas that unfold in groups – I also found out a lot about the infrastructure of online groups. Some software was better than others, and there are many more mature forms now. Caucus is a web forum that is the best I have experienced for conversation online. There are plenty of good email lists, but some do not handle files or the web all that well. For the best of all worlds for online groups using the Web & email is OnlineGroups.Net. It is very good as a web based forum and excellent for email, groups can all be accessed either way, and they can cohere on a site to form a community.

All this is on my mind as I am thinking about Thousand Sketches because the first person I shared my Psybernet ideas with as they emerged in the early 1990s was Dan Randow the main developer of OnlineGroups.Net. He was in both IT and Psychodrama and he immediately saw the online group potential for very productive work. Dan went on to develop a career facilitating groups online for organisations, for a while I worked in the company he established, GroupSense.

The initial philosophy was to use available technology. eGroups were a mainstay for GroupSense, but that went sour when Yahoo! pruchased them. It became much harder to integrate the tech into a group’s life. People needed a Yahoo ID and the messages carried ads. Something new was needed.

That led to GroupServer an open source project which has well a developed implementation at OnlineGroups.Net

I have been using the sevice for may years and have felt at home there for professional & personal groups.

OnlineGroups.Net is now offering sites with groups to the public, this is a new development and I find it fascinating how those discussions over the years with Dan about creating forms to enhance group life has led to us making public our endeavours, though different, at the same time! In the case of Dan, excellent software for groups, and for me Thousand Sketches.

Of course I have an Announcement Group for Thousand Sketches at OnlineGroups.Net.

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More than Experiential learning – psychological transformation

The main ways I have explored anything in my life is by doing it. Climbing mountains – living & breathing philosophy in my early20s, relationships, counterculture & politics, psychotherapy, Psychodrama and cyberspace!

This blog, since its to its origins in “Links Pages” is one of the vessels for my experiential learning, a fairy mild one. Psyber-L was another – a really intense mailing list, that for a while was public, until closed at the wishes of its members. The two DreamEvents were powerful spaces to learn in. Doing psychotherapy online professionally is another experience that has given me an understanding of the net.

All of these things I do, with an eye to meaning, purpose and their depth, I can’t help it. If there is a way to go deeper – I sink in! They are vessels for my psyche when it needs to rumble & explode.

My current experiential vessel Thousand Sketches began naively, but I have realised that is a zone for me just like a psychotherapy relationship, a Psychodrama group, or a love relationship. I have not understood till now that the power of the psyche is enabled in our creativity area. The project is the psyche wanting something with me. It sounds a bit grand – but it is probably a simple & every day thing, just that right now it is very alive for me & I need to make sense of it all. Occasionally I am afraid it will drive me nuts.

I am writing this as I am planning an “launch” in Christchurch on 3 November. That is part of this project, it is public. Being messed around by my psyche in public! Public in Christchurch, and in New Zealand as I take this to Trade Me

It feels “Trade Me” is very literally true. It seems very congruent that the project has an auction gallery. I have written here – and extensively about Hermes being the archetype of the Internet. He is also the God of trade. It all fits – he has got me!

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Another Sketcher – digital addict

The Digital Pencil

Some nice pictures & I like what MJM has to say about the way of working.

This is how I work

I’m completely addicted to digital drawing. I buy new watercolor paper and traditional paints and pristine sketchbooks at The Art Store, but they gather dust beside my desk. I feel less worthy somehow when I sketch using my computer. Ridiculous, I tell myself — it’s really just like choosing a mechanical pencil over a Berol 2B, or a Rapidograph over a quill pen. No digital god steers my fingers when I sit at my computer. I know that, but somehow I keep planning to get back to “real drawing” someday, where my mistakes aren’t permanently erased by a simple “Ctrl-Z” command.

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