A Personal Philosophy of Shared Knowledge

In the field of creativity, shared knowledge and wisdom have historically been hard to come by. This may be due to the house-of-cards structures upon which many creative industries are built. Or, perhaps it’s due to the fact that industries that seem to reward buttoned-up, ego-driven practices do not tend to generate great knowledge-sharing economi... See more

Artworks don’t manage knowledge—they channel it. It takes time and attention to understand an artwork’s meaning. Each piece demands a process of reconciliation, and a merging of two contexts: the artwork’s own history and the viewer’s private knowledge network. When it’s placed in a new context, its meaning evolves and expands elastically. It store... See more

This slipping-away of knowledge is always happening. It happens in our minds, as memories fade. But arguably, we don’t need to retain all knowledge.

Again, imagine the dynamism of an art object. In its enduring singularity, it retains that which we impress upon it; it suggests and offers knowledge, but it never instructs. It is a portal to knowledge, but not the knowledge in and of itself.

knowledge and wisdom are hardly “manageable.” They may be channeled, yes, but never fully captured. To capture is to kill. Keep the energy flowing.

Each time we explore a new format, we ask: How do we make it easier for readers to find wisdom that’s relevant to their own unique knowledge gap? Are certain knowledge gaps shared by all creative people at one point or another? How might a reader translate knowledge gained through a narrative format into actual wisdom?

Entire cultures, ideologies, and schools of thought—the very bedrocks of our societies—are built upon the notion that as one person grows more wise, so can the whole community. However, the idea that knowledge’s evolution happens privately and individually presents us with a problem: how do we manage knowledge and wisdom collectively?

The best we can do is attempt to share the collective knowledge of today in ways that feel honest, generous, and timeless. We need to retain something of the personal, of the human—of the original private triumph of failure.

But in many ways, it felt like we were moving in a spiral, building up new sets of knowledge just to orbit the same ideas from a slightly more advanced perspective. We expected the satisfaction of linear knowledge growth, yet despite all the tools at our disposal to expand and archive knowledge, the more we learned, the more we seemed to forget.