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.

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.

Knowledge is slippery, leaky, and ever-shifting. When we spread out our learnings across an expansive, inconsistently used set of platforms, it oozes into multiple digital cracks and crevices. As this happens, the surface area widens, and the depth becomes shallow. In this way, networked technologies enable the evaporation of knowledge.

To have deep knowledge about something is to have a rich inner world built around that subject’s orbit. How, then, does knowledge come to exist in the world beyond an individual’s private mind?

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... See more

Throughout time, humans have sought out ways to translate our private knowledge-building experiences into more public forms. At the most basic level, we do this through language. Ever since we learned to communicate through words (or grunts) some 100,000 years ago, we’ve been pushing our knowledge-sharing techniques further.

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?

Intentionally or not, networked culture creates patterns of information exchange. Together, these patterns merge to form the public infrastructure on which we all come to build our own knowledge networks. But while we all may share a common current of information, the way the current gets channeled, plugged into, and illuminated is a personal... See more

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