Artifact: Etymology as Rhizoskills and Rhizopractice

As per usual Dave has me thinking. He wants us to create an artifact, an artifact that represents rhizomatic learning, something he can then curate as a tangible representation of the many many ways things in #rhizo14 and #rhizo15 are intangible.

Sure let me get right on that…..wow this is not an easy task. A practical guide.  I have pondered this since Wednesday.

Artifact

I started with the idea of an artifact. English scholar that I am I looked up the etymology of the word and discovered that it was coined in 1821. So artifact as we understand it is a very Regency era thing which in and of itself is very interesting. The Regency was a liminal time, history of the in between spaces, very much like rhizomatic learning itself.

The word artifact (or in its original spelling artefact) comes from the Latin arte (of art or skill) + fact (to make) therefore an artifact is something made using art or skill. So what can a person participating in #rhizo15 with absolutely no artistic ability create to leave as artifact? Skills will have to be the focus.

Skills…what skills or rhizoskills does one use in the rhizospace of rhizopractice? Artifacts usually have cultural importance or weight so what heavy-weighted skills rest at the heart or rhizomatic learning?  Information literacy

Rhizomatic learning necessitates information literacy. The artifact that best represents this is below…an index. (This is the index of my #rhizo15 posts so far..my rhizobreadcrumbs...)

In my studies indexes, bibliographies, and work cited have been the start of the most rhizomatic of learning experiences. You know what I am talking about, you read a book, that book references another book or article, you read that other book or article which in turn references another source, you read that other source and so on… This btw is why some dissertations never get completed, because sometimes people don’t know when to press the red stop button and just cut off the perpetuity.

Anti-artifact

It occurred to me that if this is to be a true rhizomatic artifact it would require some sort of anti-artifact. Again to the root word mobile. So anti-artifact would be something made from incompetency. I couldn’t help but think of that when Dave suggested one of his motivations for this artifact request was to be able to give something to “someone who does not know what they are talking about at all.”

So what would this incompetently made thing look like…. Well anything that I would attempt to make from an artistic point of view would aesthetically be incompetent. So therefore I present this

The fact that I am such a horrible drawer has become an actual selling point for marketing purposes of my course. My coordinator howls at this video on a regular basis as do my students and friends “Seriously Ann why does the horse have all 4 legs, you would never see all 4 legs like that.”

So there…artifacts and anti-artifacts my work here is done…ha ha jokes our work is never done.