Zizek, Slavoj - Do Nothing

‘Sometimes, doing nothing is the most violent thing to do. […] The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to 'be active', to 'participate', to mask the nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, 'do something' [...] The true difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw.’ (Vilolence, Zizek, 2008)

Alys, Francis - collaboration

" The collaboration process is to watch an idea bounce back and forth, and eventually develop its own course in that bouncing ( el rebote)... ...The more the project evolves, the more this bouncing back and forth between myself and the collaborators intensifies, and it can lead to a final shape sometimes quite far from the original intention. It's in that process that the project takes on its own life and develops. The more ambitious the logistics of the project, the more I will turn into a producer or a coordinator of the project and, when it happens, a spectator of my own fantasy."

"And then there are all the other ingredients of the live event. Once the axiom has been posed and the location set, the development and outcome of the piece happen within an open field of possibilities, in the sense that any outcome of the event becomes a valid answer to the premises of the piece. Once the action is launched, there is no longer any strict or unilateral plan to be followed. Only the actual course of the action itself will provide a response to the preliminary axiom."

"The only constant rule that I have witnessed is that if the storyline - the plot proposal - is clear and strong enough, it will resist all these mutations. The situation will unfold in a way not unlike what your intuitive expectations were. It is the test of the scenario. If the scenario does not hold, the action will deviate and become something else."

Francis Alys in conversation with Russell Ferguson. Francis Alys, 2007 Phaidon Press

Barthes, Roland - 2 themes in Photography

Studium

'Thousands of photographs consist of this field and in these photographs I can, of course, take a kind of general interest.. ..What I feel about these photographs derives from an average effect, almost from a certain training."

"..but I believe this word exists in Latin: it is studium, which doesn't mean, at least not immediately, "study," but application to a thing, taste for someone, a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment, of course, but without special acuity."

Punctum

"The second element will break (or punctuate) the studium. This time I will not seek it out, it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all the better in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because the photographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points; precisely, these marks, these wounds are so many points. This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole - and also a cast of the dice. A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).

Grundtvig, N.F.S - Folk High Schools

"I saw life, real human life, as it is lived in this world, and saw at once that to be enlightened, to live a useful and enjoyable human life, most people did not need books at all, but only a genuinely kind heart, sound common sense, a kind good ear, a kind good mouth, and then liveliness to talk with really enlightened people, who would be able to arouse their interest and show them how human life appears when the light shines upon it." (1856 quoted in Borish 1991: 18).

http://www.infed.org/schooling/b-folk.htm