Oral Ames Rooms and Escape Rooms
(a game of dialogic analogies)
There are two models of antagonistic dialogic knowledge that I find particularly productive and that are best described using architectural analogies. Interestingly, these are models that, once in operation, people participating in them tend to become uncomfortable and combative— which paradoxically is what makes the models work.
First, the escape room (an escape room is a game where people are placed inside a room and required to solve a number of puzzles within a certain amount of time in order to unlock the room).
Wittgenstein famously said once that the aim of philosophy was to show the fly the way out of the bottle. I have often thought about education in a similar way, but rather as a way to find the key out of the escape room. I like the escape room analogy because of my general aversion toward social hierarchies, and because I like the instances where a group of people (regardless of their social, economic or academic status) are placed in a horizontal situation of knowledge — the kind where a group departs from a shared place of unknowing and slowly build toward clarity.
I typically try to make this happen through a workshop process, constructing models of conversation for people to participate in and generate ideas. A key focus for me in running these workshops is that the discussion has to be structured in a way where the questions being formulated cannot be easily answered using existing art historical or theoretical knowledge, and where other sources of knowledge (personal experience, professional knowledge from other spheres) can be equally useful.
Some of the first times that I used this specific workshop format for exploring questions collectively was during my project The School of Panamerican Unrest, where I conducted 25 or so such workshops through Latin America. In these workshops, my aim was to get the group in the corresponding city to articulate the most top of mind political and cultural issues affecting their city or country. Usually the debates would be civil, but those that got more out of hand were perhaps the most revealing and, ultimately, productive.
One of them took place In Mérida, Yucatán, at the School of Arts of Yucatán (ESAY), which was around that time run by the Mexican artist Mónica Castillo. During that workshop, the older artists in Mérida, Yucatán, who were steeped in tradition and crafts, started arguing with the younger ones (art students from the ESAY, who were very interested in experimental, post-conceptual art) around the topics of tradition vs. innovation, with the older artists talking about experimental arts becoming an imitation of the exterior, while the younger artists critiquing traditional arts as a provincial and isolated practice.
I often reflect about that exchange in Mérida. While there were a lot of heated arguments, the tensions that had built over time in that community finally burst into the open that day; and having defined where the fault lines of opinion lied made it much easier to arrive at an understanding about the issues that the local arts community needed to resolve (at the time, the group decided that what was needed was a more art criticism, and they vowed to create a series of public events focused on critique). The positive outcome of that exchange represents, to me, the puzzle that the group figures out collectively which then gets them out of the escape room.
The second spatial model, the Ames room, deals more with what I would term “agency role play”.
In 1946, the American ophthalmologist Adelbert Ames, who researched optical illusions, developed a room of a trapezoidal shape with patterns made in such a way that, when looked through a peephole, it appeared to be a normal, rectangular shaped room. However, when one person stands on one side of the room they can look gigantic or small, depending of their position.
In conversation, the equivalent of an Ames room is a structure where authority (scale) shifts depending of what is being discussed. Traditional academic models (like panel discussions or symposia) have fixed visual and spatial hierarchies where the experts are the only ones allowed to talk, perched on a stage. But in other, more dynamic models, there are systems where hierarchies shift. These include Progressive Moderation (where leadership in guiding the discussion is shared), World Café model (participants rotate in small group discussing different subjects) or Round Robin Discussions (where each speaker is given a set time to speak) that spread the responsibility and agency of each speaker as the conversation progresses. The connection to the Ames room is that the speakers’ dominance depend of their position at any given moment.
In art, this shifting of power dynamics is best exemplified in the play Pedro y el Capitán, by Mario Benedetti — an intense, psychological drama centered on the interaction between two characters: Pedro, a political prisoner, and the Captain, his torturer. Over the course of four acts, Pedro, the prisoner, manages to find the vulnerabilities and inner conflicts of the Captain, ultimately subduing him through mental games.
Recently, when I ran a discussion group and was confronted and challenged by the participants, I thought of both the Ames and the Escape rooms in terms of antagonistic dynamics, and strangely perhaps, recognized that my instinctive impulse to suppress hostile engagement was wrong (and thus I allowed the questioning of my authority to go on, allowing them to formulate arguments as to why I was wrong, which led to interesting insights). It has taken me many years as an educator and artist to accept the necessary entanglement, and potential benefits, of antagonist debate. I have now come to understand, and even appreciate, confrontation (even the hostile kind) as an indirect form of caring, for the person doing the confrontation would not be doing so if they were not invested in the subject at hand. The natural impulse of a (I should say, inexperienced) moderator or teacher is to suppress dissent; however, things get more interesting when interlocutors are suddenly given the power and the control of the direction of the conversation.
Going back to Wittgenstein: philosophy enthusiasts know that the eccentric philosopher once tried his hand at architecture, designing a house for his sister Margarethe.
The house, known as the Stonborough House or simply Wittgenstein House, is located at Kundmanngasse 19 in Vienna's 3rd district (Landstraße). Built in the period of 1926-28, Wittgenstein famously obsessed over every single detail of the house up to the design of the door handles; he forced the architect to change the height of the ceiling by a mere 1.18 inches and insisted on other minuscule and seemingly absurd adjustments driving the architect and almost everyone else involved in the project to the verge of insanity. It is a fascinating moment where a major 20th century philosopher attempted to make literal some of his methodological thinking about language.
So perhaps another way to describe the effectiveness of those dialogic Ames and Escape room models might be in saying that the aim of Education is to helps us see the fly in different scales, and then help it decode a puzzle to find its way out to freedom.
Interesting parallel analogy, with a unexpected image at the end (Wittgenstein's house). The aggression and mania of the house, and the story of its abandonment. Thomas Bernhard's "Correction" (1975) is a meditation on that particular kind of aggression: in the novel it's Roithamer's aggression against his sister to make the perfect house for her (perhaps to trap her, or to control her) and against himself (by setting himself an impossible task). I just finished reading Gert Jonke's "Geometric Regional Novel," which is like an echo of "Correction": it's about an apparently perfect region of Austria that is kept tenuously under control by a proliferation of inhuman bureaucratic laws and customs. That book, too, is full of ucontrolled violence, some of it planned by the author and some, I think, uncontrolled.
Just by way of saying your very hopeful account of groups and rooms is followed, very affectingly, by a story about the unhelpful violence of rooms.
Love this!