VIDEO-CONFERENCING At Praxis, we have been looking into methods of face to face contact with people for some months now, experimenting with various system trying to find the easiest/ simplest/ cheapest/ way to communicate to Windows and Mac. It has not been easy, as each system has to be understood and then tested, and this has recently taken up more than half our working time. The system we had shortlisted, and which we were about to use, worked through a remote server in the USA. The server suddenly went through a series of breakdowns which makes it entirely unsuitable for our uses, where people can only get together for an hour or two in advance: one breakdown would cause many problems. End of investigation!
Other solutions we have turned down because they used a very small picture which lacks much of the emotional quality of a reasonable size image such as you have seen on the recent CD. Incidentally, the time and cost of working with CD, and the lack of coherent comment from students, have both caused us to focus our initial video efforts on more immediate forms of communication. At the same time, there has been a major breakthrough with the Carolinas Group being able to `meet' and confer with Robin using a Mac, and we were all for the first-time able to see and be seen full-screen using the Apple programme iChat. They have found it most beneficial, even though their view was limited due to crowding round a small screen outside a truck-stop café with a wireless connection. Plans now taking shape give us several options, including: 1. Messenger software allowing reasonable quality of two-way full-screen communication as used already with Carolinas group but at present able to communicate only with one group at a time. We are about to test similar communication over Windows systems. 2. This is expected to be updated within weeks to the point where we can communicate with three groups at one time. 3. Two versions of a new system where we can produce talks in a number of configurations. With this in mind, we intend to develop methods of progressively greater sophistication after testing the basic system. Three evening talks in November During the month of November at Three Barns, artist Lillian Delevoryas (Robin's wife) gave a series of three talks based on her paintings, inspired by the text `Contemplation on the Life of Moses' or `Perfection in Virtue', by Saint Gregory of Nyssa (Greek, 4th C.) It is hoped that two of the three talks will soon be available `on disc'. 1. Planking the Ark, Birth, and Childhood St. Gregory wrote: "It is the function of the free will both to beget this virtuous offspring and to nourish it with proper food and take forethought how to save it unharmed from the water. For there are those who present their children to the tyrant, delivering them naked and without forethought to the stream. I am speaking of life as a stream made turbulent by the successive waves of passion, which plunge what is in the stream under the water and drown it." 2. Sacred and Profane Knowledge "Since the daughter of the king, being childless and barren (I think she is rightly perceived as profane philosophy), arranged to be called his mother by adopting the youngster, Scripture concedes that his relationship with her who was falsely called his mother should not be rejected until he had recognized his own immaturity. But he who has already attained maturity, as we have learned about Moses, will be ashamed to be called the son of one who is barren by nature For truly barren is profane education, which is always in labour but never gives birth. For what fruit worthy of such pangs does philosophy show for being so long in labour?" `Do not all who are full of wind and never come to term miscarry before they come to the light of the knowledge of God, although they could as well become men if they were not altogether hidden in the womb of barren wisdom?' 3. Affliction `Let us imagine a stream flowing from a spring and branching out at random into different channels. Now so long as it flows this way it will be entirely useless for the cultivation of the soil. Its waters are spread out too much; each single channel is small and meagre, and the water, because of this, hardly moves. But if we could collect these wandering and widely scattered channels into one single stream, we would have a full and compact waterflow which would be useful for the many needs of life. 'So, too, I think, it is with the human mind. If it spread itself out in all directions, constantly flowing out and dispersing to whatever pleases the senses, it will never have any notable force in its progress towards the true Good. But now recall the mind from all sides, and make it collect itself, so that it may begin to operate in that function which is preferably connatural to it, without scattering and wasting itself: then the mind will find no obstacle in its rise to heaven and in its grasp of the true meaning of reality. `Often water contained in a pipe bursts upwards because of the force of the pressure, and it does this against its natural downward motion because it has nowhere else to flow. So too is it with the mind of man. If it is confined on all sides by the water-tight pie of self-restraint, if it has no other outlet, it will be raised up by the very tendency of its motion towards a love of higher things. For it is impossible for our human nature ever to stop moving; it has been made by its Creator ever to keep changing. Hence when we prevent it from using up its energy on trifles, and keep it on all sides from doing what it should not, it must necessarily move in a straight path towards truth.' (From Glory to Glory) The talks combined readings from the text of Gregory of Nyssa, the philosophical tradition which shaped his writing, and the relation of the life of Moses to the development of the psyche. Let us know if you are interested in details of how to obtain the video discs when they are available. |
