I have only this to say about ignorance; it jumps
out at you when and where you least expect it.
Sometimes it shocks but mostly it surprises me. As
for confusion, I can say only this: we all live
in only hope that we can communicate despite our
ignorance.

ok. to respond to your message: I had, and I
emphasize the past tense here, HAD, a hard time
figuring out what your beef was, exisle. I mean
it's not like anybody directly rubbed you the
wrong way or stepped on your toes during the
workshop for you to start throwing around inuendos
about ignorance. Since the beginning of the
workshop you insisted on bringing up issues in
such a way that any preset agenda the organizers
might have had was effectively preempted while
other participants' interests in learning
something technical during our sessions slipped by
the wayside.

I was ready to take you to task for this but I've
thought about your message here for several days
now and finally it dawns on me that your approach
is not so much about anger and it is about
something else: a wholly different approach to
workshops, to collective effort, to art content
perhaps.

I think you've been trying to say that you wanted
to start out from the beginning talking about
issues of ideology, politics, difference, etc. and
that you felt this possibility was precluded by
the format of the workshops, which was definitely
technical. If I've got it right I think you could
have just said so without tearing a strip off the
organizers and maybe we could have worked out a
way to do that.

Your conclusions in the message posted here are
striking in their contrast to what precedes them
and I have to agree that the individual projects
are interesting and provocative in many political
ways that indicate nothing of the technical
preoccupations or failure to touch reality that
you are so concerned about. I agree with youl it
is to everyone's credit that they focussed on
their work, their art, technical matters becoming
an integral part, neither dominant nor subservient
to, their thinking.

I am not ignorant of the fact that there are ways
of workshopping that promote issue-based exchange.
Perhaps the organizers will pursue that another
time. I regret in a way that this was not that
time. I regret more that I did not see what
you were getting at, catching your "drift" earlier
exisle. But in the end, I regret the hours lost
trying to make this a time it was clearly not
going to be.

• Michel Foucault's drift