Glossary

Aesthetic Moment

The experience of communion that takes place between an audience and an artwork, where the audience can include the artist.

Aesthetic Value

A function of the tension, the consonance and the purity of an artwork.

Allusion

A reference in an artwork to elements not contained within the artwork itself.

Analect

From the Greek, analektos - to gather together

1. An anthology of brief excerpts from diverse longer works.

2. One of a large set of instructions and guidelines for daily activities, which outline a particular philosophical outlook when considered together.

Artistry

A measure of an artist’s command over the purity of an artwork’s essence.

Association

An illusionary element of an entity formed by the past experiences of the observer.

Christian Existential Humanism

A combination of Christian faith, an existentialist worldview and a humanist social agenda

Christian Existentialism

The idea that no secular or sacred laws, traditions or requirements supercede the demands of the personal relationship between God and an individual human being.

Consonance

Relationships or alignments between the elements of an entity.

Craft

A measure of an artist’s command over the consonances of an artwork, typically including a mastery of styles and conventions, a developed sense of perception, a prior education in the great works of the field, and an attention to technical details.

Creativity

A measure of an artist’s command over the tension in an artwork.

Essence

The holistic total of the meaningful elements of an entity.

Existence

All the objective, specifiable details of the Universe.

Existentialism

The idea that (human) existence is a series of free choices, the responsibility for which cannot be lessened by any set of rules, any circumstances, or any outside influences.

Fanon's Law

After the African philosopher, Franz Fanon

People protect their own positive self image by associating their own negative traits with “the other” --an identifiably different group.

Kitoba's corollary to Fanon's Law:

Once a negative trait has been invested in “the other,” it removes all direct power that the self has over that trait. Therefore the self’s only avenue of attack against the negative trait becomes the oppression and/or destruction of the other.

Fractal Metaphysics

A view of the teleological structure of the universe grounded in the mathematics and the geometries of chaos and complexity theory.

Ged's Law

After Ursula LeGuin's "Wizard of Earthsea"

To gain personal power over the evil in the world, one must own it as part of one’s self, and acknowledge one’s own complicity.

Genre

An artwork in skeletal outline, elaborated through a series of derived artworks that all share a set of common elements and conventions.

Hero

A role model; real or fictional; generally human but often "super-human"; often the protagonist of a story; the embodiment of an abstract virtue in the form of a flesh-and-blood person.

Humanism

The celebration and support of the skills, potential, characteristics and accomplishments of the human race considered as a whole.

Illusion

An (intentional or unintentional) element of an entity only present as a perception by an observer.

Ineffective Resistance

A response pattern which redirects opposition to social inequities into behaviors that will not endanger the status quo. Members of oppressed or socioeconomically depressed groups are often socialized to adopt ineffective resistance patterns in school.

Intertainment

A game, video, forum, meme or other entertainment found specifically on the World Wide Web.

Panentheism

The doctrine that everything in the world is a part of God, but that God is also more than the sum of everything in the world.

Purity

A measure of the unity of the essence of an entity.

Reconstructivism

A artistic style that builds up a new and better whole from deconstructed parts, and/or a educational philosophy that avocates student pursuit of social reform as an intergral part of the curriculum.

Style

An element of the existence of an entity possessing very little essence.

Tension

The meaningful diversity of the elements of an entity.

Transcendence

1. The combination of two or more unlike elements into a unified whole, without the diminishment of their own individual Essences.

2. A state of an entity where the Tension, Consonance and Purity are all at their maximum values.

Trihumanism

Christian Existential Humanism

Value Space

A representation of the moral choices people make, and the relationships between those choices, as if plotted onto a multidimensional space.