Robert P. Taylor's SeeRIBIE: Personal Reflections on a Professional Trip

Though plans of all sorts are necessary for defining one's life, life is also defined by the encounters and events in which one participates, whether that participation is by choice or chance. Elaborate plans for life are never exactly fulfilled and often are hardly fulfilled at all, because whatever the plans, life-defining events continually engage the individual's life, alter it in ways not set forth in the plans. While they may cast some light on it, formal records of an individual's life, can instead, like formal painted portraits, obscure it, by abstracting it from the encounters that define it. Similarly, traditional visual records such as group photographs tend to feature the individuals from the event or the encounter in formal pose free of the randomness of the actual encounter or event, again losing the defining power of what happened. SeeRIBIE has been created to provide a alternative such other records.

SeeRIBIE is intended as a reflection of a specific variety of intense human activity and its definitional character - that surrounding academics as they present their expertise among peers on the road, at another institution or major conference. SeeRIBIE assumes there are many dimensions to such activity, and that rapid sketches done on-the-spot, capture a sense of this defining process that would otherwise be lost or overlooked, or refined out of the traditional records of such an event. The rationale for such a sketch-based record of human activity is discussed further in Images as Records of Encounters and Events below. Other, Analogous Websites, also below, presents links to other Taylor sites featuring the approach used in SeeRIBIE.