There is a circular hole in the wall, about 30-40 cm diameter and perforated at 1 meter above the ground. A man enters through the hole in the wall and a man (apparently the same individual) exits again through the same hole. His mate is standing right next to the hole and seems to be waiting for him. Yesterday I came across these pictures again. The enigmatic hole is the entrance to a room. It is a door that keeps you fit, elastic and flexible, if you want to discover what there is at the other side of the wall. Its dimension relies on the utmost reduction of a bending human body. And the erotic experience of penetrating it is intimately connected both to the materiality of the hole and the earthen texture of the wall. It is an intuitive understanding of a house as the shelter of a woman’s uterus. It requires thinking where to place first a leg, an arm, then a hand and a foot. But even if it looks like a perforation, as if material had been removed out of the massive surface, the hole was indeed already there before the wall was built all around it. It is incredibly mysterious when our iconic idea of a rectangular door mutates and becomes something else that defines a new type of threshold.
Below there is another door of Korongo houses that also fascinates me: the oversized threshold, shaped as a human-size keyhole. One discovers its meaningfulness after knowing that it lets villagers access the room while carrying two large jars with drinking water hanging from a stick over their shoulders.
George Rodger captured in his photographs the everyday lives of the Nuba people in Sudan in late 1940s, their houses, their wrestling combats with sharp-edge bracelets, and their aesthetic scars that adorn their bodies.
Ancient humans may not have had the luxury of updating their Facebook status, but social networks were nevertheless an essential component of their lives, a new study suggests.
The study’s findings describe elements of social network structures that may have been present early in human history, suggesting how our ancestors may have formed ties with both kin and non-kin based on shared attributes, including the tendency to cooperate. According to the paper, social networks likely contributed to the evolution of cooperation.
“The astonishing thing is that ancient human social networks so very much resemble what we see today,” said Nicholas Christakis, professor of medical sociology and medicine at Harvard Medical School and professor of sociology in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and senior author on the study. “From the time we were around campfires and had words floating through the air, to today when we have digital packets floating through the ether, we’ve made networks of basically the same kind.”
“We found that what modern people are doing with online social networks is what we’ve always done — not just before Facebook, but before agriculture,” said study co-author James Fowler, professor of medical genetics and political science at the University of California, San Diego, who, with Christakis, has authored a number of seminal studies of human social networks.
Via Science Daily. Continue HERE
Image above: The Hadza of Tanzania live as hunter-gatherers. (Credit: Courtesy of Coren Apicella/Harvard Medical School)
Rob Bryanton made his first record at twelve, and was host of a regional CBC-TV music series at twenty. He is the President of Talking Dog Studios (www.talkingdogstudios.com) in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, which specializes in music and sound for film and television. He has been nominated eight times in the last eight years for Canada’s prestigious Gemini Awards, four times in the category “Best Original Music Score for a Dramatic Series”, and four times for “Best Sound for a Dramatic Program”. Recent projects to which Rob has contributed his talents as a composer and sound mixer include the hugely popular CTV series “Corner Gas”, plus the historical mini-series “Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story” (CBC-TV). Rob is also responsible for the theme and underscoring on CBC’s Canadian Antiques Roadshow. While Rob has had poems and song lyrics published in several anthologies over the past decade, “Imagining the Tenth Dimension” is his first book. It represents the culmination of a lifelong fascination with science, philosophy, and the nature of reality which, as he tells in the book, began at the age of seven. Rob is also the current President of the Saskatchewan Motion Picture Association, and is an active volunteer in his community. A typical stubborn prairie boy, he is proud to have built a career for himself as a composer and sound mixer in his home town, and to have been a part of Saskatchewan’s burgeoning film and television industry for the past 30 years. Rob lives in Regina with his wife Gail and their dog Buddy. Gail and Rob have two sons, Todd and Mark. Text taken from Amazon
The day when heavy machinery and manpower transformed a Dutch beach into a lunar landscape of hills and craters. At sunset the labor stopped, and a live drumbeat announced the ceremony of a woman, gracing this imaginary moon with an American flag. The same evening, while the party still went on, the landscape was flattened out again, leaving no physical trace of the event behind—save the memories and a story to tell future generations.
In the past two years, protesters against authoritarian regimes have begun to heavily use social-networking and media services, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and cell phones, to organize, plan events, propagandize, and spread information outside the channels censored by their national governments. Those governments, grappling with this new threat to their holds on power, have responded by trying to unplug cyberspace.
Some examples: In April 2009, angry young Moldovans stormed government and Communist Party offices protesting what they suspected was a rigged election; authorities discontinued Internet service in the capital. In Iran, the regime cracked down on protesters objecting to fraudulent election outcomes in June 2009 by denying domestic access to servers and links, and by slowing down Internet service generally — although protesters and their supporters found ways around those restrictions. In Tunisia, when protests against President Zine el Abidine ben Ali escalated in December 2010, his government sought to deny Twitter services in the country and hacked the Facebook accounts of some Tunisian users in order to acquire their passwords. In Egypt, amid mass protests in Cairo and several other cities in January 2011, Hosni Mubarak’s government attempted to disconnect the Internet. But there, too, protesters found limited workarounds until the doomed regime eventually restored some services.
Authoritarians may have reason to fear cyberspace. It is widely believed that the proliferation of Internet access and other communications technologies empowers individuals and promotes democracy and the spread of liberty, usually at the expense of centralized authority. As Walter Wriston optimistically put it in his 1992 book The Twilight of Sovereignty: “As information technology brings the news of how others live and work, the pressures on any repressive government for freedom and human rights will soon grow intolerable because the world spotlight will be turned on abuses and citizens will demand their freedoms.”
Written by Eric R. Sterner, The New Atlantis. Continue HERE
5 million starlings stream into Rome every winter evening. They form some of the most mesmeric aerial displays to confuse and avoid a peregrine falcon on the look out for his evening meal.
Earthflight uses many different filming techniques to create the experience of flying with birds as they reveal some of the greatest natural and man-made monuments of the planet.
In recent weeks it has become public in Argentina, the project initiated by two artists from Buenos Aires, Guillermo Faivovich and Nicholas Goldberg, consisting of a loan moving the meteorite “El Chaco” to Kassel, Germany, during the international art contemporary art exhibition Documenta 13.
“In Argentina, a rich and complex debate has recently arisen about the loan of this object. dOCUMENTA (13) therefore suspended its loan request on January 16 in respect of the positions stated by experts and local communities. Furthermore, dOCUMENTA (13) would like to state that no loan of the El Chaco meteorite will be further requested without a full endorsement by the peoples of the land of Chaco, by the local community as a whole, and in careful consideration of the beliefs and principles of the traditional custodians today. The artists are currently meeting with all concerned parties to discuss the matter together.”
Could this be one of those tactical, post-colonial, and anti-paradigmatic works of conceptual art banning?
Cultural astronomer Alejandro López, among his colleagues, promoted the opposition to this project, which seriously violates the rights of Aboriginal Chaco. The writings of ancient chroniclers and investigations carried up from the Aboriginal worldview, clearly show that for these people meteors scattered on Campo del Cielo, are very important milestones in its territory.
Since the project was announced to move the meteorite Chaco aborigines have voiced opposition to it and want to work to make their voices heard. Click HERE to read and sign the petition. The petition is written in Spanish. However, you don’t read Spanish to sign it.
El Chaco meteorite, Campo del Cielo, near Gancedo, Chaco, Argentina
Click HERE to read the statement written by Documenta 13 suspending their request for the exhibition.
Interview with Guillermo Faivovich in La Voz, an Argentine publication.
CELLTEXTS by Ines & Eyal Weizman was a 2008 project that created an archive of texts, love letters, philosophical statements, letters to mothers, songs, treatises, political manifestos, and novels… written from incarcerated dissidents all around the world. The library uses the writer’s time spent in prison (1 day to 45 years) to organize an amalgam of published knowledge.
The installation is dedicated to prisoners engaged in writing. The work is organized around a collection of hundreds of books and other texts from across the world written under conditions of enforced incarceration. The collection includes the work of writers who have been sent to prison for the contents of their writing, for their political involvement, as well as of prisoners convicted of other crimes who have used the time and seclusion of their incarceration to become writers. Through the collection of texts an archipelago of prison cells emerges. The cells are thus revealed as sites of intellectual production, marking the limit condition of writing. The collection is assembled in recognition that spatial confinement and isolation may induce a process of creative, imaginative, sometimes spiritual, cultural production.
The individual’s impulse to survive through texts, through reclaiming her own voice against the imposition of others, creates an autarkic realm in which practices of dissidence, political and personal, could be reinstated. Commissioned and designed by and for the state, prison cells acquire a potential subversive content, becoming critical spatial apparatuses. Paradoxically, imprisonment emerges as an active practice of citizenship a mechanism of political opposition that call for a confrontation or intolerance with certain forms of government.
Excerpt from Ines & Eyal Weizman’s statement: For many prisoners, the prison could offer a period of reflection, scholarship and education as well as a resonating chamber for political dissent. Regis Debray described the Prison as “the dissident’s second university”. Antonio Gramsci was forced to write in code to bypass the constraints of the prison and its censorship. Ezra Pound learns from the Chinese Encyclopedia which he smuggled into his Pisan cage. For Antonio Negri it was the routines of the prison that represented the principal form of punishment in a capitalist society. Auguste Blanqui formulated in the middle of the 19th century, a detailed guide for the armed uprising of the revolutionary multitudes which included sketches and street maps with exact details of barricades. Many writers are fascinated with insects and animals coming into their prison cells.
Lego toys have always seemed pleasantly gender-neutral. Perhaps that’s why the new Lego Friends line for girls has triggered a fair bit of protest from some health and equal-rights organizations.
The new line, whose characters sport slim figures and stylish clothes, will contribute to gender stereotyping that promotes body dissatisfaction in girls, said Carolyn Costin, an eating disorders specialist and founder of the Monte Nido Treatment Center in Malibu.
Online petitions have been started to protest the line, which includes a Butterfly Beauty Shop and a Your Fashion Designer Workshop. The International Assn. of Eating Disorder Professionals said the toys were “devoid of imagination and promote overt forms of sexism.”
Written by Shari Roan, Los Angeles Times. Continue HERE
New York-based British artist, Sue Coe, in sketching, drawing, and painting what she has seen in factory farms, slaughterhouses and other places where animals are made to suffer all over the world, is both witness and change agent. Our Hen House, the internet’s hub of all things vegan and animal rights (which was just named by VegNews Magazine the Indie Media Powerhouse of 2011), is proud to announce the latest installment in our Art of the Animal series: a new video-short, “Sue Coe: Art of the Animal.” Our Hen House’s ongoing Art of the Animal video series speaks with artists of all kinds who speak up for animals through their medium. Now, we invite you and your site’s visitors to experience the revelatory images that document the reality of animal exploitation, and to learn first-hand from Sue Coe how her journey into this oftentimes dark, but very real world, manifested.
Directed by Our Hen House’s Executive Director, Jasmin Singer, the video-short takes the viewer on a journey narrated by Sue Coe, and features selections from her vast body of work. Coe describes the impetus behind her life’s work – growing up next door to a hog farm and hearing the hogs’ screaming as they were led to slaughter. These experiences left an indelible mark on the artist. In turn, Coe leaves her own mark on the hearts and minds of anyone who views her images, which have been shown in galleries and museums all over the world. The unapologetically graphic nature of Coe’s work results in viewers bearing witness to suffering – a fate that began for Coe so many years ago – yet also leaves many feeling inspired to create change. For Sue Coe, and for many of us who take in her images, complacency is no longer an option. Though many vegans and animal rights advocates are already aware of these realities, even seasoned activists will be moved and inspired by Coe’s artistic explorations of animal suffering.
Synopsis: This conference aims to reflect on the relevance of the concept of dissidence for architectural practice today. Although dissidence has been primarily associated with architectural practices in the Eastern Bloc at the end of the Cold War period, contemporary architectural and other aesthetic practices have in recent years developed a host of new methodologies and techniques for articulating their distance from and critique of dominant political and financial structures. Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence asks how we can conceive of the contemporary political problems and paradoxes of architecture in relation to their precedents? Devoid of the agency of action, Cold War dissidents articulated their positions in drawings of fantasy-like paper architecture, while contemporary forms of architectural practice seem to gravitate towards activism and direct-action in the world. The political issues – from interventions in charged areas worldwide to research in conflict zones and areas undergoing transformations – currently stimulate a field of abundant invention in contemporary architecture. Both, Cold War dissidents and contemporary activists encounter problems and paradoxes and must navigate complex political force fields within which possible complicities are inherent risks.
New forms of critical practice, and political and spatial dissent are manifold, appearing in stark contrast to contemporary architectural practice in which professional courage seems to have been translated into structural “virtuosity” of surfaces. This conference seeks to map out and expand on the methodologies of architectural action and reinvigorate the concept of dissent within the architectural/spatial field of the possible. A more historical thread that runs through the programme will seek to weave the genealogy of political/spatial practices from the Cold War dissidents of the Soviet Bloc to the activists of South American favelas.
Dissidents in the former communist countries used a specific set of codes to question the ideological doctrine of the state party. Architects who were otherwise employed in state run architectural collectives, or as staff in architecture schools met to produce writings, private lectures, secret installations and architectural articulations of allegories and legends – activities that challenged the ’stifling’ standardized language of Soviet architecture. Many of these ‘paper architects’ questioned the relationship between art, architecture and politics, but also, and significantly so, the ideological, and thus also ethical function of various forms of ‘creative practices’. The political melt-down of the Soviet Bloc reconfigured this complex field of political codes, architectural gestures and references. The withdrawal of the architect from large ideological concepts regarding social utopias mirrored that fragmentation and dissemination of (neo)liberal market structures. Large ideological battles were replaced with a multiplicity of local, or issue-specific conflicts within which forms of activism have been integrated. Dissent against large integrated and complex networks is no longer possible. All that is left is to navigate the complex fields of forces in a reflective and innovative manner. But can the assemblage of gestures and techniques of past struggles and ‘dilemmas’ of working in politically suppressive regimes help to inform those of today?
The conference thus seeks to attract contemporary spatial practitioners, architects, urbanists, journalists, activists, filmmakers and curators, asking them to reflect upon contemporary forms and conditions of dissent and their potential problems and inevitable paradoxes. It welcomes, too, the reflections of architects and architectural historians to reflect upon previous articulations of political dissent through architectural practice.
The Political Equator was conceptualized by Teddy Cruz in 2005. Political Equator 3 was a 2-day cross-border mobile conference held on the 3rd and 4th of June 2011. This event was co-organized by the Center for Urban Ecologies at the Visual Arts Department at UCSD, and two community-based, non-profit organizations on both sides of the border, Casa Familiar in San Ysidro, California and Alter Terra in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico.
The third program in a the series of bi-national conferences, PE3 continues to engage pressing regional socio-economic, urban and environmental conditions across the San Diego –Tijuana border. These meetings have been focusing on a critical analysis of local conflicts in order to re-evaluate the meaning of shifting global dynamics, across geo-political boundaries, natural resources and marginal communities.
Radiolab: Stochasticity (a wonderfully slippery and smarty-pants word for randomness), may be at the very foundation of our lives. To understand how big a role it plays, we look at chance and patterns in sports, lottery tickets, and even the cells in our own body. Along the way, we talk to a woman suddenly consumed by a frenzied gambling addiction, meet two friends whose meeting seems to defy pure chance, and take a close look at some very noisy bacteria. Listen to podcast HERE
Indian IT professionals are pictured at an industry event in Bangalore in 2010. India’s urban youth are suffering social-media “fatigue,” prompting a number to delete their Facebook and other accounts, according to a new study.
“Youngsters have started finding social media boring, confusing, frustrating and time-consuming,” the survey commissioned by by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM) found.
India’s youth have “started experiencing social-media fatigue” and are tending to log less frequently onto social networks like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Orkut, and others than when they signed up, the study reported.
The research that polled 2,000 young people aged 12-25 in 10 cities found many were instead using mobile applications such as Blackberry Messenger, WhatsApp, Nimbuzz, or Google Talk that allow them to chat with their friends.
“Tech overload is apparent among youth and their fixation with social media seems to be eroding,” said D.S. Rawat, ASSOCHAM secretary general, commenting on the survey emailed to AFP on Tuesday.
Some 55 percent of respondents said they had “consciously reduced” their time spent on social media websites and it was no longer a “craze” for them.
More than half of the 55 percent who had cut down on their activity on social media sites said they had actually deactivated or deleted their accounts and profiles from these websites.
Of nearly 200 young people interviewed in New Delhi, 60 percent said they found it “boring and sick to see constant senseless status updates.”
Most of the social media website users said they had opened many accounts initially but now preferred now to stick to a single site.
A majority of the Indian respondents also said “compulsive” social networking had led to insomnia, depression and poor personal relationships, the survey said.
Oterp is a mobile phone game project using a GPS sensor to manipulate music in real time, depending on the player’s position on Earth. It generates new melodies when traveling. The objective of Oterp is to mix the reality of our everyday environment with a video game. This is a new way to imagine our movements in a society increasingly on the move and dependent on mobile interfaces.
Performing Data, the exhibition, was a review of Fleischmann and Strauss´ body of work from Virtual Reality (Home of the Brain) up to Mixed Reality (Murmuring Fields or Energie-Passagen), from Fluid (Liquid Views) to Rigid (Rigid Waves) up to Floating Interface (Media Flow).
Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss from the Fraunhofer IAIS Research Institute show an intersection of the body and immaterial digital data. From Body Space (Virtual Striptease) to Knowledge Space (Semantic Map): Interactivity as an extension of touch is a central strategy of their work – interactivity with its complex relationship to reality, re-presentation and presence.
The body as interface and intersections to the disembodied digital information. Immersion in data flow causes productive moments of disturbance and suspension, and consequently – a feeling of real physical presence.
The exhibition Performing Data included works from the early 1990s, when the artists/scientists were co-founders of the ART+COM collective in 1987 in Berlin. Since 1992 they developed their work as research artists at KHM and GMD – the German National Research Center for Information Technology, since 1997 as directors of the Media Art & Research Studies (MARS) department and since 2001 at Fraunhofer Society, in the Institute for Media Communication (IMK) and the Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems in Sankt Augustin, Germany.
RC: Eve Sussman and her collaborative team Rufus Corporation are touring their latest film project whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir, to the Sundance Film Festival, Berlinale, and Site Santa Fe in January and February 2012.
An expedition to the banks of the Caspian landed Rufus Corporation in a dystopian “future-opolis” that became the location for their experimental film noir. Pushing the envelope of cinematic form, the film is edited live in real time by a custom programmed computer they call the “serendipity machine.” whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir delivers a changing narrative – culled from 3,000 clips, 80 voice-overs and 150 pieces of music – that runs forever and never plays the same way twice. The unexpected juxtapositions create a sense of suspense alluding to a story that the viewer composes. Driven by key words, the work seamlessly comes together as a movie – that is not a movie.
The film follows the observations and surveillance of the central protagonist, a geophysicist named Holz (Jeff Wood), stuck in a 1970’s looking metropolis operated by the New Method Oil Well Cementing Company. Voiceovers and dialogues (in English and Russian with English subtitles) forge the implied narrative – wire tapped telephone conversations, reel-to-reel tapes, snippets of a job interview between Mr. Holz and his employer and a mysterious woman referred to simply as “Dispatch”. A narrator describes various impositions on the citizens including strangely manipulated time keeping, a language ration, lowered suicide statistics, the effects of lithium, and the workings of the water factory. It becomes evident that the character is controlled by the city and the factory he is working in, as the course of the story is controlled by the machine that edits the film.
Dan Fessler: As an undergraduate, most of the professors in the Anthropology Department at my university practiced psychological anthropology, a subfield of sociocultural anthropology that combines theories from various branches of psychology with the study of culture. I decided that I was going to be a psychological anthropologist, and I continued on at the same university, with the same professors, for my graduate degrees. Although I was confident that, to understand human behavior, it was necessary to investigate the interaction of mind and culture, I nevertheless became increasingly dissatisfied with psychological anthropology, which lacks an overarching theory from which to derive hypotheses, and which often eschews hypothesis testing in favor of description and interpretation. Anthropologists usually emphasize the differences between people in different societies, yet, during my doctoral field research, I was impressed by the underlying universalities in human emotions. I began thinking more about human evolution, and, with guidance from several primatologists, I gradually began to invent my own version of evolutionary psychology. I was unaware that such a discipline was already emerging – indeed, many of my ‘new’ ideas had already been formulated more clearly by others. It was a revelation when I attended my first meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, and discovered a whole field devoted to my area of interest.
Via The International Cognition & Culture Institute’s Blog. Continue HERE
This was a practice where the mother, often disguised or hiding, often under a spread, holds her baby tightly for the photographer to insure a sharply focused image.’
Adam Rutherford meets a new creature created by American scientists – the spider-goat. It is part goat, part spider, and its milk can be used to create artificial spider’s web.
It is part of a new field of research, synthetic biology, with a radical aim: to break down nature into spare parts so that we can rebuild it however we please.
This technology is already being used to make bio-diesel to power cars. Other researchers are looking at how we might, one day, control human emotions by sending ‘biological machines’ into our brains.
In the classic film “12 Angry Men,” Henry Fonda’s character sways a jury with his quiet, persistent intelligence. But would he have succeeded if he had allowed himself to fall sway to the social dynamics of that jury?
Research led by scientists at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute found that small-group dynamics — such as jury deliberations, collective bargaining sessions, and cocktail parties — can alter the expression of IQ in some susceptible people. “You may joke about how committee meetings make you feel brain dead, but our findings suggest that they may make you act brain dead as well,” said Read Montague, director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory and Computational Psychiatry Unit at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, who led the study.
The scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate how the brain processes information about social status in small groups and how perceptions of that status affect expressions of cognitive capacity.
“We started with individuals who were matched for their IQ,” said Montague. “Yet when we placed them in small groups, ranked their performance on cognitive tasks against their peers, and broadcast those rankings to them, we saw dramatic drops in the ability of some study subjects to solve problems. The social feedback had a significant effect.”
Photo above: President George W. Bush delivers remarks at the opening of the Organization of American States General Assembly in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Monday, June 6, 2005. White House Photo by Eric Draper.
ZVO.ČI.TI. so.und.ing Collection is a podcast collection of Slovenian sound artists, composers of electroacoustic, experimental, algorithmic, electronic, improvised and composed works.
The DVD release of the ZVO.ČI.TI so.und.ing Collection represents the final part of the multi-year project devised to be a continuous production of thematic radio and podcast audio programmes about specific authors and works of theirs that were created in the studio or performed live.
The purpose of the project is to connect and highlight Slovenian authors who make contemporary music in the music performance, sound, intermedia, performing, online and other areas and to present them, using existing communication possibilities, into the wider arena of world contemporary sound creativity.
“The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can “Google” the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue. The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.”
A robot walks into a bar and says, “I’ll have a screwdriver.” A bad joke, indeed. But even less funny if the robot says “Give me what’s in your cash register.”
The fictional theme of robots turning against humans is older than the word itself, which first appeared in the title of Karel Čapek’s 1920 play about artificial factory workers rising against their human overlords. Just 22 years later, Isaac Asimov invented the “Three Laws of Robotics” to serve as a hierarchical ethical code for the robots in his stories: first, never harm a human being through action or inaction; second, obey human orders; last, protect oneself. From the first story in which the laws appeared, Asimov explored their inherent contradictions. Great fiction, but unworkable theory.
The prospect of machines capable of following moral principles, let alone understanding them, seems as remote today as the word “robot” is old. Some technologists enthusiastically extrapolate from the observation that computing power doubles every 18 months to predict an imminent “technological singularity” in which a threshold for machines of superhuman intelligence will be suddenly surpassed. Many Singularitarians assume a lot, not the least of which is that intelligence is fundamentally a computational process. The techno-optimists among them also believe that such machines will be essentially friendly to human beings. I am skeptical about the Singularity, and even if “artificial intelligence” is not an oxymoron, “friendly A.I.” will require considerable scientific progress on a number of fronts.
“One of the most radical solutions in the field of shelter is represented by the underground towns and villages in the Chinese loess belt. Loess is silt, transported and deposited by the wind. Because of its great softness and high porosity (45%), it can be easily carved. [...] The dark squares in the flat landscape are pits [...] about the size of a tennis court. Their vertical sides are 25 to 30 feet high. L-shaped staircases lead to the apartments below whose rooms are about 30 feet deep and 15 feet wide, and measure about 15 feet to the top of the vaulted ceiling. They are lighted and aired by openings that give onto the courtyard.” [from LeopoldLambert's boiteaoutils on B. Rudofsky's Architecture without architects]
Amazon: In this book, Bernard Rudofsky steps outside the narrowly defined discipline that has governed our sense of architectural history and discusses the art of building as a universal phenomenon. He introduces the reader to communal architecture–architecture produced not by specialists but by the spontaneous and continuing activity of a whole people with a common heritage, acting within a community experience. A prehistoric theater district for a hundred thousand spectators on the American continent and underground towns and villages (complete with schools, offices, and factories) inhabited by millions of people are among the unexpected phenomena he brings to light.
The beauty of “primitive” architecture has often been dismissed as accidental, but today we recognize in it an art form that has resulted from human intelligence applied to uniquely human modes of life. Indeed, Rudofsky sees the philosophy and practical knowledge of the untutored builders as untapped sources of inspiration for industrial man trapped in his chaotic cities.
Jeff Widener holds his photo of Tank Man in Tienanmen Square from 1989.
Steve McCurry holds his 1984 photo of a young woman from Peshawar, Pakistan. “I looked for this girl for 17 years and finally found her in 2002. Her name is Sharbat Gula.”
Neil Leifer holds his photo, Ali vs. Liston, which he took on May 25, 1965 in Lewiston, Maine.
The Tank Man of Tienanmen Square. Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston in victory. The portrait of the Afghan Girl on the cover of National Geographic. Many of us can automatically recall these photos in our heads, but far fewer can name the photographers who took them. Even fewer know what those photographers look like.
Tim Mantoani hopes to change that by taking portraits of famous photographers holding their most iconic or favorite photos in his new book Behind Photographs: Archiving Photographic Legends. Mantoani has shot over 150 of these portraits in the last five years, most of which are contained in the book.
“I felt like there was kind of this void,” says Mantoani. “There were all these anonymous photographers out there who have not been given enough credit.”
At a time when everyone has a camera in their pocket and millions, if not billions of photos are flying around the internet each day, Mantoani wants to help people understand that iconic photos don’t just happen. They are the product of people who devote their entire lives to photography. Giving these people a face, he says, helps do that.
Seven years after a motorcycle accident damaged his spinal cord and left him paralyzed, 30-year-old Tim Hemmes reached up to touch hands with his girlfriend in a painstaking and tender high-five. For more information about the trial, visit UPMC.com/BCI
From Cairo to cyberspace, from Main Street to Wall Street, today’s social movements have a creative new edge that’s blurring the boundaries between artist and activist, hacker and dreamer. But the principles that make for successful creative action rarely get hashed out or written down.
Until now.
Beautiful Trouble brings together ten grassroots groups and dozens of seasoned artists and activists from around the world to distill their best practices into a toolbox for creative action. Among the groups included are Agit-Pop/The Other 98%, The Yes Men/Yes Labs, Code Pink, SmartMeme, The Ruckus Society, Beyond the Choir, The Center for Artistic Activism, Waging Nonviolence, Alliance of Community Trainers and Nonviolence International.
Contributors include Rae Abileah, Ryan Acuff, Celia Alario, Phil Aroneanu, Peter Barnes, Jesse Barron, Andy Bichlbaum, Nadine Bloch, Kathryn Blume, L.M. Bogad, Josh Bolotsky, Mike Bonanno, Andrew Boyd, Kevin Buckland, Margaret Campbell, Doyle Canning, Samantha Corbin, Yutaka Dirks, Steve Duncombe, Mark Engler, Simon Enoch, Jodie Evans, John Ewing, Brian Fairbanks, Bryan Farrell, Janice Fine, Lisa Fithian, Cristian Fleming, Elisabeth Ginsberg, Stan Goff, Arun Gupta, Silas Harrebye, Judith Helfand, Daniel Hunter, Sarah Jaffe, John Jordan, Dmytri Kleiner, Sally Kohn, Steve Lambert, Anna Lee, Stephen Lerner, Zack Malitz, Nancy Mancias, Duncan Meisel, Matt Meyer, Dave Oswald Mitchell, Tracey Mitchell, George Monbiot, Brad Newsham, Gaby Pacheco, Mark Read, Patrick Reinsborough, Simon Roel, Joshua Kahn Russell, Leonidas Martin Saura, Levana Saxon, Maxine Schoefer-Wulf, Nathan Schneider, Kristen Ess Schurr, John Sellers, Rajni Shah, Brooke Singer, Matt Skomarovsky, Andrew Slack, Phillip Smith, Jonathan Matthew Smucker, Starhawk, Eric Stoner, Jeremy Varon, Virginia Vitzthum, Harsha Walia, Jefferey Webber and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.
Beautiful Trouble puts the accumulated wisdom of decades of creative protest into the hands of the next generation of change-makers. www.beautifultrouble.org
You are special. Don’t worry, this is not the start of yet another Joel Osteen sermon. I mean only that your existence, itself a wildly improbable fact, increasingly seems to be the only peg on which cosmologists can hang the existence of our Universe.
Oh, and not just you, by the way. I’m special, too. All of us observers capable of wondering why we are here are special, because we contribute to what is known as the Anthropic Principle. Here’s the nub of it, given by Stephen Hawking and a colleague in 1973: “The answer to the question ‘why is the universe [the way it is]?’ is ‘because we are here.’”
There’s something odd about that. As the cosmologist George F.R. Ellis notes, the Anthropic Principle sends the arrow of causation winging, feathers first, back to the bow. It declares, to paraphrase DesCartes, “I think, therefore the Multiverse.”
Written by Clay Farris Naff at the Huffington Post. Continue HERE
Slovak musician Lukáš Kmit responded by improvising his own classical version of the Nokia ringtone. Orthodox Jewish synagogue in Presov Slovakia. Recorded by GREATMILAN in July 30, 2011
El Chaco meteorite, Campo del Cielo, near Gancedo, Chaco, Argentina
Blobs of light (M I T C H Ǝ L L/flickr/CC-BY-2.0) 
Indian IT professionals are pictured at an industry event in Bangalore in 2010. India’s urban youth are suffering social-media “fatigue,” prompting a number to delete their Facebook and other accounts, according to a new study.
Leif Parsons
Marrakech (Morocco)
Jeff Widener holds his photo of Tank Man in Tienanmen Square from 1989.
Steve McCurry holds his 1984 photo of a young woman from Peshawar, Pakistan. “I looked for this girl for 17 years and finally found her in 2002. Her name is Sharbat Gula.”
Multiverse by BellaCielo
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