Medical Simulation is Jim Johnston’s recent work shot at The Bristol Medical Simulation Centre, a training facility in West England. This center provides medical students and clinicians the opportunity to rehearse and perfect procedures on Human Patient Simulators (HPS’s)—fullscale and fully interactive human body simulators—in efforts to improve competency and reduce the 1-5% of accidental deaths that occur in hospitals due to human error.
So it goes with the brain. We are the aliens in that landscape, and the brain is an even more complicated cipher. It is composed of 100 billion electrically active cells called neurons, each connected to many thousands of its neighbors. Each neuron relays information in the form of miniature voltage spikes, which are then converted into chemical signals that bridge the gap to other neurons. Most neurons send these signals many times per second; if each signaling event were to make a sound as loud as a pin dropping, the cacophony from a single human head would blow out all the windows. The complexity of such a system bankrupts our language; observing the brain with our current technologies, we mostly detect an enigmatic uproar.
Looking at the brain from a distance isn’t much use, nor is zooming in to a single neuron. A new kind of science is required, one that can track and analyze the activity of billions of neurons simultaneously.
Excerpt from an article written by DAVID EAGLEMAN, NYT. Continue HERE
For the first time in history individual piano notes have been made visible using the CymaScope instrument. The piano notes were painstakingly recorded by Evy King and then fed into the CymaScope one by one and the results recorded in high definition video. Click HERE to see sound.
Shannon Novak, a New Zealand-born fine artist, commissioned us to image 12 piano notes as inspiration for a series of 12 musical canvases. We decided to image the notes in video mode because when we observed the ‘A1′ note we discovered, surprisingly, that the energy envelope changes over time as the string’s harmonics mix in the piano’s wooden bridge. Instead of the envelope being fairly stable, as we had imagined, the harmonics actually cause the CymaGlyphs to be wonderfully dynamic. Our ears can easily detect the changes in the harmonics and the CymaScope now reveals them–probably a first in acoustic physics.
Capturing the dynamics was only possible with HD video but taming the dynamics of the piano’s first strike, followed by the short plateau and long decay phase, was tricky. We achieved the result with the help of a professional audio compressor operating in real time.
The Cymascope is an instrument that makes sound or music visible, creating detailed 3D impressions of sound or music vibrations. Here the rapidly expanding sphere is captured in a frozen moment. The interior reveals a beautiful and complex structure representing the rich harmonic nature of violin music.
All text and images via Cymascope
The Open Library of Humanities (OLH): a project exploring a PLOS-style model for the humanities and social sciences. This site aims to give the background to and rationale for such a project along with an initial call for participants so that we can put a team together in Spring 2013. As their preliminary statement: we are not affiliated in any way with PLOS. This website will be used for the preliminary stages of developing the organizational structure of OLH, as we launch as a not-for-profit company, and in the run-up to launching the actual journal and database.
“Commercial speech – advertising – makes up most of what we share as a culture…As the language of commercialism has become louder, the language of high culture has become quieter.” – James B. Twitchell, Twenty Ads that Shook the World
Throughout the modern period, advertising and consumer culture have dominated everyday life; moreover, the trappings of commercialism permeate much of supposed ‘high culture’. Commodities clutter the pages of novels from Dickens and Zola to Bret Easton Ellis; works by Joyce and DeLillo are enlivened by advertising jingles and slogans; brands and trademarks pervade the practice of artists from Picasso to Warhol and the visualisation of consumer desire is appropriated and challenged in the work of Richard Hamilton and Martha Rosler.
Whether celebrating or critiquing advertising and consumer culture, art reflects our enduring fascination with them, despite research into the psychological effects of advertising, concerns over the evils of consumerism, and the often sinister nature of market research. The recent television show Mad Men, for instance, has revivified interest and scholarly debate surrounding the power of advertising and the consumer, as well as restaging debates around sexism, truth and the heteronormative ideal. Meanwhile, sociology in the wake of Erving Goffman continues to explore advertising’s uses and abuses of gender, identity and desire. Countervailing against consumerism and advertising’s many critics, theorists such as Michel de Certeau and the critical movement Thing Theory have endeavoured to examine advertising and consumer culture from a standpoint that goes beyond the model of the ‘passive consumer’ or Marx’s account of commodity fetishism.
Topics for discussion may include but are by no means limited to:
- The ways in which advertising and consumer culture intersect with issues of class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity
- Psychological/psychoanalytic perspectives on advertising and consumer behaviour; how identity is created and reflected through participation in consumer culture; the legacy of Freud and Bernays.
- How artists have appropriated the techniques of advertising, or have been co-opted by advertising and commodity culture (Koons, Rosler, Murakami, Kusama and Hirst) -Theorists who have engaged with advertising and consumer culture (Adorno, Barthes, Baudrillard, Certeau, Fukuyama, Goffman, Klein, Marx, McLuhan).
- The use of music in advertisements.
- The formal innovations literature has adopted to create a poetics of advertising/consumer culture.
- Shopping, the rise of the department store, brand names, and their representation in culture.
- Histories of advertising agencies or ‘ad-men’.
- How the importance of advertising in art may challenge the boundaries between high and low culture and/or modernism and postmodernism.
- Anti-consumerist movements (the Situationist International, Adbusters) and strategies (détournement, culture jamming).
- The recent transformations advertising has undergone as a result of social media -The advert as spectacle or ‘event’ (celebrity endorsements, Christmas advertising, product placement, Pawel Althamer’s Real Time Movie).
- Figures who have worked in advertising, either before or during their artistic careers (Fitzgerald, Rushdie, DeLillo, Warhol, Lynch).
- Political advertising and the roles of politics in advertising.
Submissions are now open for the Advertising and Consumer Culture symposium. More info HERE
Last month, 100 students attending the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design (NSCAD) interrupted a board meeting to read their manifesto.
“Our manifesto was collectively written by the student faculty and staff to reaffirm what is essentially to NSCAD as a university.”
“The meeting was pretty much immediately adjourned once the students entered the room,” she says. “Half the board members left, but some stayed and had a conversation with students.”
Here is their manifesto: MANIFESTO FOR A VIBRANT, STRONG AND INDEPENDENT NSCAD
Via NSCAD is Alive and The Chronicle Herald.
Frans Evers’s The Academy of the Senses is a book wanting to be three books at once. A study of the scientific approaches to synesthesia, related to the psycho-physical research conducted by Evers during his studies at the university; an alternative art history of the twentieth century based on the double paradigm of Castel’s clavecin oculaire and Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk; and a full account of the genesis of the Interfaculty Image & Sound. To encompass this entire range of subject, Evers coined a new term, “synesthetics,” to denote the experience, creative force, and study of synesthesia.
Throughout his career, Evers has profiled himself as an educational reformer. Together with electronic music pioneer Dick Raaijmakers, he started a series of projects and lectures exploring the interaction of music and fine arts, which culminated in the establishment of the first multimedia department in the Netherlands, the Interfaculty Image & Sound at the University of the Arts in The Hague, which Evers headed from 1989 until 2007. This book maps out the theoretical and artistic foundations of this educational reform project, as well as its synesthetic output: large multi-media performances such as a reworking of Anton Schoenberg’s Die Glückliche Hand, Mondrian’s Promenoir, and Scheuer im Haag.
The Academy of the Senses is a “source book,” a work of inspiration, rather than a rigid account of historical facts. It provides anyone with an interest in the wondrous realm of multimedia arts and synesthesia as a creative force, whether student or professional, an introduction into the foundations and extensions of seeing sound and hearing colors throughout the centuries.
Text and Image via Vangervenoei
Architektur für Kinder is an ongoing research project about the history of playgrounds and will transform into an international show in the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh PA (June 2013).
Sensor technologies are all the rage right now, and for good reason. As a kid one of my favorite watches was a Casio with a temperature sensor in it, yet my iPhone 5 has to traverse a network of hardware devices to tell me the temperature, and even then the sensor is miles away. If we want our devices to be smarter, they’re going to need more sensory input about our surroundings. I interviewed Dr. George Yu, the man behind the Node, a platform for sensory input which happens to work with iOS devices.
Today there’s news of the Lapka set of sensors for your iPhone, and a few days ago I read news of the SCOUT, a sort of personal medical Tricorder (although nowhere near as powerful as the ones featured in Star Trek). While Lapka looks nice, how many people really need to measure radiation on a regular basis? Also, logging your EM field for the day is great, but what’s the practical use?
What’s been lacking in the past has been a sort of basic utility device with attachments that you can add as needed, all of which enable your iPhone to “see” the world around it. As if the iPhone were compatible with Batman’s utility belt. Enter Node, a sort of Wiimote-meets-Tricorder device that’s more of a platform than iOS accessory. It’s designed to be functional, has high-grade equipment inside and is hacker friendly.
Text by Victor Agreda, Jr via Tuaw. Continue HERE
Images via Variable Technologies
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is built by a community–a community of Wikipedians who are expected to “assume good faith” when interacting with one another. In Good Faith Collaboration, Joseph Reagle examines this unique collaborative culture.
Wikipedia, says Reagle, is not the first effort to create a freely shared, universal encyclopedia; its early twentieth-century ancestors include Paul Otlet’s Universal Repository and H. G. Wells’s proposal for a World Brain. Both these projects, like Wikipedia, were fuelled by new technology–which at the time included index cards and microfilm. What distinguishes Wikipedia from these and other more recent ventures is Wikipedia’s good-faith collaborative culture, as seen not only in the writing and editing of articles but also in their discussion pages and edit histories. Keeping an open perspective on both knowledge claims and other contributors, Reagle argues, creates an extraordinary collaborative potential.
Wikipedia’s style of collaborative production has been imitated, analyzed, and satirized. Despite the social unease over its implications for individual autonomy, institutional authority, and the character (and quality) of cultural products, Wikipedia’s good-faith collaborative culture has brought us closer than ever to a realization of the century-old pursuit of a universal encyclopedia.
Foreword by Lawrence Lessig
Publisher MIT Press, 2010
History and Foundation of Information Science Series
ISBN 0262014475, 9780262014472
244 pages
Text via MITPress
Download HERE
A Summer School focused on the future of food consumption, its new urban landscape, environments of novel culinary exploration, hybridization of traditional practices, rites and festivals with contemporary digital design technologies, prototyping protocols and bio-gardening techniques.
The teaching model of this Summer School is grounded on the experimental tradition of the Architectural Association and on the design philosophy of ecoLogicStudio, that will curate the event and co-run the design workshop. After setting up our Urban LAB in the SPAZIOFMGperl’architettura gallery [sponsored by Active], we will embark in a series of exploration trips and “gardening” experiments around the emergent bio-farming network of Milano Parco Sud, site to 2015World Expo; inspired by the achievements of the Slow Food movement, we will radicalize their efforts through the deliberate contamination of the traditional and the futuristic, the natural and the bioengineered. Our ambition with AA Italy ‘cyber-GARDENing the city’ is to enjoy 10 intense days within the country with the highest concentration of culinary traditions and learn new cutting edge design techniques to manifest the possibilities of a radical interpretation of such traditions as new global bio-lifestyles. The aspiring cyber-gardeners will be able to explore and invent new hybrid design practices by combining Applets design with distributed urban sensing and mapping, computational parametric design with hydroponic cultivation, and cutting edge digital animation with journalistic and critical narrative. These tree design clusters will be interfaced and interrelated during the workshop giving to all participants the opportunity to experiment with multiple techniques and challenge different aspects of the brief. This final outcome will be a single 1:1 prototypical space to be set up within the lobby of our urban LAB; a space embedded with biological life, sensing potential, ecosystem narrative and real-time social networking interface; a space for the discussion and re-definition of urban agricultural services and supply chain.
Text and Image via cyberGARDENS
Lauren was always a top student, but the pressures of her first year studying for a PhD in atmospheric chemistry at a UK university sent her spiraling into depression. At best, she couldn’t focus on academic tasks, feeling as if her brain was “scrambled”; at worst, she couldn’t get out of bed.
She developed a crippling fear of presenting her research. “Doing a PhD is such a personal thing, one that you’ve invested so much time in, that any criticism can feel like a direct reflection of yourself,” says Lauren.
But she did something that many postgraduates do not: she got help. With counseling and medication, Lauren — a pseudonym that she uses on a blog detailing her experience (see go.nature.com/4ta9fo) — is entering the final year of her PhD. Hers is one of more than 50 stories highlighted on the website Students Against Depression, funded by the Charlie Waller Memorial Trust in Thatcham, UK. “The website aims to raise awareness that depression isn’t a personal failing or weakness; it’s a serious condition that requires treatment,” says psychologist Denise Meyer, the website’s project manager.
Text and Image via Nature. Continue article written by Virginia Gewin HERE
Performing Architecture is a one-day symposium – on Saturday, October 13, 2012 – bringing together significant theorists and practitioners in the fields of architecture and performance and inviting a broader engagement with the artistic and academic community. In parallel with the art world’s return to performance and a renewed search for architecture’s social and political relevance, this symposium seeks to move beyond disciplinary hegemony in the dissemination of architecture today.
Pedro Gadanho (MoMA) and RoseLee Goldberg (Performa) will explore questions of political and aesthetic representation in their respective curatorial practices. Vito Acconci (Acconci Studio) and Jill Stoner (UC Berkeley) will engage the hermeneutics of performativity in the critical and material destructuring of space. Liz Diller (Diller Scofidio + Renfro) will present works that deal with spectatorship in relation to theater, institutional and public space. Artist Mary Ellen Carroll will demonstrate the performative gesture in her work, and question architecture’s appropriation of the public. Alex Schweder will enact an architectural renovation in real time. Victoria Øye (Canadian Centre for Architecture), Brynn Hatton (Northwestern University), Carlin Wing (New York University), and Timothy Simonds (Brown University) will present recent research on the materialization of performance in contemporary architecture. With the issues addressed at Performing Architecture, we hope to offer lasting provocations to how we think of the body, space, structure, and design in the disciplines of performance and architecture – and somewhere between the two.
Text via Performing Architecture
A utopia without pregnancy or childbearing? That was the dream of the controversial Dialectic of Sex author, who was found dead on Tuesday at 67.
It’s hard to imagine that Shulamith Firestone and Helen Gurley Brown thought very highly of each other. Gurley Brown wore immaculate make-up and had a driver. There were needlepoint pillows in her office. She had sex. She told other women that they should have sex, too.
Firestone, on the other hand, did not have sex. In fact, she was a political celibate. She encouraged other women to become celibate. Some of them did. She wore owl glasses; she looked like the 70s radical she was.
Firestone, whose death was reported yesterday, will not receive a fraction of the encomia Gurley Brown did after her death earlier this month. Why? Both women were feminist pioneers. Both wrote canonical feminist texts that became bestsellers when they were published about a half century ago. Both shaped absolutely the ways we think about gender, education, and the family today. Both put sex at the center of their analyses.
Excerpt of an article written by Emily Chertoff, at The Atlantic. Continue HERE
According to EteRNA: By playing EteRNA, you will participate in creating the first large-scale library of synthetic RNA designs. Your efforts will help reveal new principles for designing RNA-based switches and nanomachines — new systems for seeking and eventually controlling living cells and disease-causing viruses. By interacting with thousands of players and learning from real experimental feedback, you will be pioneering a completely new way to do science. Join the global laboratory!
EteRNA is starting with simple shapes like “the finger” and “the cross” to make sure you can nail the fundamentals. And then we’ll be moving on to elaborate shapes like trees. And then molecules that switch folds when they sense a specific other piece of RNA. This might take a few weeks, or it might take a year — we want to make sure we can ace these exercises.
After that, we will embark on one of a few epic projects – perhaps we’ll make the first RNA random-access memory for a computer. Or switches that enables cells to fluoresce if they start expressing cancer genes. Or how about a nanomotor? Or a nanoLED display? There are lots of options, and we’ll let you propose your own and choose.
Finally, you’ll start seeing a few other kinds of puzzles popping up in later stages: The ability to play with RNAs in three dimensions. The ability to see natural RNAs from bacteria, viruses, and humans; and challenges to predict their properties. Stay tuned.
Play EteRNA
Ram Singh, 17, earns just one dollar from the 100 cups of tea he makes every day outside Delhi railway station, but each evening, after packing up, he goes to the bank and deposits nearly half of it.
Singh holds an account at a special bank, run for — and mostly by — Indian street children, that keeps what little money they have safe and seeks to instill the idea that savings, however meager, are important.
Just one among millions of street children who rely on menial jobs for survival, Singh is determined to make his work pay some sort of future dividend.
Excerpt from an article written at France24. Continue HERE
This book explores the relationship between living, code and software. Technologies of code and software increasingly make up an important part of our urban environment. Indeed, their reach stretches to even quite remote areas of the world. Life in Code and Software introduces and explores the way in which code and software are becoming the conditions of possibility for human living, crucially forming a computational ecology, made up of disparate software ecologies, that we inhabit. As such we need to take account of this new computational environment and think about how today we live in a highly mediated, code-based world. That is, we live in a world where computational concepts and ideas are foundational, or ontological, which I call computationality, and within which, code and software become the paradigmatic forms of knowing and doing. Such that other candidates for this role, such as: air, the economy, evolution, the environment, satellites, etc., are understood and explained through computational concepts and categories.
Introduction: What is Code and Software?
Thinking Software
Code Literacy (‘iteracy’)
Decoding Code
Software Ecologies
Attributions
Text and Image via Life in Code and Software. Content edited by David M. Berry
The Baining—one of the indigenous cultural groups of Papua New Guinea—have the reputation, at least among some researchers, of being the dullest culture on earth. Early in his career, in the 1920s, the famous British anthropologist Gregory Bateson spent 14 months among them, until he finally left in frustration. He called them “unstudiable,” because of their reluctance to say anything interesting about their lives and their failure to exhibit much activity beyond the mundane routines of daily work, and he later wrote that they lived “a drab and colorless existence.” Forty years later, Jeremy Pool, a graduate student in anthropology, spent more than a year living among them in the attempt to develop a doctoral dissertation. He too found almost nothing interesting to say about the Baining, and the experience caused him to leave anthropology and go into computer science. Finally, however, anthropologist Jane Fajans, now at Cornell University, figured out a way to study them.
Excerpt from a text written by Peter Gray, Psychology Today. Continue HERE
Image via
Stockholm Resilience Centre advances research on the governance of social-ecological systems with a special emphasis on resilience – the ability to deal with change and continue to develop.
The aim is to create a world-leading transdisciplinary research center that advances the understanding of complex social-ecological systems and generates new and elaborated insights and means for the development of management and governance practices. The new center will advise policymakers from all over the world, and develop innovative collaboration with relevant actors on local social-ecological systems to the global policy arena.
“In order to solve the great environmental problems of the world, we need to change course. Our hope is that the Stockholm Resilience Centre will contribute essential knowledge that is needed to steer development onto a sustainable path,” says Johan Rockström, Executive Director of Stockholm Resilience Centre.
“We want to build a unique transdisciplinary research environment where innovative ideas can flourish. By combining new forms of cooperation with a holistic perspective, we hope to generate the insights that are needed to strengthen societies’ and the ecosystems’ capacities to meet a world which spins faster and faster,” says Carl Folke, Science Director of Stockholm Resilience Centre.
Text and Images via Stockholm Resilience Centre
The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society works to integrate contemplative awareness and contemporary life in order to help create a more just, compassionate, reflective, and sustainable society.
Contemplative practices, including prayer, meditation, yoga, and many contemplative arts, help individuals regain balance and calm in the midst of challenging circumstances. This state of calm centeredness provides effective stress reduction and can also help address issues of meaning, values, and spirit. Contemplative practices can help people develop greater empathy and communication skills, improve focus and concentration, reduce stress and enhance creativity. In time, with sustained commitment, they cultivate insight, wise discernment, and a loving and compassionate approach to life.
The Institute of Urbanology learns from its environment while contributing to its improvement. Its research is intended to be directly relevant to the localities where it works as well as anyone interested in urban development and neighborhood life.
Urbanology is defined as the understanding of incremental developmental processes and daily practices in any given locality through direct engagement with people and places. The institute contributes to the debate on urban development by engaging with local community groups, creating new concepts, implementing projects and recommending strategies and policies.
The Institute sharpened its methodology through years of fieldwork in New York, Bogota, Tokyo, Istanbul, New Delhi, Goa and Mumbai. It has offices in Dharavi, Mumbai and Aldona, Goa. In Dharavi, the Institute studies homegrown practices in the fields of housing, artisanship and trade, and physical and theoretical spaces where these fields converge. In Goa, it looks at the transforming role of villages within larger economic, cultural, ecological and urban systems.
The Institute of Urbanology regularly organizes seminars and workshops that bring together local actors, activists, artists, architects and urbanists. It uses art, architecture, story telling, and other creative means of expression to stimulate debates and intervention in the urban realm. It uses the web as well as live events to document, convene, produce and diffuse diverse modes of development.
The Institute of Urbanology is a registered Trust in the State of Goa. Its trustees are James Ferreira, Frederick Noronha and Abhay Sardesai. Its advisors include Amitav Ghosh and Yehuda E. Safran.
The Institute of Urbanology signed research partnerships with the Laboratory for Urban Sociology (LASUR) at the Swiss Intitute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, and the Max Plank Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in German.
Text via The Institute of Urbanology
SymbioticA is the first research laboratory of its kind, enabling artists and researchers to engage in wet biology practices in a biological science department. It also hosts residents, workshops, exhibitions and symposiums.
With an emphasis on experiential practice, SymbioticA encourages better understanding and articulation of cultural ideas around scientific knowledge and informed critique of the ethical and cultural issues of life manipulation.
The Centre offers a new means of artistic inquiry where artists actively use the tools and technologies of science, not just to comment about them but also to explore their possibilities.
Text via SymbioticA. Image above: Oron Catts (Australian, born 1967) and Ionat Zurr (Australian, born 1970)
Strelka Press is a radical publishing house for original writing on architecture, design and the city. Its mission is to promote a new wave of thinking on contemporary issues in architecture and design. The publishing house has a global perspective, but it also has a special interest in how the international discourse can influence the Russian context. Apart from printed books, Strelka Press offers a new platform for long-form writing in the shape of short e-books that give readers instant access at affordable prices.
Strelka Press is the publishing arm of Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design. Based in London and Moscow, Strelka Press publishes books in English and Russian.
Strelka Institute is a non-profit organization aimed at generating knowledge, producing new ideas and making them come true. Its lecture halls and studios provide free tuition for international young specialists with backgrounds in architecture, design, social sciences, etc. Its courtyard hosts open lectures, conferences and film screenings. Its bar provides both a place for the social networking of creative people from around the globe and a source of Strelka’s financial backing: what the bar earns goes to support the institute.
Strelka is an educational centre that is open to the world and ready to share. What happens here spills out into social exchange.
The output of the institute is multidimensional. It includes graduates and their projects. It involves a growing network of creativity. But, most importantly, it helps shape the reality of tomorrow.
Jason Freeman is an Associate Professor of Music in the College of Architecture at Georgia Institute of Technology.
Over the last few years, a wide range of new publishing initiatives have developed within the arts and design fields. New book fairs are emerging in major cities, small publishing houses and independent presses are frequently initiated and the alternative bookshop seems to recurrently be reborn in new forms. Something that seems to tie these activities together, is that they are run by practitioners themselves — photographers, artists, authors and graphic designers — often with a visionary idea of how to redefine the world of publishing.
On May 25th 2012, a few of these interesting and inspiring practitioners have been invited to Stockholm to take part in the seminar ‘Publishing as (part-time) Practice’. Confirmed participating publishers are: Elin Maria Olaussen / Karen Christine Tandberg from Torpedo Books and Press (NO), Georg Rutishauser from Edition Fink (CH), Matthew Stadler from Publication Studio (US), Anna Gerber / Britt Iversen from Visual Editions (UK), Nille Svensson from Nilleditions (SE), Jacob Grønbech Jensen / Rikard Heberling / Emi-Simone Zawall from Drucksache (SE) and more to be announced. Andrew Blauvelt from Walker Art Center (US) will introduce the event as well as provide a concluding reflection at the end of the evening.
Text via Konst & Teknik
Founded in 1979 as part of the Dada Archive and Research Center, the International Dada Archive is a scholarly resource for the study of the historic Dada movement. The Archive has compiled a comprehensive collection of documentation and scholarship relating to Dada.
The collection of the International Dada Archive is made up of works by and about the Dadaists including books, articles, microfilmed manuscript collections, videorecordings, sound recordings, and online resources. Primary access to the entire collection is through the International Online Bibliography of Dada, a catalog containing approximately 60,000 titles. This collection is housed in various departments of the University of Iowa Libraries; most of its holdings are in either the Main Library or the Art Library.
All text via the International Dada Archive
Each month, the wonderful Domus Mixtape series brings together musicians, writers, artists and designers to create live sound-based portraits of cities around the world.
All text below comes from DOMUS MIXTAPE.
“For the first in our series of mixtapes on cities and their sounds, Domus travels to Mexico City, the sprawling Aztec metropolis that today is home to 20 million people. There, Daniel Perlin catches up with this month’s special guest, journalist and blogger Daniel Hernandez, to patch together an audible portrait of the Mexican capital’s underground music scene. The resulting mix is a mélange of Mexican cumbia, ska, rockabilly, hip-hop, tribal guarachero and white noise from the frenetic streets of the Distrito Federal. The mixtape includes tracks by Afrodita, Toy Selectah, Kumbia Queers, Sonido Sonoramico, Los Rebel Cats, Maldita Vecindad, as well as a segment by sound artist Rogelio Sosa and Hernandez reading an ode to the city’s noise from his upcoming book, Down and Delirious in Mexico City. Orale, chilangos!”
Tracklist
1. tepito-5may2010 – Daniel Goldaracena
2. Ni Negrita Si Baila – Sonido Sonoramico
3. Daniel Hernandez_1/Centro 11/27/10 – Daniel Hernandez and Daniel Perlin
4. El Obachere – (3Ball mix) – Erick Rincon & Alan Rosales
5. Quinto Patio Ska – Maldita Vecindad Y Los Hijos Del Quinto Patio
6. Daniel Hernandez_2/Centro 11/27/10 – Daniel Hernandez and Daniel Perlin
7. Chicalango – MC Luka
8. Rayo de Sol – Sonidero Nacional
9. GOTA (Hijo de la Cumbia Remix) – Sekreto feat Morenito de Fuego
10. Te quiero un chingo – Kumbia Queers
11. Daniel Hernandez_3/Centro 11/27/10 – Daniel Hernandez and Daniel Perlin
12. Chica Sensual – Sonido Espectral
13. No Hagas Caso A Tus Papas – Los Rebel Cats
13. Daniel Hernandez_4 – Daniel Hernandez
14. Vaiven No. 1 (Soundinstllation audio v2) – Rogelio Sosa
15. Daniel Hernandez_5/Centro 11/27/10 – Daniel Hernandez and Daniel Perlin
16. Welcome to the Witch House (†‡† Remix)/BESTIA (Toy Selectah Mex-More Remix ) – Mater Suspiria Vision/Helloseahorse
17. pasconcito (dj n-ron rico mix) – Afroditas
“Most Londoners will recognise that walking past four closed pubs on a Sunday lunchtime is a sure sign of impending apocalypse. So when I found myself walking through the antiseptic, empty, nerve-centre of banks and insurance brokers in London’s square mile one weekend, the sheer quantity of unlit supermarkets, shopping centres, clothes shops, cafes, salad bars and pubs was terrifying. The sound of this city was a deafening, noisy, silence.”
Tracklist
01 Softmain – Dream Crown
02 Scanner – Candles + Beatrice Galilee reading
03 We Are Grave – Permanent
04 Salwa Azar – Poseidon Sea
05 si-cut.db – Academic Hit
06 Scanner – Self Same Circuits
07 Bladzez Krome – Liquid
08 Neck Dust – Shrill
09 Brick Lane Buskers
10 Scanner – Night Haunts
“So let’s be clear. I am not from Rio de Janeiro. I am not a Carioca. Even after 18 years of coming and going, 5+ years lived and hours worked, partied, lost, found and wandered, I am not a Carioca. What I have is the serious problem so many gringos have. The idea of Rio has invaded me, left its mark, devoured me and consumed whatever thoughts and sounds resonate in my brain. “Tupi or not Tupi?” Goes the anthropohagic manifesto, and in writing, enunciating the multiplicity of times, spaces, sounds and feelings that is Rio. Rio, of course, does not exist, as no single city exists. It is instead a bricolage, defined geographically by divisions between its largely working-class Zona Norte, and its smaller, wealthier, iconic, Zona Sul. At first impression, its appearance from the ground is conflicted, agonistic, its favelas inescapable from view, requiring a double-consciousness and radical strategies of internal conflict negotiation. And now, annexing the often-gated zones of Barra de Tijuca, Jacaerepagua and on, any attempt to define a homogeneous sound of this city becomes even more remote, even more absurd.”
Tracklist
01. Natureza nº 1 em Mi Maior—Lucas Santtana
02. Eu Nasci Em Angola—Caxambu da Comunidade Sao Jose da Serra-
03. Dizem Que Sou Louco/Frogs, Pops, Rio, Nite —M.V. Bill
04. Orquestra Filarmônica da Favela—DJ Sany Pitbull
05. ta tomado (n-ron tamborclap riddim)—bonde nervoso
06. Alerte Limão—Chelpa Ferro
07. Pau de Arara. Baião de São Sebastião Baião—Luiz Gonzaga & Gonzaguinha
08. Crowd, Rio, Restaurant, Copa Cabana
09. Nao Foi Em Vão (Original Album Version)—Orquestra Imperial
10. Animais Sem Asas/papa capim—+2 Moreno, Domenico & Kassin, Meu Tambor—+2 Moreno, Domenico & Kassin
11. Fuego (Maga Bo Remix)—Bomba Estereo
12. Olha A Virada—Mocidade Independente, rap de felicidade accapella—Mcs Cidinho & Doca
13. Macumbinha/DJBR/toques para celular – abertura dos bailes funk
14. IDogBarks Constant 15. V.V.—B. Negão
16. Bells, Church, RioGloria Evening
17. embalaeu (N-RON and Reganomics mix)—Clementina de Jesus
18. rebichada (N-RON AMENMIX)—Chico Buarque e os trapalhões
19. Radio Samba—Nacão Zumbi
20. love banana—João Brasil
21. Shottas—Leo Justi
22. Angicos (paulo rafael mix)—Chico Science, Fred 04, Siba, Lucio Maia, Paulo Rafael
23. Crowd, Rio, Gávea
24. Vai Saudade—Velha Guarda da Portela
For Free Downloads and More Cities visit Domus Mixtapes
Arvind Gupta is an Indian toy inventor that popularizes science. His series of films by Arvind Gupta Toys is absolutely wonderful.
To the biologist Edward O. Wilson, the Metropolitan Museum of Art encapsulates some of the conflicting impulses natural selection has instilled in humans: the innate drive for expression that spurs some of us to make art, the selfishness that motivates others to earn the riches needed to collect it, and the altruism that compels the donation of collections for the public good — as long as the donors’ names are inscribed on the walls too.
But asked to imagine the museum from the perspective of ants, whose intricate social world he has built a towering reputation by studying, Dr. Wilson painted a scene that was less a lesson in evolution than a chaotic free-for-all.
“To them the crowds would just be a flank-to-flank herd of enormous elephants you have to dodge around,” he said with a boyish giggle from the museum’s teeming steps during a recent visit to New York to promote his 27th book, “The Social Conquest of Earth,” which is being published Monday by Liveright. “I don’t think ants would have any aesthetic or intellectual interest in the museum, though they would certainly find a happy home in Central Park.”
Excerpt of an article by JENNIFER SCHUESSLER at NYT. Continue HERE
Intellectuals have been accused of failing to restore a European confidence undermined by crisis. Yet calls for legitimating European narratives – combined with nostalgia for a golden age of Europeanism – remain faithful to the logic of nineteenth-century nation building, argues Jan-Werner Müller. What, then, should Europe’s intellectuals be doing?
Towards the end of last year, as the Eurozone crisis was reaching (yet another) climax, a number of journalists in the German quality press alerted their readers to an aspect of the crisis which had received scant attention so far: the euro crisis marked not only the failure of Europe’s central bankers, or Greek bureaucrats, or Italian non-taxpayers, or Angela Merkel (all depending on one’s perspective) – it also signified a comprehensive failure of intellectuals. Why were they not defending the great achievements of European integration? Why were they not putting forward appealing visions of the continent’s future, instead squandering a great legacy of mutual trust and understanding among Europeans which had been nurtured over many decades? Were they simply sleeping through a crisis that might eventually usher in the return of ugly nationalisms? Or even military conflict, as elder European statesmen like Helmut Kohl never tire of warning?
Excerpt of an article written by Jan-Werner Müller at EUROZINE. Continue HERE
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Should Wanderlustmind live?
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