Dr. Maya Angelou is one of the most renowned and influential voices of our time. Hailed as a global renaissance woman, Dr. Angelou is a celebrated poet, memoirist, novelist, educator, dramatist, producer, actress, historian, filmmaker, and civil rights activist.
Born on April 4th, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, Dr. Angelou was raised in St. Louis and Stamps, Arkansas. In Stamps, Dr. Angelou experienced the brutality of racial discrimination, but she also absorbed the unshakable faith and values of traditional African-American family, community, and culture.
As a teenager, Dr. Angelou’s love for the arts won her a scholarship to study dance and drama at San Francisco’s Labor School. At 14, she dropped out to become San Francisco’s first African-American female cable car conductor. She later finished high school, giving birth to her son, Guy, a few weeks after graduation. As a young single mother, she supported her son by working as a waitress and cook, however her passion for music, dance, performance, and poetry would soon take center stage.
In 1954 and 1955, Dr. Angelou toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess. She studied modern dance with Martha Graham, danced with Alvin Ailey on television variety shows and, in 1957, recorded her first album, Calypso Lady. In 1958, she moved to New York, where she joined the Harlem Writers Guild, acted in the historic Off-Broadway production of Jean Genet’s The Blacks and wrote and performed Cabaret for Freedom.
As the last American soldiers left Iraq in December, so, too, did many of the journalists who had covered the war, leaving little in the way of media coverage of post-war Iraq. While there were some notable exceptions — including two fine articles by MIT’s John Tirman that asked how many Iraqis had been killed as a result of the US invasion — overall the American press published few articles on the effects of the occupation, especially the consequences for Iraqis.
As a college professor, I have a special interest in what happened to Iraqi universities under US occupation. The story is not pretty.
Until the 1990s, Iraq had perhaps the best university system in the Middle East. Saddam Hussein’s regime used oil revenues to underwrite free tuition for Iraqi university students — churning out doctors, scientists, and engineers who joined the country’s burgeoning middle class and anchored development. Although political dissent was strictly off-limits, Iraqi universities were professional, secular institutions that were open to the West, and spaces where male and female, Sunni and Shia mingled. Also the schools pushed hard to educate women, who constituted 30 percent of Iraqi university faculties by 1991. (This is, incidentally, better than Princeton was doing as late as 2009.) With a reputation for excellence, Iraqi universities attracted many students from surrounding countries — the same countries that are now sheltering the thousands of Iraqi professors who have fled US-occupied Iraq.
Written by Hugh Gusterson, The Bulletin of Atomic Sciences. Continue HERE
“If you design with a view to optimize anything, it is bound to end up suboptimal, because it can’t cope with change. This applies as much to political constitutions, universities and buildings”
~ Jeff Mulgan
It began as a housing marvel. Two decades later, it ended in rubble. But what happened to those caught in between? The Pruitt-Igoe Myth tells the story of the transformation of the American city in the decades after World War II, through the lens of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing development and the St. Louis residents who called it home. At the film’s historical center is an analysis of the massive impact of the national urban renewal program of the 1950s and 1960s, which prompted the process of mass suburbanization and emptied American cities of their residents, businesses, and industries. Those left behind in the city faced a destitute, rapidly de-industrializing St. Louis , parceled out to downtown interests and increasingly segregated by class and race. The residents of Pruitt-Igoe were among the hardest hit. Their gripping stories of survival, adaptation, and success are at the emotional heart of the film. The domestic turmoil wrought by punitive public welfare policies; the frustrating interactions with a paternalistic and cash-strapped Housing Authority; and the downward spiral of vacancy, vandalism and crime led to resident protest and action during the 1969 Rent Strike, the first in the history of public housing. And yet, despite this complex history, Pruitt-Igoe has often been stereotyped. The world-famous image of its implosion has helped to perpetuate a myth of failure, a failure that has been used to critique Modernist architecture, attack public assistance programs, and stigmatize public housing residents. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth seeks to set the historical record straight. To examine the interests involved in Pruitt-Igoe’s creation. To re-evaluate the rumors and the stigma. To implode the myth.
Speakers: Professor Craig Calhoun, Professor Bruno Latour, Alan Rusbridger, Professor Judy Wajcman, David Adjaye, Professor Geoff Mulgan, Lord Richard Rogers, Polly Toynbee.
This event was recorded on 14 May 2010 in Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building.
In this exciting half-day conference two panels on ‘Public Life and Public Policy’ and ‘Cities and the Public Realm’, discuss these themes in the context of the work of Professor Sennett, the eminent sociologist whose recent books include The Culture of the New Capitalism and The Craftsman.
Amidst society’s hopes for a green future, the power of working with nature is still not sufficiently understood or exploited. Too many visions remain divorced from the end user. Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto, the architects and co-founders of London-based ecoLogicStudio, feel that ‘using and interacting with natural elements in a symbiotic way can become a game with ecological benefits.’ Recently they have focused on the potential of algae—micro-algae are used for energy, while macro-algae—like bio-radars or generative agents—is used for filtering water and making food.
New symbiotic algae and seafood/fish farms generated in Crane Greenhouses
As global regions undergo structural and demographic shifts, agritourism and algae farms have huge potential, but models need testing and feedback from people, so that prototypes can be optimally identified as multi-use educational resources related to their living context. ‘You don’t have so many choices at the moment. There is a detachment of production from consumption, when even recycling can be fun’, say ecoLogicStudio. Their Algae Farm for the Swedish Municipality of Simrishamn demonstrates the interactive potentials for algae-related urban activities and architectural prototypes. Here on the Ostersjiön region of Sweden on the Baltic Sea a decaying fishing industry and aging local population ‘calls for the introduction of a new type of economic and urban system.’
HORTUS (Hydro Organisms Responsive To Urban Stimuli) is a new exhibition from ecoLogicStudio that engages with the notions of urban renewable energy and agriculture through a new gardening prototype. Over a four-week growing period, flows of energy (light radiation), matter (biomass, carbon dioxide) and information (images, tweets, stats) will be triggered to induce multiple mechanisms of self-regulation and evolve novel forms of self-organisation. HORTUS proposes an experimental hands-on engagement with these notions, illustrating their potential applicability to the masterplanning of large regional landscapes and the retrofitting of industrial and rural architectural types, as exemplified in the project ‘Regional Algae Farm’ developed by ecoLogicStudio for the Swedish region of Osterlen.
Architectural Association School students, staff and visitors are invited to engage daily with HORTUS to invent new protocols of urban biogardening. A virtual organism such as this offers the opportunity to capture and build up information and cultivation practices, enriching the material experience of the visitor turned urban ‘cyber-gardener’.
Getting out of the cave and seeing things as they really are: that’s what philosophy is about, according to Almira Ribeiro. Ribeiro teaches the subject in a high school in Itapuã, a beautiful, poor, violent neighborhood on the periphery of Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia in Brazil’s northeast. She is the most philosophically passionate person I’ve ever met.
Most of the four million slaves shipped from Africa to Brazil were sold in Salvador, the first residence of Portugal’s colonial rulers. It’s still Brazil’s blackest city. In Ribeiro’s neighborhood, children play football or do capoeira, pray in Pentecostal Churches or worship African gods. Many are involved with drugs; “every year we lose students to crack,” she tells me. And they study philosophy two hours each week because of a 2008 law that mandates philosophy instruction in all Brazilian high schools. Nine million teenagers now take philosophy classes for three years.
“But seeing things as they really are isn’t enough,” Ribeiro insists. As in Plato’s parable in The Republic, the students must go back to the cave and apply what they’ve learned. Their lives give them rich opportunities for such application. The contrast between the new luxury hotels along the beach and Itapuã’s overcrowded streets gives rise to questions about equality and justice. Children kicking around a can introduce a discussion about democracy: football is one of the few truly democratic practices here; success depends on merit, not class privilege. Moving between philosophy and practice, the students can revise their views in light of what Plato, Hobbes, or Locke had to say about equality, justice, and democracy and discuss their own roles as political agents.
Written by Carlos Fraenkel, Boston Review. Continue HERE
There’s no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.
The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience.
“Prejudice is extremely complex and multifaceted, making it critical that any factors contributing to bias are uncovered and understood,” he said.
Controversy ahead
The findings combine three hot-button topics.
“They’ve pulled off the trifecta of controversial topics,” said Brian Nosek, a social and cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia who was not involved in the study. “When one selects intelligence, political ideology and racism and looks at any of the relationships between those three variables, it’s bound to upset somebody.”
Polling data and social and political science research do show that prejudice is more common in those who hold right-wing ideals that those of other political persuasions, Nosek told LiveScience. [7 Thoughts That Are Bad For You]
“The unique contribution here is trying to make some progress on the most challenging aspect of this,” Nosek said, referring to the new study. “It’s not that a relationship like that exists, but why it exists.”
Written by Stephanie Pappas, Live Science. Read Article HERE
For the next 306090 book, guest editor David L. Hays wants to know, “What is essential knowledge for architecture?”What is essential knowledge for architecture?
This frequently posed question targets fundamental principles of design, those basic criteria and priorities through which disciplinary stability is ensured. Yet, insofar as relevance is a core value of architecture, in both theory and practice, the contingent nature of the future guarantees that some forms of knowledge not presently considered essential will eventually become indispensable.
With that condition in mind, the editors of 306090 15, (Non-)Essential Knowledge for (New) Architecture, seek contributions that envision possible futures for architecture through speculations about new disciplinary knowledge. What specific methods, materials, or understandings—tools, ratios, formulas, properties, principles, guidelines, definitions, rules, practices, techniques, reference points, histories, and more—not presently considered essential to architecture could, or should, define its future? Pertinent knowledge might be previously forgotten, currently undervalued, generally misunderstood, or not yet recognized. Architects have long looked both to the outmoded traditions of their discipline and to other fields altogether when imagining possible directions for their work. In blurring the boundary between essential and non-essential knowledge, this inquiry seeks not to codify the contemporary state of the art for architecture, nor to assert the value of multidisciplinarity, but to envision, and potentially catalyze, new disciplinary approaches.
(Non-)Essential Knowledge for (New) Architecture will serve as both a gauge of contemporary concerns and a manual for emergent theory and practice. Submissions are sought from practitioners, theorists, historians, critics, artists, activists, and anyone else with direct or indirect interest in the future of architecture.
Click HERE to submit and for more information.
Deadline: Friday, March 30, 2012
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.
A new school system in Sweden eliminated all of its classrooms in favor of an environment that fosters children’s “curiosity and creativity.”
Vittra, which runs 30 schools in Sweden, wanted learning to take place everywhere in its schools — so it threw out the “old-school” thinking of straight desks in a line in a four-walled classroom (via GOOD).
Vittra most-recently opened Telefonplan School, in Stockholm. Architect Rosan Bosch designed the school so children could work independently in opened-spaces while lounging, or go to “the village” to work on group-projects.
All of the furniture in the school, which looks like a lot of squiggles, is meant to aid students in engaging in conversation while working on projects.
The school is non-traditional in every sense: there are no letter grades and students learn in groups at their level, not necessarily by age.
Admission to the school is free, as long as the child has a personal number (like a social security number) and one of the child’s parents is a Swedish tax payer.
Written by Meredith Galante for Business Insider. Continue HERE
The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture 2010, given by Professor Bruno Latour: “May Nature Be Recomposed? A Few Questions of Cosmopolitics”.
Location: Nobel Museum, Svenska Akademiens Börssal, May 11 2010. The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture is given every spring at the Nobel Museum by an international scholar of excellence.
“Codecademy was created out of the frustrations Zach and Ryan felt with learning how to program. Tired with less effective text and video resources, Ryan and Zach teamed up to create Codecademy, a better, more interactive way to learn programming by actually coding. This is just the beginning. Join us as we make it easy for everyone to love and learn how to code.”
Myths of Rape , by Leslie Labowitz-Starus, Performed for Three Weeks in May, Suzanne Lacy, 1977.
The history of postwar art in Los Angeles is punctuated by dramatic examples of public artworks, large-scale spectacles, expansive performances, and small-scale interventions in the public sphere. The Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival celebrates this history through a contemporary lens, with a series of adaptations, re-inventions, and commissions that are inspired by the installation and performance artists working in Los Angeles between 1945 and 1980.
Throughout the 11-day festival, a group of new public artworks will be on view throughout the city. In addition, new performances will premiere every day, including outdoor visual spectacles, experimental theater and sound art, social and political interventions, and media art. A nightly after-party, Black Box, will provide a space for socializing, and include surprise performances each evening.
The festival is presented as part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-80, an unprecedented collaboration of cultural institutions across Southern California coming together to celebrate the birth of the L.A. art scene. As the festival moves throughout the city, visitors will also be surrounded by dozens of groundbreaking exhibitions about the history of art in Southern California. The festival calendar has been designed to allow time to attend both the performances and nearby exhibitions on each day.
Bracket 3 invites the submission of critical articles and unpublished design projects that investigate the potentials when situations extend beyond norms – into the extremities. We are conditioned, as designers of the built environment, towards the organization of people, programs and movement. Indeed the history of modern urbanism, architecture and building science has been predicated on an anti-entropic notion of programmatic and social order. But are there scenarios in which a state of extremity or imbalance is productive?
Ulrick Beck, in “Risk Society’s Cosmopolitan Moment” suggests that being at risk is the human condition at the beginning of the twenty-first century. While risk produces inequality and destabilization, he argues, it can be the catalyst for the construction of new institutions. The term extreme is defined as outermost, utmost, farthest, last or frontier. Bracket [at Extremes] seeks to understand what new spatial orders emerge in this liminal space. How might it be leveraged as an opportunity for invention? What are the limits of wilderness and control, of the natural and artificial, the real and the virtual? What new landscapes, networks, and urban models might emerge in the wake of destabilized economic, social and environmental conditions?
Bracket [at Extremes] will examine architecture, infrastructure and technology as they operate in conditions of imbalance, negotiate tipping points and test limit states. In such conditions, the status quo is no longer possible; systems must extend performance and accommodate unpredictability. As new protocols emerge, new opportunities present themselves. Bracket [at Extremes] seeks innovative contributions interrogating extreme processes (technologies, operations) and extreme contexts (cultural, climatic). What is the breaking point of architecture at extremes?
Across disciplines academics and artists are researching and creating practices that are highly contextual (determined by the environment in which they are located), exploring ways of articulating specific environments, spaces or places. This conference examines a specific problematic that attends the dissemination of this work: how to engage with ‘being there’ when ‘there’ is not here?
We understand environment (social, built, natural, technological) as that which surrounds and informs us. Through our practice we influence our environment. What we create is shaped by our surroundings. We exist in a relation of mutual exchange; making ourselves other and incorporating that which is other in turn. This conference offers a forum for academics and creative practitioners to come together and engage with articulations of mutual formation: to discuss work as environment.
Such work often relies on direct, personal experience of a particular environment. Transfer and abstraction, necessary for the communication of this work beyond the specifics of this original environment, challenge the work. Negotiating publication or conference environment, for example, necessitates reformulation of the work, engendering changes in texture and experience, in adapting to alternative structures. What do such alterations, translations or transformations, mean for this work?
This conference aims to examine these questions on a very practical level. When it comes to considering environment, what is the relationship between the structures of dissemination and the environment our work seeks to convey? What is the relationship between our academic environment and the work we (aim to) produce? How do we utter our environment?
Poets and writers, artists, academics, social and environmental scientists, performers and musicians, among others, are invited to discuss ways of uttering environment. Organizers seek work that explores the phenomenological sense of speaking with environment. They encourage the use of a diverse range of media as part of this dialogue. Participants are invited to find new ways of expressing their research and/or artistic practice in a conference setting that reflects upon this process of adaptation as a process of practical enquiry.
Deadline for applications: 31st March
Conference: 1st-2nd September 2012
Discipline and sub-disciplines in Mind, Brain, and Education Science. Source: Bramwell for Tokuhama-Espinosa
Evidence-Based Solutions for the Classroom
How do we learn best? What is individual human potential? How do we ensure that children live up to their promise as learners? These questions and others have been posed by philosophers as well neuroscientists, psychologists, and educators for as long as humans have pondered their own existence. Because MBE science moves educators closer to the answers than at any other time in history, it benefits teachers in their efficacy and learners in their ultimate success.
Great teachers have always “sensed” why their methods worked; thanks to brain imaging technology, it is now possible to substantiate many of these hunches with empirical scientific research. For example, good teachers may suspect that if they give their students just a little more time to respond to questions than normal when called upon, they might get better-quality answers. Since 1972 there has been empirical evidence that if teachers give students several seconds to reply to questions posed in class, rather than the normal single second, the probability of a quality reply increases.[1] Information about student response time is shared in some teacher training schools, but not all. Standards in MBE science ensure that information about the brain’s attention span and need for reflection time would be included in teacher training, for example.
The basic premise behind the use of standards in MBE science is that fundamental skills, such as reading and math, are extremely complex and require a variety of neural pathways and mental systems to work correctly. MBE science helps teachers understand why there are so many ways that things can go wrong, and it identifies the many ways to maximize the potential of all learners. This type of knowledge keeps educators from flippantly generalizing, “He has a problem with math,” and rather encourages them to decipher the true roots (e.g., number recognition, quantitative processing, formula structures, or some sub-skill in math). MBE science standards make teaching methods and diagnoses more precise. Through MBE, teachers have better diagnostic tools to help them more accurately understand their students’ strengths and weakness. These standards also prevent teachers from latching onto unsubstantiated claims and “neuromyths” and give them better tools for judging the quality of the information. Each individual has a different set of characteristics and is unique, though human patterns for the development of different skills sets, such as walking and talking, doing math or learning to read, do exist. One of the most satisfying elements of MBE science is having the tools to maximize the potential of each individual as he or she learns new skills.
The following was an excerpt from Mind, Brain, and Education Science: A comprehensive guide to the new brain-based teaching (W.W. Norton) a book based on over 4,500 studies and with contributions from the world’s leaders in MBE Science. Continue HERE
This tool is being developed to provide a low cost, easy to use, and a safe method for making aerial image maps. Over the last two years, we’ve build a global community of mappers who are engaged in discussion around the development and use of these tools. Normally aerial image maps are made from satellites and airplanes. This activity introduces easy methods for making on-demand image maps. Our community is particularly interested in applying this to civic and environmental issues.
Applications and example uses
Residents of the Gulf Coast are using balloons and kites to produce their own aerial imagery of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill… documentation that will be essential for environmental and legal use in coming years. We believe in complete open access to spill imagery and are releasing all imagery from the oil spill mapping project into the public domain. Browse maps and data from the Gulf Coast in the Public Laboratory Archive
How to make your own
at least 1000 ft of string on a spool
a cheap digital camera with “continuous mode”
a balloon or kite
a rubber band
tape & scissors
leather or cloth gloves
How to use it
The illustrated guide includes lots of tips for a successful flight; print it and bring it with you!
Be sure to review the Balloon Mapping Regulations for the US, or the equivalent wherever you are planning to map.
Try to launch your balloon to at least 1000 ft for a good compromise of high resolution vs. large area.
Stay away from power lines, airports, and traffic.
Source: Public Laboratory. More info and download material HERE
An example without the mapping: iPad Survives 100,000+ Foot Fall From Space Near Area 51.
The social network is soon to be filled with stars…not celebrities, but actual celestial bodies. The GLObal Robotic telescopes Intelligent Array (GLORIA) is a €2.5 million project (~$3.4M USD) that will, for the next three years, provide open access to research class robotic telescopes around the world. Spear-headed by Francisco Sanchez at the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, GLORIA will eventually include 17 telescopes on 4 continents, gathering mountains of data that users can help analyze and discuss. Yet the project will be more than simply crowd-sourcing data crunching to the internet: through a system of social karma, participants in GLORIA will be able to actually direct the robotic telescopes and control where they look in the sky. By combining astronomy with Web 2.0, GLORIA aims to gather widespread interest from the internet, and perhaps even accelerate science with the power of the crowd.
Those that speak Spanish may enjoy the following interview of Francisco Sanchez as he discusses GLORIA in Spain:
Officially started on October 1st of 2011, GLORIA will be rolled out fairly slowly, with probably only six or seven of the telescopes available in 2012. Two of the seventeen telescopes haven’t even been installed yet. Despite the staggered launch, Sanchez and his colleagues are operating from a well-established model. The Montegancedo Observatory (affiliated with the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid) is a 10 inch robotic telescope that can already be accessed online via special software called Ciclope Astro. Developed in part by Sanchez, Ciclope Astro is capable of controlling and managing accesss to the telescope, as well as organizing its images and collected data. As GLORIA expands to eventually include all seventeen of its planned telescopes, Ciclope Astro should be able to serve as the hub for the evolving social network that will form around the project.
Text by Aaron Saenz from Singularity Hub. Continue HERE
The Fifth International Deleuze Studies Conference, “Deterritorializing Deleuze,” is being organized in coordination with Southeastern Louisiana University, Department of History and Political Science Tulane University Department of Philosophy.
Although we wait to hear from several invited speakers, currently confirmed speakers include (among others):
Brent Adkins
Jeffrey Bell
Ronald Bogue
Levi Bryant
Ian Buchanan
Claire Colebrook
Gary Genosko
Eugene Holland
Joe Hughes
Eleanor Kaufman
Gregg Lambert
Mary Beth Mader
Catarina Pombo Nabais
Paul Patton
Patricia Pisters
John Protevi
Anne Sauvagnargues
Daniel Smith
Charles Stivale
James Williams
Individual abstracts as well as panel proposals are welcomed at this point and until the submission deadline, which is March 31, 2012. We will also have a mixture of plenary panels and quasi-plenary panels (with only three concurrent panels) on themes appropriate to this year’s theme, Deterritorializing Deleuze. There will thus be, for example, panels on Deleuze and architecture, Deleuze and literature, Deleuze and music, Deleuze and the philosophical tradition, etc. We especially welcome submissions that push Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s) thought in these directions along others that are not listed.
The conference registration fee has yet to be determined, though it will be listed here when it has been. Deadline for registration fees will be June 1, though fees will be discounted for those who pay on or before May 15.
Summer Workshop
Prior to the conference we will have the 6th Annual Deleuze Camp. Spaces are limited so it is recommended that those interested submit their application and registration fee ($225.00) to the Conference organizer by February 1. Applications should include a brief statement of one’s research interests in Deleuze. Selection is made on a first-come first-serve basis. There is also the possibility for presenting a brief 15-minute summary of one’s research work during the workshop. If you are interested in doing so, please make sure to state your desire to do so and provide some detail of what you will be discussing. Applicants will be notified by March 1 whether they will be allotted one of the open-mic slots.
Graph Words is an online interactive English dictionary and thesaurus that helps you find the meanings of words and show connections among associated words. You can easily see the meaning of each by simply placing the mouse cursor over it.
Usage
To search for a word, type the word in the search box at the top of the window and press the “Draw” button. You may also press the enter key instead. After searching for a word, the main display will populate with many words and meanings. The word you searched for will appear in the center of the display, and will be surrounded with words and meanings that are related to it.
To save what is currently displayed in the Graph Words, you can press the “Save as image” button on the toolbar.
Underlayer
Underneath Graph Words lays the WordNet – a large lexical database of English. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. These meanings and semantic relationships are revealed graphically by the HTML5 canvas made available by Graph Words.
TAMAR LEWIN: While students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pay thousands of dollars for courses, the university will announce a new program on Monday allowing anyone anywhere to take M.I.T. courses online free of charge — and for the first time earn official certificates for demonstrating mastery of the subjects taught.
M.I.T. led the way to an era of online learning 10 years ago by posting course materials from almost all its classes. Its free OpenCourseWare now includes nearly 2,100 courses and has been used by more than 100 million people.
But the new “M.I.T.x” interactive online learning platform will go further, giving students access to online laboratories, self-assessments and student-to-student discussions. Continue NYT Article HERE
NSF/December 8: New research published today in the journal Science suggests it may be possible to use brain technology to learn to play a piano, reduce mental stress or hit a curve ball with little or no conscious effort. It’s the kind of thing seen in Hollywood’s “Matrix” franchise.
Experiments conducted at Boston University (BU) and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, recently demonstrated that through a person’s visual cortex, researchers could use decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to induce brain activity patterns to match a previously known target state and thereby improve performance on visual tasks.
Think of a person watching a computer screen and having his or her brain patterns modified to match those of a high-performing athlete or modified to recuperate from an accident or disease. Though preliminary, researchers say such possibilities may exist in the future.
“Adult early visual areas are sufficiently plastic to cause visual perceptual learning,” said lead author and BU neuroscientist Takeo Watanabe of the part of the brain analyzed in the study.
Neuroscientists have found that pictures gradually build up inside a person’s brain, appearing first as lines, edges, shapes, colors and motion in early visual areas. The brain then fills in greater detail to make a red ball appear as a red ball, for example. Continue HERE
View a video showing researchers explaining Decoded Neurofeedback.
A baby lab reveals a surprisingly early gift of gab. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Notre Dame)
ScienceDaily (Dec. 9, 2011) — From the moment they’re born, babies are highly attuned to communicate and motivated to interact. And they’re great listeners.
New research from the University of Notre Dame shows that during the first year of life, when babies spend so much time listening to language, they’re actually tracking word patterns that will support their process of word- learning that occurs between the ages of about 18 months and two years.
“Babies are constantly looking for language clues in context and sound,” says Jill Lany, assistant professor of psychology and director of Notre Dame’s baby lab, where she conducts studies on how babies acquire language. Continue HERE
WJ-SPOTS is a project that was conceived of and designed by media curator Anne Roquigny, in which artists, critics, thinkers, inventors, researchers, curators, organizers and producers of cultural events are invited to look back on 15 years of Internet history.
The interviews are conducted inside the WJ-S multi-screen environment www.wj-s.org, transformed for the occasion into a space for thought and investigation. Online browsing of a selection of emblematic websites, chosen by the speakers, take place simultaneously on 3 big screens. Real time surfing is like a magnified and augmented thought presentation, offering multiple of points of view while the participants answer a series of 5 questions.
QUESTIONS
/ Who are you ? can you tell us in a few words what you have been doing these last years ?
// You have been involved in network activities or netbased projects for many years. From an artistic perspective, what has happened in this field ? what have you witnessed or found interesting about the internet ? What is your experience and feeling about the birth and the adolescence of the internet ?
/// From a social, political, artistic or philosophical point of view. what is the impact of this concept of network ? How has the Internet and the idea of network changed your attitude and practice, your relation to space and time and the way we behave, work, think, share, exchange, collaborate, create… ?
//// In the future do you think internet will still be an interesting territory to explore ? Do you think it can be a fertile space for creation ? Do you think it will produce some kind of interesting artistic mutating forms where the physical world and the virtual world can hybride, mutate, merge, fuse or collide ?
///// What are for you the most important, emblematic, essential, exemplary websites of the last 15 years ? They will be presented and browsed through live by the WJ-SPOTS team on big screens while you will be answering the previous questions.
WJ-Spots Brussels – part 1
Under the sponsorship of The Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art serves as a research repository of new media art and resources. The curatorial vision emphasizes digital interfaces and artistic experimentation by international, independent artists. Designed as an experimental center of research and creativity, the Goldsen Archive includes materials by individual artists and collaborates on conceptual experimentation and archival strategies with international curatorial and fellowship projects. HERE
Welcome to the future of medical understanding. The BioDigital Human is an HTML5 bases platform for medicine and healthcare. Using 3-D, Web-GL visualization the BioDigital Human serves as an interactive tool for medical students to access complex human anatomy in a simple web browser. The surgical and disease-state animations embedded into the interface provide an interactive visual-aid for medical device and pharmaceutical sales reps to explain medical concepts to healthcare practitioners. As anatomical landmarks are paired with embedded education, instructive and training information, the BioDigital Human is the most intuitive way for data groups to organize and navigate medical information.
This video is an introduction to the BioDigital Human platform. Visit http://biodigitalhuman.com to try it for yourself. Or call 212.226.0326 to speak with a member of our team about licensing the BioDigital Human for integration into your application.
How Many Really? compares the number of people involved in key historical events or situations to the people you know through Facebook or Twitter. You can also add your own numbers — for example, the amount of students in your class.
Dimensions is an experimental prototype for the BBC. (Find out what happens to your details.) Try How Big Really? to compare the scale of important places and events to the places you know. HERE
Coded Cultures: City as Interface
Coded Cultures is an multinational initiative of the group 5uper.net to discuss and reflect the intersections of media, art, society and technology in experimental settings of exihibitions, workshops, symposia, presentations and artistic interventions. For the fourth time, Coded Cultures presents a forum to discuss and present (new) media arts, digital communities and positions itself in the current international (media arts) discurse. Coded Cultures 2011: The City as Interface takes place from september 21st to october 2nd and is located around the second district (Leopoldstadt) in Vienna, Austria.
Cultural accomplishments of individuals or differently organized forms of human beings in context with an ever-changing (transforming) environment bring manifold products and processes to surface: cultural artifacts, »distributed agencies«, »framed interactivity« , collective ideas. The city as artistic playfield is used to present Coded Cultures 2011 in a dislocated way, presenting new media arts, media architecture, hacktivism and similar fields of expression with a strong focus on intermediation and discursivity. Through interactive and experimental forms of presentation, accompanied by classical forms of displaying new media arts (such as exhibitions and performances) the role of media arts, media artists and art festivals as such are to be discussed, presented and reflected upon.
This is a work-in-progress sample clip for “Be Strong, Be Gentle, Be Beautiful.” Please help us finish the film, to make a contribution please go to the website. Keiko Fukuda’s destiny was set two generations before her birth, during the final days of the samurai era. In 1934, at 21 years of age, Keiko Fukuda embarked on a long journey with judo as her vehicle. This path meant giving up marriage, family, and her Japanese citizenship. She has endured war, discrimination, and crossed oceans, to become the only woman to attain 10th degree black belt. She is the last living student of judo’s founder, Kano. Today at 98, she still teaches judo three times a week, and through her gentle soul she exudes wisdom and inspiration to all. “Be Strong, Be Gentle, Be Beautiful,” is an hour-long documentary film about Keiko Fukudas inspirational journey. The film will be released early in 2012.
27 Mar 2000, Manhattan, New York, New York, USA – Author Maya Angelou hosts the 2000 annual conference for the Children’s Defense Fund. – Image by ©Najlah Feanny/CORBIS SABA
New symbiotic algae and seafood/fish farms generated in Crane Greenhouses
Myths of Rape , by Leslie Labowitz-Starus, Performed for Three Weeks in May, Suzanne Lacy, 1977.
Ed Bereal and members of The Bodacious Buggerrilla performing Miss America Piece, ca. 1969-70
A baby lab reveals a surprisingly early gift of gab. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Notre Dame)
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