“I have been primarily interested in how and why ordinary people do unusual things, things that seem alien to their natures. Why do good people sometimes act evil? Why do smart people sometimes do dumb or irrational things?” –Philip Zimbardo
01. The Halo Effect: When Your Own Mind is a Mystery
02. How and Why We Lie to Ourselves: Cognitive Dissonance
03. War, Peace and the Role of Power in Sherif’s Robbers Cave Experiment
04. Our Dark Hearts: The Stanford Prison Experiment
05. Just Following Orders? Stanley Milgram’s Obedience Experiment
06. Why We All Stink as Intuitive Psychologists: The False Consensus Bias
07. Why Groups and Prejudices Form So Easily: Social Identity Theory
08. How to Avoid a Bad Bargain: Don’t Threaten
09. Why We Don’t Help Others: Bystander Apathy
10. I Can’t Believe My Eyes: Conforming to the Norm
A multimedia investigation by Susan Greene at the Dart Society. Their mission is to connect and support journalists worldwide who advance the compassionate and ethical coverage of trauma, conflict and social injustice.
Susan Greene: A few weeks ago, on the fifteenth anniversary of his first day in prison, Osiel Rodriguez set about cleaning the 87 square feet he inhabits at ADX, a federal mass isolation facility in Colorado.
“I got it in my head to destroy all my photographs,” he writes in a letter to me. “I spent some five hours ripping each one to pieces. No one was safe. I did not save one of my mother, father, sisters. Who are those people anyway?”
Such is the logic of the gray box, of sitting year after year in solitude.
Whether Rodriguez had psychological problems when he robbed a bank, burglarized a pawn shop and stole some guns at age 22, or whether mental illness set in during the eight years he has spent in seclusion since trying to walk out of a federal penitentiary in Florida – it’s academic. What’s true now is that he’s sick, literally, of being alone, as are scores of other prisoners in extreme isolation.
In a 2008 paper on neuroeconomics, Stanford economist George Loewenstein said: “Whereas psychologists tend to view humans as fallible and sometime even self-destructive, economists tend to view people as efficient maximisers of self-interest who make mistakes only when imperfectly informed about the consequences of their actions.”
This view of humans as completely rational – and the market as eminently efficient – is relatively recent. In 1922, in the Journal of Political Economy, Rexford G. Tugwell, said (to paraphrase) that a mind evolved to function best in “the exhilarations and the fatigues of the hunt, the primitive warfare and in the precarious life of nomadism”, had been strangely and quickly transported into a different milieu, without much time to modify the equipment of the old life.
The field of economics has since rejected this more pragmatic (and I would argue, realistic) view of human behavior, in favor of the simpler and neater “rational choice” perspective, which viewed the power of reflection as the only force driving human behavior.
But to paraphrase sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, our currently held views of what is reasonable, sensible and good sense tend to take shape in response to the realities “out there” as seen through the prism of human practice – what humans currently do, know how to do, are trained, groomed and inclined to do.
We compare ourselves to people we know, and come into contact with – either through social groups, or lately, with the advent of mass and, even fragmented media, people we think are like us.
Excerpt of an article written by Paul Harrison, The Conversation. Continue HERE
Slought Foundation (‘Sl-aw-t’) is a non-profit organization based in Philadelphia that engages the public in dialogue about cultural and socio-political change. We collaborate with a range of partners including artists, communities, universities, and governments to encourage cultural inclusiveness and social activism. Culture means more than preservation or presentation to us; it means the exchange of ideas, the creation of concepts.
From Kwame Anthony Appiah to Helene Cixous, Werner Herzog to Kazuyo Sejima, our programs feature today’s visionaries in conversation about the role of the artist in society, and the potential transformation of social and political structures. In 2010, 450+ hours of recordings from these programs, available online, were downloaded over 125,000 times by visitors from 100 countries.
In 1876, the first issue of the Revue historique was published in Paris. The birth of the journal is commonly seen as a founding moment. History was now defined as a professional discipline, with explicit scientific and more precise methodological requirements, with specific and codified forms of training and a strong sense of academic community. There is nothing here that is specific to France: actually, the German model of historical erudition had inspired a number of national communities in Europe and outside Europe. On the occasion of the first issue of the new Revue, one of the directors, Gabriel Monod, a leading figure of the time, addressed future contributors. In his editorial, he recommended “avoiding contemporary controversies, addressing the subjects of their studies with the methodological rigor and absence of bias required by science, and not seeking arguments for or against any theory involved indirectly only.” Monod then explained the insufficient progress of the discipline in France as resulting from “political and religious passions” which, “in the absence of scientific tradition” had not been curbed. Hence the utmost restraint was called for. A new time was open to science, method and objectivity after decades of tense, dense, and exhausting ideological conflicts on the French Revolution, the absolute monarchy and the conflicting relations between Church and State over centuries. Historians would better choose to cool their objects of study down and avoid contemporary topics. Distancing the past now was a pressing requirement.
In the embryonic, ever evolving era of social media — when milestones come by the day, if not by the second — June 8, 2010, has secured a rightful place in history. That was the day Wael Ghonim, a 29-year-old Google marketing executive, was browsing Facebook in his home in Dubai and found a startling image: a photograph of a bloodied and disfigured face, its jaw broken, a young life taken away. That life, he soon learned, had belonged to Khaled Mohamed Said, a 28-year-old from Alexandria who had been beaten to death by the Egyptian police.
At once angered and animated, the Egyptian-born Ghonim went online and created a Facebook page. “Today they killed Khaled,” he wrote. “If I don’t act for his sake, tomorrow they will kill me.” It took a few moments for Ghonim to settle on a name for the page, one that would fit the character of an increasingly personalized and politically galvanizing Internet. He finally decided on “Kullena Khaled Said” — “We Are All Khaled Said.”
“Khaled Said was a young man just like me, and what happened to him could have happened to me,” Ghonim writes in “Revolution 2.0,” his fast-paced and engrossing new memoir of political awakening. “All young Egyptians had long been oppressed, enjoying no rights in our own homeland.”
Image: Wael Ghonim, photo by Sam Christmas. Written by JOSE ANTONIO VARGAS, NYT. Continue reading HERE
“Nazis on the moon” sounds like a punchline. But it’s actually the premise of the most talked-about feature at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival. The plot of Finnish entry “Iron Sky” revolves around “a group of Nazis who escape to the moon at the end of World War II to plan a new assault,” according to BBC News. “Added to the farce is a US President with more than a passing resemblance to former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, and a navy cruiser called the USS George W Bush.”
The most expensive film in Finnish history, “Iron Sky” has, according to BBCNews, “been hailed by some members of the international press as a sign that Germans are now at peace with their Nazi past.” But some Germans felt less comfortable. “Although I heard that audiences were laughing out loud, in my screening… it wasn’t like that,” Kerstin Sopke of the Associated Press told the BBC.
The film’s director, Timo Vuorensola, doesn’t see it that way either. “No, I absolutely think that’s not what’s it about,” he told The Arty Semite in an email.
I think that Germans have as a people moved away from the times, and have learned perhaps more than any other people in the world the horrors fascism brings, and know that history needs to be respected, but that the Germans living now (other than some very special cases) are not the ones who did the horrors. So they haven’t gotten ‘a peace with Nazi past,’ as BBC strangely words it, but they’ve understood that the current German youth did not do the bad things, thus making it possible to approach the subject with other emotions than the well-known ‘German guilt’. It’s time now to make sure it will never happen again.
Written by Michael Kaminer, The Jewish Daily Forward. Continue HERE
Half a century into the digital era, the profound impact of information technology on intellectual and cultural life is universally acknowledged but still poorly understood. The sheer complexity of the technology coupled with the rapid pace of change makes it increasingly difficult to establish common ground and to promote thoughtful discussion.
Responding to this challenge, Switching Codes brings together leading American and European scholars, scientists, and artists—including Charles Bernstein, Ian Foster, Bruno Latour, Alan Liu, and Richard Powers—to consider how the precipitous growth of digital information and its associated technologies are transforming the ways we think and act. Employing a wide range of forms, including essay, dialogue, short fiction, and game design, this book aims to model and foster discussion between IT specialists, who typically have scant training in the humanities or traditional arts, and scholars and artists, who often understand little about the technologies that are so radically transforming their fields. Switching Codes will be an indispensable volume for anyone seeking to understand the impact of digital technology on contemporary culture, including scientists, educators, policymakers, and artists, alike.
In the Congo Basin, Bayaka pygmies patrol their forests with handheld tracking devices. Using the devices to record instances of poaching, industrial roads and illegal logging, they map their landscape, documenting the course of deforestation and harmful development.
The project is part of an emerging field that its champions describe as the ‘new wave’ of citizen science. With endeavours ranging from air-pollution assessments in Europe to chimpanzee counting in Tanzania, the next generation of citizen science attempts to make communities active stakeholders in research that affects them, and use their work to push forward policy changes. This is one of the main points of focus of the London Citizen Cyberscience Summit being held this week at the Royal Geographical Society and University College London.
Although researchers have been calling on amateurs and enthusiasts for decades to aid in collecting and processing large volumes of data, the latest approaches aim to enlist the public in helping to shape research questions, says Francois Grey, a physicist at Tsinghua University in Beijing and coordinator of the Citizen Cyberscience Centre in Geneva, Switzerland. Grey, an organizer of the summit, maintains that communities can play a valuable part in setting the agenda for scientific investigations.
Written by Katherine Rowland, Nature. Continue HERE
The Antipode Foundation, Antipode’s new companion website/blog. Rather than a repository for so many addenda, or somewhere to send material which can’t ‘cut it’ in the pages of the journal, we want this to be something with a point, something of significance, working to create and support a radical geography community. Rather than a cynical exercise in advertising, or some modish initiative launched unthinkingly, we want this to be something with as much purpose and direction, substance and quality, and vitality and energy as its parent journal. With all this firmly in mind, we’ll be extending some already existing projects as well as launching some new ones.
Since August 1969 Antipode has published peer-reviewed papers which offer a radical (Marxist/socialist/anarchist/anti-racist/feminist/queer/green) analysis of geographical issues and whose intent is to engender the development of a new and better society. Now appearing five times a year and published by Wiley-Blackwell, Antipode continues to publish some of the best and most provocative radical geographical work available today; work from both geographers and their fellow travellers; from scholars both eminent and emerging.
Antipode sponsors two keynote lectures each year; one at the Association of American Geographers (AAG) annual meeting and one at the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG) annual conference. We invite presenters who represent both the political commitment and intellectual integrity that characterize a radical journal of geography.
Beyond the Neoliberal Zombieland. Jamie Peck, University of British Columbia, Canada. Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), August 2011
And the social science — not a “gay science,” but a rueful –which finds the secret of this universe in “supply and demand,” and reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone, is also wonderful. Not a “gay science,” I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate and, indeed, quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science.” Thomas Carlyle.
“Economics is a serious subject” Joan Robinson.
“And ‘when laughter and gaiety are found, thinking is good for nothing’- that is the prejudice of this serious beast against all ‘gay science’” Friedrich Nietzsche.
“The less education a man has, or in other words, the less he knows of the specific connection of the objects to which he directs his observations, the greater is his tendency to launch out into all sorts of empty possibilities. An instance of this habit in the political sphere is seen in the pot-house politician.” (G.W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences)
Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated—Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example. Others are ignored, and we can often learn valuable lessons from them about what is likely to lie ahead. Right now, in fact.
At the moment, we are failing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s decision to launch the most destructive and murderous act of aggression of the post-World War II period: the invasion of South Vietnam, later all of Indochina, leaving millions dead and four countries devastated, with casualties still mounting from the long-term effects of drenching South Vietnam with some of the most lethal carcinogens known, undertaken to destroy ground cover and food crops.
The prime target was South Vietnam. The aggression later spread to the North, then to the remote peasant society of northern Laos, and finally to rural Cambodia, which was bombed at the stunning level of all allied air operations in the Pacific region during World War II, including the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this, Henry Kissinger’s orders were being carried out—“anything that flies on anything that moves”—a call for genocide that is rare in the historical record. Little of this is remembered. Most was scarcely known beyond narrow circles of activists.
Even President Barack Obama makes mix-tapes? We are not so sure about the veracity of this post. However, we like the idea. Your Music Today writes: Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard of a presidential campaign having an official playlist. Sure they’ve used particular songs to represent their values throughout a campaign, but a full playlist is out of the ordinary. But that’s exactly what Obama created, and tweeted, this morning. His own campaign launched an official 28-song playlist that includes tracks from Arcade Fire to Bruce Springsteen. You can go have a listen over on Spotify.
We already knew that Obama is a bit of a music connoisseur, who even enjoys his share of hip-hop (although no tracks made the final cut). And the 28 tracks, whether he picked them of not, actually make up a pretty respectable playlist! My only question is: wouldn’t this technically violate the SOPA bill if it were passed?!
Full track list below:
01 No Doubt – “Different People”
02 Earth Wind & Fire Experience feat. Al McKay Allstars – “Got To Get You Into My Life – (Live)”
03 Booker T. & The MG’s – “Green Onions – Single/LP Version”
04 Wilco – “I Got You”
05 The Impressions – “Keep On Pushing – Single Version”
06 Jennifer Hudson – “Love You I Do”
07 AgesandAges – “No Nostalgia”
08 Ledisi – “Raise Up”
09 Sugarland – “Stand Up”
10 Darius Rucker – “This”
11 Arcade Fire – “We Used to Wait”
12 Florence And The Machine – “You’ve Got The Love”
13 James Taylor – “Your Smiling Face”
14 REO Speedwagon – “Roll With The Changes”
15 Raphael Saadiq – “Keep Marchin’”
16 Noah And The Whale – “Tonight’s The Kind Of Night”
17 Zac Brown Band – “Keep Me In Mind”
18 Aretha Franklin – “The Weight”
19 U2 – “Even Better Than The Real Thing”
20 Dierks Bentley – “Home”
21 Sugarland – “Everyday America”
22 Darius Rucker – “Learn To Live”
23 Al Green – “Let’s Stay Together”
24 Electric Light Orchestra – “Mr. Blue Sky”
25 Montgomery Gentry – “My Town”
26 Ricky Martin – “The Best Thing About Me Is You Feat. Joss Stone”
27 Ray LaMontagne – “You Are The Best Thing”
28 Bruce Springsteen – “We Take Care Of Our Own”
Conflict Kitchen is a take-out restaurant that only serves cuisine from countries that the United States is in conflict with. The food is served out of a take-out style storefront, which rotates identities every 6 months to highlight another country. Each Conflict Kitchen iteration is augmented by events, performances, and discussion about the culture, politics, and issues at stake with each county we focus on. We are currently presenting the third iteration of Conflict Kitchen via La Cocina Arepas, an Venezuelan take-out restaurant that serves homemade arepas, grilled corncakes served to order with a variety of fresh fillings. Developed in collaboration with members of the Venezuelan community, our arepas come packaged in a custom-designed wrapper that includes interviews with Venezuelans both in Venezuelan and the United States on subjects ranging from Venezuelan food and culture to issues of geopolitics.
Jim Moran explains why saving the planet will be an uphill struggle.
The recent development of the branch of philosophy called ‘environmental philosophy’, or as it is sometimes referred to, ‘environmental ethics’, has been characterized by a variety of theoretical disputes about the best way to provide a philosophical basis for engagement with the environmental problems facing us, now and in the future. Many of the early writers hoped that a new environmental ethics would emerge, embodying a set of principles that could help us deal with our relation to animals and the natural world in a way that traditional ethical theories seemed to have overlooked.
One of the early contributors to this project was Aldo Leopold, who was not a philosopher but a professor of forestry and land management. His famous essay ‘The Land Ethic’, found in his 1949 book The Sand County Almanac, has stimulated a great deal of discussion about the kind of principles we need to guide us on environmental issues. Leopold argued for the extension of what we see as worthy of our respect from the human community to include animals and the natural world, or what he referred to as ‘the biotic community’. His famous principle, briefly expressed, was, ‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise’.
Leopold carried forward a discussion by nineteenth century conservationists about whether nature should be preserved only because of its economic and practical benefits for humans or because it provides value beyond merely supplying natural resources. He mentioned the songs of birds and the beauty of flowers as being part of nature’s bounty. He also brought into focus the importance of the interconnection of things in nature, defending the kind of holistic perspective which has since played such a crucial role in scientific ecology. He insisted that environmental ethics should focus on systems and not just on individual things. Our human dependence on nature cannot be understood without a deep ecological study of the interconnectedness of life. Rachel Carson’s famous 1962 book Silent Spring, which was so important in stimulating environmental awareness, is a good example of this approach to conservation.
Capital Growth is a partnership initiative between London Food Link, the Mayor of London Boris Johnson, and the Big Lottery’s Local Food Fund. It is championed by the Chair of the London Food Board Rosie Boycott and aims to create 2012 new community food growing spaces across London by the end of 2012. Capital Growth offers practical help, grants, training and support to groups wanting to establish community food growing projects as well as advice to landowners.
CAMBRIDGE – One of our era’s foundational myths is that globalization has condemned the nation-state to irrelevance. The revolution in transport and communications, we hear, has vaporized borders and shrunk the world. New modes of governance, ranging from transnational networks of regulators to international civil-society organizations to multilateral institutions, are transcending and supplanting national lawmakers. Domestic policymakers, it is said, are largely powerless in the face of global markets.
The global financial crisis has shattered this myth. Who bailed out the banks, pumped in the liquidity, engaged in fiscal stimulus, and provided the safety nets for the unemployed to thwart an escalating catastrophe? Who is re-writing the rules on financial-market supervision and regulation to prevent another occurrence? Who gets the lion’s share of the blame for everything that goes wrong? The answer is always the same: national governments. The G-20, the International Monetary Fund, and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision have been largely sideshows.
Even in Europe, where regional institutions are comparatively strong, it is national interest and national policymakers, largely in the person of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who have dominated policy making. Had Merkel been less enamored of austerity for Europe’s debt-distressed countries, and had she managed to convince her domestic electorate of the need for a different approach, the eurozone crisis would have played out quite differently.
Written by Dani Rodrik, Project Syndicate. Continue HERE
Evgeny Morozov: The other day, while I was rummaging through a stack of oldish articles on the future of the Internet, an obscure little essay from 1998 — published, of all places, on a Web site called Ceramics Today — caught my eye. Celebrating the rise of the “cyberflâneur,” it painted a bright digital future, brimming with playfulness, intrigue and serendipity, that awaited this mysterious online type. This vision of tomorrow seemed all but inevitable at a time when “what the city and the street were to the Flâneur, the Internet and the Superhighway have become to the Cyberflâneur.”
Intrigued, I set out to discover what happened to the cyberflâneur. While I quickly found other contemporaneous commentators who believed that flânerie would flourish online, the sad state of today’s Internet suggests that they couldn’t have been more wrong. Cyberflâneurs are few and far between, while the very practice of cyberflânerie seems at odds with the world of social media. What went wrong? And should we worry?
Written by EVGENY MOROZOV, New York Times. Continue HERE
Evgeny Morozov is the author of “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom.”
Image above: Gustave Caillebotte’s “Paris Street; Rainy Day,” from 1877.
The NFL is done for the year, but it is not pure fantasy to suggest that it may be done for good in the not-too-distant future. How might such a doomsday scenario play out and what would be the economic and social consequences?
By now we’re all familiar with the growing phenomenon of head injuries and cognitive problems among football players, even at the high school level. In 2009, Malcolm Gladwell asked whether football might someday come to an end, a concern seconded recently by Jonah Lehrer.
Before you say that football is far too big to ever disappear, consider the history: If you look at the stocks in the Fortune 500 from 1983, for example, 40 percent of those companies no longer exist. The original version of Napster no longer exists, largely because of lawsuits. No matter how well a business matches economic conditions at one point in time, it’s not a lock to be a leader in the future, and that is true for the NFL too. Sports are not immune to these pressures. In the first half of the 20th century, the three big sports were baseball, boxing, and horse racing, and today only one of those is still a marquee attraction.
Americans are increasingly aware that the ideal of equal opportunity is a false promise, but neither party really seems to get it.
Republicans barely admit the problem exists, or if they do, they think tax cuts are the answer. All facts point in the opposite direction. Despite various tax cuts over the past 30 years, not only have income and wealth inequality dramatically increased, but the ability of individuals to rise out of their own class has declined. Social stagnation is increasingly the norm, with poverty rates the highest in 15 years, real wage gains worse even than during the decade of the Great Depression, average earnings barely above what they were 50 years ago, and more than 80 percent of the income growth of the past 25 years going to the top 1 percent. In fact, since 1983, the bottom 40 percent of households have seen real declines in their income and the same goes for the bottom 60 percent when it comes to wealth. We know what the economic status quo does: It redistributes upwards.
Despite the ambiguity of their goals, the Occupy protests have made one point abundantly clear: The mainstream Democratic alternative is paltry stuff. For the most part, Democrats disagree that tax cuts and deregulation are the solution, and instead argue that the state should be used to guarantee equal opportunity. For instance, cheap, publicly available education, job training and affirmative action are all justified on the grounds that each American should have the skills to compete and the labor market should treat everyone equally.
Written by Alex Gourevitch and Aziz Rana, Salon. Continue HERE
In-House Festival, Jerusalem Season of Culture, 2011. [Photo via Jerusalem Season of Culture]
Hospitality begins at home — but it also describes our relation to each other as peoples, territories and nations. In his 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” which is the basis for the United Nation’s Declaration of Human Rights, Kant argues that the stranger’s right to hospitality is a universal right, and that it is derived both from the right to self preservation, which emerges from the law of nature (gesellschaft), and from the right of association, which is part of the law of society (gemeinshaft). For Kant, society might not be natural, pleasant or desirable; but it is a real condition of a populated world. Humans by nature are strangers who travel from an original solitary or familial place and are confronted by association. The only alternative to hospitality or exchange is aggression or war.
This right of hospitality exists only between equals; for the stranger must be capable of returning to his own house, where he would then preside as host. How then does the rule of hospitality extend to those who cannot claim their reciprocal right, such as the refugee, who is not a guest because he is not also a host? Without the wherewithal to reciprocate as a citizen of a nation, the refugee must present himself as merely human, or rely on a third party, such as the United Nations, to demand the rights of hospitality for him. How does the rule of hospitality extend to a stranger who is not a guest because he harbors aggression in relation to his lacking the status of host? It is tempting to recast Jerusalem as a new, singular space of hospitality, where inhabitants are simultaneously strangers and hosts in a continual state of reciprocity. Giorgio Agamben similarly describes a variation on the two-state solution whereby Jerusalem is an extra-national and simultaneous capital of both Arab and Jew — a new topological space, like a Mobius strip singular and dual at once. And beyond the intractable divisions of Jerusalem, perhaps hospitality offers us language with which to describe our emerging geo-political spaces and the aspirations we have for them.
An hour south of Lethbridge, Alberta, and twenty minutes from Montana, Milk River is one of the last Canadian towns before the border. The one-block downtown is Prairie minimalist: a Chinese restaurant near a lonely stop sign, beyond it a bank, and across the highway, yellow and green grain elevators. Just west of town, the pavement peters out to a gravel range road, and to the south the Milk River surges with flood water. From the Rockies to Medicine Hat, this usually dry country, where researchers scour barren coulees for dinosaur bones, was awash in six days of uninterrupted rain. Pincher Creek declared an emergency; High River faced its namesake. Though troubling, this spring’s wet weather provided an ironic counterpoint to my objective: to find the century-old Spite Canal, an artifact of Canadian-American history born of drought and embodying the enmeshed nature of the two countries’ relationship with water.
Looking north across treeless hills, I saw a conspicuously straight line emerge from the rain. My rental car vibrated over a Texas gate, and minutes later I scrambled up a grassy embankment. Beyond it was a ditch about two metres deep that followed the contour of the land northward. This crude trench — unmarked, largely unremembered, and now crumbling back into the prairie — is the physical fact on the ground that induced Teddy Roosevelt’s chest-beating America to sign a treaty with Canada that is still lauded today.
Its origins can be traced to the late 1800s when settlers north and south of the forty-ninth parallel relied on two rivers: the St. Mary and the Milk. Both flow from Montana into Canada before diverging; the St. Mary carrying on to Hudson Bay, the Milk turning back into Montana after looping 250 kilometres through Canada. Rising high in the mountains, the snow-fed St. Mary ran strongly all summer; the Milk, born in the foothills, often dried to a trickle. That led the Americans to launch a plan in 1901 to divert water out of the St. Mary and move it across the foothills to the Milk and their ranches in Montana.
Zoroastrianism traditionally conceives death as a temporary triumph of evil over good: rushing into the body, the corpse demon contaminates everything it comes in contact with.
The flesh of a dead body being so unclean it can pollute everything, a set of rules had to be created in order to dispose of the corpse as safely as possible: as the natural elements of earth, air and water are sacred, the corpses were not to be thrown upon the water or interred. Cremation was also forbidden, as fire is the direct -purest- emanation of the divinity.
Hence a complex ritual was developed, in which the corpses would be eventually exposed to birds of prey and thus devoured, in a final act of charity.
After death every division of class and wealth disappeared, for all deceased would be treated equally.
A proper architectural typology was invented solely for the purpose of burial’s ritual: transported in the desert by nasellars (traditional zoroastrian pallbearers), the bodies of the deceased were then carted onto sandstone, forbidding hills, to be eventually disposed on cilindrical constructions called Towers of Silence.
Via Socks Studio. Please be aware that some of the images at the end of the post are extremely graphic. Viewer discretion is advised. Continue HERE
The exhibition “Mengele’s Skull” is structured around a specially commissioned book of the same title co-authored by Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman. Artist and filmmaker Hito Steyerl has been commissioned to respond to the proposition laid out in this book. Next to major new works by Hito Steyerl, this exhibition presents documentary and source materials.
The publication Mengele’s Skull discusses the forensic identification of the remains of infamous Nazi-doctor Joseph Mengele after his exhumation in 1985. The forensic investigation and identification of Mengele’s remains marks a transition. From now on, the “era of the witness”, centered around human testimony and trauma, gradually gives way to an “era of forensics”, in which things – such as bones – act as the witnesses of past events. How do bones act as witnesses? What role do technologies such as 3D scans and biomedical data play in the making of forensic evidence? And what is the role and politics of images?
Woman, Art & Technology is a new series of interviews on Furtherfield. Over the next year Rachel Beth Egenhoefer will interview artists, designers, theorists, curators, and others; to explore different perspectives on the current voice of woman working in art and technology. I am honored to begin this series with an interview with Lynn Hershman Leeson, a true pioneer in the field who has recently produced !Women Art Revolution- A Secret History.
Over the last three decades, artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson has been internationally acclaimed for her pioneering use of new technologies and her investigations of issues that are now recognized as key to the working of our society: identity in a time of consumerism, privacy in a era of surveillance, interfacing of humans and machines, and the relationship between real and virtual worlds. She has been honored by numerous prestigious awards including the 2010-2011 d.velop digital art and 2009 SIGGRAPH Lifetime Achievement Awards. Hershman also recently received the 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, an award which supported her latest documentary film !Women Art Revolution – A Secret History.
Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef (C), translator Ahmed Ratib (L) and deputy Ambasador Sohail Shaheen (L) listen to journalists’ questions during a news conference in Islamabad, October 29, 2001. Afghanistan has no need of outside help and advised Pakistani mujahideen not to enter the country, Zaeef said on Monday. REUTERS/Pawel Kopczynski
Art Institutions and the Feminist Dialectic aims to explore the unique challenges and opportunities presented by the exhibition, acquisition and preservation of feminist artwork by Ontario’s public art galleries. In December 2008, the Ontario Association of Art Galleries (OAAG), in collaboration with Carla Garnet, organized a symposium that invited women curators, museum professionals and artists to bring attention to this topic, “Art Institutions and the Feminist Dialectic.” Nine Canadian women visual art professionals were invited to speak at the symposium.
An additional presentation from Carmen Mörsch, an international arts educator and researcher, is also included, presented in February 2010. The purpose of this website is to publish the transcripts, video and audio recordings of this symposium online, making them publicly available to engage a wider audience. We encourage visitors to engage with these critical practices and important presentations, as well as the additional resources and links provided by the presenters.
Seismopolite Journal of Art and Politics presents reviews, essays and features to investigate the possibilities of artists and art scenes worldwide to reflect and influence their local political situation. The Journal comes out 4 times per year in English and Norwegian.
This issue of Seismopolite Journal brings texts about art and politics from a number of localities worldwide.
Only light and memory: the permeable cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Through a local framing May Adadol Ingawanij and David Teh shed a rare light on the many tensions that are channelled, yet somehow balanced, in the films of the Palme d’Or-winning director
Details on contemporary fascism
The exhibition Details at Bergen Kunsthall focuses on the political potential in art as an archaeology of the politics of perception: it specifically inquires about everyday repositories of contemporary fascism.
Fear of Speaking
Curator June Yap discusses the conditions for freedom of speech in Singapore under the so-called ‘new normal’ after the parliamentary and presidential elections, with reference to a recent theatre play entitled Fear of Writing.
Interview with Övgü Gökçe, Project Coordinator of Diyarbakır Arts Center
The Diyarbakır Arts Center (DSM) is the Diyarbakır branch of Anadolu Kültür, an organization which helps discovering the local cultural and artistic potentials of cities all over Anatolia, and works to form bridges between diverse cities in Turkey and to international cities and art scenes.
On the Fallacies of “Useful Art”: Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International
Chris Mansour discusses the implications of performance artist Tania Bruguera’s concept of Arte Útil, which she opposes to an idea of aesthetic autonomy.
The political matrix: The 12th Istanbul Biennial
This year’s Istanbul Biennial deconstructs the idea of the art space architecturally, and simultaneously reclaims it as a pure function of the visitors’ bodily and intellectual possibilities of navigation.
Shawn Vincent: What did people do in the Middle Ages? If you meet a random person on the street, what is his likely occupation? Or did people work at all? Were the Middle Ages some Communist utopia, where everybody laid around all day and things were magically produced by fairies?
Of course not. They didn’t have electronics engineers and computer programmers, but they did have coopers, bakers, blacksmiths, and many other jobs that made their society go around. If you do a little research, there were tons of medieval occupations. Luckily, I’ve done it for you, so you don’t have to!
In the following list, I have made a link to the online version of Webster’s Dictionary, so you can find out what things are. In some cases, the definition is also included locally. I am slowly making local definitions for all these occupations, for your convenience.
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.
Beyond the Neoliberal Zombieland. Jamie Peck, University of British Columbia, Canada. Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), August 2011
In-House Festival, Jerusalem Season of Culture, 2011. [Photo via Jerusalem Season of Culture]
Maya Zack: Living Room, 3D computer generated anaglyph. [Courtesy of the artist and Alon Segev Gallery, Tel Aviv]
Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef (C), translator Ahmed Ratib (L) and deputy Ambasador Sohail Shaheen (L) listen to journalists’ questions during a news conference in Islamabad, October 29, 2001. Afghanistan has no need of outside help and advised Pakistani mujahideen not to enter the country, Zaeef said on Monday. REUTERS/Pawel Kopczynski
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
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