I’ve reached the cosmology part of my General Relativity (GR) course, and one of the early points that comes up is my traditional rant against confusing three very distinct concepts when thinking about the universe. Roughly stated, these are; What is the shape of the universe? Is the universe finite or infinite? and Will the universe expand forever or recollapse.
When we apply GR to cosmology, we make use of the simplifying assumptions, backed up by observations, that there exists a definition of time such that at a fixed value of time, the universe is spatially homogeneous (looks the same wherever the observer is) and isotropic (looks the same in all directions around a point). We then specialize to the most general metric compatible with these assumptions, and write down the resulting Einstein equations with appropriate sources (regular matter, dark matter, radiation, a cosmological constant, etc.). The solutions to these equations are the famous Friedmann, Robertson-Walker spacetimes, describing the expansion (or contraction) of the universe.
It is important to take a moment to emphasize what we have done here. GR is indeed a beautiful geometric theory describing curved spacetime. But practically, we are solving differential equations, subject to (in this case) the condition that the universe look the way it does today. Differential equations describe the local behavior of a system and so, in GR, they describe the local geometry in the neighborhood of a spacetime point.
Excerpt of an article written by Mark Trodden at DISCOVER. 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
In 1962, an undergraduate at the University of Michigan named Tom Hayden drafted a document that would launch a decade of student protest and mass action for a more democratic society.
Five decades later, we assess its impact and enduring legacy. — Boston Review
Tom Hayden
The Port Huron Statement’s core message is timeless but not dogmatic: we all need participatory democracy.
APRIL 10
Kim Phillips-Fein
The economic inequalities of our own day were anticipated even at the height of postwar affluence.
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Bill Ayers
The ’60s remain a prelude to the necessary fundamental changes to come.
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Angus Johnston
Advances in student power have shaped the course of American higher education and the nation.
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Eric Mann
Like the signatories of the Port Huron Statement, the Occupiers need to expand beyond the narrower interests of their original members.
APRIL 12 Kirkpatrick Sale
The Statement was nothing less than a proto-ideology for a New Left.
APRIL 12 Danielle Allen
We cannot be free without being equal.
APRIL 12 Jennifer Hochschild
On the left we see a vacuum where traditional class-oriented populism used to be.
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Trevor Stutz
Only moral clarity will transform alienation and apathy into action.
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Bernardine Dohrn
The Statement was a clarion call for people to take control of key social institutions and of their own lives.
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The 66-year-old French philosopher Jacques Rancière is clearly the new go-to guy for hip art theorists. Artforum magazine’s ever-sagacious online “Diary” has referred to Rancière as the art world’s “darling du jour,” and in its recent issue, the magazine itself has described digital video artist Paul Chan as “Rancièrian” — as an aside, without further explanation, no less! For anyone looking for a primer, Rancière’s slim The Politics of Aesthetics has just been published in paperback.
Rancière has the undeniable virtue, for the esoterica-obsessed art world at least, of being something of an odd duck. A one-time fellow traveler of Marxist mandarin Louis Althusser, Rancière split with him after the May ’68 worker-student rebellion against the de Gaulle government, feeling that Althusser, a partisan of the Stalinized French Communist Party, left too little space in his theoretical edifice for spontaneous popular revolt. Against this background of disenchantment, Rancière set out to explore the relationships between philosophy and the worker, rethink ideas of history and try to construct a progressive theory of art.
The Politics of Aesthetics is a quick and dirty tour of a number of these themes. It features five short meditations on various conjunctions of art and politics, plus a lengthy interview with Rancière by his translator Gabriel Rockhill titled “The Janus-Face of Politicized Art,” an introduction by Rockhill and a concluding essay by the art world’s other favorite quirky philosopher, Slavoj Zizek. It is a short but serious book and, in keeping with French intellectual practice, sensuously impenetrable, coming equipped with a glossary of terms for the uninitiated.
I’ve promised to write about the surveillance drone that I’ve been building over the past couple of months. I have always wanted to have my own drone that could send back a live video feed. This is partly inspired by products like the AeroVironment RQ-11 Raven, which is currently in use by the US military, and which you can view in action here. The Raven is basically just a glorified RC airplane, with a sophisticated landing system that allows it to be recovered by a soldier without great pilot skills (which is one reason they cost around $35,000 each).
To get to the bottom line, my drone has taken its first flights, the results of which you can see in a video of my office at Stanford and in a local park.
When my kids were younger I looked into buying an RC helicopter for this purpose and actually tried to wire a camera on a car, but the consumer technology wasn’t up to snuff back then. Now it is.
‘The Dirty Art Department offers itself as an open space for all possible thought, creation, and action. It sees itself as a dynamic paradox, flowing between the pure and the applied, the existential and the deterministic, and the holy and the profane. It is concerned with individuality, collectivity, and our navigation of the complex relationship between the built world and the natural world, and other people and ourselves. It’s a place to build objects or totems, religions or websites, revolutions or business models, paintings, or galaxies.
The Dirty Art Department comes from a common background of design and applied art, it seeks however to reject the Kantian division between the pure and the applied arts. Since ‘god is dead’ and ‘the spectacle’ is omnipresent, it sees the creation of alternative and new realities as the way to reconsider our life situation on this planet.
The Dirty Art Department is open to students from all backgrounds including designers, artists, bankers, skeptics, optimists, economists, philosophers, sociologists, independent thinkers, poets, urban planners, farmers, anarchists, and the curious.’
Human beings are diverse and live in diverse ways. Should we accept that we are diverse by nature, having followed separate evolutionary paths? Or should we suppose that we share our biological inheritance, but develop differently according to environment and culture? Over recent years scientific research has reshaped this familiar “nature-nurture” debate, which remains central to our understanding of human nature and morality.
For much of the 20th century social scientists held that human life is a single biological phenomenon, which flows through the channels made by culture, so as to acquire separate and often mutually inaccessible forms. Each society passes on the culture that defines it, much as it passes on its language. And the most important aspects of culture—religion, rites of passage and law—both unify the people who adhere to them and divide those people from everyone else. Such was implied by what John Tooby and Leda Cosmides called the “standard social science model,” made fundamental to anthropology by Franz Boas and to sociology by Émile Durkheim.
More recently evolutionary psychologists have begun to question that approach. Although you can explain the culture of a tribe as an inherited possession, they suggested, this does not explain how culture came to be in the first place. What is it that endows culture with its stability and function? In response to that question the opinion began to grow that culture does not provide the ultimate explanation of any significant human trait, not even the trait of cultural diversity. It is not simply that there are extraordinary constants among cultures: gender roles, incest taboos, festivals, warfare, religious beliefs, moral scruples, aesthetic interests. Culture is also a part of human nature: it is our way of being. We do not live in herds or packs; our hierarchies are not based merely on strength or sexual dominance. We relate to one another through language, morality and law; we sing, dance and worship together, and spend as much time in festivals and storytelling as in seeking our food. Our hierarchies involve offices, responsibilities, gift-giving and ceremonial recognition. Our meals are shared, and food for us is not merely nourishment but an occasion for hospitality, affection and dressing up. All these things are comprehended in the idea of culture—and culture, so understood, is observed in all and only human communities. Why is this?
Excerpt of an essay by Roger Scruton at Prospect. Continue HERE
In an age when Internet devices are always on, meeting face-to-face is becoming increasingly rare as people choose to meet screen-to-screen. Goldfield wants to know what this new dynamic is doing to normal social interaction? How do these devices and social media services, such as Facebook, affect the way we socialize and communicate with each other?
But, more than that, what impact do these social networks have on their user’s mental health?
Murray and Goldfield have teamed up and have scraped together funding to conduct a study this summer examining the impact Facebook has on people’s mental health and their everyday lives and interactions.
They aren’t alone.
John Lyons, director of CHEO’s mental-health research group, has applied to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research for a grant to conduct his own study into the topic. However, Lyon’s study will be laser focused. With so much anecdotal evidence about the effects of cyberbullying and online taunts, he wants to know what role social media plays in a person’s decision to end their life, and if there is a way to leverage social technologies to reach out to people considering suicide.
“It’s becoming the medium by which young people communicate with each other. It’s a pretty significant social change,” said Lyons. “There are some very valuable things about social media and networking, and there are also some dangers. Historically, the (societal) changes have been in musical taste and style of dress. Now it has to do with technology and the use of technology to deal with social relations. It’s so fast moving and there is so much going on that it’s rather complicated to figure out the good and the bad aspects of it.”
Excerpt of an article by Vito Pilieci at The Gazette. Read HERE
Humans frequently engage in arbitrary, conventional behavior whose primary purpose is to identify with cultural in-groups. The propensity for doing so is established early in human ontogeny as children become progressively enmeshed in their own cultural milieu. This is exemplified by their habitual replication of causally redundant actions shown to them by adults. Yet children seemingly ignore such actions shown to them by peers. How then does culture get transmitted intra-generationally? Here we suggest the answer might be ‘in play’.
Principal Findings
Using a diffusion chain design preschoolers first watched an adult retrieve a toy from a novel apparatus using a series of actions, some of which were obviously redundant. These children could then show another child how to open the apparatus, who in turn could show a third child. When the adult modeled the actions in a playful manner they were retained down to the third child at higher rates than when the adult seeded them in a functionally oriented way.
Conclusions
Our results draw attention to the possibility that play might serve a critical function in the transmission of human culture by providing a mechanism for arbitrary ideas to spread between children.
By Mark Nielsen, Jessica Cucchiaro, Jumana Mohamedally
Early Cognitive Development Centre, School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
Unthinkable as it may be, humanity, every last person, could someday be wiped from the face of the Earth. We have learned to worry about asteroids and supervolcanoes, but the more-likely scenario, according to Nick Bostrom, a professor of philosophy at Oxford, is that we humans will destroy ourselves.
Bostrom, who directs Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, has argued over the course of several papers that human extinction risks are poorly understood and, worse still, severely underestimated by society. Some of these existential risks are fairly well known, especially the natural ones. But others are obscure or even exotic. Most worrying to Bostrom is the subset of existential risks that arise from human technology, a subset that he expects to grow in number and potency over the next century.
Despite his concerns about the risks posed to humans by technological progress, Bostrom is no luddite. In fact, he is a longtime advocate of transhumanism—the effort to improve the human condition, and even human nature itself, through technological means. In the long run he sees technology as a bridge, a bridge we humans must cross with great care, in order to reach new and better modes of being. In his work, Bostrom uses the tools of philosophy and mathematics, in particular probability theory, to try and determine how we as a species might achieve this safe passage. What follows is my conversation with Bostrom about some of the most interesting and worrying existential risks that humanity might encounter in the decades and centuries to come, and about what we can do to make sure we outlast them.
Excerpt of an article by Ross Andersen at The Atlantic. Continue HERE
How did a small art college in Nova Scotia become the epicenter of art education–and to a large extent of the postmimimalist and conceptual art world itself–in the 1960s and 1970s? Like the unorthodox experiments and rich human resources that made Black Mountain College an improbable center of art a generation earlier, the activities and artists at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (aka NSCAD) in the 1970s redefined the means and methods of art education and the shape of art far beyond Halifax.
A partial list of visiting artists and faculty members at NSCAD would include Joseph Beuys, Sol LeWitt, Gerhard Richter, Dan Graham, Mel Bochner, Lucy Lippard, John Baldessari, Hans Haacke, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Frank, Jenny Holzer, Robert Morris, Eric Fischl, and Dara Birnbaum. Kasper Koenig and Benjamin Buchloh ran the NSCAD Press, publishing books by Hollis Frampton, Lawrence Weiner, Donald Judd, Daniel Buren, Michael Asher, Martha Rosler, and Michael Snow, among others. The Lithography Workshop produced early works by many of today’s masters, including John Baldessari, Vito Acconci, and Claes Oldenburg. With The Last Art College, Garry Kennedy, the college’s visionary president at the time, gives us the long-awaited documentary history of NSCAD during a formative era.
From gallery openings to dance performances to visiting lectures to exhibitions to classroom projects, the book gives a rich historical and visual account of the school’s activities, supplemented by details of specific events, reminiscences by faculty and students, accounts of artists’ talks, and notes on memorable controversies.
About the Author
Garry Neill Kennedy is a Canadian conceptual artist who was awarded the Portia White Prize by the Arts Council of Nova Scotia in 2000 and a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2004. From 1967 to 1990 he was President of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
Gretel Adorno was a remarkable woman about whom far too little is known. Although the recent publication of her correspondence with Walter Benjamin has confirmed the impression that she was a formidable intellect in her own right, she remains largely a mystery. What we do know for certain is that she was deeply devoted to her husband Theodor, whom she married in September, l937. Abandoning a career as a chemist to support his work unreservedly, she seems to have been resigned to his extra-marital affairs, and was so despondent after his death in August, l969 that she made a botched suicide attempt. Among the many services she rendered was the dutiful taking of minutes from the intellectual discussions he thought worth recording. Beginning in March of l938, shortly after his emigration to America and full integration into the life of the Institut für Sozialforschung (then resettled in New York), she wrote down a number of conversations he had with the director of the Institute, Max Horkheimer. She continued to play this role well after they all returned to Frankfurt in the early l950s to reestablish the Institute.
One such conversation took place over several days in March and April, l956, when Horkheimer and Adorno sat down to discuss a variety of pressing issues, political, sociological, and philosophical, and Gretel Adorno was there to record the results for posterity, or at least as an aide memoire for later more formal considerations of the same issues. Never intended for publication, the protocols nonetheless appeared in l989 alongside many other drafts and notes as an appendix to the thirteenth volume of Horkheimer’s collected works. They were blandly entitled “Diskussion über Theorie und Praxis.” Last year, they were translated into English by the venerable Rodney Livingstone for the New Left Review, and shortly thereafter repackaged as a little book with the much more provocative title Towards a New Manifesto.
Free will has long been a fraught concept among philosophers and theologians. Now neuroscience is entering the fray.
For centuries, the idea that we are the authors of our own actions, beliefs, and desires has remained central to our sense of self. We choose whom to love, what thoughts to think, which impulses to resist. Or do we?
Neuroscience suggests something else. We are biochemical puppets, swayed by forces beyond our conscious control. So says Sam Harris, author of the new book, Free Will (Simon & Schuster), a broadside against the notion that we are in control of our own thoughts and actions. Harris’s polemic arrives on the heels of Michael S. Gazzaniga’s Who’s In Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain (HarperCollins), and David Eagleman’s Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (Pantheon), both provocative forays into a debate that has in recent months spilled out onto op-ed and magazine pages, and countless blogs.
What’s at stake? Just about everything: morality, law, religion, our understanding of accountability and personal accomplishment, even what it means to be human. Harris predicts that a declaration by the scientific community that free will is an illusion would set off “a culture war far more belligerent than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution.”
The Chronicle Review brought together some key thinkers to discuss what science can and cannot tell us about free will, and where our conclusions might take us.
You Don’t Have Free Will
Jerry A. Coyne
The Case Against the Case Against Free Will
Alfred R. Mele
Free Will Is an Illusion, but You’re Still Responsible for Your Actions
Michael S. Gazzaniga
Want to Understand Free Will? Don’t Look to Neuroscience
Hilary Bok
The articles within this issue 8 of the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest attest, as a collection, to our belief in the utility of a multiplicity of approaches. A multiplicity of tactics is sometimes used to pragmatically cover for unsolvable differences in what is to be considered as appropriate action within a single protest. We do not use it as a cover though, instead we suggest (as many others have) that it is rich layers of often antagonistic relationships within generally broad trends that make a movement more successful, not less. Nevertheless, to intelligently understand the impact of potential actions is the task of all involved in the movements.Let us explore this multiplicity to its most creative, least reductive potential.
Marco Cuevas-Hewitt – Towards a Futurology of the Present Notes on Writing, Movement, and Time
Meg Wade – Grassroots Modernism as Autonomous Ethos and Practice
Jaleh Mansoor – Poetics, Commitment Ayreen Anastas’s M*Bethlehem and Pasolini Pa Palestine
Mattias Regan – Playing (with) the Impossible Modernism’s Populist Poetics
Victor Tupitsyn – Socialist Modernism and Beyond
Ron Sakolsky – The Surrealist Adventure and the Poetry of Direct Action Passionate Encounters Between the Chicago Surrealist Group,
the Wobblies and Earth First!
Gabriel Mindel Salomon – The Subjective Object Or Harry Hay in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
(originally published in the Journal of Radical Shimming)
Ian Milliss – Losing My Self Some anecdotes about anonymity
Gavin Grindon – Surrealism, Dada and the Refusal of Work Autonomy, Activism and Social Participation in The Radical Avant Garde
(originally published in the Oxford Art Journal). Note: Link opens to PDF
Olive McKeon – Oh What A Mess I’ve Made On Aesthetics and Political Praxis
Sue Bell Yank – Re-casting Institutional Memory The Slow Breakdown of the Art/Politics Divide
Survival Kit Collective – Survival Kit Collective Arcosantian economics, Biospherian aesthetics: a kit for grassroots ecological projects
Protest and Stagnation – Self-generated Discourse in the Context of the Austrian Student protests of 2009/2010
Khristopher Flack – Anywhere is Everywhere Reclaiming Community through production in the Rural Northeast
Tim Jensen – On the Emotional Terrain of Neoliberalism The opposite of despair is not hope, the opposite of depression is not happiness
Libertad Guerra – Uncommon Commonalities Aesthetic Politics of Place in the South Bronx
Luis Guerra – The Bomb Case An Uncelebratory Task
Christopher Lee – Frontlining Currency Speculative Numismatics” as Antagonistic Graphic Design
Public Laboratory – DIY mapping, Popular Participation Ecological and political monitoring in the Gulf of Mexico and beyond
Ultra Red – Andante Politics Popular Education in the Organizing of Unión de Vecinos
Randal Koene, Neuroscientist and Neuroengineer, discusses Substrate Independent Minds with Stuart Mason Dambrot on Critical Thought TV. Topics covered include the science, technology and ethics of Whole Brain Emulation, Universal Darwinism, Pattern Survival and a possible very far-future universe.
Our fond or fearful memories — that first kiss or a bump in the night — leave memory traces that we may conjure up in the remembrance of things past, complete with time, place and all the sensations of the experience. Neuroscientists call these traces memory engrams.
But are engrams conceptual, or are they a physical network of neurons in the brain? In a new MIT study, researchers used optogenetics to show that memories really do reside in very specific brain cells, and that simply activating a tiny fraction of brain cells can recall an entire memory — explaining, for example, how Marcel Proust could recapitulate his childhood from the aroma of a once-beloved madeleine cookie.
“We demonstrate that behavior based on high-level cognition, such as the expression of a specific memory, can be generated in a mammal by highly specific physical activation of a specific small subpopulation of brain cells, in this case by light,” says Susumu Tonegawa, the Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience at MIT and lead author of the study reported online today in the journal Nature. “This is the rigorously designed 21st-century test of Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield’s early-1900s accidental observation suggesting that mind is based on matter.”
Image: a transgenic mouse hippocampus. Image: Nikon Small World Gallery
Lawrence M. Krauss, a well-known cosmologist and prolific popular-science writer, apparently means to announce to the world, in this new book, that the laws of quantum mechanics have in them the makings of a thoroughly scientific and adamantly secular explanation of why there is something rather than nothing. Period. Case closed. End of story. I kid you not. Look at the subtitle. Look at how Richard Dawkins sums it up in his afterword: “Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?,’ shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages. If ‘On the Origin of Species’ was biology’s deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see ‘A Universe From Nothing’ as the equivalent from cosmology. The title means exactly what it says. And what it says is devastating.”
Excerpt from an article written by DAVID ALBERT at the NYT. Continue HERE
Gravity varies slightly, wherever you go. So can we measure this phenomenon with a set of Kern scales and our traveling assistant? Watch the film or explore the results so far.
Aim
If Earth was a perfect sphere of uniform density, then gravity would be consistent. But it’s not, which means gravity varies wherever you go. So can we chart those discrepancies using just a basic-range Kern scale?
Method
We’re shipping our Gnome Kit from scientist to scientist around the world. Join the experiment and you’ll receive:
1x Kern EWB 2.4 Scale
Pre-calibrated according to local gravity at Kern HQ, Balingen, Germany.
1x Kern Gnome
The perfect test-subject for two good reasons: Gnomes are already accustomed to traveling the world. They also originate from our homeland, Germany.
1x Lab gloves & 1 x Air duster
Important because dust or grease will reduce the accuracy of the results.
Liz Miller & Martin Allor at Concordia University ask: “How can human rights activists best reach audiences in a multichannel universe that is increasingly inundated with images of war, tragedy and suffering? How to avoid having your campaign lost in the sea of nonstop reality media? The Witness model of advocacy promotes “narrowcasting,” the idea that it is not always how many people see a video but who sees it and what they do with it.
Cotton production, India. Courtesy of Uwe H. Martin
Niger Delta States. Courtesy of George Osodi.
SUPPLY LINES brings visual practitioners with notable bodies of previous work on globalization together with theorists working in areas of spatial culture, geography, art history and cultural theory to critically examine concepts of resource extraction, use, circulation, and representation. It furthermore forges a collaborative and interdisciplinary mode of geographical knowledge production, with the ultimate intent of stimulating ongoing research, education and public interest in the common use of limited resources. In addition to reframing resources, in other words, Supply Lines seeks to reposition the public’s relation to them. In so doing, it aspires to contribute to participatory, community-oriented models of society, which are increasingly crucial as resource conflicts intensify.
This visual research project explores human interactions with natural resources (e.g., water, oil, silver) and the spatial and social relations ensuing from them. Rather than understanding resources as fixed or externally given, the project conceives of them as collectively produced and able to mobilize and interrelate diverse areas with one another: geographically, historically, economically, and culturally. With growing consciousness about the global limitation and unsustainability of vital resources, there is an urgent need for new means of representation to convey the complexity of such social, geopolitical, ecosystemic and climatic relations. This project’s development of new visual and theoretical material aims to contribute to expanding the notion of “resource” from a hitherto primarily economic-industrial domain toward an aesthetic-cultural context.
Death is supposed to be an event proclaimed but once, and yet some deaths, curiously enough, need to be affirmed again and again, as if there were a risk that the interred will crawl back up into the world of the living if fresh handfuls of dirt are not tossed on their graves. One such member of the living dead, accompanying the likes of God and Karl Marx, is Sigmund Freud. How often one hears, thanks recently to the fetishization of neuroscience, that psychoanalysis is now bunk, irrelevant, its method decadent and “dangerous,” as the recent David Cronenberg film, “A Dangerous Method,” informs us.
Over the years, the “talking cure” — so dubbed by Bertha Pappenheim, a.k.a. “Anna O.,” who became Freud’s first psychoanalytic case study — has received quite a bit of ridicule and reworking. With countless children and adults taking behavior-altering drugs, many are again tolling the bell for psychoanalysis. Who wouldn’t choose fast-acting pills over many years on the couch, health insurance companies most of all? Perhaps, after surviving scandal, revision and pop characterization, drugs and money will definitively put old Sigmund to rest.
If psychoanalysis were simply a way of “curing” certain individuals of socially unwanted behavior, then I would have no problem with its disappearance. Similarly, if psychoanalysis were just a way for wealthy individuals to talk to one another about their lackluster existences, it might as well continue on its way to the dustbin of history. And if, God forbid, psychoanalysis has devolved into just another addition to the theory toolkit of academics in the humanities, someone ought to put it out of its misery now.
Excerpt of an article by BENJAMIN Y. FONG at NYT. Continue HERE
Can physicists produce insights about language that have eluded linguists and English professors? That possibility was put to the test this week when a team of physicists published a paper drawing on Google’s massive collection of scanned books. They claim to have identified universal laws governing the birth, life course and death of words.
The paper marks an advance in a new field dubbed “Culturomics”: the application of data-crunching to subjects typically considered part of the humanities. Last year a group of social scientists and evolutionary theorists, plus the Google Books team, showed off the kinds of things that could be done with Google’s data, which include the contents of five-million-plus books, dating back to 1800.
Excerpt from an article written by CHRISTOPHER SHEA at WST. Continue HERE
Department 21 is a project where designers, artists and architects can meet, collaborate and share working space beyond the institutional boundaries of their own disciplines.
Department 21 was set up in 2009 when a group of students at the Royal College of Art, London initiated an experimental cross-departmental studio space, thereby engendering new discussions and ways of working than had been seen in recent years at the college.
Emerging from an institutional context in which individual authorship and outcome-driven projects are the dominant frames for creative production, the project is the result of a need for new, collaborative forms of exchange between students from different disciplines: it is a means to get in touch with other peoples’ practices (and in this way question one’s own practice), as well as being a platform to support collaboration beyond specialties.
The philosophy driving Department 21 is an emancipated vision of postgraduate studentship, where all those entering a space of education have the responsibility to take a position regarding their learning process. Contrary to the commonly found format of short interdisciplinary collaboration with a secure outcome, Department 21 feels it necessary to create premises for individuals to encounter the others’ spontaneous collaborative working methods based on common interests, curiosity and critical dialogue. The ongoing research work of the project is therefore to identify, test and refine methodologies that enable this type of encounter to emerge and thrive.
A propos of absolutely nothing, a few texts I’ve found helpful in unpacking the aforementioned genre, in no particular order:
1. Binyavanga Wainaina’s “How to Write About Africa.” You’ve probably read it already – and if you haven’t, get on that – but I need to get that out of the way first. It’s the entrance to any serious conversation, the prerequisite. Not just because he’s right, but because it’s funny. And its funny because it comes from a place of exhaustion, of total and complete exasperated frustration. That’s important, because it helps you understand how omnipresent this shit is, what an unstoppable energizer bunny of neverendingness it is. Humor isn’t enough, is never enough – after all, how can you satirize people who satirize themselves? – but the recourse to it tellingly reflects an experience that you need to come to terms with, the experience of living in the world created by such discourse. As he wrote in a reflective essay, later:
“How to Write about Africa” grew out of an email. In a fit of anger, maybe even low blood sugar — it runs in the family — I spent a few hours one night at my graduate student flat in Norwich, England, writing to the editor of Granta. I was responding to its “Africa” issue, which was populated by every literary bogeyman that any African has ever known, a sort of “Greatest Hits of Hearts of Fuckedness.” It wasn’t the grimness that got to me, it was the stupidity. There was nothing new, no insight, but lots of “reportage” — Oh, gosh, wow, look, golly ooo — as if Africa and Africans were not part of the conversation, were not indeed living in England across the road from the Granta office. No, we were “over there,” where brave people in khaki could come and bear witness. Fuck that. So I wrote a long — truly long — rambling email to the editor.
Written by Aaron Bady, The New Inquiry. Continue HERE
Where Art Belongs, the title of Chris Kraus’s latest collection of essays, sounds corrective. As if, instead of in its proper place, art is elsewhere. It has been mislaid, like a cell phone. Or perhaps, like a vase, not so much lost as thoughtlessly positioned. Where is art, and who put it there?
Anyone who has read Kraus’s earlier work can guess who she’ll bring in for questioning. “Until recently,” Kraus wrote in her previous essay collection, 2004’s Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness, “there was absolutely no chance of developing an art career in Los Angeles without attending one of several high-profile MFA studio programs,” including ones at institutions where Kraus herself has taught. (Since the late 1990s, she has held teaching positions at a number of schools in California, including UC San Diego, UC Irvine, and Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design.) The MFA is a “two-year hazing process” “essential to the development of value in the by-nature elusive parameters of neoconceptual art. Without it, who would know which cibachrome photos of urban signage, which videotapes of socks tossing around a dryer, which neominimalist monochrome paintings are negligible, and which are destined to be art?”
Duly initiated in sock videos, artists graduate to a handful of galleries, where their advanced degrees reassure collectors intending to get their money’s worth. The MFA is a quality assurance stamp, certifying that no matter what a piece looks like on the surface, it is guaranteed to be full of art-historical references. Alternative exhibition spaces are “dead-end ghettos, where no one, least of all ambitious students, from the art world goes.” While curators and professors consider the continuum between MFAs and galleries a “plus”—“what makes LA so great,” chirps one gallery owner, “is that the school program is actually a vital part of the community”—Kraus had her doubts. What “community” were these people talking about? “It is bizarre,” she observed, “that here, in America’s second largest city, contemporary art should have come to be so isolated and estranged from the experience of the city as a whole.”
This piece was originally published in N+1′s Issue 13, “Machine Politics.” Continue HERE
High-profile exhibitions on surrealism and abstract expressionism rarely resurrect debates about the validity of Freudian psychoanalytic theory or Clement Greenberg’s rejection of representation. So it might be germane to ask why the current resurgence of institutional, critical and media attention on feminist art has sparked impassioned discussions about the relevance of feminism in today’s allegedly “post-feminist” art world?
The answer is not only because women of all generations remain conflicted about feminism, but because art is arguably the most appropriate medium to represent feminism’s complex history, meaning and purpose. As the best of the recent feminist art survey shows demonstrate, “feminism” is far from a fixed term. Putting aside feminist theory’s distracting obsession with semantics, the term still encompasses too many and too varied ideological factions, political agendas, identities and histories to fit any single definition that is not troublingly essentialist, reductivist or vague.
One proof of gender equality might be that the feminist movement’s history has played out like other revolutions by splintering into a host of militant and mutually antagonistic subgroups. Yet in spite of divisiveness within the active feminism movement, the revolution’s salient principle – that women are intelligent, capable people – has saturated our culture at large to the point of being taken for granted.
Written by Ana Finel Honigman at The Guardian. Continue HERE
Image above: Art work by the Guerilla Girls. Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi
In many ways, the artistic debates prevalent in the 1970s are recurring in our time: the relation between art and ecology, the position of the artist within a information and media society and the crisis of (neo)liberalism. Although the societal context and diameters of these discussions have changed profoundly, their basis can be found in the period from 1965 to 1975, considered a paradigmatic shift in art and society. But how well do we actually know our immediate past and what can we learn from it? Smithson’s artistic heritage provides an interesting and relevant case study in this respect. Rethinking Robert Smithson aims to open up a discussion about current concerns in art and theory at the intersection of art historical debate and contemporary art practice. Along the line of two thematic approaches related to Smithson’s work, Art and Ecology and The Cinematic Condition, topical concerns in artistic practice are reconsidered by internationally renowned theorists and artists.
I was now about to form another being of whose disposition I was alike ignorant; she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness…and she…might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation…She might also turn with disgust from him to the superior beauty of man…trembling with passion, tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged… I left the room, and locking the door, made a solemn vow in my own heart to never resume my labours (Mary Shelly – Frankenstein, 1818)
From the earliest days of film, story tellers have been fascinated with the image of the mechanical woman. Maria, the dark and destructive fembot of Metropolis (1927) requires little introduction and has thoroughly captured the cultural imaginary.
We may say that Maria is the prototype of all “bad girl robots” who follow her. Bad girl ‘bots seem to be pathologically preoccupied with the destruction of humanity and this remains a dominant character trait of robot women in film. Unlike her male counterpart (i.e. Bionic Man; Dekkard; Robo Cop; etc.), she is seldom charged with keeping/restoring order on behalf of the State. And if she is, she inevitably malfunctions or rebels (or both).
Andreas Huyssen argues that technology represented as female monstrosity or maschinenmensch emerged at the turn of the 18th century as the literary imagination appropriated the image of the human-like automaton, popularized during the 17th and early 18th century, and transformed it from the symbol of Enlightenment, “testimony to the genius of mechanical invention,” to an image of terror and “threat to human life” that is so familiar to us today.
Blade Runner’s (1982) Pris and Zhora are bad girl ‘bots in that one is a mercenary and the other a “basic pleasure bot” (prostitute: but without pay) who defy rules concerning replicant (cyborg) autonomy.
Contemporary films like Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), continue this trend with such memorable female machines as the TX.
All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. . . .
—John Donne
LOVE AND THEFT
Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator—marked by her forever—remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.
The author of the story I’ve described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale of Lolita in 1916, forty years before Vladimir Nabokov’s novel. Lichberg later became a prominent journalist in the Nazi era, and his youthful works faded from view. Did Nabokov, who remained in Berlin until 1937, adopt Lichberg’s tale consciously? Or did the earlier tale exist for Nabokov as a hidden, unacknowledged memory? The history of literature is not without examples of this phenomenon, called cryptomnesia. Another hypothesis is that Nabokov, knowing Lichberg’s tale perfectly well, had set himself to that art of quotation that Thomas Mann, himself a master of it, called “higher cribbing.” Literature has always been a crucible in which familiar themes are continually recast. Little of what we admire in Nabokov’s Lolita is to be found in its predecessor; the former is in no way deducible from the latter. Still: did Nabokov consciously borrow and quote?
An excerpt form an essay written by Jonathan Lethem at Harper’s Magazine. Read it HERE
Cotton production, India. Courtesy of Uwe H. Martin
Niger Delta States. Courtesy of George Osodi.
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