Written by Hal Foster, ART FORUM. Continue HERE

View of “September 11,” 2011. Foreground: Christo, Red Package, 1968. Background, from left: Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Questions), 1991; Willem de Rooij, Index: Riots, Protest, Mourning and Commemoration (as represented in newspapers, January 2000–July 2002), 2003. Photo: Matthew Septimus.

There’s no doubt ancient astronomers were clever folk. Realizing Earth was round, estimating the Sun’s distance, discovering heliocentricity — it’s quite a list. But Brad Schaefer (Louisiana State University) suggested at the recent American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin that we should add another light bulb to the glow shining from history: ancient astronomers may have corrected for dimming caused by the atmosphere, centuries before anyone came up with a physical model for it.

This dimming is called atmospheric extinction. Extinction happens because starlight has to pass through Earth’s atmosphere in order to reach us. But the effect isn’t uniform: if you spend time stargazing you’ve probably noticed that a star high up in the sky’s dome looks brighter than it does as it slides toward the horizon. That’s because light coming to us from near the horizon passes through more atmosphere than if it shines straight down from overhead. (The Sun looks redder at sunset and sunrise for the same reason.)

Astronomers have cataloged stars’ magnitudes for at least two millennia, all the way back to an ancient document called the Almagest. It was the Almagest that Schaefer began with — but his goal wasn’t to determine if astronomers in olden days accounted for extinction. He wanted to use the brightnesses reported in it to decide a long-standing debate over who wrote the catalog in the first place, Hipparchus of Rhodes (circa 150 BC) or Ptolemy of Alexandria (circa AD 150).

Written by Camille Carlisle, SKY & Telescope. Continue HERE

Image above: Frontispiece illustration from a Venetian 1496 edition of the Almagest, depicting Ptolemy instructing the 15th-century astronomer Regiomontanus (also known as Johannes Müller von Königsberg). Above the men is the zodiac, encircling the celestial sphere. Zachariel / Wikimedia Commons

Author Susan Cain explains the fallacy of “groupwork,” and points to research showing that it can reduce creativity and productivity.

Do you enjoy having time to yourself, but always feel a little guilty about it? Then Susan Cain’s “Quiet : The Power of Introverts” is for you. It’s part book, part manifesto. We live in a nation that values its extroverts – the outgoing, the lovers of crowds – but not the quiet types who change the world. She recently answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.

Cook: This may be a stupid question, but how do you define an introvert? How can somebody tell whether they are truly introverted or extroverted?

Cain: Not a stupid question at all! Introverts prefer quiet, minimally stimulating environments, while extroverts need higher levels of stimulation to feel their best. Stimulation comes in all forms – social stimulation, but also lights, noise, and so on. Introverts even salivate more than extroverts do if you place a drop of lemon juice on their tongues! So an introvert is more likely to enjoy a quiet glass of wine with a close friend than a loud, raucous party full of strangers.

It’s also important to understand that introversion is different from shyness. Shyness is the fear of negative judgment, while introversion is simply the preference for less stimulation. Shyness is inherently uncomfortable; introversion is not. The traits do overlap, though psychologists debate to what degree.

Continue on Live Science HERE

Continuing from the Dawn of Social Networks: Ancestors May Have Formed Ties With Both Kin and Non-Kin Based On Shared Attributes. HERE

If you ever sit back and wonder what it might have been like to live in the late Pleistocene, you’re not alone. That’s right about when humans emerged from a severe population bottleneck and began to expand globally. But, apparently, life back then might not have been too different than how we live today (that is, without the cars, the written language, and of course, the smartphone). In this week’s Nature, a group of researchers suggest that we share many social characteristics with humans that lived in the late Pleistocene, and that these ancient humans may have paved the way for us to cooperate with each other.

Modern human social networks share several features, whether they operate within a group of schoolchildren in San Francisco or a community of millworkers in Bulgaria. The number of social ties a person has, the probability that two of a person’s friends are also friends, and the inclination for similar people to be connected are all very regular across groups of people living very different lives in far-flung places.

So, the researchers asked, are these traits universal to all groups of humans, or are they merely byproducts of our modern world? They also wanted to understand the social network traits that allowed cooperation to develop in ancient communities.

Written by By Kate Shaw, Ars Technica. Continue on Wired HERE

Alinka Echeverría: “Six Million Pilgrims (2009) is a photographic typology of the backs of three hundred Mexican Catholic pilgrims on their journey to the
Basilica de Guadalupe in Mexico City. This yearly pilgrimage, undertaken by approximately six million people every year takes place on the anniversary of the five apparitions of the Virgin of Guadalupe between the 9th and 12th December 1531 to the indigenous man Juan Diego in Tepeyac, the sacred place of the Aztec goddess Tonantzin. The myth of the apparitions marks a turning point in the spiritual conquest of native Mexicans by the Spanish and lead to the amalgamation of Tonantzin and the Virgin Mary. This is the origin of the devotion of Mexicans to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Since the spiritual conquest of Mexico (arguably one of the most important legacies of the colonial period), the image of the Virgin has been of central importance in the history of Mexico. Her image was used by political leaders as a symbol of faith and freedom during the Independence movement in 1810, and again during the Revolution a century later.

In 2010 the Virgen de Guadalupe continues to be the center piece of our cosmology as Mexicans. This work is an observation of her role in contemporary visual culture and the vast layers of symbolism transmitted through her iconic image. I am also interested in the pilgrimage as a socio-political and cultural phenomenon and in the psychological and emotional relationship that each individual has with the Virgin. The work is inspired by the Becher tradition of systematic documentation. I chose to photograph the pilgrims that are carrying their virgin, which is usually hanging in their home. They take their paintings, sculptures, posters or cloaks of the Virgen to the Basicila to be blessed and to give thanks. Each portrait was taken separately, then ‘cut out’ and mounted onto a plain background. This decontextualization is intended to focus our attention on the individual. It also functions as a means to be able to then recombine it with the other hundreds of pilgrims. When placed back into the series the image has a direct relationship to the other portraits
rather than with the rest of the elements originally in the image. The large number of portraits creates a visual maze of similarity and difference, perhaps metaphoric of Mexican identity and makes us imagine the millions of pilgrims that visit the Basilica every year.”

www.alinkaecheverria.com

An interview by soso Magazine about sexual attraction to urban objects, featuring the love story between Erika Eiffel (aka. Mrs. Berliner Mauer) and the Berlin Wall: A radical extreme of literally appropriating public space.

Generations of chain-smoking writers, skinny-jeaned bloggers and people with guitars have howled on about the subject. Love. Why do we love when all heavenly odds seem to be working against us? Why do we love after the other has disappointed us? Heck, why do we even love at all? During 5½ hours worth of tea, Erika Eiffel and I attempted to answer the unanswerable. It took us just that long to realize that, well, it’s beyond us, but we’ll probably never regret that we tried.

Before the Wall, Erika had a string of successful relationships with truly inspiring objects of affection. The kind that looks great on paper, at least. There was her love for a bow, which earned her two world champion titles on the US national archery team. Then there was the Japanese sword that made her the youngest world champion in the art of Iai-batto-jutsu. And her relationship with the admittedly very sexy F-15 jet got her one rare congressional nomination to the US Air Force academy. Finally, in 2007, she settled down and had a public commitment ceremony with the Grand Madame of Paris — the Eiffel Tower. Everyone agrees the tower is beautiful. With its straight lines and sturdy steel it’s an architectural marvel. Although she loves the tower to this day, she now knows that the ceremony was her attempt to have an at least somewhat accepted, mainstream objectum sexual relationship. It didn’t feel quite right. So just like I moved on from my eerily beautiful, learned and sophisticated ex-boyfriend to be with someone I had loved for years, Erika packed her bags and moved to Berlin to be with her Mauer.

[Interview conducted by Jennifer Hofmann; photographs by Anastasia Loginova]:

Okay, let’s get to it. When did you first realize that you were objectum sexual?

Well, I always knew. I used to hate manufactured toys so I built my own. For example, I found these two small planks of wood that I really connected to. So I nailed them together and took them with me wherever I went. To school, to bed, to play dates…everywhere. Of course, people thought it was cute then.

Read Interview HERE

There is a circular hole in the wall, about 30-40 cm diameter and perforated at 1 meter above the ground. A man enters through the hole in the wall and a man (apparently the same individual) exits again through the same hole. His mate is standing right next to the hole and seems to be waiting for him. Yesterday I came across these pictures again. The enigmatic hole is the entrance to a room. It is a door that keeps you fit, elastic and flexible, if you want to discover what there is at the other side of the wall. Its dimension relies on the utmost reduction of a bending human body. And the erotic experience of penetrating it is intimately connected both to the materiality of the hole and the earthen texture of the wall. It is an intuitive understanding of a house as the shelter of a woman’s uterus. It requires thinking where to place first a leg, an arm, then a hand and a foot. But even if it looks like a perforation, as if material had been removed out of the massive surface, the hole was indeed already there before the wall was built all around it. It is incredibly mysterious when our iconic idea of a rectangular door mutates and becomes something else that defines a new type of threshold.

Below there is another door of Korongo houses that also fascinates me: the oversized threshold, shaped as a human-size keyhole. One discovers its meaningfulness after knowing that it lets villagers access the room while carrying two large jars with drinking water hanging from a stick over their shoulders.

George Rodger captured in his photographs the everyday lives of the Nuba people in Sudan in late 1940s, their houses, their wrestling combats with sharp-edge bracelets, and their aesthetic scars that adorn their bodies.

[photos by George Rodger in Village of the Nubas. Phaidon 1999]

Ancient humans may not have had the luxury of updating their Facebook status, but social networks were nevertheless an essential component of their lives, a new study suggests.

The study’s findings describe elements of social network structures that may have been present early in human history, suggesting how our ancestors may have formed ties with both kin and non-kin based on shared attributes, including the tendency to cooperate. According to the paper, social networks likely contributed to the evolution of cooperation.

“The astonishing thing is that ancient human social networks so very much resemble what we see today,” said Nicholas Christakis, professor of medical sociology and medicine at Harvard Medical School and professor of sociology in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and senior author on the study. “From the time we were around campfires and had words floating through the air, to today when we have digital packets floating through the ether, we’ve made networks of basically the same kind.”

“We found that what modern people are doing with online social networks is what we’ve always done — not just before Facebook, but before agriculture,” said study co-author James Fowler, professor of medical genetics and political science at the University of California, San Diego, who, with Christakis, has authored a number of seminal studies of human social networks.

Via Science Daily. Continue HERE
Image above: The Hadza of Tanzania live as hunter-gatherers. (Credit: Courtesy of Coren Apicella/Harvard Medical School)

Rob Bryanton made his first record at twelve, and was host of a regional CBC-TV music series at twenty. He is the President of Talking Dog Studios (www.talkingdogstudios.com) in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, which specializes in music and sound for film and television. He has been nominated eight times in the last eight years for Canada’s prestigious Gemini Awards, four times in the category “Best Original Music Score for a Dramatic Series”, and four times for “Best Sound for a Dramatic Program”. Recent projects to which Rob has contributed his talents as a composer and sound mixer include the hugely popular CTV series “Corner Gas”, plus the historical mini-series “Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story” (CBC-TV). Rob is also responsible for the theme and underscoring on CBC’s Canadian Antiques Roadshow. While Rob has had poems and song lyrics published in several anthologies over the past decade, “Imagining the Tenth Dimension” is his first book. It represents the culmination of a lifelong fascination with science, philosophy, and the nature of reality which, as he tells in the book, began at the age of seven. Rob is also the current President of the Saskatchewan Motion Picture Association, and is an active volunteer in his community. A typical stubborn prairie boy, he is proud to have built a career for himself as a composer and sound mixer in his home town, and to have been a part of Saskatchewan’s burgeoning film and television industry for the past 30 years. Rob lives in Regina with his wife Gail and their dog Buddy. Gail and Rob have two sons, Todd and Mark. Text taken from Amazon

The day when heavy machinery and manpower transformed a Dutch beach into a lunar landscape of hills and craters. At sunset the labor stopped, and a live drumbeat announced the ceremony of a woman, gracing this imaginary moon with an American flag. The same evening, while the party still went on, the landscape was flattened out again, leaving no physical trace of the event behind—save the memories and a story to tell future generations.

First Woman On The Moon, 1999 by Aleksandra Mir.

In the past two years, protesters against authoritarian regimes have begun to heavily use social-networking and media services, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and cell phones, to organize, plan events, propagandize, and spread information outside the channels censored by their national governments. Those governments, grappling with this new threat to their holds on power, have responded by trying to unplug cyberspace.

Some examples: In April 2009, angry young Moldovans stormed government and Communist Party offices protesting what they suspected was a rigged election; authorities discontinued Internet service in the capital. In Iran, the regime cracked down on protesters objecting to fraudulent election outcomes in June 2009 by denying domestic access to servers and links, and by slowing down Internet service generally — although protesters and their supporters found ways around those restrictions. In Tunisia, when protests against President Zine el Abidine ben Ali escalated in December 2010, his government sought to deny Twitter services in the country and hacked the Facebook accounts of some Tunisian users in order to acquire their passwords. In Egypt, amid mass protests in Cairo and several other cities in January 2011, Hosni Mubarak’s government attempted to disconnect the Internet. But there, too, protesters found limited workarounds until the doomed regime eventually restored some services.

Authoritarians may have reason to fear cyberspace. It is widely believed that the proliferation of Internet access and other communications technologies empowers individuals and promotes democracy and the spread of liberty, usually at the expense of centralized authority. As Walter Wriston optimistically put it in his 1992 book The Twilight of Sovereignty: “As information technology brings the news of how others live and work, the pressures on any repressive government for freedom and human rights will soon grow intolerable because the world spotlight will be turned on abuses and citizens will demand their freedoms.”

Written by Eric R. Sterner, The New Atlantis. Continue HERE

5 million starlings stream into Rome every winter evening. They form some of the most mesmeric aerial displays to confuse and avoid a peregrine falcon on the look out for his evening meal.

Earthflight uses many different filming techniques to create the experience of flying with birds as they reveal some of the greatest natural and man-made monuments of the planet.

In recent weeks it has become public in Argentina, the project initiated by two artists from Buenos Aires, Guillermo Faivovich and Nicholas Goldberg, consisting of a loan moving the meteorite “El Chaco” to Kassel, Germany, during the international art contemporary art exhibition Documenta 13.

“In Argentina, a rich and complex debate has recently arisen about the loan of this object. dOCUMENTA (13) therefore suspended its loan request on January 16 in respect of the positions stated by experts and local communities. Furthermore, dOCUMENTA (13) would like to state that no loan of the El Chaco meteorite will be further requested without a full endorsement by the peoples of the land of Chaco, by the local community as a whole, and in careful consideration of the beliefs and principles of the traditional custodians today. The artists are currently meeting with all concerned parties to discuss the matter together.”

Could this be one of those tactical, post-colonial, and anti-paradigmatic works of conceptual art banning?

Cultural astronomer Alejandro López, among his colleagues, promoted the opposition to this project, which seriously violates the rights of Aboriginal Chaco. The writings of ancient chroniclers and investigations carried up from the Aboriginal worldview, clearly show that for these people meteors scattered on Campo del Cielo, are very important milestones in its territory.

Since the project was announced to move the meteorite Chaco aborigines have voiced opposition to it and want to work to make their voices heard. Click HERE to read and sign the petition. The petition is written in Spanish. However, you don’t read Spanish to sign it.

El Chaco meteorite, Campo del Cielo, near Gancedo, Chaco, Argentina

Click HERE to read the statement written by Documenta 13 suspending their request for the exhibition.

Interview with Guillermo Faivovich in La Voz, an Argentine publication.

CELLTEXTS by Ines & Eyal Weizman was a 2008 project that created an archive of texts, love letters, philosophical statements, letters to mothers, songs, treatises, political manifestos, and novels… written from incarcerated dissidents all around the world. The library uses the writer’s time spent in prison (1 day to 45 years) to organize an amalgam of published knowledge.

The installation is dedicated to prisoners engaged in writing. The work is organized around a collection of hundreds of books and other texts from across the world written under conditions of enforced incarceration. The collection includes the work of writers who have been sent to prison for the contents of their writing, for their political involvement, as well as of prisoners convicted of other crimes who have used the time and seclusion of their incarceration to become writers. Through the collection of texts an archipelago of prison cells emerges. The cells are thus revealed as sites of intellectual production, marking the limit condition of writing. The collection is assembled in recognition that spatial confinement and isolation may induce a process of creative, imaginative, sometimes spiritual, cultural production.
The individual’s impulse to survive through texts, through reclaiming her own voice against the imposition of others, creates an autarkic realm in which practices of dissidence, political and personal, could be reinstated. Commissioned and designed by and for the state, prison cells acquire a potential subversive content, becoming critical spatial apparatuses. Paradoxically, imprisonment emerges as an active practice of citizenship a mechanism of political opposition that call for a confrontation or intolerance with certain forms of government.

Excerpt from Ines & Eyal Weizman’s statement: For many prisoners, the prison could offer a period of reflection, scholarship and education as well as a resonating chamber for political dissent. Regis Debray described the Prison as “the dissident’s second university”. Antonio Gramsci was forced to write in code to bypass the constraints of the prison and its censorship. Ezra Pound learns from the Chinese Encyclopedia which he smuggled into his Pisan cage. For Antonio Negri it was the routines of the prison that represented the principal form of punishment in a capitalist society. Auguste Blanqui formulated in the middle of the 19th century, a detailed guide for the armed uprising of the revolutionary multitudes which included sketches and street maps with exact details of barricades. Many writers are fascinated with insects and animals coming into their prison cells.