blob detection

today in class we were shown "blob detection" - so i could put a camera on the ceiling of a room and know where everyone was standing - then i could take that data and feed it to a 3D environment. When the cost of headmounted video displays drop from current level of hundreds of dollars, it could be very cheap to create a virtual world. . . so if i am wearing the goggles and so are you and we get within the "line of sight" in a virtual maze of objects then we'd see eachother. pretty cool stuff

what is art, what is role of artist?

I uploaded a video - it is a very fast explanation of my current thinking. It will appear below this entry which was written very quickly as well.

 To summarize - if art is created in mind of observer (Eco, Barthes, Duchamp), then what is the point of the artist? As "schools of thought" and "isms" are vanishing, like cubism or post modernism, the artist is free to do what he wants and not explain... but then folks want the bio of the artist to figure out the intent. i feel ambivalent about it. I like to share my story and it informs my work, but it's a distraction.

Further if audience wants to know what fascinates or obsesses the artist, that's fine.. but my work is about transcending that. In that sense if my work has a meaning, or entertains, or annoys.. or is about me. then it's not about what I want it to be about

creating the experience of attention to attention... awareness of awareness. all that stuff arises within awareness - thus like desire, aversion, boredom, restlessness, and doubt (like the  108 earthly temptations a person must overcome to achieve nirvana.)

that said, i am being shaped by fatherhood. like right now i am typing this rather than clean dishes and put out laundry. Jennifer's hands are full with the baby. so there is a tension between my artistic goals and domestic duties. or is that a myth? maybe they are the same. if my goal is mindfulness, and I have a robot under my shirt measruing that, then I am ALWAYS CREATING MY ART.

summary of my work's mission: pay attention to attention.

challenge for art: Artist who seek to engage the mind, or entertain, (or even some folks make art aims to irritate) draw the attention down a hole, or spiraling up a mountain, but it's no longer still.

Interactive Art project in School to Promote Meditation

Perhaps art only can prove itself when it is brave enough to leave the gallery setting.  One location that art seems to particularly result in the sharp downgrade in the status of a work of art, is when it appears in a grade school. Thus, this is the ideal place to have my work exhibited to make my point. 

Of course, as the work is interactive, it's not an exhibition, but rather a vehicle for exchange.  The most marked exchange inside of a school is that the students abdicate their freedom and will, in order to receive rewards or avoid punishments. While this is contrary to my vision for how education should be conducted, and contrary to the value of cultivating present-mindedness, given that the work will appear, and solicit interaction, within school walls, this carrot and stick approach will be employed. In that the work will inspire competition and herald the "winners."

An artist wants participation, just as an artist wants visitors to a gallery to engage. Students submit to authority in hopes of some day becoming the authority  If the system gives out awards as a stand-in for love, acceptance, and appreciation - students will grow up to see money or prizes as the customary stand-in.

The value system that my work purveys, is "meditation is good for you". This is to profess that peace of mind, quietude, and stillness improves one's life. But as with anything we're told is good for us, unless we already believe the value, then bribery is a powerful technique to inspire participation. This is true for children as well as adults.

The work of art consists of a camera attached to a computer sitting in a private room devoid of distractions. Participants are invited to watch a video of melting ice, stare at the floor, or to close their eyes. Facing the camera they're prompted to state their name. When they stand up, the computer then records how long they were meditating and the date and time. At the end of the week, or month, it presents a report of who meditated the most total time, and who had sessions with the highest frequency. Or perhaps just shows the total amount as compared to other galleries, institutions, or schools that hosted it prior. The video maybe then reviewed in high speed to ensure that they were meditating and not reading a book or texting their friends!
 
How does this relate to art? Marina Abramović suggests the artist's state of presence is more important than nature of the work itself. She says, "The artist should look deep deep within himself for inspiration. The deeper he looks the more universal he becomes. The artist is the universe."

Abramović calls for the artist to be transparent, to give and receive at same time. This work - and my work creating a mindfulness robot that reminds me when my breath changes, aims to do this. Being shown in a gallery, winning accolades, and selling the work is secondary and perhaps even a distraction. Further, in keeping with introspection and monitoring my thoughts as I monitor my breath and monitor the participants (whether in a school or gallery), I must admit that I invoked the authority of Marina Abramović to inform - or justify - my approach. She is a genuine inspiration, but I mentioned her to lend credence. In that sense I am aiming to enter the "art dialogue" - but this in my view is wholly unnecessary. 

Just as "love means never having to say you're sorry," I feel "being an artist means never having to explain yourself!"

a talk about art, control, and promise of interactive art

Evolving Role of Artist from freedom fighter to guru

-->

Why I am Here at FMI and What I plan to do (as of 11am on October 15, 2012)

Let’s start with the mind since we are always trying to make up our minds. But what makes up the make up of the mind?

The way I see it (borrowing from Lao Tzu), the mind constantly offers our consciousness many options for thoughts to pursue. Once a choice is made, words (voice or tweets) and bodily actions are the output.[1]

The first level of the artist is interested in stories and evoking emotions. These are essential arrows in the quiver of any artist or human being, but it assumes we are choosing our thoughts, words, and actions. This may actually not be true, or paradoxically both true and false. Rather than debate at that level, for now all of us can readily admit that if one takes certain actions enough times, these actions will form habits. In other words, we become unconscious and reflexive – rather than conscious and reflective. This is perhaps the second level role of the artist: to wake people up. This can poetically equate the artist with the role of a “Freedom Fighter”. This I believe can move toward spirituality and creativity (bringing about freedom), but often fed by a egoic desire for conflict or attention and the artist is a soldier or spy working to undermine the system or culture.

Yet I feel the artist is inevitably a result of some system and a culture (even being counter-culture is still being part of a culture), and so best to know what system you’ve bought into, or if you are an artist the system you're aiming to sell. We can use the structures of thinkers who’ve unlocked vibrant theories about the patterns in that culture. Now the artist can be more than do the "waking up" not as a “Freedom Fighter” but “the wonk,” “the hacker,” or “the open source Utopian”.

The systems I employ to hack the software program called "Culture" or "conscious evolution" are Jung’s theory about masculine and feminine as well as Spiral Dynamics as championed by Don Beck and Ken Wilber

But we need to quickly move the third level and transcend models and structures. If we stop at systems, we fail to fulfill the greater value of art. Lao Tzu said our habits (after being formed by thoughts, words, and actions) evolve into our character. In other words, our identity. The artist has a great role here. First, the artist can make us aware that character or identity is a construct and is flexible. In this we can use improv theater, interactive art, open source, and Jung’s model itself. All empower users to stretch their mind, weaken attachment to identity, and let people take on different stances. Then once this is demonstrated, we can enter level four, the artist as Techno-Shaman or Guru, who can guide us to transcend identity entirely.

We can get seduced by structures and concepts of self. Art can break us free, or just give us new more complex ones to distract us.

Lao Tzu ends the journey with destiny. Perhaps our destiny is to use art to transcend notions of individual destiny, as well as escape our literal notions about space, and limiting, linear conceptions about time.

One of the most famous tools for the meditator to facilitate transcending thoughts, staying present, and observing identification with the ego, is watching the breath. Could art be created that uses the breath as the input and sound as the output to enable meditation to last all day, all week, all month, or all year? Can this tool, or input device, illuminate those events in our lives that bring us out of the present? Would this build a stronger habit of catching the mind as it wanders and (as per Lao Tzu) transform our character - and in my case - "a character of non-identification with character".

My Proposed Project

Purposefully vague at this point, it takes in the breath and outputs a sound. The robot (we'll call it a robot for fun) has a prime directive: "Keep the user aware of the breath for the maximum amount of time". The secondary directive that comes out of this is "Do not disturb their lives or the people around them." The second feeds the first as users will shut it off, or have it shut off by those around them if it is disturbing. What strategy and tactics will the robot deploy? Certainly being overly strict or punitive may risk the user quitting. Perhaps it will need to use a reward system as well.

This can be viewed as the creation of one artificial life form to empower another (the user). In that this robot is seeking to maximize breath awareness, it is art that aims to enter the "Real World" - it has no interest in being in a gallery unless the user lives there. Art and Artist, when located in a gallery setting, may enjoy a support and understanding, but how will people greet the artist's mission when he and the art are let out of the cage? If art cannot make it on the tough streets, is it valuable? universal? helpful? These are interesting questions, but for now... let's be pragmatic and simply ask "How can the robot's output become either entertaining, or change enough, so that it doesn't get ignored, but too present or too easily ignored?" Is sound the best output? Is tactile possible so as to be undetectable by others?

1. Viewed pragmatically, we can imagine that if the robot used sound, the user would eventually learn to ignore the sound, or the annoyance to the user and/or others would cause the robot's ejection.
2. How to address times when it's easy to forget the breath - when the mind is occupied say shopping or writing. We can become un- self conscious when in public (you lose yourself) or too self-conscious (overly aware of self as object and criticizing), or lost in past/future desires and aversions

On a personal level, I'd like to know what sorts of activities or times of day decay mindfulness. With this knowledge, I can make a greater effort in those circumstances. On a spiritual level the questions go deeper to.... "who is breathing?" If you have body identification, you still must admit the breath continues in deep sleep and as per this project, it's forgotten. So then, if I am not the one breathing, who is the one who is interested in watching the breath.

In conclusion, why the breath? We celebrate art that can tell a good story (film, theater, novel writing), or make us think - but art that has us pay attention to something we are already doing? That hardly seems like art, right? But we spend most of our time lost in stories (whether our own life stories... or fictional ones) - and lost in thoughts, concepts, and ideas. Lost, as in not present. So why pay attention to something that happens whether we pay attention or not? Well... the breath tells us when we are not present, for if we forget to breathe, or ignore that breathing is happening, we are elsewhere. Of course if we are alive, then some part of us, or some mystserious force beyond us, keeps the lungs going.

This thing, whether subroutine or some "Angel of Breathing" - doesn't care whether you know the breath is going on - it's job is too important for any distractions. Living beings have had this relationship with"Prāṇa," but now we introduce this robot who shares the diligence and will teach us to have some degree of attention as well. In this, the robot's value system is simple: promoting awareness of breath, by some form of audio, tactile, or visual output is paramount. So if you are curing a disease, engaged in pride, shame, sadness, anger, or fear, - all of that is less important than being present with the breath.

What if the robot is right and this is the most important?! And even deeper, we hope to reveal what is the Ultimate Watcher - who is it that is aiming to watch the breath?

Phase 2, once working, we can ask "is this art or a meditation tool?" - and then decide if and how to make it art beyond concept to be an experience for an audience.

---

[1] Those who pursue art, or progressive ideas (technologically, socially, culturally, spiritually), feel they’ve found a more refined taste and while this may be true, it can make communicating to the masses distasteful or ineffective as they’ve become out of touch.

open source

Creating structures that are about sharing is revolutionary, but open source goes further (thanks to technology), they are sharing the implementation details. This empowers participants to add onto a thing and thus evolve/mutate it. This is why the work can be innovative – but also why it’s vital that the mind is liberated from “lower level” value systems while it makes decisions. The quieter voices – in particular, intuition – can lead projects in unimaginable directions (think invention of the personal computer).

 If put into boxes, hierarchies, high stakes, serious, non-communal, selfish work environments – the mind clams up. The mind goes into defense/attack mode. It is fight or flight thinking. Sure the adrenaline may not be pumping, and sure you may get some interesting inventions, but the mind is employing a value system to make decisions that calls upon the less novel aspects of itself. Thus progress is slowed. 

With Open Source, done with the right spirit, the mind can be free. I wish to share ideas how that spirit can be cultivated. Open Sourcing Open Source. Please comment below.

Babbage
too choose
which thought
built a machine

fear of being wrong, silly, or mad
we have wiring that connects the loudest circuit
when it's the quiet ones
who have real power

flowering of open source
a magic force
from beyond the mind
built upon doing what's kind
not re-sisting but re-creating 
doing other than "the man's" been fating
fading record industry
Bill Gates BASIC misstep
was greed
spends his retirement planting seeds

 You say you want a revolution
start a popular movement, ad campaign, or open source environment

Forget what you're voting against - what are you voting for? 

What's the pinwheel for?
Tells you the computer can't decide
Stuck in a loop
faithfully forever turns on computer screen
a much deeper message than it might seem

infinity, really means that. a forever loop, a love embrace is needed for next for next for next for next for next for next for next

but lost in a loop there is no output. evolution becomes revolution and we do it again and again. "You are the sun, you are the rain, which makes this life this foolish game (Lionel Ricthie). Initials are L-R. as in left/right brain knumbskull. the skull gets numb. unless you feel the press at the crown chakra, God's thumb holding back the explosion. INside of that you are God are one. Can I release the quantum computer? can I unplug the hole and let the chakra, the crown, begins to glow.

but who am i in this equation? the self regulator is literally talking to itself. and with altruism it is saying, "thinks of others" - a paradox or evolution or maturity. the way to regulate the self to be safe/better/at peace --- that's to stop thinking about yourself! Paradox indeed! But be wary, altruism can get coopeted by the ego. let it go.

confusion makes you numb, just as your mind is unsure how to vote. what is at stake? what is my state? what must be protected, mind projecting into a future self.

but computer is steady never makes his atke mikstakes, we fear seeing ourselves as the cmputer so typios. follow the whie trabbit downt het hold hole

Starts with trust, the quiet voices, yet undesreved 
adrenaline doesn't care.

And now the essay:

 “Inspire others to Start Something (e.g. wikipedia). They could just as easily have the thought, make money, be lazy, believe fear  - but something made them think of something altruistic. If altruism is not at the base of it, likely it will not be open source and don’t pretend to self or others or you’ll waste everyone’s time.

Lawyers, DJ’s, collaborative hackers  join open-source projects not for money, but the mind gets a better feeling for innovation or a desire for something deeper than self-interest

each moment the mind is full of contrary opinions and must take a poll.

It’s a ship with no captain. That can be dangerous

this is why many who’re in turmoil, seek a father figure

And others build an internal father figure – sometimes overbearing – to create order for themselves

“Well functioning” adults have bought into cultural (or counter-cultural value systems as reference)

Means one of the thoughts gets elected leader quickly

The less bloodshed (internal strife) the quicker the body takes actions or words/concepts arise

If it’s egoic, for example the project is meant to solve some personal desire or fear, this muddies the water

Thus if you can create without baggage, you are more apt to succeed

The mind sees through a construted identity. Without that it’s unsure how it could make decisions

It ignores the minor, cutting edge, candidates who can (like in USA) create full and real change. But people fear chaos, both on a political level and on a personal level

The who election (in our minds) is built upon identificanion with all that chatter. We think it matters who wins our internal election.

Paradox: it does and doesn't.

The latter as its all just mind forgetting it’s a tool and thinking it’s you. That said, cultivating (voting for) altruistic thoughts weakens ego-identification.

Just don’t get an ego about it!

 

Sister Alicia’s social experiments
led to Mancuso's merriments
his dance hall full of sharing
all from a nun caring
to break the rules of her superior.

The birth of disco
later napster
the parties were an explosion
not necesarily ignition,
but parallel process
like two needles chasing parallel grooves
like record needles made by samuri sword makers
It's all about chances and evolution
Leary, the johnny appleseed of deeper consciousness
beyond hierarchy and other mind trips
took a risk (like Sister Alicia),
throwing the party without permission

pirate radio, computer hackers
like the luddites in reverse
using technology to speed change
and maybe chaos that seems to create fear
At the current price of canvas
and competing for gallery walls
grafitti artists
return to cavepainting roots
seems to go back, but really forward.

"new ways to share ideas that advance the common
good, private interests move in to stop this from happening"
ironic that steve jobs learned from Xerox and the open sharing spirit
of Homebrew Computer Club
and in order to create the world's biggest company
built a closed system
can you say bye-bye flash?
 but far from reviled, he's loved
so not always is the innovator punished
and not always can the old ways win
and the Internet still remains somewhat free
but
who killed the electric car
once again, Japanese manufacturing appears
this time not needles but a prius

from essay
Xerox PARC
influenced by flower power.
Some were hippies
themselves. According to John Markoff, author of What the Dormouse
Said: How 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer,
“There was this very interesting parallel between the way they worked
with psychedelics—which was about augmenting human potential—
and the works of a man named Doug Engelbart [a pioneer of humancomputer
interaction, who, among other things, invented the mouse],
who was attempting to build a machine that he thought would augment
the human mind.”

Fred Moore. Moore saw money as the root of all problems
Altair
Homebrew Computer Club

then 1980's
cocaine
selfish but maybe practical?
studio 54
and Bill Gates
 the creator of BASIC asks to be paid
and to his side
how can you do much without being paid - i mean unless you have a rich uncle that you forgot about, we have to pay the rent
"software was widely considered private property by the early 1980s."

(or if not a rich uncle, Jimmy Wales,  made a fortune as an options and futures trader in Chicago, and then decided to pursue his passion.

WHAT IF BILL GATES NEVER WROTE THAT LETTER? WHAT WOULD THE WORK LOOK LIKE?

Then cocaine is out, and it's escstasy
and we "Transcend and include" we remix disco to make house
bringign back ghost of Mancuso
the rave is invented
"Huge crowds
united for the night to thumb their noses at the authorities and imagine
a different world."
but this may be moving to a new drug called Ayuhuasca
shamanic
natural
and unlike cocaine thus far doesn't cut out the middle man (shaman)
and this may be fueling the future of burning man

Rave was flower power’s wild grandchild
escstasy makes community without commitment
shared values and aesthetics do emerge
but no expecations

UNIX and Linux
and Tim
Berners-Lee invents HTML
and doesn't worry about getting paid for it, doesn't even cross his mind how to do that

but Stallman would say don't cry for him
 , “Free software is a
matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should
think of ‘free’ as in ‘free speech,’ not as in ‘free beer.’”*

if you think about free as freedom and a right/privielge and chance to share
vs.
free as in "no free lunch" practical mindset

Firefox the latest vote
in an election that never ends
and this bring us
my friends
to the merging of the evolution of the computer, and conciousness
we are computers
the mind is constantly polling its sub routines
before each output
many calculations.
The Web “the future is opensource everything.”
wikipedia works, take that Bill Gates!
Wikipedia = 5.3 million
articles, 100+ languages. Every
day thousands of new entries are added, and thousands more are
edited and improved

Jimmy Wales is to encyclopedias what David Mancuso is to DJing.
Both Mancuso and Wales changed the game, because they saw new
possibilities in the idea of sharing.

"It’s not about nonprofit versus profit—it’s about proprietary
versus closed. If I share my code, I’ll share it under a license that says
you can use it for anything you like, but you have to share your
changes as well. And that provides a level playing field—we’re all
agreeing to share our knowledge. It struck me that this kind of social
structure and social agreement could be used much broader than just
software. One of the things that came to mind was an encyclopedia.”

Like Linux founder Linus Torvalds, Wales recognized that our
future could be open-source everything. “Some of the general principles
apply almost anywhere. In many cases, businesses are losing out
on opportunities because of their information-hoarding mind-set. They
don’t realize that their customers know more than they do.”
Wildly successful Net-based businesses such as eBay, Amazon, and
MySpace are based on the strength of their communities and the content
their users contribute for free. The technology these businesses are
based on—the code that powers the Net—is also free. If there was a
huge cost involved with adding pages to the Internet, or using it, none
of these businesses would be able to function in the same way.
Many businesses that give content away for free are making money
and growing fast. The open-source Linux software set up by Linus Torvalds
as a hobby in 1991 is today used by Google, in Motorola cell
phones, TiVos, and BMWs. Many companies, including Intel and IBM,
have programmers working full-time developing new free software for
Linux, as they obey the laws of Linux and put back some of what they
take out. By distributing their core software for free, Linux now powers
forty-three million personal computers worldwide. By selling customized
software that runs on top of the free open-source software, it’s
predicted the market for Linux products will be worth $35 billion by
2008. To paraphrase Stewart Brand, author and founder of the Whole
Earth Catalog, information wants to be free, but customized information
wants to be really expensive. Linux is a great example of a company
that follows this dictum.

Harvard Business School published a report in 2006 that
surveyed a range of businesses and concluded that introducing problems
to outsiders was the best way to find effective solutions. A European
Union report released in 2007 specifically endorsed open-source
software, claiming that in “almost all” cases, long-term costs could be
reduced by switching from proprietary software to open-source systems
such as Linux.

Systems based on sharing expand the way information is used, and
in doing so expand the market for that information. As this dawns on
more of us, the question will not be “How do we stop this happening,”
but “How do we facilitate it?” The challenge of successful social networks
in the twenty-first century will be figuring out how to create a
dedicated dance floor like the one at the Loft, and how to keep people
contributing to open-source projects and social networks, devoting
their time and expertise the way they did at the Homebrew Computer
Club. To better understand how this might work, let us look at an
example of an industry that decided to fight a new system based on
sharing, when it should have been adapting to it.

in the name of empowering artists, the record companies were the paraistes/pirates
marketing machines
and a bottle neck
now music is more free

Having the backing of a major label with the marketing muscle to
put you on every record store shelf and TV channel used to be the only
way to the top, but who needs the majors in a world where people
watch music videos online and record store chains are going out of
business? File-sharing has created a new middle class in music. The
musicians in this middle class might not go platinum, but they are making
a living.

Many artists welcomed the changes file-sharing brought because
they felt the same way as Jeff. A study by the Pew Internet & American
Life Project asked three thousand musicians and songwriters their
views on file-sharing in April 2004. A total of 35 percent of those
polled said that file-sharing was not necessarily bad, because it helped
market and distribute their work; 35 percent said file-sharing had actually
boosted their reputations. Only 23 percent of those asked agreed
that file-sharing was harmful; 83 percent said they had deliberately put
free samples of their music online.

"Suing consumers trying to figure out a new
distribution system makes about as much sense as only allowing the
DJs who promote your records to collect them between 2:00 p.m. and
4:00 p.m."

you can't fight progress
funny how it was the luddite workers
and then became music companies
movie companies
and Bill Gates


A 2004 Harvard study that matched the hard
data on downloading against the actual market performance of the
songs and albums being downloaded found that any negative effect
downloading has on CD sales was “statistically indistinguishable from
zero.” The study concluded that file-sharing was actually boosting CD
sales for the top 25 percent of albums that had more than six hundred
thousand sales.

i don't believe that, but that's the thing - you can'at fight progress

yes "When an industry responds to a Pirate’s Dilemma by
fighting rather than competing, it runs the risk of missing out on new
opportunities."

but no guarantee. might make more sense for the artist or company to sue and be selfisha nd paranoid- but there are larger forces at work here -- evolution

“Crazy” by the group Gnarls Barkley hit the number-one spot
in the UK from downloads. as the hit goes: “You really think you’re in control? “Well, I think
you’re crazy.”

in other words,l;arger forces

John Kennedy, summed up the music industry’s new position on the Pirate’s
Dilemma it faced: “At long last the threat has become the opportunity.”
The music industry found out
the hard way that resistance is futile.

Instead of fighting change, his computer company saw a way to
“embrace it in a heartbeat,” legitimize it, and became one of the most
powerful players in the music business in a few short years. Apple beat
the majors for the same reason the Homebrew Computer Club beat
Xerox back in the 1970s: they were the first to treat the threat as an
opportunity. The trick is not to fight, but to be the first to market.

we near a world full of open-source 3-D
printers could be terrifying to some, but a step ahead for progress
bill gates was wrong, people find the time, and doing what they love, often figure out some way to make  a  living.
but why not artists?

“I realized that it ought to be possible to design a 3-D printing
machine that could make almost all its own parts,” Bowyer explains.
“You’d have to put the machine together yourself. But it would effectively
be reproducing, albeit with help from a person. . . . The best definition
of biology is that it’s the study of things that reproduce. My
proposed machine would reproduce, and so a lot of biological laws
would automatically apply to it, the most obvious one being Darwin’s
law of evolution.”

Open-source culture has the potential to turn the 3-D printer, or any
other object or idea, into a living organism.

leading schools are embracing this - open source and free university courses

blogging excites kids to learn and express themselves  - no more barriers just cuz you are young
sharing of science data

Seti@home - shared computing

By sharing
disk space like it was Loft space, distributed computer networks
are faster than our most powerful supercomputers with enough PCs in
the chain. Stanford University had signed up fifteen thousand PlayStation
3 users by April 2007, who donated their console’s spare processing
power to biological research. This distributed computing network
of PlayStation 3s is faster than the fastest supercomputer in the world.

Lawunderground.
org is attempting to democratize the legal process, using
law students and volunteer lawyers to pool their knowledge and provide
free access to legal information in the form of a wiki, which generates
legal advice based on the questions you ask it.

Systems creating free substitutes
for all kinds of basic processes and services that used to be based on
sharing are things you had to pay for, as advice from doctors, lawyers,
and teachers becomes as downloadable as music. The customized
information that lawyers, doctors, and teachers give will still be expensive;
this isn’t about undermining their ability to earn money. What’s
actually being undermined is the very idea of why we work.


As Pekka Himanen observes in The
Hacker Ethic, capitalism is based on the notion that it is our duty to
work.


We live in a world that has been governed by competition for several
millennia, but increasingly competition has to compete with cooperation.
Work-centeredness was long ago replaced with self-centeredness,
but this drive to express ourselves is also forging a new community
spirit. As Linus Torvalds writes in The Hacker Ethic, “The reason that
Linux hackers do something is that they find it to be very interesting
and they like to share this interesting thing with others. Suddenly you
both get entertainment from the fact you are doing something interesting,
and you get the social part.” Our work ethic is more of a play ethic.

CAN ARTISTS TURN THINGS THAT USED TO BE "WORK" INTO PLAY? BRINGING ART EXPERIENCES INTO THE OFFICE AND THE FACTORY (VR?)


Many think that open-source models are about giving everything away
and not making any money. While this is true of some, it’s a choice.
They are about sharing information, but it is possible to manage what
you share so it’s a win-win situation for you and others.

BILL GATES GROWN UP?

Karen Ingham is into "anatomical theatre"

 the Professor Moxham essay- my initial summary and in red my ideas of how we might present it in a fun way. maybe we split the class in half to do a debate!

Karen Ingham is into "anatomical theatre" - both past and present. She longs for the return of a time when art, anatomy, art, astronomy and  alchemy happily interconnected. She feels that White and Wright show that this can still be true.

my feeling is yes, but looking more broadly  today they are not only discrete disciplines as she says, they are usually oppositional. we could stage a debate with one half of the room being artists aiming to do anatomy theater and the other end are skeptical anatomists. this reminds me of the work of Kristo which was as much about getting permission as doing the grand work itself.



She says contemporary artists  are re-invigorating notions of the Baroque, that is the examination of allegory which is perceived as something ‘other than itself (…) one text read through another’ - and in particular photography where we make images but people know pics can be faked.

The "anatomical theatre" is influenced by hierarchies of power and surveillance. She says her
anatomical collaborations stimulate and question the idea "what it is to be human?" and keeping to allegory uses images to tell a story and teach a lesson.



I wonder how true this is - yes in the past it showed this, but today TV shows about hospitals may be illustrating more - and the real power (at least in America) is big pharma but that is not mentioned at all. And what does White (taking his DNA to make pointillism of his face), say about anything? yes we know that science can dissect us but even as she writes, if we look too close we lose all the holistic meaning. So if White is just saying - " hey look too close and you lose the meaning" - ok - but we knew that already. maybe the experience itself of his art makes you feel it more deeply. I'd need to see it to say


Ingham is into Rembrandt’s "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp" (1632) as Tulp ’s gesturing hand demonstrates the physiological mechanism of the corpse’s hand. But admits this is just allegory as in a real anatomy lesson you'd never start with the hand, the painting is not a ‘lesson’ but an allegory.

"the anatomy lesson paintings are not about the portrayal of medical reality"

then what are they about?

let class comment

my feeling is that they show something about the ones doing the dissection and in Moxham’s anatomy lesson we see the times have changed:
1. the instruments of dissection are digital, not surgical.
2. teaching monitor a ‘real’ image of re-constructive hand surgery can be seen,(we must acknowledge the anatomist’s maxim ‘know thyself ’ by taken someone else apart!)
3. She has a woman as one of the medical observers, and the body is not of a criminal
4. She staged it in a real operating theater, with smell of formaldehyde and working anatomists present

Ingham feels our knowledge of how the design of a space significantly influences the nature of the acts that occur within – a kind of ergonomics of anatomy.  [I wonder how true that really is?]

She talks about signals of hierarchy in the paintings, still true today that we live in hierarchy. so what that The Anatomy Lesson at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris where the model took the place
of the cadaver, and artists were seated closer according to experience and social status.   "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Sebastiaen Egbertsz" where the body is barely visible, and it's all about surgeons posturing for posterity, or the work of Kotting which raises ideas of male dominated science reducing the female body to little more than a "cipher or fetish, primed for de-coding and display as an allegory of the mastery of male science."

yes i suppose that the reproductive rights debate in US congress was all men and so we still have this issue - but not sure painting is the best way to address this - drama or comedy

And anyway most artists fled figurative painting and drawing  for abstraction and so now that medical imaging technologies such as MRI , CAT scans, and  electron microscopes re-attracted them as the images were abstract again. But her point is that with modern tech we don't need to slice up the body to see it, but we forget and want to forget that slicing gave us the understanding and shaped our society. she writes "But as the interest in ‘virtual body’ projects suggests, in our celebrity-saturated, youth- and perfection-obsessed society, we have become a culture where death is eschewed, and the ‘real’ is disavowed in favour of its representation."

So again, might be fun to have the class divided and debate - the issues raised by

1) Helen Chadwick depicting an allegorized womb but integrating actual fertilized human eggs discarded by the IVF unit due to possible flaws.
2) The work of Wright - potentially exploitative situation - Ingham says her work empowers those missing limbs. is that true? Certianly it raises new ideas about normality.


Ingham  writes " virtual ‘realities’ no more guarantee truth, objectivity, and control than do non-digital means of investigation and representation." and as proof she recognizes the brain can do so much but hardly reducible to a bunch of cells to get the real gist (and gift) of the thing

is this true? we could debate this. I agree that knowing which parts of brain light up doesn't really tell you anything about the expereince of beign human, but with VR you can get scale (zoom into a cell or out to the galaxy)


The "theatre of anatomy" used to be about the drama of life and death - now it's all digital, mere pixels.

i say that once this happened, and the issues of hierarchy became clear - the esssence of theatre of anatomy died on the table. if you want to talk about big pharma - that's the real life and death. or health isurance issues. or that we spend more money fighting baldness than real disease. or does a society spend reousrces to fight rare disease? what about pharma for Africa??? Those are the "meaty" issues - and where the real drama of theater is occurring. Or that we are not our bodies. she hardly if at all touches on this - the work of Wright and White enhance this notion but it is more dramatic to question it.


She says that Alexa Wright (ambutee photos) and Neal White (his DNA code is pointellist version of his face) demonstrates, the theatre of the body is still exciting and a "space where power and knowledge continue to be brokered and negotiated, and a space where art and bioscience may find a creative dialogue that furthers our understanding of what it is to be human."

But I feel that White doesn't do that and Wright might do it, and addresses what is normal and not normal and how we assume that - and art that helps people is nice - but doesn't address the bigger issues in the current theater of anatomy - that being played out on a global scale where money is now the central villian and perhaps hero on the stage.

In class we discussed Sarat Maharaj's article: ‘Know‐how and No‐How: stopgap notes on “method” in visual art as knowledge production'. While it could have been written less densely, it raised some ideas about whether we do artistic research as a way to legitimize art to the larger society. Looking at how science does research to see how artist might use it better is a valuable notion and perhaps there is a connection between the domains of artistic and scientific research.

Are we seeking to add knowledge, or challenge paradigm (dialectic thinking). Of course both artists and scientists can do both. Here is a quick poem on the subject

I wonder if we approach research 

as a patient that's sickened

or an exorcist excising those

Strickened

with incorrect (blashephemous) ideas

quickening interest

afraid of doubts and fears?

Not channels, like the ancient seers

or yet - perhaps that's the rub

we think we know what's both up

and sub.

ancient mariners blindly sailing off the edge of reality.

the mapmaker creates the world with same stroke

stroke of insight

Self, meets self

delight.

Does science have an agenda with research (and does, the artist too)

as we see in part two

artist had an agenda that grew

Maybe we have capitalist bent

oriented toward individualism

or dualistic view of the Lord and
think ourselves heaven sent?

Though perhaps art alone

like play (so not alone)

can have no agenda

unless you say to seek inspiration/surprise

is agenda-full

and social value?

exterior hull

inside there's nothing?

And that'd be science's game

Part 2

We discussed Denise Ziegler, ‘Features of the Poetic. The Mimetic Method of the Visual Artist’,

-->

Mimesis is not mimicry!

The Romans copied it wrong from the Greeks,

but we know not why.

Plato spoke of mimetic art as representation of an idea. 

Aristotle says that altering the details of the reconstruction you have transformative power and make it more real. By speculating how things might be, you change the facts slightly – poetic license as we say today – and it can become more true.

Wheras Plato and Aristotle spoke of narrative, Ziegler's wild insight is use it beyond narrative. Yet she wrote, “The purpose of mimetic reiteration is to distance the situations from personal experience and thereby to facilitate the selection process.”

But, as she also wrote, " The purpose of mimetic representation is, according to Aristotle, to awaken aesthetic pleasure in the viewer. This pleasure is achieved by adhering to the mimetic model based on evoking certain emotions, namely fear and pity, and their subsequent catharsis."

So, where was the catharsis in Zielger's work? If it was there, she didn't spend much time describing it. Leaves me wondering if she did follow Aristotle's advice, to alter it a bit and then your reconstruction is more real (or seems more real) than the original. She said "Processed into a work of art and dissociated from their everyday context, these “undefinable gestures” and their traces can evoke feelings of strangeness, conflict or hilarity... It is my contention that these emotions facilitate the experience of a special kind of catharsis. Works of “undefinable gesture” function in that way in compliance with the requirements for tragedy defined by Aristotle.

Was Aristotle a limiting factor or helped her? Did she use for legitimizing? Was it kind of slapped on. But it does seem a brilliant idea - mimesis on non-narrative... so even if her execution didn’t have catharsis which for Aristotle the whole purpose to have a catharsis - still her idea is valuable.

I mean did plants racing in pots or sitting at a conference table have catharis? Did it relate to the original context? Did she reveal deeper truth? But again, a cool idea to have mimesis outside drama and thus here work is (via the essay) a contribution to other artists even if her execution maybe failed. She didn’t say much about the catharsis so we don't know.

What was the greater truth about plants?

Without a new name she is judged by his criteria so maybe a new name like "Zielgesis".

Spent so much time about the theory and Aristotle, not much on what she did.

Maybe Minimalism, like Romans, feel insecure.

But being a minimalist, perhaps better to be silent?

some random links and ideas...

When faced with a why question the best we can do is say "shhh..."

as in don't trouble your mortal mind with suh things
and paradoxically
all answers found in silence.

but of course we say answers found in science
and mystery in science is defined by the term

X

but as per this TED talk, it's X because you can't say "shhh" in Spanish

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/terry_moore_why_is_x_the_unknown.html

and my own research
http://www.skytopia.com/project/fractal/mandelbrot.html#best

http://hacknmod.com/hack/infrared-head-tracking-for-the-wii/