research

on synchronisity of art and culture, technology and environment

I am AI

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If new tendencies focus on presenting Me as “Little god”, Me as a God, and if Technocracy is focusing on presenting AI as a God, AI as all-visible, all-compassing all intelligent, than I am AI.

Written by gentlejunk

February 20th, 2025 at 10:36 am

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plants do have intelligence

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I’ve used the word intelligence in my writing because I think that scientifically we attribute intelligence to certain structures and functions. When we dissect a plant and the forest and look at those things—Does it have a neural network? Is there communication? Is there perception and reception of messages? Will you change behaviors depending on what you’re perceiving? Do you remember things? Do you learn things? Would you do something differently if you had experienced something in the past?—those are all hallmarks of intelligence. Plants do have intelligence. They have all the structures. They have all the functions. They have the behaviors.

Never Underestimate the Intelligence of Trees
Plants communicate, nurture their seedlings, and get stressed.
By Brandon Keim October 31, 2019

http://nautil.us/issue/77/underworlds/never-underestimate-the-intelligence-of-trees

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November 9th, 2019 at 7:56 pm

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There is no matter as such

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Planck#Quantum_mechanics

Planck said in 1944, “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent spirit (orig. geist). This spirit is the matrix of all matter.

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October 18th, 2019 at 5:01 pm

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mass extinction

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Your Plans For Revolution Don’t Work. Nothing We’ve Tried Works. by Caitlin Johnstone


a mass extinction the likes of which we haven’t seen since the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, with some 200 species going extinct forever every single day. The very ecosystemic context in which we evolved is vanishing underneath us. More than half the world’s wildlife has vanished in forty years, and the worldwide insect population has plummeted by as much as 90 percent. Fertile soil is vanishing, and so are forests. The oceans are choking to death, 90 percent of global fish stocks are either fully fished or overfished, the seas are full of microplastics, and phytoplankton, an indispensable foundation of earth’s food chain, have been killed off by 40 percent since 1950. Science keeps pouring in showing that global warming is occurring faster than previously predicted, and there are self-reinforcing warming effects called “feedback loops” which, once set off, can continue warming the atmosphere further and further regardless of human behavior, causing more feedback loops.

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May 1st, 2019 at 7:59 am

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connection to nature

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Knowledge, Confusion, and Manipulation (Talk, HKW, Berlin)
By felix on 21 Jan 2019


Land, when turned into property or extractive resources can be sold and bought in the market, and as we know, prices can fluctuate quite significantly. But land is nothing but the environment in which we live and to which we are connected in ways so complex that we are only slowly beginning to understand these connections more fully. When turning nature into a commodity, all these myriad of connections and relations are destroyed, and they become replaced by a single one, the price that can be realized through market transactions. But real estate cannot produce nature, even if a developer plants some trees in a corporate plaza or golf course inside a gated community.

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January 21st, 2019 at 7:56 pm

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Sight

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Yoga Vashista

In the middle between the self as the seer and the world as the seen, you are the seeing.

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January 18th, 2019 at 11:21 am

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communication revolutions are revolutions of reductions

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The article below examines what could be the essence of issues we’re facing today, the issues of hidden workings of things around us. It shows how communication revolutions are revolutions of reductions.

 “Conclusion: The whole potential of communicative transcendence lies not in the diversity of signs, but in the reduction and limitation to the essential.

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January 11th, 2019 at 7:13 pm

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being more left than left

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Is it safe to read  that there is a notion going on that a list is slowly been taken by sort of tradcon (multitude) in disguise covertly undermining the left by being more left than left, in paranoid conspiracy that is exposing everything that is done as a reversed effect of what is, or am i being too hermetic?

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April 10th, 2018 at 6:46 pm

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industrial human communities are ‘detritovorous’

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We Are the Threat: Reflections on Near-Term Human Extinction

 

This new, properly ecological perspective on humanity shows us that Homo colossus is, in fact, a detritovore. A detritovore is “an organism that subsists by consuming detritus,” or waste products. (Conventional examples of detritovores include algae, fungi, worms, potato bugs, and fiddler crabs.) But if we recognize that what Homo colossus consumes, above all else, is fossil fuels – for example, via foodstuffs that exist and can only exist in adequate quantities through the use of fossil fueled technologies, like industrial agriculture, and supply chains that require vast fleets of fossil fueled vehicles, etc. – then we can clearly see that humans, too, have become detritovores. Accordingly, “industrial human communities are ‘detritovorous’ insofar as they depend on massive consumption of the transformed organic remains from the Carboniferous period known as fossil fuels.” That is, instead of feces, our detritus sources are lumps and puddles of fossilized corpses. These long dead organisms, when they were living, obtained their own energy either directly or indirectly from photosynthesis.

Written by gentlejunk

February 21st, 2018 at 10:24 am

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Money

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Bitcoin = Death Processors

 

 

Beavers, squirrels and other small creatures, including the incredibly inventive corvids, store food (and sometimes treasures) in hiding places we call caches.

….

Notice the homonomy here? Cache and cash are the same sound, and this isn’t accidental. Direct relation with nature as and through living places is the original source of our concepts of value. Our relationships with environmentally accessible resources and caching are not merely the beginning of our monetary systems, they are the probable origin point of the peculiar forms of memory and cognition that are the hallmark of our species.

 

 

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September 6th, 2017 at 6:29 pm

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it is your duty to use that skill as an artist not a profiteer

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brico@lists.dyne.org
01/08/16 22:57

[Bricolabs] [Fwd] Re: [RojavaHackers] Internal communication

 

When you have a skill so important and powerful as technical expertise,
it is your duty to use that skill as an artist not a profiteer. And we
should only look up to the artists. All great art is political. That is
the soul that embodies a piece. Apolitical art or apolitical software is
a contradiction. It is a false work that is life denying, a cruelty
labored on people.

 

Written by gentlejunk

August 7th, 2016 at 3:28 pm

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It’s time to accept that normalcy no longer exists

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bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com to nettime-l@mail.kein.org
15/07/16 08:14

<nettime> Forms of decisionism

It’s time to accept that normalcy no longer exists. The world is on
the edge of some new form of order. You can’t appeal to the past,
to the constitution, to due process, to human rights, to your bank
account, to anything. Either we decide to know in our bones and in our
acts that inequality is already a state of emergency both nationally
and internationally, or the racist classist nationalist xenophobes
are going to decide on their own pathway. And it could easily become
something comparable to the last big round of authoritarianism and
global war.

Written by gentlejunk

July 16th, 2016 at 2:18 pm

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kalkulacija uspjeha

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Gadji beri bimba? Glandridi laula lonni cadori! – H-Alter – Udruga za medijsku kulturu

Dakle, od dadaizma možemo nau?iti i to: pokušaj i odvažnost važniji su od rezultata i kalkulacija uspjeha. Ali tome prethodi stvaranje uvjeta mogu?nosti, što se može nazvati i slobodom. Sloboda je stvar vrste odluke i upornog rada, a ne dar s neba koji zati?e “siromašne duhom”.

 

Written by gentlejunk

February 19th, 2016 at 6:47 pm

humans seldom possess or practice a sense of awareness regarding their surroundings

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Sound as Art as Anti-environment | Sounding Out!

In other words, humans seldom possess or practice a sense of awareness regarding their surroundings because there’s nothing against which surroundings may be contrasted. The “water” to McLuhan represented the various environments (physical, psychological, cultural) shaped by technological innovation, but we can—and should—extend the water metaphor to a range of hegemonic frameworks: constructions of gender, race, ability, and so on.

Written by gentlejunk

April 24th, 2015 at 8:13 am

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the end of art as a pure ‘thing’

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The Future of Art – Nick Stewart – Appropedia: The sustainability wiki

Essentially, art is structured in consciousness. Objects and images are but evidence, a trace, left after the activity of art has ended. We substitute this evidence, objects and images, for a living process and so remove the potentiality of art from everyday life. Art as a quality of life would mean the end of art as a pure ‘thing’, something separate from the rest of life.

Written by gentlejunk

February 13th, 2015 at 8:05 pm

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Schismogenesis and collaborative

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Schismogenesis – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Systems of holding back are also a form of schismogenesis. They are defined as “mutually aggregating spirals which lead people to hold back contributions they could make because others hold back contributions they could make.”[6]

In Systems intelligence literature it is held that human interaction has a tendency to fall into such systems unless conscious effort is made to counter this tendency. For example, although most managers would want to give support to their team and most team members would like to receive such support many times support does not result. This is because both parties might feel that the other party is not giving enough and thus they will themselves hold back what they in the best case could give. It has been suggested that systems of holding back are “the single most important key to life-decreasing, reciprocity-trivializing and vitality-downgrading mechanisms in human life.” [7]

 

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October 1st, 2014 at 6:15 pm

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When sharing helps companies

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News from The Associated Press

Facebook and most other social networks are built on the premise that just about everything should be shared -except the money those posts produce.

Written by gentlejunk

July 27th, 2014 at 12:00 pm

Environementalists of the planet

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Environmentalist may behave like shepherds of planet’s life, forms, technical designers, of the planet’s system production, managers of the planet’s habitats, healers of the planet’s infirmities, emissaries of the planet’s wonders, avengers of the planet’s spoilers, curators of the planet’s resources, and many other positions.

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January 20th, 2014 at 7:23 pm

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public space, democracy, consumption

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public space: Call for entries for the 2014 European Prize for Urban Public Space

aim of recognising, encouraging and publicising examples of good practice in the ways in which European cities are dealing with the many challenges they must confront. Undergoing processes of exponential growth and far-reaching transformation, these cities are facing the fact that the age-old democratic ideal of striving for cohabitation on an equal basis within a plural society is in jeopardy. Segregation and inequalities, unsustainable construction and consumption or serious deficiencies in guaranteeing the right to housing and the right to the city are problems that are tangibly manifest in urban public spaces, and it is precisely on this front where they can be combated with better results.

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January 13th, 2014 at 3:58 pm

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curator artist

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Since the 1990s the position of the curator as a producer of ideas and an author has been debated amongst artists and scholars.

Written by gentlejunk

September 7th, 2013 at 6:03 pm

Reclaim

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Podopolog

Full bodily exploration and geodesic time-space is Not an outmoded, obsolete, game-over scenario; We may need to reclaim and defend the ‘old world’ or the ‘old territories’ for any meaningful and inhabitable future.

Written by gentlejunk

August 15th, 2013 at 4:13 pm

They didn’t even put their signature

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From your heart don’t encourage animosity with anybody | Sri Sri Ravi Shankar – Official Website

There is a Sanskrit verse that says, ‘The real worship of God is to create happiness in the hearts of men’.

Yena Kena Prakarena Yasya Kasyaapi Dehinah,Santosham Janayet Praagya Tadeveshwarapujanam – Happiness in the hearts of people is the real worship of the divine.

What great wisdom, such nice words have been said in the past. That is why it is timeless wisdom.

You don’t even know who wrote it. They didn’t even put their signature, but they gave these gems for life.

Written by gentlejunk

June 22nd, 2013 at 9:33 am

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New Folk Art

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Twitter / ubuweb: Archiving is the new folk art. …

Archiving is the new folk art. Most of us spend more time organizing & managing our cultural artifacts that we do interacting with them.

Written by gentlejunk

June 10th, 2013 at 8:12 am

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Our worlds (digital and breathing)

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Networked_Performance

Our worlds (digital and breathing)

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May 28th, 2013 at 9:35 am

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promoting well-being

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Agape – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Thomas Jay Oord has defined agape as “an intentional response to promote well-being when responding to that which has generated ill-being.”[3]

Written by gentlejunk

May 28th, 2013 at 9:12 am

The changing role of art in society

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Fields Q & A session

A premise behind this question is that practices which were once subsumed under terms such as media art, digital art, art-and-technology, art-and-science, have become so diversified that no single term can work as a signpost any more. The assumption is also that typically those practices are transdisciplinary and socially engaged, combining imaginative use of technologies old and new with participatory processes and interventions in the social fabric. The changing role of art in society is one where it does not just create a new aesthetics but gets involved in patterns of social, scientific, and technological transformations.

Written by gentlejunk

May 25th, 2013 at 11:57 am

kristeva on interdisciplinarity

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Report from Arcus, Japan November 2011 | Trans Artists

“One cannot be an amateur, or decide one day ‘Let’s be interdisciplinary”. A university may decide to develop in that direction, but what matters is that each researcher finds and establishes some complicities with other researchers so that interdisciplinarity comes from the base of the pyramid and works its way up. One can only benefit from interdisciplinary practices if researchers meet other researchers whilst learning how to discuss both their competencies and the outcome of their interaction; therefore contributing to the exposure of the risks inherent in an interdisciplinary practice…the first obstacle is often linked to individual competencies coupled with a tendency to jealously protect one’s own domain. Specialists are often too protective of their own prerogative, do not actually work with other colleagues, and therefore do not teach their students to construct a diagonal axis in their methodology.”

Julia Kristeva

Written by gentlejunk

March 11th, 2013 at 6:23 pm

Art and beauty

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“Beauty doesn’t have any meaning whatsoever.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

“If you go in the direction of what you think is beautiful, your life will become narrower and narrower.” — John Cage

 

 

Written by gentlejunk

March 11th, 2013 at 5:36 pm

Role of the curator

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/soundartcurating.org

Traditionally, the curator has been affiliated to the modern museum as the persona who manages an archive, and arranges and communicates knowledge to an audience, according to fields of expertise (art, archaeology, cultural or natural history etc.). However, in the late twentieth century the role of the curator changes – first on the art-scene and later in other more traditional institutions – into a more free-floating, organizational and ’constructive’ activity that allows the curator to create and design new wider relations, interpretations of knowledge modalities of communication and systems of dissemination to the wider public.

Written by gentlejunk

February 25th, 2013 at 6:43 pm

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distinction between art that is interdisciplinary and art that is transdisciplinary

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Transvergence in Art History

Transvergence creates a distinction between art that is interdisciplinary and art that is transdisciplinary. In interdisciplinary pursuits, disciplines collaborate. Scientists and artists, commonly regarded as ideologically opposed practitioners, can intersect and contemplate their common relationships. However, these interacting disciplines ultimately retain their identities as isolated from each other. Transdisciplinary projects also have an agenda to explore common practices among disciplines, but with a more holistic approach. By transcending conventional notions of what appropriate activities within a discipline are, participants attempt to bridge disciplines in innovative ways. The result is that new commonalities are discovered among disciplines, which have implications for future innovative transvergent events.

Written by gentlejunk

February 2nd, 2013 at 10:15 am

imperfections

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On the Virtues of Preexisting Material | Contents Magazine

You can’t judge the past at its best, you need to confront its imperfections. And of course that’s true for the present as well.

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February 2nd, 2013 at 9:48 am

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a tremendous waste of human potential

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kundalini_syndrome

Bentov went so far as to speculate:

The psychological symptoms tend to mimic schizophrenia. It is very likely, therefore, that such individuals may be diagnosed as schizophrenics and be either institutionalized or given very drastic and unwarranted treatment. It is ironic that persons in whom the evolutionary processes of Nature have begun to operate more rapidly, and who can be considered as advanced mutants of the human race, are institutionalized as subnormal by their normal peers. I dare to guess, on the basis of discussions with my psychiatrist-friends, that this process is not as exotic and rare as one would like to believe, and possibly 25 to 30 percent of all institutionalized schizophenics belong to this category – a tremendous waste of human potential. It is my hope that as the material presented here gradually reaches the more open-minded physicians and psychotherapists, and as the syndrome described becomes more widely known, nontraumatic methods of dealing with these symptoms will be developed, methods that will not stop but slow down and control the rate at which the evolutionary process is progressing, thus allowing the patients to develop at a safe, acceptable rate and to function normally in everyday environment.
[91]

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October 24th, 2012 at 8:27 am

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process orientated – permanent, as a means without end

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Post-anarchism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This anarchism does not have an eventual goal, nor flow into “being”, it is not a final state of development, nor a static form of society, but rather becomes permanent, as a means without end.

Written by gentlejunk

January 12th, 2012 at 7:50 am

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Postmodern

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Postmodernism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Postmodern-ironist, which sees truth as socially constructed; the scientific-rational, in which truth is found through methodical, disciplined inquiry; the social-traditional, in which truth is found in the heritage of American and Western civilization; and the neo-romantic, in which truth is found through attaining harmony with nature and/or spiritual exploration of the inner self.

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January 11th, 2012 at 6:35 pm

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I celebrate

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I celebrate my gifts by sharing my talents with the world. Uniting with others enhances all I do.

Written by gentlejunk

December 13th, 2011 at 9:26 pm

Neoliberal University?

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[NetBehaviour] Fwd: The University is Ours – Call for Participation – Toronto April 27-29
*A Conference on Struggles Within and Beyond the Neoliberal University*
*April 27-29, 2012*
*Toronto, Ontario*

The university belongs to us, those who teach, learn, research, counsel, clean, and create community. Together we can and do make the university work. But today this university is in crisis. The neoliberal restructuring of post-secondary education seeks to further embed market logic and corporate-style management into the academy, killing consultation, autonomy and collective decision-making. The salaries of university presidents and the ranks of administrators swell, but the people the university is supposed to serve — students — are offered assembly-line education as class sizes grow, faculty is over-worked, and teaching positions become increasingly precarious. International students and scholars seeking post-secondary or graduate education are treated as cash cows rather than as people who might contribute to both research and society. Debt-burdened students are seen as captive markets by administrators, while faculty is encouraged to leverage public funds for private research on behalf of corporate sponsors.

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December 9th, 2011 at 12:09 pm

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Participation

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Premio Internazionale di Arte Partecipativa

Art which interacts with an area and its communities to produce models for social change.

An art form which goes beyond the conventional market-driven strategies of contemporary art to become a source of inspiration embedded in the local community.

A stimulus for thought and debate.

A means for encouraging new forms of collaboration.

…very original idea of using art as a meeting of the ways and a place for discussion between those who are elected to govern and those who are governed.

Written by gentlejunk

December 9th, 2011 at 10:27 am

symptoms of having lost one’s sanity

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Atheism in Hinduism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dharmakirti, a 7th century Buddhist philosopher deeply influenced by c?rv?ka philosophy, wrote in Pramanvartik:[13]

Believing that the Veda are standard (holy or divine), believing in a Creator for the world,
Bathing in holy waters for gaining punya, having pride (vanity) about one’s caste,
Performing penance to absolve sins,
Are the five symptoms of having lost one’s sanity.

Written by gentlejunk

April 2nd, 2011 at 9:12 pm

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not one or the other, but two

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and | mark shepard

AND is of course diversity, multiplicity, the destruction of identities. It’s not the same factory gate when I go in, and when I come out, and then when I go past unemployed. A convicted man’s wife isn’t the same before and after the conviction. But diversity and multiplicity have nothing to do with aesthetic wholes (in the sense of ‘one more,’ ‘one more woman’. . . ) or dialectical schemas (in the sense of ‘one produces two, which then produces three’). Because in those cases it’s still Unity, and thus being, that’s primary, and that supposedly becomes multiple. 

When Godard says everything has two parts, that in a day there’s morning and evening, he’s not saying it’s one or the other, or that one becomes the other, becomes two. Because multiplicity is never in the terms, however many, nor in all the terms together, the whole. Multiplicity is precisely in the ‘and’ which is different in nature from elementary components and collections of them.

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March 15th, 2011 at 9:02 am

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contribution to the definition of art

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Transvergence in Art History

Duchamp’s significant contribution to the definition of art is choice: an artist has the ability to choose for themselves what can represent an artistic effort

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March 10th, 2011 at 8:52 pm

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manner of encounter

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Meetings, encounters, events, various types of collaboration between people, games, festivals, and places of connectivity, in a word all manner of encounter and relational invention thus represents, today, aesthetics objects likely to be looked as such, with pictures and sculptures regarded here merely as specific cases of production of forms with something other than a simple aesthetic consumption in mind.”
Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Presses du réel, 2002.

Written by gentlejunk

March 10th, 2011 at 11:06 am

transdisciplinarity

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A New Vision of the World : Transdisciplinarity

As the prefix “trans” indicates, transdisciplinarity concerns that which is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond all discipline. Its goal is the understanding of the present world , of which one of the imperatives is the unity of knowledge.

Written by gentlejunk

March 8th, 2011 at 7:02 pm

several levels of Reality

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A New Vision of the World : Transdisciplinarity

Disciplinary research concerns, at most, one and the same level of Reality ; moreover, in most cases, it only concerns fragments of one level of Reality. On the contrary, transdisciplinarity concerns the dynamics engendered by the action of several levels of Reality at once

Written by gentlejunk

March 6th, 2011 at 3:09 pm

bundle of relations

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“Each particular artwork is a proposal to liven in shared world, and the work of every artist is a bundle of relations with the world, giving rise to other relations, and on and so forth, ad infinitum.”

 

Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Presses du réel, 2002.

Written by gentlejunk

March 4th, 2011 at 11:08 am

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Transmodernism

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Cultural Creatives – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(Paul H.) Ray gives the term Integral Culture to the growing subculture also referred to as Transmodernism, and which he refers to as the Cultural Creatives. They are concerned with ecological sustainability and in the case of a core group have a commitment to personal and spiritual development. These are individuals who can meld the best of Traditionalism and Modernism to create a new synthesis, having a cognitive style based on synthesizing varied information from many sources into a big picture. 

Written by gentlejunk

January 4th, 2011 at 6:25 pm

Anonymous

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The internet’s cyber radicals: heroes of the web changing the world | Technology | The Observer

The site is distinctive because users can post material anonymously, and some users have also organised themselves as a collective, using the name “Anonymous”. What does that actually mean?
As recently as six years ago, people were used to forums where you could lurk, you could view, but in order to post and participate, you had to register. Because you didn’t need to register on 4chan, people started to appreciate it, and realise how radically different it was. We began to see anonymity not just as an aspect or feature, but as a thing, as a principle, as an idea that we are one, we are a collective, we are Anonymous. People then came to the site who not only saw Anonymous as a principle, but started to exploit anonymity as a new platform where they could be rebellious and no one knew who they were. 

Written by gentlejunk

January 2nd, 2011 at 7:54 pm

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abundance

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nettime> Roberto Verzola: Abundance and the Generative Logic of the Commons
(Question: before refrigerators, what did people do when they had too much food? Answer: they threw a party!)

Human societies learned early on to deal with abundance including temporary ones from forests, rivers, and other hunting and gathering areas by managing them as commons. Taken for granted for a long time, the oceans, the atmosphere, and other global commons are just getting due attention.

Likewise, the creative commons of information, knowledge and culture are now getting renewed attention with the rise of the Internet which, by the way, has become a great showcase of both the concepts of commons and abundance (and their problems, too).

Written by gentlejunk

November 25th, 2010 at 9:43 am

primacy of the art object

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Between Art and Anarchism

The similarities between the avant-garde and anarchism extend beyond their similar “shock and rupture” tactics; political theorists and art historians alike have declared both to be failed movements. In the avant-garde movement, this failure arises from a paradoxical hierarchy encased in the primacy of the art object.

If the art object itself contains the power to elicit epiphany, than the artist is elevated to a status “uniquely open to the world,” and viewers that are open to the transformative experience of the object are likewise more educated and socially aware than those who are not.

 

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September 14th, 2010 at 10:53 am

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“dialogical self” goes beyond the self-other dichotomy

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Dialogical self – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dialogical Self Theory (DST) weaves two concepts, self and dialogue, together in such a way that a more profound understanding of the interconnection of self and society is achieved. Usually, the concept of self refers to something “internal,” something that takes place within the mind of the individual person, while dialogue is typically associated with something “external,” that is, processes that take place between people involved in communication. 

The composite concept “dialogical self” goes beyond the self-other dichotomy by infusing the external to the internal and, in reverse, to introduce the internal into the external. As functioning as a “society of mind”[1], the self is populated by a multiplicity of “self-positions” that have the possibility to entertain dialogical relationships with each other.

Written by gentlejunk

September 6th, 2010 at 1:34 pm

Smart saying about autonomy

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“DOING WHAT YOU’RE TOLD NOT TO DO IS NOT THE SAME AS NOT DOING AS YOU’RE TOLD”

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June 8th, 2010 at 3:58 pm

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intersubjectivity<>empathy

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Intersubjectivity – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In phenomenology, intersubjectivity performs many functions. It allows empathy, which in phenomenology involves experiencing another person as a subject rather than just as an object among objects. In so doing, one experiences oneself as seen by the Other, and the world in general as a shared world instead of one only available to oneself. 

Written by gentlejunk

April 13th, 2010 at 1:55 pm

Ich-Du and Ich-Es

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Martin Buber – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In the Ich-Es relationship, an individual treats other things, people, etc., as objects to be used and experienced. Essentially, this form of objectivity relates to the world in terms of the self – how an object can serve the individual’s interest. 

Buber argued that human life consists of an oscillation between Ich-Du and Ich-Es, and that in fact Ich-Du experiences are rather few and far between. In diagnosing the various perceived ills of modernity (e.g. isolation, dehumanization, etc.), Buber believed that the expansion of a purely analytic, material view of existence was at heart an advocation of Ich-Es relations – even between human beings. Buber argued that this paradigm devalued not only existents, but the meaning of all existence.

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April 10th, 2010 at 1:05 pm

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transferred to another post

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Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi [Das Glasperlenspiel]

Mark well: one can be a strict logician or grammarian and yet be full of fantasy and music. One can be a musician or a bead-player, and yet be devoted to law and order. The person whom we take as our ideal and try to emulate should be able at all times to exchange his art or science for any other, should allow the most crystal clear logic to radiate from his Bead Game and display the most creative fantasy in grammar. That is how we should be, and we should be prepared at any moment to be transferred to another post without opposition or allowing ourselves to become confused.

Written by gentlejunk

March 10th, 2010 at 10:29 pm

in a communist society there is no “artists”.

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Anti-art – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Karl Marx posited that art was a consequence of the class system and therefore concluded that, in a communist society, there would only be people who engage in the making of art and no “artists”

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February 14th, 2010 at 10:44 am

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Anti-art

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Anti-art – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Anti-art artworks may reject art based upon a consideration of art as being oppressive of a segment of the population. 

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February 14th, 2010 at 10:38 am

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law of five

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Discordianism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

At its basic level, the Law of Fives is a practical demonstration that perception is intent-sensitive; that is, the percipient’s intentions inform the perception. To whatever extent one considers that perception is identical with reality, then, it has the corollary that reality is intent-sensitive. 

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February 13th, 2010 at 9:54 pm

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basic rule in group-work

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G. I. Gurdjieff – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In addition, one should never violate the one basic rule in group-work which guarantees the harmonious development of the Work: the practice of external considering.

Whenever group-work fails, the failure may be traced to a lack of external considering among its members.

 

Written by gentlejunk

February 13th, 2010 at 6:26 pm

Symbolic interactionism

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Symbolic interactionism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

people act toward things based on the meaning those things have for them; and these meanings are derived from social interaction and modified through interpretation. 

Written by gentlejunk

January 30th, 2010 at 12:44 pm

Process art

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Systems art – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Process art is an artistic movement as well as a creative sentiment and world view where the end product of art and craft, the objet d’art, is not the principal focus. The ‘process’ in process art refers to the process of the formation of art: the gathering, sorting, collating, associating, and patterning. Process art is concerned with the actual doing; art as a rite, ritual, and performance. Process art often entails an inherent motivation, rationale, and intentionality. Therefore, art is viewed as a creative journey or process, rather than as a deliverable or end product.

Written by gentlejunk

January 30th, 2010 at 12:29 pm

“artistic surfing” (aka “surf clubbing,” “spirit surfing”)

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Curt Cloninger
Black Mountain, North Carolina, US
February 2009

What I’m calling “artistic surfing” (aka “surf clubbing,” “spirit surfing”) takes its inspiration from group blogging, particularly anonymous group photoblogs like 4chan.org. Internet “surf clubs” are basically invitation-only group photoblogs where artists surf the internet intuitively and obliquely, collect detritus (predominantly from commercial sites and social networking sites), recontextualize it via bricolage, titling, and Photoshop remixing, and post it at the surf club’s blog where it is often further recontextualized and reposted.

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January 29th, 2010 at 3:20 pm

collaborative video online platform

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Elmur.net

What? Why? Background

elmur.net is a non-profit initiative. It is not only an internet site; it’s also an audiovisual collective installation wishing to build a social dialogue through artistic creation. All the images you see in this site are at the same time, being projected on public spaces around the world. elmur.net is a platform at the service of society and its development.

elmur.net is a free public exhibition platform open to everyone. We invite the world to share its imagination and open up a visual dialog with the aim to inspire us to build up a better one.

elmur.net is a creative experiment; it is a practical application of the educational capabilities of the audiovisual media. The audiovisual revolution that has characterized the 20th century has already shown us the capabilities of the visual medium as a mould of cultures. Why shouldn’t we use it with positive means? We are in a moment of great transformation, and you can play an active roll on the shaping of this transformation.

There’s the need to build up a new global identity based on respect, understanding, solidarity and love. It’s time to awaken our consciousness as Earth inhabitants; we believe that we are all brothers and sisters, that happiness is a basic human right and that love is the greatest power of life.

elmur.net aims to bring art to the general public, promote open and free art exhibitions and at the same time promote artistic creation as a tool for the understanding of reality.

elmur.net IS STREET ART, SHARING & ENJOYMENT!

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January 28th, 2010 at 11:50 pm

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the bricoleur

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2009 Tatiana Mazali : megafone.net

Nowadays we talk about performative technologies and performative identity to stress the process and relationship involved. The performative activities are fundamentally processual, a part of them will always remain subject to transformation, and will be absolutely impossible to define. The performativity is linked to the event, the event is linked to the bricolage and the bricolage is linked to the new technologies: the bricoleur (word related to Levi-Strauss) makes/processes structures by means of combining the events.

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January 21st, 2010 at 12:40 am

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generative art

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eu-gene list

Philip Galanter, a Professor at the New York University: “Generative art refers to any art practice where the artist creates a process, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine, or other mechanism, which is then set into motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art.”

 

Written by gentlejunk

January 6th, 2010 at 12:37 pm

Complementary schismogenesis

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Schismogenesis – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Complementary schismogenesis

The first type of schismogenesis is best characterized by a class struggle, but is defined more broadly to include a range of other possible social phenomena. Given two groups of people, the interaction between them is such that a behavior X from one side elicits a behavior Y from the other side, The two behaviors complement one another, exemplified in the dominant-submissive behaviors of a class struggle. Furthermore, the behaviors may exaggerate one another, leading to a severe rift and possible conflict.

Written by gentlejunk

January 5th, 2010 at 12:23 pm

Do It With Others (DIWO)

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newmediafix.net » Blog Archive » Do It With Others (DIWO) at the Dark Mountain – Exhibition Opening

The Dark Mountain Project is ‘a new cultural movement for an age of global disruption.’ It aims to ‘question the stories that underpin our failing civilisation, to craft new ones for the age ahead and to write clearly and honestly about our true place in the world.’ Do It With Others (DIWO) at the Dark Mountain, a mail-art project at HTTP Gallery, is a cultural collaboration for this age. “Uncivilisation,” the Dark Mountain Manifesto, calls for a cultural response to our current predicament. Its challenge was offered to network-minded artists, technologists, writers and activists as a provocation – to work together to re-envision the narratives and infrastructures that govern our relationships with the natural world, and how they might be unravelled and rewoven to reconfigure our place in it. As “Uncivilisation” concludes, ‘the end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop.’

Artists, technologists, writers, activists and all other living beings were invited to correspond with each other across physical and digital mail networks, and the exhibition at HTTP present the results of this process.

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January 5th, 2010 at 12:21 pm

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republicrat

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 Difference in such a system is reduced to catchy,
emotional sound bites, which serve to polarize viewers, spectators and
ultimately, voters, while simulating difference - enacting a facade of
political diversity.

In the end, the winners in such a set-up - that amounts to a
perpetual, media-sparring match for cap feathers among the
self-appointed wealthy and commercial society elected, or 'electable,'
contestants - are the corporations, who infuse enough capital to the
Republi-crat majority to decide the outcomes of political policy
questions. So the corporations (and aristocratic interests) get what
they want, at the expense of the rank and file public, year after
year, ad infinitum.

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December 23rd, 2009 at 11:39 pm

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collaborative practice-led research project

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Department of Reading | Main / Playing Practice

collaborative practice-led research project

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December 21st, 2009 at 9:54 am

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dominant in capitalism

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Rhizomes 11/12: Rosi Braidotti

 

The ‘noble’ side of this vision concerns a political economy of affects such as mourning and melancholia, which I consider as a dominant ideology in capitalist culture.

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December 20th, 2009 at 9:44 am

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affection

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the processes of becoming-others, in the sense of relating, hence of affecting and being affected.

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December 20th, 2009 at 9:33 am

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machinic

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Rhizomes 11/12: Rosi Braidotti

The machinic expresses the impersonal, or intra-personal intensive resonances between the multiple levels of inter-connections that make living beings tick.

Written by gentlejunk

December 18th, 2009 at 11:03 pm

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Metanarratives

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Metanarrative – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

… attempts to construct grand theories tend to dismiss the naturally existing chaos and disorder of the universe. Second, metanarratives are created and reinforced by power structures and are therefore not to be trusted. ‘Metanarratives’ ignore the heterogeneity or variety of human existence. They are also seen to embody unacceptable views of historical development, in terms of progress towards a specific goal.

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October 21st, 2009 at 6:02 am

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Actor-network theory

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Actor-network theory – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Actor-network theory tries to explain how material-semiotic networks come together to act as a whole (e.g. a bank is both a network and an actor that hangs together, and for certain purposes acts as a single entity). As a part of this it may look at explicit strategies for relating different elements together into a network so that they form an apparently coherent whole.

According to actor-network theory, such actor-networks are potentially transient, existing in a constant making and re-making [1]. This means that relations need to be repeatedly ‘performed’ or the network will dissolve.

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October 21st, 2009 at 5:40 am

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Social constructivism

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Social constructivism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Social constructivism is a sociological theory of knowledge that applies the general philosophical constructionism into social settings, wherein groups construct knowledge for one another, collaboratively creating a small culture of shared artifacts with shared meanings. When one is immersed within a culture of this sort, one is learning all the time about how to be a part of that culture on many levels.

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October 21st, 2009 at 5:39 am

Life has become work

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A Brief History of Italian Autonomia from Sylvère Lotringer | post.thing.net

Now the distinction between work and non-work has been abolished. Now it can’t be calculated where the surplus value which capitalism, according to Marx is bound to extract from workers, is to be found. Life has become work; we are working all the time.

Written by gentlejunk

October 7th, 2009 at 5:59 pm

ubiquity

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the repetitiveness, the selfsameness, and the ubiquity of modern mass culture” (Theodor Adorno )

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September 7th, 2009 at 6:54 am

musing

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an elegant tapestry of quotations, musings, aphorisms, and autobiographical reflections (James Atlas).

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September 7th, 2009 at 6:37 am

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“hyperlink movie”

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Syriana

A recent blog item coined a term like “hyperlink movie” to describe plots like this. (I would quote the exact term, but irony of ironies, I’ve lost the link.) The term describes movies in which the characters inhabit separate stories, but we gradually discover how those in one story are connected to those in another.

Written by gentlejunk

July 13th, 2009 at 10:10 am

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Concrete poetry

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Concrete poetry – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Concrete poetry, pattern poetry or shape poetry is poetry in which the typographical arrangement of words is as important in conveying the intended effect as the conventional elements of the poem, such as meaning of words, rhythm, rhyme and so on.

It is sometimes referred to as visual poetry; a term that has evolved to have distinct meaning of its own, because the words themselves form a picture. This can be called imagery because you use your senses to figure out what the words mean.

Written by gentlejunk

June 25th, 2009 at 10:37 am

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metafiction

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Metafiction – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Metafiction is a type of fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction. It is the literary term describing fictional writing that self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in posing questions about the relationship between fiction and reality, usually, irony and self-reflection. It can be compared to presentational theatre, which does not let the audience forget it is viewing a play; metafiction does not let the reader forget he or she is reading a fictional work.

Written by gentlejunk

June 25th, 2009 at 10:34 am

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The World Question Center

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Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona

In 1969, the American artist James Lee Byars developed a performance piece entitled The World Question Center. The original idea, which was not brought to fruition, entailed gathering one hundred brilliant minds including thinkers, scientists and artists together in a room, locking them behind closed doors and inviting them to ask each other questions they had been asking themselves. The final version of this project, produced for Belgian Radio and Television, is a performance piece in which Byars contacts all of them by telephone.

Written by gentlejunk

May 20th, 2009 at 11:16 pm

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Distortion-pseudo society

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In the art group Situationist International, which Jorn along with among others the French theorist Guy Debord had founded a few years before his exhibition in Paris, this process was referred to as détournement. In short détournement – which directly translated means distortion – is a kind of anti-artistic method where the past – and, indeed, the whole world – is appropriated, annihilated and scandalized. Through this process a way opens out of the meaningless and empty pseudo-society that the artists referred to as the Society of the Spectacle.

This notion also contains a definite showdown with art as an elevated activity in order to see the artistic process as something containing a proletarian revolutionary potential. Guy Debord went as far as to believe that in order to not be swallowed by the meaningless stream of hollow representations of the Society of the Spectacle art had to be critical and negating and in the end renounce every kind of visual activity. In particular, the last part of it was a cause for different opinions among the members of Situationist International, where for instance Jorn never totally rejected the production of artistic objects. The result was that Jorn was excluded from the group along with a number of other members, and finally the group dissolved.

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May 8th, 2009 at 10:03 pm

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machine

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NoGoZone

The machine is not our servant (as some old sci-fi authors believed) but rather our symbiont.

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March 27th, 2009 at 9:38 pm

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awareness – Alfred Korzybski

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Alfred Korzybski – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Korzybski’s work held a view that human beings are limited in what they know by (1) the structure of their nervous systems, and (2) the structure of their languages. Human beings cannot experience the world directly, but only through their “abstractions” (nonverbal impressions or “gleanings” derived from the nervous system, and verbal indicators expressed and derived from language). Sometimes our perceptions and our languages actually mislead us as to the “facts” with which we must deal. Our understanding of what is going on sometimes lacks similarity of structure with what is actually going on. He stressed training in awareness of abstracting, using techniques that he had derived from his study of mathematics and science. He called this awareness, this goal of his system, “consciousness of abstracting.” His system included modifying the way we approach the world, e.g., with an attitude of “I don’t know; let’s see,” to better discover or reflect its realities as shown by modern science. One of these techniques involved becoming inwardly and outwardly quiet, an experience that he called, “silence on the objective levels.”

Written by gentlejunk

March 23rd, 2009 at 7:32 pm

Technophilia vs technophobia

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Two extreems – relationship of communication over the cofy and over the mobile phone.

Technophilia – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Technophilia and technophobia are the two extremes of the relationship between technology and society. The technophobe fears or dislikes technology, often regarding some or all technology with fear. This may be as a consequences of fear of change, a prior catastrophic experience with technology or because it may lead to a process of dehumanization. The technophile sees most or all technology as positive, adopting technology enthusiastically, and seeing it as a means to potentially improve life and combat social problems.

Technophobia – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Technophobia is the fear or dislike of advanced technology or complex devices, especially computers.[1] The term is generally used in the sense of an irrational fear, but others contend fears are justified. It is the opposite of technophilia.

Written by gentlejunk

March 23rd, 2009 at 6:18 pm

Country/now and than/we and them

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General mistake I think people are making when referring to their countries is to people they see around them in everyday life. But I guess you and me, Elenora and Rob and Ricardo are more similar between ourself than people from ‘our’ countries are similar to ‘us’? Its a question that I have received this year and am thinking a lot. I was writing about ‘we’ and  immediately got a question back: who are that ‘we’? In brico world Is it: we bricos and them proprietary consumers people? we south and them north? we vegans them meat eaters? we smokers and them straight? we nomads and them settlers? we socially aware and them not? we technically advanced and them not? and so on…

I can understand deep connections to ethical/cultural roots and appreciate them. But I cannot understand feeling of belonging to a country. As you say ‘my part of the world’. There is a general line going on brico mailing list that underlines relation where is who from and there are different aesthetic how people show love for ‘their’ country (by worrying, loving, being critical and so on)

My parallel is similar to yours when trying to explain my roots and ‘my’ country. A socialist country where there was (at least not  in my immediate neighborhood) such a difference between shoe-shining person and top-floor office person. Today its the same as you are saying: for almost as long as I know for myself western technologies were adopted/bought/obtruded to a country. Everyone was accepting/expecting it as a better tomorrow. Fine example is agriculture technology: hybrids and than GMO. Or water and soil irrigation. Rivers were made to go straight instead of serpent like to get more affordable soil to plant. Devastation of this process could not be apprehended, predicted (so I cannot say we can apprehend  or predict as McLuhan says, but more assume or guess). I have learned recently that somewhere in Germany there is a tendency to get rivers back to their natural serpent like flow. I can only guess that decision is on government level?

Also the communication technology to connect a dissident, refugee or foreign low wage dirty jobs worker to their family and friends – yes. Everyone of them knows skype, maybe still some of them having problems with reading. Also – many small farmers, old grenmas that were bringing their own, natural and biological products to the markets don’t exists for last decade or more. When I was  a kid they were all over markets,bringing fresh natural food to your doors where you would buy them. They don’t exist because it was ruined by politics of importing bad and cheep food (mind you this food was not expensive because it was biological) and because of technology.

So who are we? We are guys who try to survive. And we will sell our land, name, religion today hoping banks will go bankrupt tomorrow as new war will happen so our credits in those banks would disappear. Its shame that we get in credit depth because of new iPhone, but information is to be searched for, not to trust blindly.

So, not all of us will ever go completely Sufi, or divine. Not all society will ever be uniform and go from one step to another. Some of us have cross or bless to care more, but noone can be enlightened without their own will. In that way I think a class on ‘network literacy’ will resemble more to brico mailing list than class where professor will teach students.

Written by gentlejunk

March 12th, 2009 at 3:25 pm

tactical media

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tactical media itself is concerned with temporary destabilization rather than permanent transformation.

http://www.an-atlas.com/contents/iaa_iaa.html

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February 19th, 2009 at 4:15 am

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Interdisciplinarity

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http://www.transartists.org/article/report-arcus-japan-november-2011

 

“One cannot be an amateur, or decide one day ‘Let’s be interdisciplinary”. A university may decide to develop in that direction, but what matters is that each researcher finds and establishes some complicities with other researchers so that interdisciplinarity comes from the base of the pyramid and works its way up. One can only benefit from interdisciplinary practices if researchers meet other researchers whilst learning how to discuss both their competencies and the outcome of their interaction; therefore contributing to the exposure of the risks inherent in an interdisciplinary practice…the first obstacle is often linked to individual competencies coupled with a tendency to jealously protect one’s own domain. Specialists are often too protective of their own prerogative, do not actually work with other colleagues, and therefore do not teach their students to construct a diagonal axis in their methodology.”
Julia Kristeva

Written by gentlejunk

February 16th, 2009 at 10:41 pm

Subliminal messages software for 29.95

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It was developed for you.  It’ll work on your personal computer and quietly change exactly what you want to change in your life.

Price is just $39.95 $29.95! (limited time offer).

Yes, you read that right. You get possibility to COMPLETELY change your life for this price. And remember you also get our 100% satisfaction guarantee. We will return your money back in 24 hours after you say that you’re unsatisfied with our software.

Buy Subliminal Flash and obtain Subliminal Images for free!

To download 7-days trial version of Subliminal Flash click here (1.56 MB)

To download 7-days trial version of Subliminal Images click here (1.56 MB)

http://www.wordofmouthexperiment.com/dedpyhto/

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February 16th, 2009 at 8:54 pm

“The Metropolis and Mental Life”

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The concept of the flâneur is important in academic discussions of the phenomenon of modernity.
While Baudelaire’s aesthetic and critical visions helped open up the
modern city as a space for investigation, theorists, such as Georg Simmel,
began to codify the urban experience in more sociological and
psychological terms. In his essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life”,
Simmel theorizes that the complexities of the modern city create new
social bonds and new attitudes towards others. The modern city was
transforming humans, giving them a new relationship to time and space,
inculcating in them a “blasé attitude”, and altering fundamental
notions of freedom and being:

The deepest problems of
modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the
autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming
social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the
technique of life. The fight with nature which primitive man has to
wage for his bodily existence attains in this modern form its latest
transformation. The eighteenth century called upon man to free himself
of all the historical bonds in the state and in religion, in morals and
in economics. Man’s nature, originally good and common to all, should
develop unhampered. In addition to more liberty, the nineteenth century
demanded the functional specialization of man and his work; this
specialization makes one individual incomparable to another, and each
of them indispensable to the highest possible extent. However, this
specialization makes each man the more directly dependent upon the
supplementary activities of all others. Nietzsche sees the full
development of the individual conditioned by the most ruthless struggle
of individuals; socialism believes in the suppression of all
competition for the same reason. Be that as it may, in all these
positions the same basic motive is at work: the person resists to being
leveled down and worn out by a social-technological mechanism. An
inquiry into the inner meaning of specifically modern life and its
products, into the soul of the cultural body, so to speak, must seek to
solve the equation which structures like the metropolis set up between
the individual and the super-individual contents of life. (“The
Metropolis and Mental Life”)

Written by gentlejunk

February 2nd, 2009 at 10:47 am

map is different from the territory

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Gregory Bateson, in “Form, Substance and Difference,” from Steps to an Ecology of Mind
(1972), elucidates the essential impossibility of knowing what the
territory is, as any understanding of it is based on some
representation:

We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the
territory? Operationally, somebody went out with a retina or a
measuring stick and made representations which were then put on paper.
What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal
representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the
question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series
of maps. The territory never gets in at all. […] Always, the process of
representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps
of maps, ad infinitum.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map-territory_relation

Written by gentlejunk

January 11th, 2009 at 11:42 pm

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why sound can sometimes be irritating

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Why do certain parts of the music seem irritating to me?
The whole principle of entrainment
music means that portions of the music will reflect the current stress
or block in the listener. These portions will usually be somewhat
uncomfortable to hear. But as the music resolves, there usually is a
parallel resolution in the listener.

http://www.soundfeelings.com/products/questions/alternative.htm

Written by gentlejunk

January 10th, 2009 at 4:31 pm

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Will St Leger planted 100 fake “landmines”

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In an interview with Metro newspaper he said, “The only time that people really think about things is if they encounter them in their everyday lives”.

Written by gentlejunk

December 16th, 2008 at 1:06 pm

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international art market

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We have quickly come to understand that the international art market is effective for only approximately 3 to 5 per cent of artists. But how does who decide who will make it to the  top?…and how will the other artists survive?’

Written by gentlejunk

December 11th, 2008 at 4:10 pm

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stasis in the arts

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stasis: Definition, Synonyms from Answers.com

“Language is a primary element of culture, and stasis in the arts is tantamount to death” (Charles Marsh).

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October 14th, 2008 at 12:38 pm

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Creative Industries

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Gerald Raunig: Creative Industries as Mass Deception | transform.eipcp.net

Turning to the third component that involves the institutional form, in particular, it is obvious that the arrangements labeled as creative industries are no longer structured in the form of huge media corporations, but mainly as micro-enterprises of self-employed cultural entrepreneurs in the fields of new media, fashion, graphics, design, pop, conceptualized at best in clusters of these micro-enterprises. So if we ask about the institutions of the creative industries, it seems more appropriate to speak of non-institutions or pseudo-institutions. Whereas the model institutions of culture industry were huge, long-term corporations, the pseudo-institutions of creative industries prove to be temporary, ephemeral, project based.

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October 1st, 2008 at 9:07 am

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Autonomism

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Autonomism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Autonomist theory

Unlike other forms of Marxism, autonomist Marxism emphasises the ability of the working class to force changes to the organisation of the capitalist system independent of the state, trade unions or political parties. Autonomists are less concerned with party political organisation than other Marxists, focusing instead on self-organised action outside of traditional organisational structures. Autonomist Marxism is thus a “bottom up” theory: it draws attention to activities that autonomists see as everyday working class resistance to capitalism, for example absenteeism, slow working, and socialisation in the workplace.

Like other Marxists, autonomists see class struggle as being of central importance. However, autonomists have a broader definition of the working class than other Marxists: as well as wage-earning workers (both white collar and blue collar), autonomists also include the unwaged (students, the unemployed, homemakers etc), who are traditionally deprived of any form of union representation.

Early theorists (such as Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri, Sergio Bologna and Paolo Virno) developed notions of “immaterial” and “social labour” that extended the Marxist concept of labour to all society. They suggested that modern society’s wealth was produced by unaccountable collective work, and that only a little of this was redistributed to the workers in the form of wages. They emphasised the importance of feminism and the value of unpaid female labour to capitalist society.

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October 1st, 2008 at 8:31 am

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conquering the cosmos

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Solaris, Tarkvsky 1972

“We have no ambition to conquer any cosmos.
We just want to extend Earth up to the Cosmos’s borders.
We don’t want any more worlds.
Only a mirror to see our own in.
We try so hard to make contact, but we’re doomed to failure.
We look ridiculous pursuing a goal we fear and that we really don’t need.
Man needs man!”

Written by gentlejunk

September 27th, 2008 at 4:52 pm

sound and audio in synchresis

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Synchresis

Synchresis is at work when a stream of random audio and visual events are played. Certain audiovisual combinations will come together through synchresis and reinforce each other.

Written by gentlejunk

September 23rd, 2008 at 11:45 am

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Charles Csuri on artists and scientists

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 It takes years of a highly disciplined education to become a
research scientist
. Many years of study and artistic production are
required to become an artist especially  one with an interest in
innovation
. It appears, if you want to say a scientist is an
artist,just redefine the problem. The process becomes the content or
meaning.
Let’s make the art object the algorithms or the information and
control systems which produce it. All of which becomes the artist’s
signature. This gives the scientist the opportunity to say “I am an
artist”. The scientist also can wear the mask of an art critic because
definitions  have been changed. Now complexity and great art can be
determined by linear logic.

Written by gentlejunk

September 23rd, 2008 at 11:36 am

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Cybernetics and scrutiny

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Cybernetics – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cybernetics is the interdisciplinary study of the structure of complex systems, especially communication processes, control mechanisms and feedback principles. Cybernetics is closely related to control theory and systems theory, but both in its origins and in its evolution in the second-half of the 20th century, cybernetics is equally applicable to social (that is, language-based) systems.

Cybernetics is always and only involved when the system under scrutiny is involved in a closed loop, where action by the system in an environment causes some change in the environment AND that change is manifest to the system via information/feedback that causes changes in the way the system then behaves, and all this in service of a goal or goals. This “circular causal” relationship is necessary and sufficient for a cybernetic perspective.

What is cybernetic art today? If back in 68 and before computer (analogue than digital) have been used to loop process for feedback that was used to calculate event of the next loop. In this way cybernetics didn’t change.

‘When the energetic strength of one of the signals is relatively small, we call it feedback, but the generalization (specially when the interest is in information rather than energy) is circularity. I even go so far as to argue that all systems are circular: linear causality is, then, when the “feedback” is so weak we don’t bother with it.’

More interesting things that have changes, and are changing, is social aspect of how in history small amount of people used cybernetics to promote computer based loops in society. Today computers are promoting looping and feedbacking to society. Systems that are under scrutiny and that are put into loops are people, society, consumers, voting body, etc. If we observe that cybernetics are observing complex systems, ‘especially communication processes’, than we have to recognize todays communication processes where in Rio da Jeneiro favela of 80 000 people there is 80 cybercafes where children spend day and night on Orcut (Brasilian popular Facebook like social web application). They are not making loops to observe, but are in the system and are beeing looped to be observed.

Written by gentlejunk

September 20th, 2008 at 10:38 am

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