My friend Francesca came up with this formula. I think it's rather brilliant, and I plan to apply it in my work.
Art cultivates the imagination, and imagination sparks innovation.
In the same conversation we discussed why fine art is alienating to the mainstream of people. We distilled it to three principles:
1. Lack of exposure in most environments. (Art is available only in specialised districts of major cities.)
2. Physical and psychological distance from artworks within galleries. Art is not participatory or hands on.
3. Knowledge barriers to art appreciation, perceived as class difference.
Overcoming these barriers is the key to creating engagement in the fine arts, which in turn can enhance the financial sustainability of artists and arts organisations.
Aside from introducing distortions, they also imply that tribal conceptions of right are primitive or embyonic forms of our own conceptions of private property. While some tribal cultures represent a developmental path towards property-based civilization - notably the Mesopotamian cultures we are about to discuss - tribal forms of organization continued robustly into the 20th century. Their disappearance has been a matter of force of arms, not evolution, and they continue to represent an alternative to current ideologies.
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism.
- Walter Benjamin
Descartes' Error by Antonio Damasio
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishigaru
Noroko by forgot the author
Buddha by Karen Armstrong
Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch
Sound Unbound by Paul Miller
And a good quote:
None are so hopelessly enslaved, as those who falsely believe they are free.
-Johann von Goethe
The concept of territory arose from the efforts of early civilizations to define land as a state resource. Practical geometry offered a method for translating the organic function of "range," an expanse where animals (including humans) exploited resources, to a technical, political and legal concept. Sumerian city-states pioneered the carving of organic polities into territorial entities, and elaborations occur in the emergent civilizations of Eridu, the UR III dynasty and Babylon. While early implementations of territory lack sophistication, key elements have persisted through time, notably mathematized experience - the substitution of technology for perception. The result has been a progressive homogenization of lived experience where distinctive qualities are reduced to measurable quantities. The first recorded conceptualization of this process occurs in the "geometrizing gaze" of Sumerian sky gods who hovered above the cities they owned. Their privileged perspective allowed them to inspect and to manage, and thus to own, the first technically defined territories known to history. Modern technologies like satellites bear clear impressions of these early systems, and the current colonization of experience in advertising stems directly from the effort to subject qualitative perception to systems of control which abstract its function from organic roots.
Akhnaten by Naguib Mahfouz
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
An Osteria in Chianti by Dario Castagno
The Suppliant Maidens, The Persians, Seven Against Thebes, Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus
Art and Innovation an edited volume about Xerox Parc
Thinking in Pictures by Temple Grandin
Autism Inside Out by Donna Williams
How Can I Talk if My Lips Don't Move by Tito Mukhopadhyay
"It is a fact of neuroscience that everything we experience is actually a figment of our imagination."
- Susana Martinez-Conde, Director of the Laboratory of Visual Neuroscience with Stephen Macknik in Scientfic American Mind, July 12, 2010
My work dwells in a continuum founded by Harry Smith, Kenneth Anger and Stan Brakhage, and largely defined by Jonas Mekas, who named it “personal cinema.” Like Smith and Anger I consider myself an alchemist who uses art for psychological transformation, and Mekas’ example gave me the strength to pursue my own vision. Aesthetically my work draws on surrealism, collage and distressed media, but it is rare that I consider other visual artists during my creative process. Instead I draw on philosophy, spirituality (especially the hermetic traditions) and music, seeking to transform my direct experience into audiovisual media. I have worked with Robert Wilson for many years. While my work is not in his vein, working with him has inspired an invaluable personal and aesthetic rigor—he showed me how to acheive high standards.
The Economist magazine has sponsored an interesting debate on whether language influences thought. I decided to join it by arguing the question is a bit misguided but can still lead to important conclusions.
Text of my comments on the debate
Thank you for sponsoring this interesting debate. While it certainly inspires discussion, I am afraid the premise is a rather blunt tool for achieving credible philosophic or scientific results. The problem is that is that thought occurs both in and out of language, and therefore language is both the expression of (non-linguistic) though and the medium for discursive thought. As a consequence, the word "thought" stands variously for perception, inner experience, taxonomy, rationality and mathematics in the essays and responses.
Still I will come down in favor of Liberman's position for the following reasons. A strong view of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis holds that language shapes perception; in brief that we only perceive those things for which we possess a word. As Liberman points out, and Boroditsky clearly concedes, the "no word for X" argument is a misused argument of popular rhetoric that no academic would take seriously. After decades of tests, the only observable confirmation of Sapir-Whorf is in phonemic perception of individuals after the acquisition of language. Sounds that any baby can distinguish are grouped into phonemic categories that differ by language group, which is why English speakers can hear the difference between 'l' and 'r' while Japanese speakers cannot.
Boroditsky's examples are of how language shapes thought are indubitable, but we should examine the realms of experience they represent. Linguistic influence falls into two categories, social and technological. The former includes prejudices (Arab views of Jews) and symbolic expressions (how artists represent gendered symbols as characters). The latter includes cardinal orientation and mathematics, both of which are not only technical terms but linguistic embodiments of technologies that place them outside the aegis of organically developed mental expression. Technical language is a kind of doing, an operation on objects, even when confined to the abstractions of physics.
I argue that the symbolic and technological uses of language do not reflect the essence of the debate, which is, does language determine the speaker's fundamental worldview, ontology or experience? Taking Boroditsky's position to its logical conclusion, we would have to conclude that languages are not translatable, and this is clearly not the case. Roughly the same thoughts, that is, experiences, reflections and initiatives, occur in every human, and, no matter what language they speak, these expressions can be transmitted across a divide that is linguistic not mental.
While Boroditsky is clearly correct with regards to kinds of example she chooses, I think the spirit of your debate seeks the most general answer to the question. In that case it is most reasonable to conclude that language expresses thought, shaping its contours but not its fundamental elements.
Here's a summary of a seminar I'm giving at Liverpool Hope University on November 2.
Setting the stage
The most adventurous niches within higher education have started to register these complexities [of digital evolution]. They have begun to expand their models of training, research, and output in keeping with the distributive nature of innovation, creation, and authorship within the knowledge economy. Among the many accompanying shifts, there is an increasing erosion of the boundary line once separating the roles of scholar, artist, and technologist, as the old means of distributing knowledge give way to far more fluid means that easily allow creative producers to function in many roles and disseminate their productions to vast, geographically disparate audiences. What has emerged are varieties of creative practice that bridge the gap between thinking and doing, between the excavation of the past and the creation of the present, based on what Aristotle referred to as phronesis: knowledge integrated with practical reasoning.
[From Schnapp & Shanks 2009, 146] Jeffrey T.Schnapp and Michael Shanks. "Artereality (Rethinking Craft in a Knowledge Economy)"
Neurodiversity: Discovering the Extraordinary Gifts of Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia and Other Brain Differences by Thomas Armstrong
The Gift of Dyslexia by Ron Davis
Infiltration: How Heinrich Himmler Schemed to Build an SS Industrial Empire by Albert Speer
Isaac Newton by James Gleick
Leonardo by Martin Kemp
The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene
Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations by David Warsh
Mapping Human History: Genes, Race and Our Common Origins by Steve Olson
The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson
Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky
Travels with My Aunt by Grahame Greene
The Boxer Rebellion by Diana Preston
The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett
Savage Night by Jim Thompson
Diary of a Teenage Girl by Phoebe Gloeckner
Green Porno by Isabella Rossellini
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
How Animals See: Other Visions of Our World by Sandra Sinclair
Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin
The State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence by Martin Meredith
Lipstick Jihad by Azadeh Moaveni
Ongoing reading
On War by Carl von Clausewitz
The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene
Aborted readings
Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet
Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare by Octavio Paz
Here's an Op-Ed from the Financial Times about how the new UK government should refocus its economic policies.
How can business leaders and entrepreneurs persuade the government to create such an environment, in which manufacturing is revered and nurtured? They should help generate a national debate that promotes a consensus across government, industry, academia, the media and the public.
First, they should press for foreign and defence policies that reflect Britain’s importance in the globalised economy, rather than retrenchment and decline.
Second, we need schools that equip the country with the skills it needs to compete and create wealth globally.
Third, our universities must work more closely with industry to harness the national investment in science, and pull ideas through to the market.
Fourth, we must create an environment that gives companies a reason to invest and stay in Britain.
Fifth, the government should not be afraid to pull all the levers at its disposal to create wealth in the UK.
And sixth, transport, infrastructure, energy and communications policies must support this overall approach.
Self-Portrait: Dennis Hopper is the pilot of a series I developed with Dennis. We met in Los Angeles after an opening of my productions, the Robert Wilson Video Portraits, and he expressed a desire to do portraits in video as well. He had strong ideas about extending his vérité photographic style into motion - the results would have been as groundbreaking as Bob Wilson's. We completed one piece, an autobiography produced in his home studio. In it Dennis recites the Rudyard Kipling poem, If, and it gives deep insight into how Dennis saw himself.
Theresa Smalac wrote an insightful review for of And Everything is Going Fine, a biopic of actor ad monologist Spaulding Gray. It appears in The Fanzine, a surprisingly good cultural website I discovered when asked to contribute a photograph.
The Fanzine's request jarred loose some old memories. I spent a day with Spaulding in 1992, hanging out in the Soho neighborhood of New York City. At the time I was photography editor of IO Magazine, a short-lived literary rag based in Austin, Texas. Oddly for its date, the original article by Kate Miller, Gray Noise, continues to live a ghostly existence on Alt X. It is among the first print publications to make the leap into the online world.
Smalac makes a particularly astute statement about Soderbergh's technique. Rather than interview Spaulding's intimates, he constructs the film in Spaulding's own voice by using existing filmed material. Filmmaker Emile De Antonio pioneered this technique in Point of Order, a work that turns Senator Joe McCarthy's own words into a searing self-indictment. In the case of Gray the technique ensures that there is no closure to the film, no satisfying analytic coda to our loss.
I remember Spaulding as a warm, zany person who was incredibly open. Open-minded and open-hearted, he was one of those people who could share his inner self without self-indulgence, maybe because he was so very vulnerable.
Theresa Smalac wrote an insightful review for of And Everything is Going Fine, a biopic of actor ad monologist Spaulding Gray. It appears in The Fanzine, a surprisingly good cultural website I discovered when asked to contribute a photograph.
