Saturday, December 29, 2007

The Believer - Interview with Richard Powers

The Believer - Interview with Richard Powers: "It takes one hundred billion interconnected cells to conjure up a coherent story of the world. But if neuroscience concludes anything, it’s that sensing and feeling and thinking and perceiving and hundreds of other seemingly separate processes are all conjoined in a huge, dynamic, and continuously revised narrative network. The brain is the ultimate storytelling machine, and consciousness is the ultimate story. Our neurons tell our selves into being."

Sunday, December 16, 2007

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Prometheus Keeps a Diary.

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Prometheus Keeps a Diary.

PROMETHEUS
KEEPS A DIARY.
BY MIKE RICHARDSON-BRYAN

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Day 1

What an awful day. Chained to a rock, my liver ripped out and eaten by an eagle, and I just bit my tongue! That's gonna be a canker sore for sure. But I know I did the right thing. Those poor people needed fire in the worst way. Besides, how long can Zeus hold a grudge?

Saturday, December 15, 2007

pulse-berlin : Thinking Aloud

pulse-berlin : Thinking Aloud



Moving to another historical stage: as part of Stalinist imperialism in the early 1920s, one newly created culture collided with an older one. At that time, the Russian psychologist Alexander Luria traveled from Moscow to the Uzbek Ferghana Valley to interview the Muslim population living there. He wanted to investigate the influence of new literacy programs ordered by Moscow on their logical thinking processes. Luria published the transcripts much later in his book “Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations” (1976). Using these interviews, Goss created her piece “How to Fix the World” (2004). The interview subjects in the video appear clever and crafty in the way they interpret and evade the tasks they are given. In the video sequence “Studying the Writing of Lenin,” a lecture hall is shown in which students are gathered, bending over Stalin’s writings. An animated circle moves over the scene like a magnifying glass, changing the Roman letters into Cyrillic characters. Goss scans documentary pictures and translates their messages. In the middle of the video, an encomium to Stalin is recited called “Be immortal, great Stalin.” In contrast to oral relativism, this constructed text is an extreme example of literalness. Political indoctrination also becomes apparent in a concrete question and answer situation. As to whether all people are equal, an old man replies as though quoting from party literature that he only sees a difference between land owners and workers.

In “How to Fix the World,” Goss reminds us of the role that language plays in the attempt by governments to influence the future of their own country as well as that of other countries. Even the laconically formulated title of this piece is a reference to the intention, as crass as it is absurd, to change cultural prejudices. Using a nonsense phrase to illuminate the sinister use of propaganda to twist the truth, the video ends with a chorus intoning, “Precious metals do not rust. Gold is a precious metal. Do precious metals rust? Precious metal rusts.“

Goss’s work tends to question the creation and sustainability of the facts and rules that surround us. Currently, she is working on a video piece about the meter, the European standard of measurement. For this piece she traveled through France, as France is the country where, at the end of the 18th century, the meter was first derived from a piece of brass of that same length, and which can still be seen today in Paris.

Collaborative Arts » Essays » John Wood and Paul Harrison- The Odd Couple

Collaborative Arts » Essays » John Wood and Paul Harrison- The Odd Couple

The immediate impact of watching a Wood and Harrison video work (no single sequence lasts longer than three minutes – Jo to confirm!) is without doubt the physical nature of their endeavours – the ways in which their individual (or joint) uniform presence addresses each given obstacle. Gravity is the constant against which their bodies and/or objects are variously hurled, pulled, squashed and dropped. One could apply to their work a recent comparison of artist Bruce Nauman and Samuel Beckett, “(their work) is held or called by the ground. In both artists’ work, gravity exerts its pull everywhere, though not always visibly. As with all human beings, the ground-ward tug effects or exerts (as an accidental by-product) shapeliness, grace and balance, even as it deforms those things, pulling them into disorganisation, flatness or comic indistinction[4].”

Democracy Now! | Anthropologists Up in Arms Over Pentagon's "Human Terrain System" to Recruit Graduate Students to Serve in Iraq, Afghanistan

Democracy Now! | Anthropologists Up in Arms Over Pentagon's "Human Terrain System" to Recruit Graduate Students to Serve in Iraq, Afghanistan


JUAN GONZALEZ: What specifically is the Human Terrain program? How did it start, and how does it typically operate now in places like Afghanistan and Iraq?

DAVID PRICE: The Human Terrain program is run through BAE, which is a contracting agency. You know, in some ways it’s very similar to Blackwater in the way that it works. What they do is they take ethnographers, they take anthropologists, who may or may not have cultural expertise in the areas where they’re working, and they take these ethnographers, embed them with the troops, they travel with them, and then they try and advise commanders about taking culturally appropriate action.
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DAVID PRICE: Yeah. I know basically the facts that you stated there. I was on a panel with her in a session organized by the Network of Concerned Anthropologists at the anthropology meetings, and her critique was very interesting. Her critique of Human Terrain is not my own. Part of it is. She had serious complaints, from the inside, about basically the intellectual incompetence of the people who are involved in the program. The ethnographers really don’t have linguistic or cultural competence for the regions that they’re working in. And so, her critique was that it’s being run very poorly.

But this is where I differ with her. She believed that if, you know, better anthropologists or people with higher degrees of competence were involved, then the program would be a good one. I disagree with that entirely, because that would not resolve the ethical issues, you know, as well as the moral issues of being involved in a very corrupt war being fought in Iraq today.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about how this debate is being played out in the Anthropological Association and what this oath is all about.

DAVID PRICE: Well, the oath is very simple. You know, it’s a pledge that’s modeled after actions taken by physicists during the Reagan era, during Star Wars, where physicists said that they just wanted to be clear, individuals wanted to be clear, they did not want their research and they were not willing to be involved in the Star Wars program. Hugh Gusterson, an anthropologist who studies nuclear weapons production, came up with the idea of modeling a very similar pledge. So, you know, a small group of us, eleven of us, got together and hammered out some language—it’s very simple—saying that we’re not—you know, all of us are not even necessarily opposed to some work with the military, but anything involving counterinsurgency, such as this, or anything that violates ethical standards of research, we’re opposed to, and we’re simply asking our colleagues to stand up and be counted with us, saying that they’re not willing to use anthropology to these ends.
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