Andrew Carson

Ailve McCormack talks to artist Andrew Carson

2011-11-11T13:54:00.001Z

Ailve McCormack talks to artist Andrew Carson

November 11, 2011

In the lead up to the opening of Amharc Fhine Gall VIII - Unknown Knowns, curator Ailve McCormack talks to artist Andrew Carson about the work he is exhibiting.

Next week Ailve will be talking to Sally-Anne Kelly and Lisa Shaughnessy.

Andrew Carson

Q: Can you tell me about the work you are exhibiting in this exhibition?

The work in this show stems from my research into the ways in which we engage with each other and our surroundings through digital environments and text-based communications, and the effects these have on social paradigms and our perceptions of reality. There will be two new works in this show, one small video piece, and a larger installation. It’s a bit of a new departure for me aesthetics wise, and one of the first times I won’t be working with text itself.

Q: Your most recent work is inspired by the Egyptian Book of the Dead – what drew you to this book?

For as long as I can remember I’ve loved Ancient Egypt, and have been dipping in and out of reading the Book for years, but never really found a way I could in anyway link it to my art practice. About this time last year however, I just happened upon one chapter from it, “The Chapter of not dying a second time in Khert-Neter” and the spark was born. It’s been a lot of fun to make this work, as it finally combines two of my biggest passions in a way that is, for me, quite natural.

Q: Your current series of work is inspired by a chapter from this book that is concerned with the survival of the soul through the afterlife, how do you interpret this through your work?

The book itself was intended as a guide for surviving the passage through the underworld, and this particular chapter was designed to give the deceased the tools to ensure their soul lives on, through the dispersement of elements of the self amongst the cosmos. I began to see links between this concept, and our contemporary uses of social media sites, particularly Facebook’s decision in October 2009 to allow for the retrieval and download of a user’s entire account. For me, that opened up a world of unseen links between Egyptian afterlife beliefs, and the parts of ourselves we present online in public forums.

Q: You use a quote from the book within this series of work; "I have hidden myself amongst you, oh imperishable stars", which relates to “exploring online realities and virtual immortality”, can you explain this in more detail?

That quote comes from the afore-mentioned chapter that was the catalyst for the work. I really liked the poetic phrasing of one particular translation, and thought it best summed up my research and outputs from the series. I was looking at Facebooks memorialisation policy at the time, and found it really interesting that even after a user has passed on, the data and memories they uploaded to the site, lived on as a sort of shadow-self. This, coupled with other media sites generally used, such as Twitter, Google+ etc, allowed for a semblance of immortality, one that was not dependent on the continued existence of the physical self. The Egyptian concept of death did not only consist of the physical act of one’s body dying, but death in the Egyptian sense was also a separation from one’s social context, so for example, a person ostracised from the community, or left bereft of loved ones, was for all intents and purposes considered dead themselves. In contemporary terms, these perpetual online effigies circumvent death-by-social-exclusion.

Q: You have said that your work is inspired by a combination of “Eastern spiritual and philosophical thought, Structural and post-structural linguistic theories, folk and pop music, and 1960's psychedelic culture.” How do each of these influences manifest themselves in your work and can you expand a little on one or two?

I like tying different strands of inquiry together in my work, most of which stem from my own personal interests. Spiritualism holds a big attraction for me, especially Eastern forms, where the emphasis seems to be more based around personal enlightenment and betterment. The likes of Buddhism and Hinduism for example are appealing not only for their thoughts, but also for their rich visual history. There’s a sense of community, or greater belonging in a lot of religious identities, and that’s something that really attracts me to them. Similarly, I find music an almost infinite source of inspiration, in its use of language and poetry, alongside melody to create a lovely dynamic between being both intensely personal and emotive, and somewhat universal. In terms of manifesting these in my work, I often use particular songs, or lyric snippets to spark off a certain collective consciousness in the work, or to make immediately relatable to the viewer, whilst also utilising it to create an insight or frame of reference for the work and ideas I want to put forward.

You can see more of Andrews work on his website

http://www.andrew-carson.com/

Further Detail about Amharc Fhine Gall VIII can be found here

(SOURCE: http://www.draiocht.ie/blog/entry/ailve_mccormack_talks_to_artist_andrew_carson/)

Amharc Fhine Gall - Unknown Knowns

2011-11-04T12:49:00.004Z

The term Unknown Knowns which constitutes the title of this exhibition, is the description used by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek when he refers to the “unconscious beliefs and prejudices that determine how we perceive reality and intervene in it.” Things we know, but don’t know we know, dictate how we address situations we encounter. Obviously it is impossible to know what the unknown known is because if we did it wouldbecome the known known, but the work in this exhibition addresses the theme of unconscious knowledge.

The three artists in the exhibition have explored and represented specific elements of this through their practice. Shown through a diverse range of works, from the manipulation of materials that we know on some level are familiar to us, to the investigation into the possibility of another self and how this can determine our lives, to the idea of the second life and the attempt to survive for eternity, all three artists’ work delve into certain aspects of the unknown known.

With his latest work in the on-going series inspired by the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Andrew Carson explores notions of “online realities and virtual immortality”. This series derives from a particular chapter of the book which was written as a guide on how to survive the afterlife. It was written in order to prevent the deceased from “dying a second time”. The work draws parallels between contemporary social media interaction and ancient concepts of the soul; an idea which many people trust is known to them, yet, it is something which remains ephemeral and unknown.

Through her current work Sally-Anne Kelly is “exploring ideas about who we are, who we think we are, who we become, who others think we are, and who we present ourselves as being.” Her new series of photographs ‘The Hunted Self’ examines what we do not or cannot know about the self. She investigates the internal power struggle of the hidden and unknown self or double and how that can be realised as another or separate identity.

Lisa Shaughnessy’s practice is concerned with the physicality of the materials used and alludes to the processes used by the artist. The work presents ideas of construction and deconstruction. There is a blurring between the boundaries of painting and sculpture and what the viewer felt they knew about these materials becomes a little less certain but the fundamental qualities of the materials are still apparent. These known and familiar materials have been manipulated in such a way as to render them initially unknown.

The examination of this unknown known, equated by Žižek to the Freudian unconscious which recognises the importance of the unconscious in comprehending conscious thought and behaviour, creates a platform for this exhibition to reflect on the convictions of our knowledge and to propose that it is not vital for our existence to know that we have all the answers …

Fingal Arts Office is delighted to showcase recent local art college graduates with its annual exhibition opportunity Amharc Fhine Gall. The show seeks to increase the profile of emerging Fingal artists by giving them the chance to show in a professional, contemporary art space. It may be their first major show but with the professional presentation of their work and accompanying catalogue we hope it is the first of many. The opportunity also extends to the emerging curator who will work with the graduates to create a suitable context to show this work to a wider local and contemporary art audience.

Curated by Ailve McCormack

Video game in a box

2011-09-12T22:37:00.001+01:00

Happy Birthday Draiocht

2011-07-12T15:58:00.001+01:00

A special recital by Coolmine Musical Society to help celebrate Draíocht's 10th Birthday.

(Filmed and edited by yours truly)

Hell's Microwave

2011-06-15T17:15:00.001+01:00

Pallas Projects Summer Programme presents

HELL’S MICROWAVE

Darren Barrett, John Byrne, Andrew Carson, Aoife Cassidy,
Garrett Cormican, Orla Gilheany, Ian Slattery

Opening reception: 6 – 8pm Friday June 17th 2011
Exhibition continues: June 18th - 25th 2011

The first installment of the Pallas Projects Summer Programme of artist-initiated exhibitions is Hell's Microwave. A group show of artists who were based at the Pallas Studios on Grangegorman Road, the title is a humorous reference to the malicious arson attack in March in which the studios and offices were destroyed, the fire having originated from the kitchen microwave being set alight and its subsequent explosion. The exhibition mainly comprises of individual pieces completed by the artists since the incident, with a common starting point of making a piece with the value of representing individual work damaged in the fire. Tragic as the incident seemed at the time, it is generally agreed that on an imaginary Richter scale of human suffering, when viewed on a global social and political scale this catastrophe would maybe register a 0.5 reading, possibly even 0.25 And so, rather than using the incident as an excuse to luxuriate in feeling sorry for oneself, it was broadly agreed that a positive has emerged from the negative, fire has been the cleanser and like a phoenix from the ashes new ideas and work has arisen.

Darren Barrett’s work operates within a metaphysical crevice situated somewhere between theory and practice. Barrett characterises his own artistic and intellectual position as that of a diverging artist and is currently living through what he describes ‘as the intermittently glorious years of onanistic solitude’. John Byrne went to Art College in his native Belfast before attending the Slade School in London in the mid eighties. His early work was Performance based, culminating in his Border Interpretative Centre 2000. He has gone on to make Public Artworks including Dublin's Last Supper 2004 and Misneach 2010. Andrew Carson’s work for this exhibition is part of an ongoing series inspired by the Egyptian Book of the Dead, "I have hidden myself amongst you, oh imperishable stars" exploring online realities and virtual immortality. Recent shows have included Jockeyism (2011), Sonic Vigil, and Shortlisted (2010). Aoife Cassidy's work is autobiographical, a visual diary of personal thought processes and experiences. Combining these aspects, she implements the use of various media and techniques, traditional and non-traditional, to create kitsch and often gaudy imagery. Garrett Cormican is a painter. He makes no claim for his work, offers no explanation and invites you to look directly at it instead. Orla Gilheany has exhibited at Monstertruck Gallery, DEAF Festival, with Supafast Collective and most recently at the Flatlake Literary Festival, Co. Monaghan where she created fantasy and Irish bungalow scenes on bales of silage using graffiti techniques. She graduated from IADT with a BA Hons in Visual Arts Practice in 2008. Ian Slattery examines concepts of stereotypes and association within society. With the representation of familiar images he allows for a reinterpretation of the imagery and simultaneously of one’s preconceptions. He graduated from DIT 2008 with a BA Fine Art.

Jockeyism

2011-06-15T17:07:00.001+01:00

Jockeyism

Time:
16 June 6pm- 9pm

Location:
Block T (Above Chinatown), 1-6 Haymarket, Smithfield Square, Dublin 7

Participating artists:

Andrew Carson
Jane Fogarty
Aoibheann Greenan
David Lunney
Grace McEvoy
Oisín O'Brien
Anna O'Byrne
Kurt Oppermann
Laura Smith

Jockeyism is an invented term which describes a playful and conceptual approach to creating a series of diverse works from nine different artists. Each of the artists began by selecting a racehorse name which they deemed relevant to their own practice in both its physical and theoretical capacity and created a piece around their chosen title. This conceptual approach facilitates the collective while also informing individual practices as each artist pursues their own personal trajectory within their work.
On the one hand Jockeyism can be seen as a playful poke at the various trends and neologisms that emerge endlessly within the art world and to which artists often feel they must conform in order to establish their work. To a higher extent the title evokes some of the darker aspects of the art market i.e. the struggle to get ahead and indeed the financial risk or gamble involved in choosing art as a career. Jockeyism is an attempt to undermine this dominant position. Curated by a group of recent fine art graduates from NCAD and DIT who began a fortnightly peer critique group in Block T, this exhibition emphasises the importance and benefits of support over competition. Each participant has created their own rules and experimented outside of their regular context and mediums thereby challenging the pressure to obey convention.

David Brooks: The social anima

2011-05-02T10:57:00.000+01:00

Golan Levin makes art that looks back at you

2011-04-29T10:53:00.000+01:00

Wooden Mirrors by Daniel Rozin

2011-04-27T10:00:00.000+01:00

Jerusalem born, New York living interactive artist Daniel Rozin specializes in making mirrors out of unreflective surfaces such as wood and cork. His Wooden Mirror uses 830 square pieces of wood which are hooked up to an equal number of small motors which move the wooden blocks according to a live feed from a built in camera. The camera picks up movement in light and transfers the signal to the wood. The result is an eerie representation of reality depicted in tiny wooden pixels.

Rozim has built mechanical mirrors of various other materials that share the same behavior and interaction, such as the Pegs Mirror…

and the Weave Mirror.

SOURCE: http://www.amusingplanet.com/2010/08/wooden-mirrors-by-daniel-rozin.html

Book Posters from Postertext

2011-04-23T10:00:00.000+01:00

The book posters from Postertext lets you hang your favorite book on the wall, literally. The posters are created from the book's text, arranged to depict a memorable scene from the book. They resemble close to ASCII art, but not quite it.

Posters made from text out of popular classics like Moby Dick, Time Machine, Frankenstein, The Count of Monte Cristo, Jane Eyre, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and dozens others are available. Since the entire book could not possibly be accommodated in one sheet of paper, Postertext often uses text from the first few chapters. The font sizes are big enough for someone with normal eyesight to read the text without visual aid. Occasionally, the poster comprises text from the entire book, like ones for War of the Worlds and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Postertext posters make excellent decorative additions to your home or office, as they are both expressive and captivating. They also make great conversation pieces for book lovers. Prices range from $24 to $35.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Dracula

Moby Dick

The Count of Monte Cristo

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea

War Of The Worlds

SOURCE: http://www.amusingplanet.com/2010/11/book-posters-from-postertext.html

Peter Molyneux demos Milo, the virtual boy

2011-04-21T10:50:00.000+01:00

Movie Bar Code Compresses Entire Movies Into Barcodes

2011-04-19T10:00:00.000+01:00

Movie Bar Code is based on a simple but amazing concept - take every frame in a movie and compress it into a line. Then put them next to each other and you get a barcode of the movie. Movie Bar Code is brilliant because it gives an interesting perspective into the color palette used by different movies.

As website FlowingData observes, it’s even possible to determine when a particular scene in the movie begins or ends from the barcode, as noticeable in the barcode of the movie The Matrix (above). You can tell when they're in and out of the system.

Below is a collection of images taken from Movie Bar Code. Checkout the site for more.

American Beauty

City of God

Inception

Jaws

Kill Bill Vol1

Slumdog Millionaire

War of the Worlds

SOURCE: http://www.amusingplanet.com/2011/03/movie-bar-code-compresses-entire-movies.html

Book Origami by Isaac Salazar

2011-04-17T10:00:00.001+01:00

Claron McFadden: Singing the primal mystery

2011-04-15T10:49:00.001+01:00

3D Paper Sculptures by Bert Simons

2011-04-13T10:00:00.000+01:00

Dutch artist Bert Simons has discovered a way to create very life like 3-D sculptures out of paper. He first maps his subjects' faces using sophisticated tracking technology and feeds the data into a computer. Then using some special software he constructs the subject’s contour and then print their form on paper before putting it together using glue.

SOURCE: http://www.amusingplanet.com/2010/12/amazing-3d-paper-sculptures-by-bert.html

Patricia Ryan: Don't insist on English!

2011-04-11T10:52:00.001+01:00

Why did LOL infiltrate the language?

2011-04-10T10:00:00.002+01:00

The internet slang term "LOL" (laughing out loud) has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary, to the mild dismay of language purists. But where did the term originate? And is it really a threat to our lexicon?

"OMG! LOL's in the OED. LMAO!"

If you find the above string of letters utterly unintelligible, you are clearly an internet "noob". Let me start again.

Golly gosh! The popular initialism LOL (laughing out loud) has been inducted into the canon of the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary. Blimey! What is going on?

The OED defines LOL as an interjection "used chiefly in electronic communications... to draw attention to a joke or humorous statement, or to express amusement".

It is both "LOL" where all the letters are pronounced separately, but also commonly "lol" where it is pronounced as a word.

The phrase was ushered in alongside OMG (Oh My God), with dictionary guardians pointing to their growing occurrence "in e-mails, texts, social networking... and even in spoken use".

As well as school playgrounds, words like "lolz" and "lolling" can be heard in pubs and offices - though often sarcastically, or in parody.

Love it or loathe it, "lol" is now a legitimate word in our lexicon, says Graeme Diamond, the OED's principal editor for new words.

"The word is common, widespread, and people understand it," he explains.

The word serves a real purpose - it conveys tone in text, something that even the most cynical critics accept.

"I don't 'LOL'. I'm basically someone who kind of hates it," says Rob Manuel of the internet humour site b3ta.

"But the truth is, we do need emotional signifiers in tweets and emails, just as conversation has laughter. 'LOL' might make me look like a twit, but at least you know when I'm being arch."

Death of the dictionary

But for young internet entrepreneurs like Ben Huh, of the Cheezburger Network of comedy sites, "LOL" is much more than a necessary evil. It's both a tool and a toy.

"'LOL' is a part of everyday life. I use it all the time in e-mail exchanges. It's a polite way of acknowledging someone," he says.

"And yes, I do say 'LOL' out loud. In almost an ironic sense, like a slow handclap after a bad joke. 'Lol' means 'yes, I understand that was funny, but I'm not really laughing'."

But no matter how much irony we cake it in, the L-word grinds the ears of many people over the age of 25.

"The death of the dictionary" is how one blogger greeted its induction to the bastion of English.

While on Facebook, there are at least half a dozen "anti-LOL" groups, where lol-ophobes dream of loll-ageddon:

"If something is funny, 'ha', 'hehehehe', or 'hee hee' is perfectly fine depending on the joke, and more descriptive than 'lol'," writes one hater.

Another complains that lol "doesn't sound anything like laughter. In fact you physically CAN'T say it while smiling. I'm all for bastardisation of the language, but with lol, that thing you thought was rubbish really is rubbish".

Wags point out that "LOL" is almost always disingenuous. "How many people are actually laughing out loud when they say LOL?" asks David Crystal, author of Language and the Internet.

But those laughing least of all are the language purists, who lament "LOL" as a hallmark of creeping illiteracy.

"There is a worrying trend of adults mimicking teen-speak," says Marie Clair of the Plain English Campaign, in the Daily Mail.

"They [adults] are using slang words and ignoring grammar. Their language is deteriorating."

But is "LOL" really a lazy, childish concoction?

When the OED traced the origins of the acronym, they discovered 1980s computer fanatics were responsible.

The oldest written records of "LOL" (used to mean laughing out loud) are in the archives of Usenet, an early internet discussion forum.

And the original use was typed by Wayne Pearson, in Calgary, who says he wrote the first ever LOL in reply to a gag by someone called "Sprout".

"LOL" was "geek-speak that filtered through to the mainstream", says Manuel.

"I first saw it in the 1990s - at the end of emails. Then it got picked up by the young kids. Then it went naff. But it came back ironically - with people saying things like 'megalolz'."

Grandparents, for example, often adopt "LOL" as one of their first "internet words", says Huh. "'LOL' and 'OMG' are like momma and dada."

But many mistake "LOL" for "lots of love", leading to some unintended "LOLs", such as the infamous tale of the mother who wrote: "Your grandmother has just passed away. LOL."

It has also lent its name to some wildly popular internet crazes, like Lolcats, whose appeal spread far beyond the realms of cyber-geeks.

More than funny

So why has "LOL", above all other web phrases, become such a phenomenon?

Because it's simple and multipurpose, says Tim Hwang, founder of ROFLCon, a whole festival dedicated to "internet awesome".

"The magic of LOL is that it's both exclusive and inclusive," he says. "On one level, it's simple to understand.

"But it also conveys something subtle - depending on the situation. It means more than just 'funny'. For example, if I had my bike stolen, my friend might reply 'LOL'. It helps overcome an awkward moment."

For school kids, acronyms like "LOL" and "KMT" (kiss my teeth) are a kind of secret code, a badge of belonging, says Tony Thorne, author of the Dictionary of Contemporary Slang.

"I go into schools and record slang words - all the new terms kids are saying - words like 'lolcano'. And if you talk to kids they will say this is our language - this is what identifies us."

But aren't these slang words also harmful to children's vocabulary? Not at all, says Thorne.

"Government educationalists get all worked up about words like LOL - they see them as substandard and unorthodox.

"But the small amount of research on this issue shows that kids who use slang abbreviations are the more articulate ones. It's called code switching."

If we have a literacy crisis, it's among adults as well as children, says Thorne. And slang is not the culprit. In fact, it is enriching the language.

Diamond agrees: "There will always be a minority who want the English language to remain as a frozen beast, that doesn't admit changes," he says.

"But language is a vibrant, evolving animal."

SOURCE: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12893416

Death and the Powers: The robots' opera

2011-04-09T11:02:00.000+01:00

Ferris Jabr, reporter

(Image: Death and the Powers/MIT)

Like many operas, Death and the Powers opens with a kind of Greek chorus. Unusually, the members of this chorus are not people - they are robots: four Operabots whose triangular heads sit atop telescoping metal rods fixed to a base reminiscent of Roomba, the robot vacuum cleaner. The machines nod their heads, which flash with white light, as they explain in human voices that they are avatars who will retell the story of their creators. Each Operabot then "downloads" the memories of their human correlate - visualised by a projection of the memories behind each robot. A pulse of light then blinds the audience, and the actors appear on stage in place of the droids.

The Operabots are not absent for long. They are - along with a fleet of fellow machines and computers - both props and characters, technical wizardry and thematic devices. The high-tech production is the latest project of Tod Machover, who heads the Opera of the Future group, part of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The creative team includes former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky as librettist, director Diane Paulus of the American Repertory Theater, conductor Gil Rose and Hollywood production designer Alex McDowell, whose credits include Fight Club, Minority Report and Watchmen.

The story centers on a wealthy and influential inventor named Simon Powers - a Walt Disney, Bill Gates type - who, on the edge of death, abandons his ailing body and uploads his consciousness to an enormous computer called "The System", thereby achieving immortality. Simon's daughter Miranda, his third wife Evvy, and his adopted son and assistant Nicholas struggle to understand what has happened to Simon and whether they too should leave the world of flesh and enter The System.

(Image: Death and the Powers/MIT)

Machover's new opera features some impressive and futuristic razzle dazzle. Three enormous bookcases loom at the back of the stage onto which are projected the enchanting visual manifestations of Simon's thoughts and emotions after he enters The System. Simon's voice envelops the audience through a speaker system that makes typical surround sound seem but a whisper in comparison.

The Operabots - which narrate a humorous epilogue and roll about the stage throughout the performance - are perhaps the most charming and successful technology on stage. They are semi-autonomous, guided by the same computer system that controls the bookcases as well as by hidden puppetmasters wielding vide game controllers. Their sometime jerky movements and occasional mistakes of choreography make them all the more endearing.

But some of the Media Lab's more challenging projects are only half-successes. In one scene, a giant chandelier with looping metal framework and taut Teflon strings descends from the ceiling and encloses Evvy in an erotic embrace. This is Simon's way of fulfilling his wife's carnal desires after ditching his body. Originally, the Media Lab team intended for Evvy to play the chandelier like a harp, but that is not really what happens. She throws herself against the strings, but this produces a guttural vibration that is difficult to hear and feels incommensurate with the contraption's daunting size.

(Image: Death and the Powers/MIT)

Nicholas, Simon's half-android assistant, uses a robotic arm to help command the Operabots. The Media Lab hoped he could also use this arm to augment his singing voice on stage through a vocabulary of gestures, but it seems that the gadgets and gizmos adorning his limb are ultimately ornamental rather than functional.

A bigger problem, though, is that all of the technical innovation that appears in the production is too removed from the audience. Despite a few short explanatory paragraphs in the playbill, it is just too difficult for the audience to understand and appreciate what is going on. As the main draw of the show is that it is a robot opera - a theatrical performance infused with technology like never before - the show would be significantly enhanced if the team produced a separate booklet revealing the technical wizardry behind the curtain that MIT spent years developing. Let's face it: the audience is going to be more geeks and nerds than connoisseurs of classic opera, especially at a Boston showing not too far from MIT and Harvard. This is one case in which the magicians definitely should reveal their tricks. It's what we all came for.

SOURCE: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2011/03/death-and-the-powers-the-robots-opera.html

How will you cope, living with your avatar?

2011-04-08T10:03:00.000+01:00

(Image: Adrian Weinbrecht/Stone/Gretty)

In Infinite Reality, Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson map the exciting possibilities and daunting downsides of ever more realistic virtual worlds

Hello, future. Gaming systems that drop you into another world, such as Microsoft's Kinect or Nintendo's Wii, are just the beginning of what virtual-reality technology has to offer. Get ready for virtual immortality, teleportation, time travel and the ability to be in two places at once.

But everything comes at a price. There are those who already worry about how this technology is affecting our brains. And once the digital versions of us become indistinguishable from our real selves, what might this do to our societies?

Two of virtual reality's most prominent researchers have come together to sketch out the landscape of an emerging field I call psychotech - the place where psychology and technology collide to produce something new and exciting. Social and cognitive psychologists Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson detail the current research - primarily their own - and pose some fascinating questions, which have surprising and important answers.

Do people treat digital representations of humans as if they were real? Do we have the same expectations of virtual others as of real people? If something occurs in a virtual environment, does that make the experience less authentic, or are our brains just as susceptible to virtual fear, love and trauma? And ultimately, now that we are able to create avatars in our own image and set them loose in virtual worlds to do our bidding, should we be held accountable for their independent actions?

This isn't just a whimsical exercise in philosophy. The practical applications of immersive virtual reality are already helping people across the globe - and future applications are limited only by the imagination, the authors say.

Imagine a classroom in which the learning conditions are individually tailored for each student. Via their own portal, everyone in the group feels as though the class is designed just for them, leading to less distraction and better grades.

Or what if you never had to endure another disappointing internet shopping experience? Remember that shirt that looked perfect on the model, but turned out to be all wrong when you received it in the post? Soon some internet shops will allow you to shop in 3D virtual environments in which you can pick virtual products off virtual shelves, gaining instant information on size, colour and proportions, as your realistically shaped avatar turns it over in its hands - or even tries it on.

Blascovich and Bailenson aren't naive optimists, though. They warn that as avatars become a larger part of our daily lives, we will also become more susceptible to identity theft, privacy violations and high-tech, individualised guerrilla marketing delivered by your virtual self.

Infinite Reality starts with a short discussion of the history of virtual reality, builds to a broad overview of the research literature and ends with a road map of the near future. Sadly, at some points the pace slows to an academic crawl: at times I found myself instinctively reaching for a highlighter to mark key phrases, as if they might show up in an exam question later. But it is well worth wading through these brief textbook passages. The second half of the book picks up speed, illustrating the ground-breaking research with vivid imagery and inspiring analysis.

We have long used science fiction to live out our wildest dreams. Now, with virtual reality, we can experience them for ourselves. And if Blascovich and Bailenson are right, it's as good as the real thing. And maybe infinitely better.

Samantha Murphy is a freelance writer based in Pennsylvania

SOURCE: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2011/04/how-will-you-cope-living-with-your-avatar.html#more

The Book Art of Robert The

2011-04-07T10:00:00.000+01:00

California-born artist Robert The began making sculptures from books, often culled from dumpsters and thrift store bins, since 1991. His work has been shown across New York and across the nation.

SOURCE: http://www.amusingplanet.com/2010/02/book-art-of-robert.html

Deb Roy: The birth of a word

2011-04-05T10:54:00.001+01:00

Rhythms of life data replayed in art

2011-04-03T11:00:00.000+01:00

Jonathon Keats, contributor

Sleep Patterns, a Los Angeles exhibition by Laurie Frick, converts EEG traces, recorded from the artist as she slept, into wood and watercolour (Image: Laurie Frick)

Six years ago a computer programmer named Ben Lipkowitz began tracking how much time he wasted washing his room-mate's dishes. Soon he was recording everything he did all day long and plotting the data on colour-coded charts, impressing fellow life-loggers and attracting the interest of artist Laurie Frick.

What drew Frick's eye were the patterns, seemingly abstract, yet corresponding to rhythms of living. To her, the patterns appeared "inherently recognisable and familiar", as did the tables she started keeping of her own sleep rhythms, recorded nightly with an EEG.

Frick has made these patterns the basis of a series of artworks currently on show in Los Angeles. They do not look like conventional data plots. Blocks of activity are represented by blocks of recycled wood, which Frick attaches to the wall or lays on the floor. Her avoidance of high-tech visualisation techniques is a smart move, reining in our compulsion to analyse the data, but the materials she has chosen are problematic. The sense of nostalgia evoked by old wood distracts us with irrelevant thoughts about ageing and memory.

Frick does far better with her watercolours, where the patterns themselves are paramount. These delicate images are mesmerising to look at and beguiling to contemplate. She hypothesises that they resonate because they sum up the rhythms of human life, providing a provocative suggestion as to the origin of our aesthetic sensibilities. But it is just as likely that we are drawn to the patterns because they are unfamiliar. If that's the case, Frick's art highlights the chasm between studying life and living it.

SOURCE: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2011/03/data-of-lifes-rhythms-of-life-replayed-in-art.html

Eric Whitacre: A virtual choir 2,000 voices strong

2011-04-02T14:00:00.000+01:00

Cynthia Breazeal: The rise of personal robots

2011-03-08T11:31:00.000Z

First interactive 3D film to debut in Australia

2011-03-07T11:16:00.000Z

"I'm not frightened," says the fictionalised voice of Elisabeth Fritzl, the Austrian woman imprisoned by her father in a cellar for 24 years. In that time, she bore him seven children. It's too horrifying to imagine.

This true story is the basis of Scenario, an interactive 3D movie in which you battle computer-generated avatars controlled by artificial intelligence. The use of both 3D and AI is a world first, according to the film's makers.

At the University of New South Wales's iCinema Research Centre, I enter a 360-degree cinema with four people. Five eyes are projected onto the screen. "You must choose an eye otherwise you will not escape," says a haunting voice. From here, the games begin.

SOURCE: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2011/03/worlds-first-interactive-3d-movie-to-debut-in-australia.html

John Cage about silence

2011-03-06T11:34:00.000Z

These Words, Forever

2011-03-05T11:21:00.000Z

I stumbled across this site just there, and found this one podcast with a beautiful idea from Marconi... Well worth a listen...
http://thememorypalace.us/2009/06/episode-12-these-words-forever/

Ethan Zuckerman: Listening to global voices

2011-03-05T10:53:00.000Z

Playing music at random

2011-03-04T10:40:00.000Z

Kat Austen, CultureLab editor

John Matthias and Alexis Kirke perform Cloud Chamber

Who were the greatest composers of all time? I have wrangled many a time over Mozart versus Thom Yorke, Rogers and Hammerstein and Chopin, crossing genres and time.

Something I hadn't considered, until now, was the possibility that I might want to include artificial neural networks on my list. In fact, I've been missing out on quite a few unexpected composers, as I found out earlier this month at the Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival. It wasn't just artificial life that was on the credits for the music played that weekend: one performance was orchestrated by subatomic particles, and another by its very own audience.

Of the performances relying on artificial neural networks, the most pleasurable to listen to wasCortical Songs by John Matthias and Andrew Prior. The performance was a floating, concordant exploration of the soundscape generated by a duet comprised of Matthias's violin playing and the contemporaneous output generated by the processing of his live performance by an artificial neural network. By altering variables, Prior created different moods with which to accompany the violinist's music.

The novelty of this approach lies with its variability - randomness even. While I wonder whether Prior's tinkering with the variables could override any randomness arising from the AI, the beauty of the music was enough to ensure that this question could easily go unanswered.

Matthias's spectacular violin skills were also made use of in a live performance of Cloud Chamber by Alexis Kirke (see video above). With this composition, a cloud chamber - more commonly used to track the path of subatomic particles - controls the show. The movement of the particles dictates the way in which sound waves from Matthais's violin music are "cut" by Kirke's synthesiser. The little sound grains generated are then manipulated and fed back into Matthias's live performance.

The science doesn't stop there though. Kirke has long been fascinated by baryons - composite particles made for three quarks - and decided to map the different compositions of possible observable baryons into different pitches and rhythms. To this he added neutron scattering data from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxford. Then began the hard work of mining this vast swathe of data for phrases to use in his composition.

Sometimes jarring and atonal, the piece may not be to everybody's taste, but the story behind its genesis does add an extra dimension that keeps the audience's attention through the more inaccessible passages.

The artificial neural network and the cloud chamber introduce spontaneity and randomness into the performance, but build on pre-composed music. Going one step further, Café Concrete - an experimental sound art and film collective - performed what can loosely be termed an experiment as they jammed in the foyer of the University of Plymouth's Roland Levinsky Building. Their aim was to use their music to manipulate the distribution of their audience.

Performing in the centre of the foyer, hunched over laptops, synthesisers and a box of children's toys, the Café Concrete Researchers struck up what could loosely be described as a tune, while a team of spotters noted down the number of people within pre-determined segments of the floor space. The data was fed into a device which monitored the sounds being played and directed the performance with commands like "lessen the treble" and "tranquilise the bass". The idea is that, as the performance progresses, the monitoring device learns how the distribution of audience correlates to the different musical directions, and then changes them to make people move - a kind of ambulatory feedback loop.

Of course, there are so many confounding factors in a performance like this that no trustworthy data could be expected, but the idea is as entertaining as watching a group of people in lab coats playing with various electronics and toys. However, from my experience it's unlikely that audience-driven composition is going to be snapping at Chopin's heels any time soon.

The author's accommodation at the festival was part funded by the University of Plymouth.

Source: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2011/02/playing-music-at-random.html

Telempathy: A future of socially networked neurons

2011-03-03T10:35:00.000Z

World Wide Mind by Michael Chorost argues that we will soon be able to wire our brains directly to one another. But would you want to?

Jens Clausen, contributor

Imagine a world in which there is no need to express your thoughts or emotions in words, where you can let others experience your brain states directly. This is what Michael Chorost calls "telempathy": the ability to feel another person's emotions through a technological connection to their brain. It sounds far-fetched, but thanks to today's state-of-the-art technology, it may not be impossible.

(Image: Neal Grundy/SPL)

In fact, Chorost knows first-hand what it means to wire your brain directly to an electronic device. In his first book, Rebuilt: How becoming part computer made me more human(Souvenir Press, 2006), Chorost related his own experience of receiving a cochlear implant after becoming deaf. In World Wide Mind, he once again offers an impressively vivid story, and it is a pleasure to follow him into his envisioned future of human beings with directly connected brains - a scenario that would render web-based social networks like Facebook obsolete, as information would flow directly through social networks of brains. The World Wide Web would be supplanted by the world wide mind.

Today's clinical applications of brain-computer interfaces include those based on electroencephalography (EEG), which can be used to enable severely paralysed people to operate a computer with their thoughts, and deep-brain stimulators, used to treat the motor symptoms in Parkinson's disease and dystonia.

These sophisticated technologies appear outdated by comparison with what is in Chorost's book. What Chorost needs to achieve total telempathy are nanowires snaking through the brain's capillaries, sending and receiving information, and optogenetics - laser beams that can activate and deactivate single neurons according to the light's wavelength. Nanowires have already been shown to grow in rodent brains, and optogenetics has been used in rodents to trigger individual memories and generate specific behaviours.

However, in his technophile mission Chorost sometimes overestimates technology. Optogenetics is presented not only as a promising tool for basic research but also as a round-the-corner therapy for Parkinson's disease, one without any side effects, and this is presented as mere "low hanging fruit". That would be great, but is at best highly optimistic. While there are therapies that utilise l-dopa and deep-brain stimulation (DBS), there is currently no cure for Parkinson's, and unrealistic expectations of DBS are already a cause of post-surgical disappointment. The unknown impact of a highly investigational tool should be presented much more carefully.

There are also practical obstacles. For instance, while children are the likely early adopters of world-wide-mind technology, how many parents will consent to elective open-brain surgery on their offspring, and how many physicians will provide it? Chorost argues that if these devices develop as quickly as cochlear implants did, they will likewise be viewed as routine. But that misses a crucial point: surgery for cochlear implants, which involves drilling into the skull, is not without risk, but it is justified by the therapeutic benefit. There is no comparable benefit in sight for elective brain surgery.

World Wide Mind is a thought-provoking story about how technology will connect with the brain ever more intimately, merging humanity and the internet, providing technologically shared experiences and emotions. It forces the reader to think again - not just about neuro-technology but also about communication, about how important eye-to-eye and body-to-body contact is. Setting aside the risks of surgery, less technophilic readers may nevertheless ask, why should we want to establish a global emotional network? But this may just be a daft question from an old-fashioned mind that has yet to sign up for a Facebook account.

Jens Clausen is an assistant professor at the Institute for Ethics and History in Medicine in Tübingen, Germany

Source: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2011/02/telempathy-a-future-of-socially-networked-neurons.html

Artists of digitised life take to the stage

2011-03-02T10:25:00.001Z

(Image: Katrina Zimmerman)

Avatars, tweeters, poets and provocateurs mix on multiple platforms at The Simulationists atthe School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). This "mixed reality performance" tackles the well-trodden intersection between physical reality and its digitised form with a surprising amount of wit and inventiveness.

Devised by SAIC faculty members Claudia Hart, Mark Jeffrey (a vet of revered performance troupe Goat Island) and Judd Morrissey, The Simulationists features 11 installations incorporating video, photography, sound, sculpture and good old-fashioned print, over which to meditate (or mourn) what our growing attachment to digitised connections has spawned.

As I perused Chris Cuellar's Understanding People Is Not a Waste of Time, in which he has transformed alphabetical listings of Facebook patrons into a series of print directories resembling telephone books, a man seated beside me launched into a diatribe against the social network, which either revealed a touch of paranoia, or admirable prescience. "Putting everything online, all that's doing is making it easier for them to round us all up," he lamented.

Online role-playing gets played for cheeky laughs in Selected Works, an animated video loop in which Second Life avatars hang out in a lounge as a news crawl provides self-deprecating teases along the bottom of the screen ("Gentrification Scourge of Performance Art.")

Cris Cheek's Limn offered a trip down the rabbit hole of self-reflection, as his self-portrait, obscured by layered images of foliage in a Thai jungle (creating an eerie resemblance to Brando's Colonel Kurtz) rotated at regular intervals on a screen. Accompanied by Cheek's recorded recitation of lyrics from Grandmaster Flash's rap masterpiece The Message ("It's like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep from going under"), the effect was hypnotic and disquieting. How does a person camouflage themself when their personal information and images are instantly available to nearly everyone, everywhere?

Cheek's performance on Friday evening was a highlight, and also incorporated his own portrait - the one above manipulated from a cellphone photo taken at a conference. With his camo skirt, black-and-silver shirt and imposing bald dome, Cheek strutted before the screen like a more literate post-punk version of playwright Alfred Jarry's grotesque character Ubu Roi, creating stream-of-consciousness in response to his own image and "projecting onto himself a self he would like to be" while ruefully understanding that "he had been watching somebody else's feed".

Somewhat less successful but no less ambitious, Ursula Endlicher's Website Annotations/Impersonations placed a trio of dancers before a screen on which a series of verbal images, instructions and musings played out for them to embody, many either tweeted by audience members or typed directly into Endlicher's laptop by participants, and narrated by digitised male and female voices. The performance lost steam at points, but arresting moments of virtual aphorisms translated into physical metaphor stood out, as the dancers interpreted phrases such as "She is showing me a language I can't decipher, but I am trying."

"What exactly is happening in this obscure world of carrots and code words?" asked one tweeter. What indeed. The Simulationists mostly leaves academic theory at the door and invites viewers to take their own guided journey into the shadow world of constructed identities.

The Simulationists is at the Betty Rymer Gallery, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, until 23 March.

Source: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2011/02/a-performance-of-mixed-realities.html

The analogue artist who saw the past in the present

2011-03-01T10:24:00.001Z

A retrospective exhibition of visionary media art pioneer Nam June Paik reflects on our modern relationship with technology

(Image: Roger Sinek/Tate Liverpool)

Early in the 1960s, avant-garde composer Nam June Paik began experimenting with the wiring inside his TV. He learned how to manipulate the picture on his screen, bending and warping network broadcasts like free jazz.

In 1963, after accumulating and tweaking a dozen more televisions, Paik organised a gallery show in which people were invited to interact one-on-one with his contraptions - an unprecedented experience in an era before video cameras and cable stations.

The exhibition earned Paik a place in the history books as the pioneer of media art. Yet despite the genre's popularity, there has been scant attention given to his creations since his death in 2006. Tate Liverpool and the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT) are doing their bit to set this right with an impressively thorough joint retrospective.

In the glow of all those old cathode ray tubes, your first impulse may be to bask in nostalgia, or to radiate smug web 2.0 superiority. But Paik's artwork is too good to succumb to history. He may be the first media artist, but he is generations ahead of us.

In his 1963 exhibition, Paik had the foresight to propose that the future of media was interactive, while counter-intuitively suggesting that interactivity could be isolating. Over the following decades, he went on to explore other potentialities, which could be as optimistic as they were visionary.

One such vision was that cultural differences could be bridged through collective global channel surfing, with satellite feeds from studios around the world mixed live for everyone to see. In collaboration with television networks, he produced several such events in the 1980s.

More haunting are his contemporaneous TV Buddha installations, which embody the opposite extreme. In these works, a Buddha statue is positioned in front of a television that is itself connected to a CCTV camera trained on the watching Buddha. A Zen koan rendered in new media, TV Buddha appears to propose that our technologically mediated narcissism may bring about our enlightenment.

Of course Paik was an artist, not a prophet, and combing his work for premonitions of YouTube and Facebook is bound to disappoint. What makes Paik's art relevant is that, technologically speaking, it is ancient. Resting outside the endless cycle of gadgets and upgrades, his work surveys our mediated future in ageless terms. Sometimes he can seem naive - he is out of step with the dystopian despair of contemporary media art, for example - yet his optimism is distinct from trade-show hype. New technologies, he recognised, are opportunities to tinker with society's wiring.

Source: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2011/02/the-analogue-artist-who-saw-the-past-in-the-present.html

The linguistic genius of babies - Patricia Kuhl

2011-02-16T11:13:00.000Z

Beau Lotto: Optical illusions show how we see

2011-02-13T20:28:00.000Z

Erin McKean redefines the dictionary

2011-02-12T09:43:00.001Z

Oliver Beer: Resonant frequencies

2011-02-10T09:23:00.001Z

A really nice insight into a beautiful piece by a young British artist, Oliver Beer... more information can be found on his website: http://www.oliverbeer.co.uk/

Pangaea, the comeback

2011-02-09T10:02:00.000Z

It's the year 250,000,000 and Earth is alive and well. Humans have long since perished, but the planet is still home to a bewildering array of life forms. Yet apart from a few mysterious fossils there is no trace that we ever existed.

If we could visit this future Earth we would barely recognise it. The continents have crashed together to form a single gigantic supercontinent, surrounded by a global ocean. Much of the land is inhospitable desert, while the coast is battered by ferocious storms. The oceans are turbulent on the surface, stagnant at depth and starved of oxygen and nutrients. Disease, war, or asteroid collisions have pushed humans and many of the species we know today to extinction and competition has seen off all but the hardiest of the rest.

This supercontinent isn't the first on Earth, and it won't be the last. Geologists now suspect that the movements of the Earth's continents are cyclical, and that every 500 to 700 million years they clump together. Unfolding over a period three times as long as it takes our solar system to orbit the centre of the galaxy, this is one of nature's grandest patterns. So what drives this cycle, and what will life be like next time the continents meet?

The continents move because of circulation in the Earth's mantle beneath the seven major tectonic plates. Where the plates meet, one is forced below the other in a process called subduction. This pulls apart the crust at the other side of the plate, allowing new molten rock to well up to the surface to fill the gap. This process means that oceanic crust is constantly being created and destroyed, but because the continents are made from less dense rock than the heavier and thinner oceanic crust that forms the ocean floor, they ride higher in the mantle and escape subduction.

As a result, the continents hold their shape for hundreds of millions of years as they glide slowly around the planet. Inevitably, though, continents collide, and sometimes clump together to form a supercontinent.

The most recent, Pangaea, formed 300 million years ago and was already breaking up 100 million years later as the dinosaurs evolved. Some 1.1 billion years ago, another supercontinent, called Rodinia, formed, breaking up 250 million years later. Before that, another, and there were almost certainly many more still earlier, but since the formation of one supercontinent tends to destroy evidence of its predecessor, no one can be certain about exactly how many there have been. What is generally agreed is that there have been two true supercontinents containing all or nearly all the land on Earth - Pangaea and Rodinia - and there may have been many more true or partial supercontinents, including Pannotia, Columbia, Kenorland and Ur (see Diagram).

Right now, we are halfway through a cycle. The Pacific is gradually closing, as oceanic crust sinks into subduction zones in the north Pacific, while the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is feeding out new ocean floor as the Americas move apart from Europe and Africa. Africa is moving northward, heading for the southern coast of Europe, while Australia is also on its way north towards south-east Asia. The continents are moving at about 15 millimetres per year - similar to the speed your fingernails grow.

Roll the clock forward 50 to 100 million years and it's easy to get a rough idea where things are going. But seeing further into the Earth's future takes more than just projection of the continents' current movements. Christopher Scotese of the University of Texas, Arlington, likens the problem to predicting your drive along a highway. "You can make a guess at where you're going to be in 5 or 10 minutes, but there are always accidents, people change lanes, or the road may diverge and you have to make a choice."

There are two main ways today's continents could fit together. If the Atlantic continues to widen, the Americas will eventually crash into Asia. Alternatively, a subduction zone might somehow open up in the Atlantic and reel the sea floor back in, forcing Europe and America back together. This would essentially re-create Pangaea.

In 1992 geologist Chris Hartnady, from the University of Cape Town in South Africa took up the challenge of "pre-constructing" the next supercontinent. As the Atlantic continues to widen, "the Americas, swinging clockwise about a pivot in north-eastern Siberia, seem destined to fuse with the eastern margin of the future supercontinent", which Harvard University geologist Paul Hoffman called "Amasia". In this vision of the future, Australia will continue northward while Africa stays more or less in its present position. Antarctica won't join the supercontinent, remaining at the South Pole. "It's not attached to any subduction zone so there is no reason for it to move," Hoffman says.

Roy Livermore, now at the University of Cambridge, came to a similar conclusion. In the late 1990s he created his own version of Amasia - a future supercontinent he called Novopangaea. "I have taken the liberty of opening up a new rift between the Indian Ocean and the North Atlantic," he says. "We know the East African Rift is active, so we project that into the future by opening a small ocean. East Africa and Madagascar move across the Indian Ocean to collide with Asia; Australia has already collided with south-east Asia." South of what is now India, a mountain chain has risen from the sea along a new subduction zone. Just south of it is Antarctica.

In Livermore's future, all the present continents take part. "I don't believe Antarctica is going to stay at the pole," he says. "I want it to come north." For this to happen, he postulates a new subduction zone will open up to drag it that way. "The beauty of all this is that no one will ever be able to prove me wrong," he says.

That may be true, but other researchers disagree on how the future planet will look. Scotese has spent much of his career reconstructing where today's continents used to lie, and now applies this knowledge to project the continents into the future. He sees the planet's distant future very differently to Hoffman and Livermore.

Making mountains

Like them, he predicts that over the next 50 million years Africa will continue north, closing the Mediterranean and driving up a Himalayan-scale mountain range in southern Europe. Australia will rotate and collide with Borneo and south China. But 200 million years later, everything will change, he says. Subduction starts up on the west side of the Atlantic. The widening stops and the Atlantic begins to shrink, bringing most of the world's land masses back together as North America comes crashing into the merged Euro-African continent. Scotese originally called the resulting supercontinent Pangaea Ultima, but has recently renamed it Pangaea Proxima, meaning the next Pangaea. "The name Ultima bothered me because it implies that it's the last supercontinent," Scotese says. "This process will continue for another couple of billion years."

He says a new Atlantic subduction zone could start if a small existing subduction zone, such as part of the Puerto Rico trench in the Caribbean, spread up and down the American coast as a result of changing stresses on the planet. Under the right circumstances, he says, the crust could start to tear along this line, signalling the beginning of the end for the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Today it lies halfway between Europe and the Americas, but "if we were to start subduction in either the western Atlantic or the eastern Atlantic, then the ridge would be forced to move toward the subduction zone", he says. "Eventually it would be subducted and we'd have an ocean with a subduction zone but no ridge. That means we close the ocean, and we close it pretty fast."

For now there is nothing to show whose model is right, but what everyone agrees on is that life on the next supercontinent - however it forms - will be tough. "Supercontinents create extremes," says Paul Valdes, a climatologist at the University of Bristol, UK. We can tell what Pangaea's climate was like from geological evidence: the positions of climate-sensitive deposits such as coal, which originates in warm, wet conditions, for example, or the mineral deposits called evaporites that form when lake sediments dry out in a hot climate. This evidence can then be used to build computer models to forecast what the climate might be like in the future. The models that result suggest that supercontinents are prone to violently changing seasons.

"In Pangaea, tropical latitudes could be quite hot, up to perhaps 44 °C. Mid-latitudes had very hot summers with very cold winters when it could get down to -20 or -30 °C with very heavy snowfall," Valdes says. "In summer it would all melt, producing major flooding." Despite this, vast areas of the interior would have been dry, because rain clouds would not have been able to penetrate far inland. In such extreme climates, only a small proportion of the land could support life. On Pangaea, Valdes says, the best real estate was probably in a narrow zone just outside the tropics on the north coast of the Tethys Sea.

The vastness of the supercontinent's land mass will also provoke extreme weather. "Monsoons form because of temperature differences between the land and ocean. If you have a huge land mass, it warms up a lot and stimulates a mega-monsoon," Valdes says.

The next supercontinent's weather could be even worse. If the supercontinent happens to form at the end of an active volcanic phase, leaving behind an atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide and a warmer planet, warm surface waters could drive extreme hurricanes or "hypercanes". These huge weather systems, thousands of kilometres across and some 50 per cent stronger than today's strongest hurricanes, would batter the landscape with wind speeds of more than 400 kilometres per hour.

Life will also be difficult in the oceans. The global conveyor system of currents that keeps today's oceans oxygenated and stocked with essential nutrients depends on the size and shape of the ocean basins, and therefore the positions of the continents. Move the continents and these conveyors could cease to exist. As a result, below a few hundred metres the waters will become stratified and anoxic, and little will be able to survive.

The reef-fringed coasts close to the equator will be full of life, but even here life won't be easy. As the continents crowd together, there will be a vast reduction in the area of shallow seas that will probably lead to a mass extinction as species from all over the world are thrown together and forced to compete. Something similar will happen on land. The formation of Pangaea has been implicated in the greatest species loss of all time, the Permian mass extinction, due in part to the huge reduction in available habitats.

Life has a knack of making the best of new situations, however. As Pangaea formed and the southern icecaps melted 290 million years ago, there emerged perhaps the Earth's eeriest ever ecosystem. Dense forests of now-extinct Glossopteris trees stood up to 25 metres tall on the southern coast of the Tethys Sea and stretched inland to within 20 degrees of the South Pole.

Despite having only a summer of feeble light to sustain them, they were able to survive months of unremitting winter darkness. Trees close to the coast were lashed by mega-monsoon winds and rains roaring in from the Tethys, with thick cloud obscuring the already weak sunshine. As winter approached, Glossopteris's tongue-like leaves would fall to the oxygen-starved peat before six months of total darkness. Not surprisingly, analysis of fossilised growth rings shows that Glossopteris grew frenetically when it could.

Whatever life has to cope with on the next supercontinent, humans won't be around to see it. The next supercontinent is no more than a glint in the planet's eye, but already it has valuable lessons to teach us: clever we may be, but the Earth marches on, with or without us.

Source: http://www.science.org.au/nova/newscientist/104ns_011.htm

The internet's dark heart

2011-02-08T19:01:00.000Z

The Offensive Internet, a collection of powerful academic essays, weighs the case that the internet offends as much as it empowers

An old saying has it that when one of China's leaders, Zhou Enlai, was asked about the consequences of the French revolution, he replied it was too soon to tell. When it comes to the internet, you might think it equally wise to wait for the e-dust to settle. But since this revolution threatens (or promises) an unprecedented revision of the world, the drive to analysis is probably unstoppable.

Hence a slew of books due in the coming months, starting with a heavy-going critique with a great title. It's a collection of essays by law and philosophy academics, edited by Chicago professors Saul Levmore and Martha Nussbaum, focusing on real-world worries about how the internet causes "offence". They look at privacy, freedom of speech and reputation, and while the last two may present old problems in new clothing, privacy, say the editors, clarifies the true novelty of the internet.

Suppose formerly confidential information ends up circling the globe (WikiLeaks); or a false accusation becomes part of someone's online identity, affecting relationships and job prospects forever (cyber-bullying); or a break-up triggers retaliation, with the exposure of sexual details harming reputations or mental health (campus suicides). And any of us could be the Star Wars Kid, cited in one essay - a pudgy, nerdy 15-year-old who videoed himself pretending a golf-ball retriever was a lightsaber. This went viral when his tormentors uploaded it in 2002, to blogospheric derision.

The essays have an academic tone, and sometimes raise issues seldom addressed. For example, Nussbaum's essay "Objectification and internet misogyny" is full of graphic detail, reminding us that much of the damage done by the spread of gossip and slander is to women, and may involve what feminists call "objectification".

To turn anyone into an object "involves conferring on the object a spoiled, or stigmatised, identity", says Nussbaum, while to objectify publicly "is a variety of shame punishment". Harassment on the AutoAdmit website led two female students from Yale Law School to file complaints. Mild examples read: "[DOE I] is a dumbass bitch and [DOE II] is a slut".

Beyond citing feminist Andrea Dworkin's remedy of "asserting one's humanness", Nussbaum has only questions, wondering how to ensure those assertions are not "silenced by pornographic hate". Other authors dealing with less pervasive "offences" have easier recourse to legal solutions.

This is not a book for those already "living online", many of whom may see feminism as a spent force and total exposure as harmless, even good. But it is for those who care how the internet has complicated privacy, speech and reputation, and for those who may have to rescue it from itself.

Source: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2011/01/the-internets-dark-heart.html

The Love Beyond The Chair (Preview)

2011-02-08T07:27:00.003Z

(For best viewing, watch on Vimeo in HD)

Andrew Carson - The Love Beyond The Chair from Andrew Carson on Vimeo.

"We were talking- about the space between us all

And the people- who hide themselves

behind a wall of illusion" (1)

Finding parallels between 60's communal subcultures and incorporating music from the era, the work appropriates lyrics and sound from "Within You, Without You", by The Beatles and locates a new relevance for it in our age of digital communication. Through video and sound installations, the failures of digital environments to provide adequate platforms of communication are critiqued.

"We were talking- about the love that's gone so cold

And the people- who gain the world and lose their soul-

They don't know- they can't see- are you one of them?" (2)

Seeking to understand how we navigate text-based forms of contact, the work addresses the removal of human exchange intrinsic to these forms of communication. Questioning the effects this has on interpersonal relations, it reveals the increased distancing and loss that occurs as a result.

(1),(2), HARRISON, George, "Within You, Without You", 1967

Hearing music through someone else's eyes

2011-02-07T16:49:00.001Z

Like many people, I frequently associate colours with words, sounds and occasionally smells. Like most, my associations aren't strong or consistent enough to be considered true synaesthesia, the neurological condition under which normally distinct sensory impressions cross over and blend with one another. But there's evidence that experiences similar to synaesthesia can be induced in those who don't normally have it: through training or hypnosis, for example.

So it seems that synaesthesia may not be so ineffable after all, and in recent years there's been a proliferation of art that attempts to capture its essence for the benefit of "neurotypicals". That's a tough task - how do you communicate such an intrinsically subjective experience? Indeed, few of the works I've experienced to date have proved much more stimulating than looking through a kaleidoscope. Would Parfums Pourpres du Soileil des Pôles - a performance piece for three harmonium players and a synaesthete - turn out to be any different?

Many people certainly won't find the individual elements of Parfums prepossessing. During the hour-long performance, the musicians play an uninterrupted succession of glacial arpeggios - sustained chords that are slowly assembled and disassembled, note by note. (Fans of dronewill be well satisfied, though.) As they do so, the synaesthete selects and arranges coloured cards to reflect his or her perception of the music, a spectacle reminiscent of watching someone hunting for particular Lego bricks to complete a particularly abstract construction.

While this might not sound very entertaining, there's a certain intellectual fascination to it. During last Wednesday's performance at the South London Gallery, the choreography was byClaude-Samuel Lévine, who arranged the cards in several horizontal rows, continually adding and removing them as the music developed. At times the arrangement became disordered and vaguely resembled a painting by Kandinsky (often believed to be a synaesthete); at others it fell into a strict grid that was more like Mondrian (not a synaesthete). He later explained that the "y" axis of his arrangement more or less represented musical pitch, and the "x" axis time. What the colours represented proved harder to articulate, at least in terms comprehensible by a non-synaesthete.

Lévine clearly felt strongly that his presentation reflected his personal experience. His collaborator Laurent Montaron told me that it was much the same each time the piece was performed - a hallmark of true synaesthesia. Try as I might, however, I couldn't grasp the correspondence between Lévine's actions and the musical progressions - with the exception of one dramatic key change, which led to the frenzied construction of a wall of white cards and a second that prompted Lévine to sweep away the multicoloured mass that he had painstakingly assembled for the past 10 minutes.

(Image: South London Gallery)

A couple of my fellow audience-members did claim to have "got it", but it was hard to know how seriously to take those claims. Since synaesthesia has become widely known (perhaps even trendy), it's noticeable that more and more people profess to have it - sometimes offering only the flimsiest of evidence. But trying to compare notes led quickly into the philosophical quagmire of qualia.

A more common reaction, however, was bafflement, edged with suspicion from some of those encountering synaesthesia for the first time. Synaesthetic art might gratify the eye and ear, but I was left wondering if it's actually possible to communicate effectively across the gulf between the minds of those with and without the condition. Inasmuch as the experience of art is necessarily subjective, the experience of synaesthetic art is doubly so; and Montaron says different synaesthetes respond in markedly different ways to the piece, confusing matters still further.

Even the title of the piece - "purple perfumes of the polar sun" in English - is evocative but opaque: it's a line from Metropolitain by the French poet, libertine and synaesthete Arthur Rimbaud. Exactly what Rimbaud was describing in his poem remains the subject of controversy; and it seems a fair bet that the message of Parfums will remain just as elusive - at least to those of us who are not, in the end, special synaesthetic snowflakes.

Source: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2011/01/hearing-music-through-someone-elses-eyes.html#more

Beyond belief: why Egyptian art outlives its myths

2011-02-06T14:41:00.002Z

We do not believe or understand many of the ancient Egyptians' stories and yet the art they inspired retains its power.

Art is in love with myth. Before written records, art seems to have illustrated myths whose details nobody knows: what stories were told in prehistoric times about the paintings in the Chauvet cave, or the stones of Avebury? Surely such narratives existed. Anyway as soon as writing does start to complement images, the deep impulse to give visual life to mythology can be deciphered.

The British Museum's Book of the Dead exhibition, which I reviewed yesterday, opens up a richer experience of Egyptian art by investigating the mythology of life after death that was so fundamental to this culture. But the relationship between art and myth is complex. It's one thing to look at the great Egyptian artefacts in the British Museum and see them as expressions of a body of mythology. But what happens when Egyptian art is translated from its original context? In the Vatican Museum you can visit the shrine to the Egyptian gods that the Roman emperor Hadrian created in his gardens at Tivoli in the second century AD. What did Osiris mean to Hadrian? He identified the god with his own lover, Antinous. Was this belief, or poetry?

Or, to take a more up-to-date example, the same question can be asked of all the souvenir Egyptian replicas visitors to the British Museum will buy. Is a shabti on your mantelpiece an expression of mythology, or memory, or nothing at all?

Although I did see a temple to Horus in someone's garden once, Egyptian myths are not our myths. Why does the art keep its power, for those of us who are not occultists? Perhaps the answer is that myth inspires art, but the art it inspires can outlive it. An image is not a text. If myth arouses enough passion and intelligence, it can bring truly great art into being. That art takes on a life of its own. We may not believe or even understand the stories ancient works of art or souvenir statuettes tell. But when we look at them we bask in the afterglow of the old stories.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2010/nov/03/myth-art-egypt-book-dead?intcmp=239

Murray Gell-Mann on the ancestor of language

2011-02-05T16:39:00.001Z

General Semantics

2011-02-03T16:46:00.000Z

This is a very useful website (if you have an interest in semantics that is). There is a great online resource library housing hundreds of papers on the subject.

The Institute of General Semantics

Zebrafish - Mending Broken Hearts

2011-02-03T10:31:00.003Z

James Geary, metaphorically speaking

2011-02-02T10:28:00.002Z

Charity Tillemann-Dick: Singing after a double lung transplant

2011-01-31T16:12:00.004Z

Amber Case: We are all cyborgs now

2011-01-13T15:21:00.002Z

I don't necessarily agree, but interesting nonetheless

DIY Gramophone

2011-01-06T14:31:00.005Z

Special thanks to Barry Manilow's "Please Don't Be Scared"... I'm not Barry, don't worry...

The audio quality is surprisingly quite good, considering the materials used...

Evelyn Glennie: How to listen to music with your whole body

2010-12-30T21:30:00.005Z

Website of the week // Number 10 // 07.12.10

2010-12-07T10:23:00.000Z

Another artist's portfolio site this week, this time Jesper Just. His work is powerfully emotive and beautifully shot. It's a lovely website too!

Jesper Just

Susan Philipsz wins 2010 Turner Prize

2010-12-06T19:50:00.002Z

Scottish artist Susan Philipsz has just been announced the 2010 winner of the Turner Prize for her piece "Lowlands". Philipsz's work is the first piece of sound art to win the prize. Her work was my favourite by far of the four shortlisted artists this year. I'm glad she won.

Steven Pinker on language and thought

2010-12-03T10:28:00.001Z

Steven Pinker looks at language and how it expresses what goes on in our minds and how the words we choose communicate much more than we realise.

Language May Help Create, Not Just Convey, Thoughts and Feelings

2010-12-01T13:09:00.000Z

The language we speak may influence not only our thoughts, but our implicit preferences as well. That's the finding of a study by psychologists at Harvard University, who found that bilingual individuals' opinions of different ethnic groups were affected by the language in which they took a test examining their biases and predilections.

The paper appears in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

"Charlemagne is reputed to have said that to speak another language is to possess another soul," says co-author Oludamini Ogunnaike, a graduate student at Harvard. "This study suggests that language is much more than a medium for expressing thoughts and feelings. Our work hints that language creates and shapes our thoughts and feelings as well."

Implicit attitudes, positive or negative associations people may be unaware they possess, have been shown to predict behavior towards members of social groups. Recent research has shown that these attitudes are quite malleable, susceptible to factors such as the weather, popular culture -- or, now, by the language people speak.

"Can we shift something as fundamental as what we like and dislike by changing the language in which our preferences are elicited?" asks co-author Mahzarin R. Banaji, the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard. "If the answer is yes, that gives more support to the idea that language is an important shaper of attitudes."

Ogunnaike, Banaji, and Yarrow Dunham, now at the University of California, Merced, used the well-known Implicit Association Test (IAT), where participants rapidly categorize words that flash on a computer screen or are played through headphones. The test gives participants only a fraction of a second to categorize words, not enough to think about their answers.

"The IAT bypasses a large part of conscious cognition and taps into something we're not aware of and can't easily control," Banaji says.

The researchers administered the IAT in two different settings: once in Morocco, with bilinguals in Arabic and French, and again in the U.S. with Latinos who speak both English and Spanish.

In Morocco, participants who took the IAT in Arabic showed greater preference for other Moroccans. When they took the test in French, that difference disappeared. Similarly, in the U.S., participants who took the test in Spanish showed a greater preference for other Hispanics. But again, in English, that preference disappeared.

"It was quite shocking to see that a person could take the same test, within a brief period of time, and show such different results," Ogunnaike says. "It's like asking your friend if he likes ice cream in English, and then turning around and asking him again in French and getting a different answer."

In the Moroccan test, participants saw "Moroccan" names (such as Hassan or Fatimah) or "French" names (such as Jean or Marie) flash on a monitor, along with words that are "good" (such as happy or nice) or "bad" (such as hate or mean). Participants might press one key when they see a Moroccan name or a good word, and press another when they see a French name or a bad word. Then the key assignments are switched so that "Moroccan" and "bad" share the same key and "French" and "good" share the other.

Linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf first posited in the 1930s that language is so powerful that it can determine thought. Mainstream psychology has taken the more skeptical view that while language may affect thought processes, it doesn't influence thought itself. This new study suggests that Whorf's idea, when not caricatured, may generate interesting hypotheses that researchers can continue to test.

"These results challenge our views of attitudes as stable," Banaji says. "There still remain big questions about just how fixed or flexible they are, and language may provide a window through which we will learn about their nature."

Ogunnaike, Dunham, and Banaji's work was supported by Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Mellon Mays Foundation.

SOURCE

Website of the week // Number 9 // 30.11.10

2010-11-30T10:03:00.002Z

HTML 5 features again this week (I just can't get enough of it to be honest) Again, the storyline is less than thrilling but as a technical exercise it's very interesting. (Ignore the calls to download Internet Explorer... avoid it like the plague and opt for Google Chrome)

NEVER MIND THE BULLETS

(once again, thanks to the great Mark Carty)

Jesper Just - No Man Is an Island II (2004)

2010-11-29T12:57:00.004Z

Unfortunately embedding has been disabled, but the short film can be found HERE. It's well worth checking out, some powerful stuff.

Website of the week // Number 8 // 23.11.10

2010-11-23T11:46:00.003Z

Interactive online media has reached new levels... This site is great if you've a webcam. Stick with it past the seemingly endless customisable options before it begins, and ignore the pious anti-smoking message and you're in for a treat or two...

http://www.attraction-lemanga.fr/

"The Silence" @ Broadcast 24/11/10 @ 6pm

2010-11-22T10:42:00.000Z

The fourth and final installment in the Broadcasting Bergman series of films will be "The Silence" from 1962. The film will be screened at 6:00pm this Wednesday (24/11/10).

THE SILENCE

The last movie in Bergman's so-called "Faith Trilogy", the movie concerns the emotional distance between two sisters. The younger one is still attractive enough to pick up a lover in a strange city. The older one, even though she is very ill, would like to make a human connection also but cannot leave the hotel room. Traveling with the sisters is a small boy who escapes into the hotel, meets a troupe of dwarfs. Which sister is this little boy's mother?

E-tomb allows social networking from beyond the grave

2010-11-18T10:09:00.001Z

The E-tomb, featured on Yanko Design, is a concept piece that partners the growing importance of social networking with the traditional form of cemeteries.

Plans have emerged online for a Bluetooth-enabled gravestone which allows friends and family to still 'interact' with you once you're dead.

The gravestone contains solar panels and stores your personal information and former web presence. Friends and family can then access your virtual life from it, as well continuing to update and upload anecdotes and stories about you.

The designs claim the E-tomb will be able to store information from websites such as Facebook and personal blogs.

Visitors to the grave can then use their phone, via Bluetooth, to access the information.

The designs state: 'The logs, photos and videos in spaces could help people to be in remembrance of the one passed away vividly.

'E-TOMB has been designed for people in the information age to provide a more emotional form of tomb.'

The idea has received a mixed reaction, with bloggers appreciating the way it embraces how today's society is spending increasing amounts of time online but question whether traditional graveyards should be disturbed in any way.

Source: http://www.metro.co.uk/tech/847509-e-tomb-allows-social-networking-from-beyond-the-grave#ixzz15cxRmhX1

What's next...?

Website of the week // Number 7 // 16.11.10

2010-11-16T09:45:00.000Z

This week we have Serbian Artist Katarina Zdjelar's online portfolio.

Her work explores notions of identity, authority and community and revolve around individuals who challenged by simultaneous inhabitation of different languages, perform themselves through practicing, remembering or reinventing themselves.

Particular works to check out are "Everything is Gonna Be" and "The Perfect Sound"

http://katarinazdjelar.net/

"Winter Light" @ Broadcast 17/11/10 @ 6pm

2010-11-15T10:42:00.000Z

The third installment in the Broadcasting Bergman series of films will be "Winter Light" from 1962. The film will be screened at 6:00pm this Wednesday (17/11/10).

WINTER LIGHT

A widowed priest is troubled by lack of faith. The story centers around his relationship with a schoolteacher, who loves him but whom he can not love back and his bonds to a god he isn't sure he believes in. He tries to find a meaning with love and faith again, discussing his predicament both with those that has a lot of faith and those that might have lost it, in a cold winter landscape.

Website of the week // Number 6 // 09.11.10

2010-11-09T09:22:00.000Z

It's the return of an old favourite this week with the wesbite of Xu Bing

Xu is one of my all-time favourite artists, and his website provides hours of art-related entertainment. He's got all his previous works up for you to check out, alongside a plethora of texts, reviews and interviews...

Go on, indulge yourself!

Peter Murray // This Land Again @ The Green Gallery

2010-11-08T21:07:00.001Z

The Green Gallery proudly invites you to the opening reception of This Land Again, a solo show by Peter Murray.

This Land Again is a series of landscape images that has been evolving over the last two years. The locations depicted within the images span all four provinces. From the northern point of the Giant’s Causeway to the opposite extreme of Dursey Island off the Beara peninsula, there’s a wide range of locations and it’s interesting to see just how much variety is offered by the landscape of this small Island. It offers a series of images mapping a unique and modern vision representing the entire country. This vision does not necessarily depict Irish landscape in picturesque grandeur; instead it offers a realist view of how Ireland is being shaped by the current population. In documenting this impermanence the series attempts to present an archival snapshot of Irish landscape in the early 21st century.

Peter Murray is a Northern Irish Photographic Artist and graduate of the Dublin Institute of Technology Photography BA (2009). His images have featured in a variety of locations such as the RDS, RUA RED South Dublin Arts Centre, and the National Photographic Archive. His work has been accredited by a number of institutions, most notably the RDS when he was awarded the prestigious Taylor Art Award, becoming the first photographic artist to receive the annual award since its inception in 1860.

"Through A Glass Darkly" @ Broadcast 10/11/10 @ 6pm

2010-11-08T10:42:00.000Z

The second in the Broadcasting Bergman series of films will be "Through A Glass Darkly" from 1961. The film will be screened at 6:00pm this Wednesday (10/11/10).

THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

A young woman, Karin, has recently returned to the family island after spending some time in a mental hospital. On the island with her is her lonely brother and kind, but increasingly desperate husband. They are joined by Karin's father, who is a world-traveling author that is estranged to his children. Karin is suffering from hallucinations and hysteria. She thinks she is visited by God.

Website of the week // Number 5 // 02.11.10

2010-11-02T09:22:00.001Z

Artist Arnold Dreyblatt's online portfolio is this week's choice.

No points awarded for guessing why I might have chosen his work...

"The Seventh Seal" @ Broadcast 03/11/10 @ 6pm

2010-11-01T09:42:00.001Z

The first in the Broadcasting Bergman series of films will be "The Seventh Seal" from 1957. The film will be screened at 6:00pm this Wednesday (03/11/10).

THE SEVENTH SEAL

A Knight and his squire are home from the crusades. Black Death is sweeping their country. As they approach home, Death appears to the knight and tells him it is his time. The knight challenges Death to a chess game for his life. The Knight and Death play as the cultural turmoil envelopes the people around them as they try, in different ways, to deal with the upheaval the plague has caused

'Haitch' or 'aitch'? How do you pronounce 'H'?

2010-10-31T12:51:00.005Z

The pronunciation of common words has changed drastically over time. So, as the British Library begins a quest to record people's articulations, what do the differences in how we pronounce words say about us?

Pedants, beware. The sound of says, ate, mischievous, harass, garage,schedule and aitch is shifting.

Once upon a time, there were gales of laughter when Frank Spencer in Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em pronounced harass with the emphasis on the second syllable.

Now, according to the British Library, evidence suggests that for people under the age of 35, it is becoming the favoured pronunciation.

Indeed the younger you are, the more likely you are to make says rhyme with lays rather than fez, ate rhyme with late rather than bet and to add a whole new syllable to mischievous, turning it in to miss-CHEEVY-us rather than MISS-chiv-us.

The British Library now wants to get a clearer idea of how spoken English is changing by recording as many people as possible reading the opening paragraph of the Mr Men book, Mr Tickle.

The library's socio-linguist Jonnie Robinson picked the passage because it's well known, easy to read and will probably be read with as "normal a voice as possible". He does not want people to put on a "posh" speaking voice.

It's part of the library's forthcoming Evolving English exhibition and aims to show how pronunciation is not a matter of right and wrong but merely fashion.

One exhibit is the BBC's guide to pronunciation from 1928. In it, it informs announcers thatpristine rhymes with wine, respite is pronounced as if there were no e, combat is cumbat, financewas finn-ance. Even then some of the suggestions were becoming archaic. Not only ishousewifery no longer pronounced huzzifry, it is almost entirely obsolete as a word.
Quite why some words change is unknown. Because, while many are importations from America - schedule turning into skedule is almost certainly a consequence of American films and television - the gradual shift of garage to sound like garridge is less easy to explain.
So too is there a mystery as to why certain pronunciations cause such strong feeling. Take the eighth letter of the alphabet, pronounce it haitchand then look for the slightly agonised look in some people's eyes.

One suggestion is that it touches on a long anxiety in English over the letter aitch. In the 19th Century, it was normal to pronounce hospital,hotel and herb without the h. Nowadays "aitch anxiety" has led to all of them acquiring a new sound, a beautifully articulated aitch at the beginning. America has perhaps hung on to its aitchless herb because it has less class anxiety attached to pronunciations.

However, the link between class, voice and status is not what it once was. Many of us are barely aware of how we say says or ate or what was once considered the right and proper way.
It marks a decline in class anxiety in speech; attitudes to accents and pronunciations have become much more relaxed.

However, there are some pronunciations that do inspire ridicule and prejudice. If you rhymecloth, wrath and off with north and wharf then you are in a small and declining tribe.
The shift from the "received pronunciation" of the 1930s and 40s is well documented but one example of how far it has fallen out of favour is that in the forthcoming BBC costume drama, South Riding, the Yorkshire accents of the 1930s pass without comment but the voices that would have been classic "RP" in the book have been updated.

Audiences, it is argued, simply could not sit through a drama and care about a character if they sounded that "posh". They would be too busy laughing.

By David Sillito

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11642588

Coded Sensation

2010-10-29T10:40:00.000+01:00

Remember cassette tapes? Martin Rille's Coded Sensation takes them a big step further by transforming them into magnetic skin.

CODED SENSATION Website

Man jailed for making and selling Tracey Emin fakes

2010-10-28T20:14:00.001+01:00

An ex-art student who worked alongside artist Tracey Emin has been jailed for 16 months for forging her work.

Jonathan Rayfern, 32, was jailed by a judge at Manchester Crown Court after he admitted 10 counts of fraud and one of deception.

His defence said the fakes were made to pay off loan sharks.

The artist said her art came from the heart and she was "upset and distressed" that people had been conned.

The fakes, valued at more than £25,000, included sketches on fabric and a pencil drawing on calico, sold on the eBay website.

The court heard Rayfern, of Ellesmere Street, Manchester, sold at least 11 fake items for £26,000.

The former art student at Westminster University had worked alongside Emin for two weeks at her London gallery, studying how she produced her work "at the master's hand".

Rayfern, who also worked at a Vivienne Westwood shop in London, was a man "beguiled by art, beauty and celebrity", the court heard.

He claimed Emin was a personal friend on Facebook and boasted of visiting London's Groucho Club with the artist.

Jailing Rayfern, Judge Martin Rudland said: "It may be you are a skilled artist yourself, but there is a streak of dishonesty in you. There may well be an element of the fantasist about you, but the reality has come home to roost."

'Upset and distressed'

Rayfern sold 10 items via eBay to gallery owner Alan Elkin, from Warwick, including a sketch with the words, "I'm not broken just slightly damaged", in Emin's forged signature and dated 1988, which was bought for £1,250.

Tracey Emin said her art was 'very personal'

A second victim, Kevin Finch, paid £5,000 for a mono print drawing on calico with the sketch of a small bird and the words, "Do you know how to forget".

Andrew Hill, defending, said Rayfern was interested in art and artists, and had his own genuine collection of Emin works worth £16,000, purchased while he was an art student.

But he began forging Emin's work to pay off loan sharks he had borrowed money from to make a video of an art project.

He did not to sell his own Emin collection because of his "acute" interest in her work and the "joy" it gave him.

A statement from Emin said: "My artwork is deeply personal and comes from my heart. It hurts and distresses me to see these fakes and forgeries that have no regard, respect or understanding of what I do.

"With a view to others, I am upset and distressed to think that people have been conned."

SOURCE:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-11646321

Website of the week // Number 4 // 26.10.10

2010-10-26T10:42:00.001+01:00

This time when I say this website is filled with tonnes of invaluable content, I'm not kidding!

Publicart.ie is one of the foremost online resources for the arts in Ireland. It delivers information, details and dynamic content to the Nth degree, and is edited by the extremely capable Sarah Searson and Cliodhna Shaffrey.

If you need to know something relating to the visual arts in the public realm in Ireland, chances are you'll find your answer here (along with countless other gems)

Broadcasting Bergman @ Broadcast Gallery DIT

2010-10-24T12:11:00.001+01:00

Broadcast presents a series of themed film screenings from acclaimed Swedish director, Ingmar Bergman every Wednesday in November.

The screenings are free, and each film will be presented with a short introduction.

The Seventh Seal

3/11/10 @ 18:00h

Through A Glass Darkly

10/11/10 @ 18:00h

Winter Light

17/11/10 @ 18:00h

The Silence

24/11/10 @ 18:00h

Stephen Fry talks about language

2010-10-21T20:57:00.000+01:00

Website of the week // Number 3 // 19.10.10

2010-10-19T15:17:00.000+01:00

Considering the last two entries were heavily visual based (gimmicks did someone say?), I thought this week I'd pick a website laden with plenty of useful content...

Here's Yvette's Bridal Dresses, Never before have I seen a website to easy to navigate!

</irony>

Interview with Susan Philipsz

2010-10-19T05:22:00.000+01:00

I'm just back from seeing Susan Philipsz's amazing piece in the Tate Britain as part of the Turner Prize. Of all the art that I saw over the weekend (including Frieze) hers was the one piece that stood out by a mile!

Website of the week // Number 2 // 12.10.10

2010-10-12T17:43:00.000+01:00

This week it's Format-Standard, Showcasing a unique way of presenting writing and increasing user participation

Freeplay @ Broadcast Gallery // 28th October, 1:00pm

2010-10-08T18:45:00.001+01:00

Broadcast Gallery invites you to a "playtest" or open rehearsal using the "Body Response System", a multimedia tool that responds to movement.

The BRS is being developed by Maria Coleman (Ph.D. Researcher, School of Art, Design and Printing, DIT- http://vimeo.com/mariacoleman)

Freeplay will feature Saxophone/processing improvisations by Seán Óg (Ph.D. Researcher, School of Music, DIT- http://www.sean-og.com/) and dance improvisations by Niamh Condron (www.thistorsion.com)

Kindly supported by the arts@DIT award.

http://www.dceng.net/maria/FreePlay.jpg

Homemade Spacecraft

2010-10-06T14:40:00.001+01:00

Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.

Video from a camera attached to a weather balloon that rose into the

upper stratosphere and recorded the blackness of space.

Website of the week // Number 1 // 5.10.10

2010-10-05T23:51:00.000+01:00

So I thought it might be nice to start a new regular thing on this blog; Website of the Week, where I plug interesting websites I've come across on my travels through cyberspace.

Starting the ball rolling is this PHENOMENAL site by Chris Milk and Arcade Fire, built using HTML 5
It's called The Wilderness Downtown, and is well worth checking out!

From the site:

"The Wilderness Machine

A postcard is created by an analog signal: you. This site takes that postcard and converts it to digital. The Wilderness Machine brings it back to analog. Look for it on tour with the band in North America. If you're lucky enough to get someone's postcard from it, plant it. A tree will grow out of it."

'Lost' language discovered on back of letter

2010-09-26T20:59:00.000+01:00

Archaeologists have claimed that scrawl on the back of a letter recovered from a 17th century dig site reveals a previously unknown language spoken by indigenous peoples in northern Peru.

A team of international archaeologists found the letter under a pile  of adobe bricks in a collapsed church complex near Trujillo, 347 miles  north of Lima. The complex had been inhabited by Dominican friars for  two centuries.
“Our investigations determined that this piece of paper records a  number system in a language that has been lost for hundreds of years,”  Jeffrey Quilter, an archaeologist at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of  Archaeology and Ethnology, said.
A photograph of the letter recently released by archaeologists shows  a column of numbers written in Spanish and translated into a language  that scholars say is now extinct.
“We discovered a language no one has seen or heard since the 16th or  17th century,” Mr Quilter said, adding that the language appears to  have been influenced by Quechua, an ancient tongue still spoken by  millions of people across the Andes.
He said it could also be the written version of a language  colonial-era Spaniards referred to in historical writings as pescadora,  for the fishermen on Peru’s northern coast who spoke it.
So far no record of the pescadora language has been found.
The letter, buried in the ruins of the Magdalena de Cao Viejo church  at the El Brujo Archaeological Complex in northern Peru, was discovered  in 2008.
But Mr Quilter said archaeologists decided to keep their discovery  secret until the research showing evidence of the lost language was  published this month in the journal American Anthropologist.
“I think a lot of people don’t realize how many languages were  spoken in pre-contact times,” Quilter said. “Linguistically, the  relationship between the Spanish conquistadors and the indigenous was  very complex.”
Article Source:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/peru/8019625/Lost-language-discovered-on-back-of-letter.html

Sentences on Conceptual Art

2010-08-30T23:19:00.000+01:00

I remember reading these a few years ago and finding them completely fascinating... I still read them when I'm stuck for inspiration, or at a stand still process wise...

Sol LeWitt, Open Geometric Structure 2-2,1-1, 1991, painted wood, 20 x 29½ x 20 inches. © The LeWitt Collection, Chester, CT.
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Sentences on Conceptual Art

by Sol Lewitt

Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.
Rational judgements repeat rational judgements.
Irrational judgements lead to new experience.
Formal art is essentially rational.
Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.
If the artist changes his mind midway through the execution of the piece he compromises the result and repeats past results.
The artist's will is secondary to the process he initiates from idea to completion. His wilfulness may only be ego.
When words such as painting and sculpture are used, they connote a whole tradition and imply a consequent acceptance of this tradition, thus placing limitations on the artist who would be reluctant to make art that goes beyond the limitations.
The concept and idea are different. The former implies a general direction while the latter is the component. Ideas implement the concept.
Ideas can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.
Ideas do not necessarily proceed in logical order. They may set one off in unexpected directions, but an idea must necessarily be completed in the mind before the next one is formed.
For each work of art that becomes physical there are many variations that do not.
A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist's mind to the viewer's. But it may never reach the viewer, or it may never leave the artist's mind.
The words of one artist to another may induce an idea chain, if they share the same concept.
Since no form is intrinsically superior to another, the artist may use any form, from an expression of words (written or spoken) to physical reality, equally.
If words are used, and they proceed from ideas about art, then they are art and not literature; numbers are not mathematics.
All ideas are art if they are concerned with art and fall within the conventions of art.
One usually understands the art of the past by applying the convention of the present, thus misunderstanding the art of the past.
The conventions of art are altered by works of art.
Successful art changes our understanding of the conventions by altering our perceptions.
Perception of ideas leads to new ideas.
The artist cannot imagine his art, and cannot perceive it until it is complete.
The artist may misperceive (understand it differently from the artist) a work of art but still be set off in his own chain of thought by that misconstrual.
Perception is subjective.
The artist may not necessarily understand his own art. His perception is neither better nor worse than that of others.
An artist may perceive the art of others better than his own.
The concept of a work of art may involve the matter of the piece or the process in which it is made.
Once the idea of the piece is established in the artist's mind and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly. There are many side effects that the artist cannot imagine. These may be used as ideas for new works.
The process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course.
There are many elements involved in a work of art. The most important are the most obvious.
If an artist uses the same form in a group of works, and changes the material, one would assume the artist's concept involved the material.
Banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution.
It is difficult to bungle a good idea.
When an artist learns his craft too well he makes slick art.
These sentences comment on art, but are not art.

First published in 0-9 (New York), 1969, and Art-Language (England), May 1969

Marcel the Shell with Shoes on...

2010-08-29T18:32:00.000+01:00

A great little pick-me-up, with some cool animation... Enjoy!

Digital Carousel

2010-08-20T15:12:00.000+01:00

This was written, and meant to be posted a last week... (Sorry Mark)...

I’m in the middle of reading a book by Steven Pinker, one of my favourite thinkers and linguists. The book, “The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Thought”, looks at the way language affects and shapes our views of reality. How we describe the world through geography, thus we have terms such as “under the ground” or “under the sea”. The geography of linguistics defines our perceptions of the world around us. To use the book’s own argument to prove a point, language helps us navigate our world.

It was with ideas of realities and perceptions swirling around my head that I visited DIGITAL CAROUSEL last week. The exhibition was a collaborative installation by students from DCU’s MSc Multimedia. Comprising of two projections, the show was one of the more engaging exhibitions I’ve seen recently. One one side of the space we are presented with an analogue slide projector unceremoniously rotating to its own beat every ten seconds, throwing up for consideration various vintage slides: Still vignettes, their colours fading, remisicent of times gone by. Running in parallel to this was a larger digital video projection of a computer desktop running a plethora of tasks, primarily taking these images and animating them in alternately humourous and poignant fashions. To all of this was added an audio piece consisting of sounds, songs and other auditory wonders. A visitor couldn’t help but immediately feel as if they were intruding on someone’s memories. 
  
According to the show’s press release: “The concept of the project is to build a link between an event as it actually happened and the event as it is remembered. The analogue projection is a record of the event. The digital projection is a representation of how the event is perceived or imagined.” The group was certainly successful in its aim. The confusing nature of memory is visualised and presented in a unique and striking way. Their choice of media is certainly apt. The use of analogue slides to represent the actual event highlights analogue’s triumph over digital, in sound as in image: the actual light from the event is recorded. Part of the reality is captured in the image. Digital’s capturing fails in its inherent method of catching a moment; all it can present is a digital pixelated approximation of light. The lossy nature of digital capturing echoes the lossy nature of our memory. Our memory, rather than preserving a reality, merely copies it, and invariably gets a few things wrong along the way. Thus memory creates a reality, albeit one similar to the one is seeks to emulate...

"It took a long, long, long time..."

2010-08-20T15:08:00.001+01:00

I've only just discovered THIS amazing tool (better late than never I guess)... It's an audio editor, or stretcher really, that has the ability to extend any audio you wish...

Check out this example of a Justin bieber song I found...

J. BIEBZ - U SMILE 800% SLOWER by Shamantis

I can see this creeping it's way into my work sometime in the future...

Digital Carousel

2010-08-05T15:18:00.000+01:00

Digital Carousel opens this Friday at 12 Rutland Place, Dublin 1. I'm really looking forward to it, it's definitely gonna be one of the highlights of the Dublin summer shows! From what I've been hearing about it it's gonna be awesome!

From the Website: "Digital Carousel is a collaborative art installation project. A group of five M.Sc. Multimedia students from Dublin City University are aiming to explore memory, nostalgia and perception through the use of technologies both old and new.

35mm slides, a carousel projector and a digital projector will be used to create a constructed fantasy experience"

One of the guys involved is the inimitable Mark Carty (who's up and leaving us soon, but we'll say nothing about that... :P)

Check out the promo video below...

DC Promo from Digital Carousel on Vimeo.

Block T Party

2010-07-20T23:06:00.000+01:00

Here's some installation and set-up shots of my work as recently shown in Block T, Smithfield... It consisted of 300 digital prints, tiled together to create a 3 x 6 metre wall drawing...

The guys in Block T were so much fun to work with, and the fundraiser night was incredible!... It's well worth checking out the space if you get a chance; they're doing some really cool stuff!...

Halfway there...

 Almost done...

The finished piece...

"The Love There That's Sleeping", 2010, 300 Digital Prints

Sonic Vigil V - 7 hour sound art concert

2010-07-13T21:59:00.000+01:00

(I've got some work in the Sound Stations in this if anyone's around Cork)

Sonic Vigil V
7 HOURS OF SOUND ART & EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC
St Fin Barre’s Cathedral
Sat 17TH July, 1pm-8pm

Curated by The Quiet Club and Gruenrekorder, Sonic Vigil returns with a stunning line-up of leading international experimental musicians and sound artists and practitioners from the booming Irish scene. This unique event, a SEVEN HOUR marathon of experimental music and sound art, will take place in St Fin Barre’s Cathedral on Saturday 17th July.

The Quiet Club was formed in 2006 by Danny Mc Carthy and Mick O’Shea, two of Ireland’s foremost sound artists, as an outlet for their own work and that of other artists. Gruenrekorder is a German-based record label focusing on phonography and sound art. Gruenrekorder’s speciality is field recording, the investigation of nature and the environment as an acoustic experience. A major highlight this year is the participation of David Toop, recognised as one of the world’s leading exponents of sound art. Toop’s new book Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener is due to be published next month. Of special note in Sonic Vigil V are performances by poets from the SoundEye Festival, including Maggie O’Sullivan, a master of word music and verbal sound effect.

The audience will also be treated to several quadraphonic sound pieces, the premier of John Byrne’s Turntable Parlour Orchestra (which involves twenty artists performing on turntables), and the live sound manipulation of Roland Etzin, Lasse-Marc Riek and D’incise.

Coinciding with Sonic Vigil V will be the launch of Sound Stations. These listening structures, positioned around the cathedral, were designed by students of the Cork Centre for Architectural Education and fabricated in the National Sculpture Factory. They will contain CDs of works from open submission to a worldwide open call. The Sound Stations will run from the 17-24th July and will be officially launched on World Listening Day, Sunday 18th July

Block T Party

2010-07-13T21:48:00.000+01:00

Block T, the new arts centre in Smithfield are having a fundraiser exhibition/music night/mini festival on Saturday 17th July...

I'll be on of the artists showing in the exhibition, so do come along if you're free!

For more information click HERE

Block T 1-6 Haymarket (above Chinatown), Smithfield Square, Dublin 7

Andrew Carson

Ailve McCormack talks to artist Andrew Carson

Ailve McCormack talks to artist Andrew Carson

Andrew Carson

Q: Can you tell me about the work you are exhibiting in this exhibition?

Q: Your most recent work is inspired by the Egyptian Book of the Dead – what drew you to this book?

Q: Your current series of work is inspired by a chapter from this book that is concerned with the survival of the soul through the afterlife, how do you interpret this through your work?

Q: You use a quote from the book within this series of work; "I have hidden myself amongst you, oh imperishable stars", which relates to “exploring online realities and virtual immortality”, can you explain this in more detail?

Amharc Fhine Gall - Unknown Knowns

Video game in a box

Happy Birthday Draiocht

Hell's Microwave

Jockeyism

David Brooks: The social anima

Golan Levin makes art that looks back at you

Wooden Mirrors by Daniel Rozin

Book Posters from Postertext

Peter Molyneux demos Milo, the virtual boy

Movie Bar Code Compresses Entire Movies Into Barcodes

Book Origami by Isaac Salazar

Claron McFadden: Singing the primal mystery

3D Paper Sculptures by Bert Simons

Patricia Ryan: Don't insist on English!

Why did LOL infiltrate the language?

Death and the Powers: The robots' opera

How will you cope, living with your avatar?

The Book Art of Robert The

Deb Roy: The birth of a word

Rhythms of life data replayed in art

Eric Whitacre: A virtual choir 2,000 voices strong

Cynthia Breazeal: The rise of personal robots

First interactive 3D film to debut in Australia

John Cage about silence

These Words, Forever

I stumbled across this site just there, and found this one podcast with a beautiful idea from Marconi... Well worth a listen... http://thememorypalace.us/2009/06/episode-12-these-words-forever/

Ethan Zuckerman: Listening to global voices

Playing music at random

Telempathy: A future of socially networked neurons

Artists of digitised life take to the stage

The analogue artist who saw the past in the present

The linguistic genius of babies - Patricia Kuhl

Beau Lotto: Optical illusions show how we see

Erin McKean redefines the dictionary

Oliver Beer: Resonant frequencies

Pangaea, the comeback

Making mountains

The internet's dark heart

The Love Beyond The Chair (Preview)

Hearing music through someone else's eyes

Beyond belief: why Egyptian art outlives its myths

Murray Gell-Mann on the ancestor of language

General Semantics

Zebrafish - Mending Broken Hearts

James Geary, metaphorically speaking

Charity Tillemann-Dick: Singing after a double lung transplant

Amber Case: We are all cyborgs now

DIY Gramophone

Evelyn Glennie: How to listen to music with your whole body

Website of the week // Number 10 // 07.12.10

Susan Philipsz wins 2010 Turner Prize

Steven Pinker on language and thought

Language May Help Create, Not Just Convey, Thoughts and Feelings

Website of the week // Number 9 // 30.11.10

Jesper Just - No Man Is an Island II (2004)

Website of the week // Number 8 // 23.11.10

http://www.attraction-lemanga.fr/

"The Silence" @ Broadcast 24/11/10 @ 6pm

E-tomb allows social networking from beyond the grave

Website of the week // Number 7 // 16.11.10

"Winter Light" @ Broadcast 17/11/10 @ 6pm

Website of the week // Number 6 // 09.11.10

Peter Murray // This Land Again @ The Green Gallery

"Through A Glass Darkly" @ Broadcast 10/11/10 @ 6pm

Website of the week // Number 5 // 02.11.10

"The Seventh Seal" @ Broadcast 03/11/10 @ 6pm

'Haitch' or 'aitch'? How do you pronounce 'H'?

Coded Sensation

Man jailed for making and selling Tracey Emin fakes

Website of the week // Number 4 // 26.10.10

Broadcasting Bergman @ Broadcast Gallery DIT

I stumbled across this site just there, and found this one podcast with a beautiful idea from Marconi... Well worth a listen...
http://thememorypalace.us/2009/06/episode-12-these-words-forever/