http://mixmouse.net/blog/?p=6

Rune Peiterson: Digital as Tool

Rune Peiterson’s “Saccadic Sightings: Einstein and Bohr”, accessed through Rhizome, is definitely an illustration of the usage of digital technology as a tool, because the piece is composed of puzzling photographs that were manipulated with digital technology. One of the main things I took away from the artist’s statement about this piece is that “matter is always in flux”. I thought this piece particularly interesting because of its focus on the naked eye as a master of illusion. The piece comments on how human eyes are unable to reflect complete reality, and that there are always bits that are blurred or left out. I like the “hallucinatory” effect that Peteirson achieved through his digital treatment – it made the piece intriguing and kept me thinking and constantly wondering what the images actually were. Interestingly enough, the piece is also a critique on how the objects we perceive are shaped by our culture. Sure enough, while trying to figure out what the images in “Saccadic Sightings: Einstein and Bohr” were, I kept drawing images from my personal knowledge/image bank. Peiterson’s use of digital art as a tool was also interesting – he created a device that recorded his eye movements, basically imitating what the eye takes in before sending information to the brain and reorganizing it into a recognizable image. I like how when I look at this collection, I feel like I’m looking through someone else’s glasses (albeit extremely blurry ones) and feeling as if I am not completely in tune with my vision. It kind of relates to my senior project, which namely deals with dreams and how what we “see” in our dreams are only half-baked, warped bits of reality.

Book review by Anthony Campbell. Copyright ©; Anthony Campbell (1999), http://www.acampbell.ukfsn.org/bookreviews/r/damasio.html

Antonio Damasio, “DESCARTES’ ERROR – Emotion, reason, and the human brain”, Papermac, London 1994, ISBN 0 333 65656 3

—

Antonio Damasio Quote:

Even in the small world of brain science [in the 1860s], two camps were beginning to form. One held that psychological functions such as language or memory could never be traced to a particular region of the brain. If one had to accept, reluctantly, that the brain did produce the mind, it did so as a whole and not as a collection of parts with special functions. The other camp held that, on the contrary, the brain did have specialized parts and those parts generated separate mind functions. The rift between the two camps was not merely indicative of the infancy of brain research; the argument endured for another century and, to a certain extent, is still with us today.

http://machineslikeus.com/People/Damasio_Antonio.html

—

More here: http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/damasioreview.html

And if you’re in Amsterdam this Friday: http://www.spui25.nl/spui25/programma.cfm/D0514303-1DC6-41CB-A39C33AB93215736

—The link has been updated—

If science is neither cookery, nor angelic virtuosity, then what is it?
Modern societies have tended to take science for granted as a way of knowing, ordering and controlling the world. Everything was subject to science, but science itself largely escaped scrutiny. This situation has changed dramatically in recent years. Historians, sociologists, philosophers and sometimes scientists themselves have begun to ask fundamental questions about how the institution of science is structured and how it knows what it knows. David Cayley talks to some of the leading lights of this new field of study.

It is time for new stories. The Dark Mountain Project intends to conjure into being new ways of seeing and writing about the world. We call this Uncivilisation.

Our aim is to bring together writers and artists, thinkers and doers, to assault the established citadels of literature and thought, and to begin to redraw the maps by which we navigate the places and times in which we find ourselves…”

From The Project

The Dark Mountain Project Website

more here

from http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/