'Cause I feel for you
May 13, 2012

Via Wikipedia: "Emotion is a complex psychophysiological experience of an individual's state of mind as interacting with biochemical (internal) and environmental (external) influences. In humans, emotion fundamentally involves physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience. Emotion is associated with mood, temperament, personality, disposition, and motivation. Motivations direct and energize behavior, while emotions provide the affective component to motivation, positive or negative.

No definitive emotion classification system exists, though numerous taxonomies have been proposed. Some categorizations include:
– Cognitive versus non-cognitive emotions
– Instinctual emotions (from the amygdala), versus cognitive emotions (from the prefrontal cortex).
– Universal emotions recognized cross-culturally based on research on identification of facial expressions

Several different theories aim to explain the origin, neurobiology, experience, and function of emotions."

Filed under: Wunderkammer

Notes from Class 8 of CS183: Startup
May 8, 2012

Via Blake Masters: "People like stories. Our brains are wired to respond them. We recall facts better when they are embedded in narrative. Hollywood is the proof of their value. We pay lots of money for stories. Entertainment is a much bigger industry than venture capital because people like stories. Even a crappy game like Mass Effect 3 sells a million copies because it tells a story. So you should try to tell one, too. Why did you start your company? What do you want to achieve? Then drape the facts around that skeleton.
Fortunately, the framework for a good story has been long established. Aristotle figured out the elements of a perfect pitch thousands of years ago. He identified the principles of logos, ethos, and pathos. Logos is argument based on facts and reason. Ethos is argument based on character—your character. This is the credibility piece. Finally, pathos is argument based on listeners’ emotions. Those are what you need to exploit. So think about your pitch in terms of logos, ethos, and pathos. There is 3,000 years of decent evidence that people respond to pitches that get these factors right. (...)

Predictable things that VCs will want to know:

1) Macro
a. Are you a company or just a product/feature?
b. Your vision for the company

2) Your product(s)
a. What it is
b. What problem it solves
c. Why it is superior
d. Why it is not likely to be displaced for some time

3) Team
a. This is the ethos part of the presentation – why are you the right people for the task and why should the VC trust you?
b. Are you missing anyone?
c. How are you recruiting/convince the 20th employee to join?
d. What’s your philosophy on compensation?

4) The Business
a. Market size, specifically the addressable market
b. How much of the market are you are going to capture and how
c. Competitive analysis/advantages
d. Business model
e. How will you generate revenue?
   i. Sales process
   ii. Customer acquisition cost
   iii. Profitability
f. Barriers to entry/exit

5) The Ask
a. How much do you need and what will you use it for?
b. What’s your burn?
c. Valuation

6) Funding History/Syndication
a. Who else are you talking to? (This is the pathos bit)
b. Why do you want to work with this VC?
c. What do you want from the VC besides money?"

Filed under: Wunderkammer

by Bertrand Russell
May 2, 2012

Via brain pickings:
"1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness."

Filed under: Wunderkammer

by Bruce Sterling
April 29, 2012

Via Wired: "A genuine New Aesthetic in CERN would ask for some aesthetic help there in CERN, in tackling one of the biggest problems in the history of aesthetics. Which is: why is some (but not all) mathematics beautiful?

The beauty of mathematics is a fact of creative life. The beauty of software code is also a fact of creative life. Math people and coders both know that those beauties are real, real like anvils. Yet that is a truly deep and wicked aesthetic problem. A modern aesthetic movement who could resolve that problem would have a grand achievement. Instead of merely collecting weird seashells on the vast Newtonian shore, they’d be able to state that they had carried out a huge land-reclamation project.

An intellectually honest New Aesthetic would have wider horizons than a glitch-hunt. It would manifest a friendlier attitude toward non-artistic creatives and their works. It would be kinder with non-artists, at ease with them, helpful to them, inclusive of them, of service to them. It’s not enough to adopt a grabbier attitude toward the inanimate products of their engineering."

The New Aesthetic tumblr.

Filed under: Wunderkammer

…the More Likely You Are to Change Your Mind
April 28, 2012

Via peer-reviewed by my neurons: "The connection between being comfortable defending a position and changing that position, initially seems counter-intuitive, but it makes sense if you think about it like this: Possessing knowledge that supports a position makes you more comfortable defending that position. However, because you based your position on knowledge, your position is liable to change when your knowledge changes. On the other hand, people who adhere to a position that’s not based on expertise won’t be as comfortable defending their position, but there is little chance that new knowledge will come along and change their minds. In other words, comfort with a position is associated with changing the position because they are both are driven by the same thing — knowledge."

Filed under: Wunderkammer

by Jiddu Krishnamurti
April 27, 2012

"What is it that we call love? It is this whole field of jealousy, of lust, of harsh words, of caress, of holding hands, of quarrelling and making up. These are the facts in this field of so-called love. Anger and caress are everyday facts in this field, are they not? And we try to establish a relationship between the various facts, or we compare one fact with another. We use one fact to condemn or justify another within this same field, or we try to establish a relationship between a fact within the field and something outside of it. We do not take each fact separately, but try to find an interrelationship between them. Why do we do this? We can understand a fact only when we do not use another fact in the same field as a medium of understanding, which merely creates conflict and confusion. But why do we compare the various facts in the same field? Why do we carry over the significance of one fact to offset or to explain another?

Do we understand a fact through the screen of idea, through the screen of memory? Do I understand jealousy because I have held your hand? The holding of the hand is a fact, as jealousy is a fact; but do I understand the process of jealousy because I have a remembrance of holding your hand? Is memory an aid to understanding? Memory compares, modifies, condemns, justifies, or identifies; but it cannot bring understanding. We approach the facts in the field of so-called love with idea, with conclusion. We do not take the fact of jealousy as it is and silently observe it, but we want to twist the fact according to the pattern, to the conclusion; and we approach it in this way because we really do not wish to understand the fact of jealousy. The sensations of jealousy are as stimulating as a caress; but we want stimulation without the pain and discomfort that invariably go with it. So there is conflict, confusion and antagonism within this field which we call love. But is it love? Is love an idea, a sensation, a stimulation? Is love jealousy?

These are mere ideas, opinions, and so they have no validity. Such ideas only breed enmity, they do not cover or hold reality. Where there is light, darkness is not. Darkness cannot conceal light; if it does, there is no light. Where jealousy is, love is not. Idea cannot cover love. To commune, there must be relationship. Love is not related to idea, and so idea cannot commune with love. Love is a flame without smoke."

Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes on Love

Filed under: People

Atmosphere
April 23, 2012

Walk in silence
Don't walk away, in silence
See the danger
Always danger
Endless talking
Life rebuilding
Don't walk away

Walk in silence
Don't turn away, in silence
Your confusion
My illusion
Worn like a mask of self-hate
Confronts and then dies
Don't walk away

People like you find it easy
Naked to see
Walking on air
Hunting by the rivers
Through the streets
Every corner abandoned too soon
Set down with due care
Don't walk away in silence
Don't walk away

Filed under: Wunderkammer

48 Psychological Facts You Should Know About Yourself
April 19, 2012

Via Business Insider: "Humans can only process small amounts of information at a time (consciously that is… the estimate is that we handle 40,000,000 pieces of information every second, but only 40 of those make it to our conscious brains). One mistake that web sites make is to give too much information all at once. (…) Think progressive disclosure."

Filed under: Wunderkammer

Julian Treasure
April 14, 2012

Via TED: "In our louder and louder world, says sound expert Julian Treasure, 'We are losing our listening.' In this short, fascinating talk, Treasure shares five ways to re-tune your ears for conscious listening – to other people and the world around you.

Also, consider Julian Treasure's blog.

Thanks to Manfred Waffender!

Filed under: People

Farewell, David
April 12, 2012

Filed under: Wunderkammer

Zhuanshu 篆文, with Wang Pi / Wang Bi Version
April 8, 2012

The student learns by daily gain.
The way is gained by daily loss.
Loss after loss until at last comes rest.
By letting go all gets done.
The world is won by those who let go.
–Lao-tzu, Tao te Ching

Filed under: Wunderkammer

Let Your Eyes Predict
April 6, 2012

Via Social Science Research Network: "This study investigates the prediction accuracy of anticipatory pupil dilation responses in humans prior to the random presentation of alerting or neutral sounds. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that the autonomous nervous system may react prior to the presentation of random stimuli. A total of 80 participants, who were matched according to gender to take into account individual differences, were asked to listen to a random sequence of 10 neutral and 10 alerting sounds. Their pupil dilation was continuously recorded and the diameter of their pupils was used to predict the category of sound, alerting, or neutral. The pupil dilation of both males and females predicted alerting sounds approximately 10% more accurately than would be expected by chance, whereas neutral sounds were predicted at the chance level. This result was confirmed using a frequentist and a Bayesian statistical approach. Following the results of the study, practical and theoretical implications of these results are discussed."

Filed under: Wunderkammer

by Ken Wilber
April 3, 2012

Via Shambhala Publications: "In a breathtaking trip from the Big Bang to the Postmodern world we inhabit, Ken Wilber examines the universe and our place in it—and comes up with an accessible and entertaining account of how it all fits together. Along the way he sheds light not only on the great cosmic questions but on various contentious issues of our day, such as environmental ethics, gender relations, multiculturalism, and even the meaning of the Internet. A Brief History of Everything is the perfect introduction to the great Integral thinker at his wise and witty best."

Thanks to Ralf Neubauer!

Filed under: Reading

Alexander Shulgin Documentary
March 29, 2012

Via Dangerous Minds: "Étienne Sauret’s documentary Dirty Pictures is warm-hearted and appropriately shambolic look at the life of Alexander Sasha Shulgin, the man who discovered the psychedelic effects of MDMA and a variety of other home-brewed synthetic compounds that alter, expand and raise consciousness.
A former Dow Chemical drug developer who early on saw the light (a mescaline trip), Shulgin moved on to independent research in the mid-1960s. With his wife Ann, he developed and tested hundreds of psychoactive drugs, mostly analogues of phenethylamines (which include MDMA and mescaline) and tryptamines like DMT and psilocibyn.
'I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit. We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can catalyze its availability.' –Ann Shulgin.
Shulgin’s books PiHKAL (Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved) and TiHKAL (Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved) combine autobiography and research into essential reading for anyone who is interested in the science and history of psychedelics and the life of a spiritual revolutionary who has fearlessly led the fight to wrest consciousness from the brain police."

Filed under: People

Hear with your eyes, see with your ears
April 2012

The KPMG-Kunstabend on 04 April 2012 in the K20 venue also means to demonstrate that music and fine arts belong together. Under the motto, Hear with your eyes, see with your ears!, Thomas Leander, professor for piano at the Robert Schumann School of Music and Media, and me offer an examination of selected pictures from the current exhibition, Fresh Widow. Images of Windows since Matisse and Duchamp.

We have been invited by curators Dr Maria Müller-Schareck and Angela Wenzel of the Kunstsammlung Nordhrein-Westfalen, who join us in the discussion.

Filed under: Talks & Workshops

The relationships between various scientific domains
March 28, 2012

Via Plosone: "Intricate maps of science have been created from citation data to visualize the structure of scientific activity. However, most scientific publications are now accessed online. Scholarly web portals record detailed log data at a scale that exceeds the number of all existing citations combined. Such log data is recorded immediately upon publication and keeps track of the sequences of user requests (clickstreams) that are issued by a variety of users across many different domains. Given these advantages of log datasets over citation data, we investigate whether they can produce high-resolution, more current maps of science.

Over the course of 2007 and 2008, we collected nearly 1 billion user interactions recorded by the scholarly web portals of some of the most significant publishers, aggregators and institutional consortia. The resulting reference data set covers a significant part of world-wide use of scholarly web portals in 2006, and provides a balanced coverage of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. A journal clickstream model, i.e. a first-order Markov chain, was extracted from the sequences of user interactions in the logs. The clickstream model was validated by comparing it to the Getty Research Institute's Architecture and Art Thesaurus. The resulting model was visualized as a journal network that outlines the relationships between various scientific domains and clarifies the connection of the social sciences and humanities to the natural sciences."

Thanks to Elsa Wormeck!

Filed under: Wunderkammer

by Luigi Serafini
March 24, 2012

Via Wikipedia: "Codex Seraphinianus, originally published in 1981, is an illustrated encyclopedia of an imaginary world, created by the Italian artist, architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini during thirty months, from 1976 to 1978. The book is approximately 360 pages long (depending on edition), and written in a strange, generally unintelligible alphabet.

Originally published in Italy, the book has since been released in a number of different countries.

The word Codex in the title means book (from Latin caudex), and Seraphinianus is derived from the author's last name, Serafini. (In Italian, serafini refers to the seraphs.)"

Via John Coulthart: "As Hofstadter says, the mind is indeed staggered when considering the labour that went into the creation of this work, particularly for something that, in its willful hermeticism, subscribes to the Brian Eno recipe for originality: Do something that’s so time-consuming or difficult that no one else would ever bother. If this makes it sound like a slightly more involved equivalent of those Guinness Record-competing constructions made of toothpicks, then the comparison is unfair. The Taj Mahal in matchsticks operates on something like the chimps-with-typewriters principle: any number of people, given enough time, application and boxes of Swan Vesta could do as much. The Codex Seraphinianus is rather more special than that. It may be a folly but, like all the best follies, it achieves its own aesthetic apotheosis through accumulation of detail, sheer inventiveness and the ultimate conviction of its own worth; like all the best follies it is also unique. It might even be argued that the Codex Seraphinianus is one of the purest works of fantasy, one that affects no compromise with supporting narrative or histrionic drama but aims straight for the gold."

Filed under: Reading

by Garth Zietsman
March 19, 2012

Via FreakoStats: "We have all had arguments. Occasionally these reach an agreed upon conclusion but usually the parties involved either agree to disagree or end up thinking the other party hopelessly stupid, ignorant or irrationally stubborn. Very rarely do people consider the possibility that it is they who are ignorant, stupid, irrational or stubborn even when they have good reason to believe that the other party is at least as intelligent or educated as themselves.

Sometimes the argument was about something factual where the facts could be easily checked e.g. who won a certain football match in 1966.

Sometimes the facts aren’t so easily checked because they are difficult to understand but the problem is clear and objective. (…)

Sometimes the facts aren’t as mathematical or logical as the Monty Hall solution. Each party to the argument appeals to facts which the other party disputes. (…)

Sometimes the arguments boil down to differences in values. For example, what tastes better chocolate or vanilla ice cream, or who is prettier Jane or Mary? In these cases there isn’t really a correct answer – even when a large majority favors a particular alternative. Values also have a strong way of influencing what people accept as evidence or indeed what they perceive at all.

The interesting thing is that when the disagreement isn’t a pure values difference it should always be possible to reach agreement."

Filed under: Wunderkammer

by Fringe Chubini
March 11, 2012

under the neon sky
we were walking
in a destroyed city
ruins behind the facades

I’ll never lost my grey eyes
I’ll never lost my electric lips

under the neon sky
we were dreaming
on the end of the day
ruins behind the facades

I’ll never lost your sad eyes
I’ll never lost your biting heart

Filed under: Wunderkammer

by Stephen Wolfram
March 10, 2012

Via Stephen Wolfram blog: "One day I’m sure everyone will routinely collect all sorts of data about themselves. But because I’ve been interested in data for a very long time, I started doing this long ago. I actually assumed lots of other people were doing it too, but apparently they were not. And so now I have what is probably one of the world’s largest collections of personal data.
Every day —in an effort at self awareness— I have automated systems send me a few emails about the day before. But even though I’ve been accumulating data for years—and always meant to analyze it—I’ve never actually gotten around to doing it. But with Mathematica and the automated data analysis capabilities we just released in Wolfram|Alpha Pro, I thought now would be a good time to finally try taking a look—and to use myself as an experimental subject for studying what one might call personal analytics.
Let’s start off talking about email. I have a complete archive of all my email going back to 1989—a year after Mathematica was released, and two years after I founded Wolfram Research. Here’s a plot with a dot showing the time of each of the third of a million emails I’ve sent since 1989..."

Filed under: People

A talk by Cory Doctorow
March 8, 2012

Via Chaos Communication Congress: "The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race.

The problem is twofold: first, there is no known general-purpose computer that can execute all the programs we can think of except the naughty ones; second, general-purpose computers have replaced every other device in our world. There are no airplanes, only computers that fly. There are no cars, only computers we sit in. There are no hearing aids, only computers we put in our ears. There are no 3D printers, only computers that drive peripherals. There are no radios, only computers with fast ADCs and DACs and phased-array antennas. Consequently anything you do to secure anything with a computer in it ends up undermining the capabilities and security of every other corner of modern human society.

And general purpose computers can cause harm -- whether it's printing out AR15 components, causing mid-air collisions, or snarling traffic. So the number of parties with legitimate grievances against computers are going to continue to multiply, as will the cries to regulate PCs.

The primary regulatory impulse is to use combinations of code-signing and other trust mechanisms to create computers that run programs that users can't inspect or terminate, that run without users' consent or knowledge, and that run even when users don't want them to.

The upshot: a world of ubiquitous malware, where everything we do to make things better only makes it worse, where the tools of liberation become tools of oppression.

Our duty and challenge is to devise systems for mitigating the harm of general purpose computing without recourse to spyware, first to keep ourselves safe, and second to keep computers safe from the regulatory impulse."

Filed under: People

by Slavoj Žižek
February 25, 2012

Via Lacon Dot Com: "This Hegelian logic is at work in Wagner’s universe up to Parsifal, whose final message is a profoundly Hegelian one: The wound can be healed only by the spear that smote it (Die Wunde schliesst der Speer nur der Sie schlug). Hegel says the same thing, although with the accent shifted in the opposite direction: the Spirit is itself the wound it tries to heal, i.e., the wound is self-inflicted. That is to say, what is Spirit at its most elementary? The wound of nature: subject is the immense – absolute - power of negativity, of introducing a gap/cut into the given-immediate substantial unity, the power of differentiating, of abstracting, of tearing apart and treating as self-standing what in reality is part of an organic unity. This is why the notion of the self-alienation of Spirit (of Spirit losing itself in its otherness, in its objectivization, in its result) is more paradoxical than it may appear: it should be read together with Hegel’s assertion of the thoroughly non-substantial character of Spirit: there is no res cogitans, no thing which (as its property) also thinks, spirit is nothing but the process of overcoming natural immediacy, of the cultivation of this immediacy, of withdrawing-into-itself or taking off from it, of – why not – alienating itself from it. The paradox is thus that there is no Self that precedes the Spirit’s self-alienation: the very process of alienation creates/generates the Self from which Spirit is alienated and to which it then returns. (Hegel here turns around the standard notion that a failed version of X presupposes this X as their norm (measure): X is created, its space is outlined, only through repetitive failures to reach it.) Spirit's self-alienation is the same as, fully coincides with, its alienation from its Other (nature), because it constitutes itself through its return-to-itself from its immersion into natural Otherness. In other words, Spirit’s return-to-itself creates the very dimension to which it returns. (This holds for all return to origins: when, from 19th century onwards, new Nation-States were constituting themselves in Central and Eastern Europe, their discovery and return to old ethnic roots generated these roots.) What this means is that the negation of negation, the return-to-oneself from alienation, does not occur where it seems to: in the negation of negation, Spirit’s negativity is not relativized, subsumed under an encompassing positivity; it is, on the contrary, the simple negation which remains attached to the presupposed positivity it negated, the presupposed Otherness from which it alienates itself, and the negation of negation is nothing but the negation of the substantial character of this Otherness itself, the full acceptance of the abyss of Spirit’s self-relating which retroactively posits all its presuppositions. In other words, once we are in negativity, we never quit it and regain the lost innocence of Origins; it is, on the contrary, only in negation of negation that the Origins are truly lost, that their very loss is lost, that they are deprived of the substantial status of that which was lost. The Spirit heals its wound not by directly healing it, but by getting rid of the very full and sane Body into which the wound was cut.”

Filed under: Wunderkammer

An ongoing project by Andrei Smirnov
February 24, 2012

Via Generation Z: "The late 1920s was also the period in which sound was being developed to accompany films and animations in Russia. In 1929 one of the leading experimental Soviet filmmakers, the painter, book illustrator and animator Mikhail Tsekhanovsky (1889-1965) was involved in the production of the first Soviet sound movie Piatiletka. The Plan of the Great Works. When in October of that year the first roll of film was developed, it was Tsekhanovsky who voiced the idea: 'What if we take some Egyptian or ancient Greek ornaments as a sound track? Perhaps we will hear some unknown archaic music?' He was referring to the shapes and outlines of vases and how these could be used as if wave forms to generate sound. It was at this precise moment that technology of synthesizing sound from light, called the Graphical Sound techniques were invented and, possibly the first electronic soundtracks ever created.

The group with whom he was working included the talented inventor and engineer Evgeny Sholpo (1891-1951) who was already working on new techniques of so-called performer-less music, but the most outstanding participant in the project was the aforementioned composer Arseny Avraamov. The next day they were already furiously at work on experiments in what they referred to variously as ornamental, drawn, paper, graphical, artificial or synthetic sound. It was Avraamov who completed the first artificial sound tracks in 1930 and by 1936 there were four main trends of Graphical Sound in Soviet Russia: hand-drawn Ornamental Sound (Avraamov, early Boris Yankovsky, 1905-1973); hand-made Paper Sound (Nikolai Voinov, 1900-1958); Variophone or automated Paper Sound (Evgeny Sholpo, Georgy Rimsky-Korsakov); and the spectral analysis, decomposition and re-synthesis technique (Boris Yankovsky). Yankovsky's idea was related to the separation of the spectral content of sound and its formants, resembling the popular recent computer music techniques of cross synthesis and the phase vocoder. It was certainly one of the most radical, paradigm-shifting propositions of the mid 1930s. Researchers involved in Graphical Sound had to overcome enormous technical and theoretical (as well as more mundane) difficulties during its short existence. The results of their work were surprising and unexpected, and ahead of the group's time by decades. However, collision with the state was fatal. In less than ten years, all of their work had ended and was almost instantly forgotten."

Thanks to Lena Willikens!

Filed under: Visual Music

Dérive
February 12, 2012

Via Wikipedia: "Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning to flow—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning, architecture, and design. Fluxus is sometimes described as intermedia."

Via Wikipedia: "Nach dem Dadaismus war Fluxus der zweite elementare Angriff auf das Kunstwerk, das im herkömmlichen Sinn negiert wurde und als bürgerlicher Fetisch galt. Was zählte, war die schöpferische Idee."

Via Wikipedia: "The Situationist International rejected all art that separated itself from politics, the concept of 20th century art that is separated from topical political events. The SI believed that the notion of artistic expression being separated from politics and current events is one proliferated by reactionary considerations to render artwork that expresses comprehensive critiques of society impotent. They recognized there was a precise mechanism followed by reactionaries to defuse the role of subversive artists and intellectuals, that is, to reframe them as separated from the most topical events, and divert from them the taste for the new that may dangerously appeal the masses; after such separation, such artworks are sterilized, banalized, degraded, and can be safely integrated into the official culture and the public discourse, where they can add new flavors to old dominant ideas and play the role of a gear wheel in the mechanism of the society of the spectacle."

Via Wikipedia: "Die Situationisten versuchten, ästhetische Konzepte auf die Gesellschaft zu übertragen, ähnlich wie Joseph Beuys, Fluxus, die Konzeptkunst und andere Strömungen in der Kunst: Ästhetisch, bezogen auf ihren Kunstbegriff, waren Situationen, in denen sich Menschen unmittelbar frei und gleichberechtigt begegnen, austauschen, sich selbst verwalten, kreativ sind, sich ihren Leidenschaften hingeben und keinerlei unnötigen Zwängen mehr unterliegen.

Wir meinen zunächst, daß die Welt verändert werden muß. Wir wollen die am weitesten emanzipierende Veränderung von der Gesellschaft und dem Leben, in die wir eingeschlossen sind. Wir wissen, daß es möglich ist, diese Veränderung durch geeignete Aktionen durchzusetzen. Es ist gerade unsere Angelegenheit, bestimmte Aktionsmittel anzuwenden und neue zu erfinden, die auf dem Gebiet der Kultur und der Lebensweise leichter zu erkennen sind, aber mit der Perspektive einer gegenseitigen Beeinflussung aller revolutionären Veränderungen angewandt werden. –Rapport über die Konstruktion von Situationen (…)

Die Kunst selbst sollte nun durch ihre Verwirklichung im Leben aufgehoben werden, was bedeutete, dass Poesie oder künstlerisches Denken und Handeln nicht mehr nur auf Leinwänden, sondern in der Gestaltung der alltäglichen Lebenswelt Aller stattfinden sollte. Dies bedeutete das Ende der Kunst als besondere Kategorie, denn alles wäre (auch) Kunst.

Filed under: Wunderkammer

by Rob Ager
February 11, 2012

Via Collative Learning: "Using unpublished info from the Stanley Kubrick Archives as a key source, Kubrick's Gold Story is a film analysis that uncovers economic themes encoded in The Shining with regard to gold vs fiat monetary systems. Written, narrated and edited by Rob Ager."

Also, you might want to consider Room 237, which "is a subjective documentary feature which explores numerous theories about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and its hidden meanings. This guided tour through the most compelling attempts to decode this endlessly fascinating film will draw the audience into a new maze, one with endless detours and dead ends, many ways in, but no way out.  Discover why many have been trapped in the Overlook for 30 years."

Filed under: People

Compare
February 03, 2012

Via Vanity Fair: "For most of the last century, America’s cultural landscape—its fashion, art, music, design, entertainment—changed dramatically every 20 years or so. But these days, even as technological and scientific leaps have continued to revolutionize life, popular style has been stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating the new. (...)
We seem to have trapped ourselves in a vicious cycle-economic progress and innovation stagnated, except in information technology; which leads us to embrace the past and turn the present into a pleasantly eclectic for-profit museum; which deprives the cultures of innovation of the fuel they need to conjure genuinely new ideas and forms; which deters radical change, reinforcing the economic (and political) stagnation."

vs.

Via Cyborgology: "And then there is war. Lots of war. Anderson briefly mentions Vietnam as a cultural touchstone of the 60s and 70s, but no mention of this generation’s indefinite warfare. No mention of drones becoming household words, no mention of the art that opposes the war, the record-setting protests that, while largely ignored by the media, definitely did actually happen. Also no mention of the video games as a form of media. Nothing about violent video games made by the American Army, no discussion of Hillary Clinton’s crusade to keep violent video games out of the hands of children, or the any of the similar discussions we have had, as a society, about interactive media.

Popular politics and protest are very influential in pop culture. But when such protest is ignored by the media, individuals are left to making their own media, and with it, their own culture. Anderson is looking for culture in all the wrong places. There are parts of our culture that definitely conform to Kurt Anderson’s critique. The GAP and Starbucks haven’t changed much in the past decade and, as Anderson correctly notes, Now that multi-billion-dollar enterprises have become style businesses…a massive damper has been placed on the genreal impetus for innovation and change. One thinks immediately of the first episode of Portlandia, in which Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein triumphantly declare that The dream of the 90s is alive in Portland. But even then, the very existence of a show like Portlandia, suggests that this subculture has reached such a level of self-referential awareness, that it is only a matter of time before it is all SO TOTALLY OVER."

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