June 21, 2012
Elizabeth Murray (1940 – 2007) was an American painter. In 1967, Murray moved to New York, and first exhibited in 1971 in the Whitney Museum of American Art Annual Exhibition. One of her first mature works included ‘Children Meeting,’ 1978 (now in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum, New York), an oil on canvas painting evoking human characteristics, personalities, or pure feeling through an interaction of non-figurative shapes, color, and lines. She is particularly noted for her shaped canvas paintings.
In 1999, Murray was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. This grant led directly to opening of the Bowery Poetry Club, a Lower East Side performance arts venue run by her husband, Bob Holman. In 2007, Murray died of lung cancer. In her obituary, the ‘New York Times’ wrote that she ‘reshaped Modernist abstraction into a high-spirited, cartoon-based, language of form whose subjects included domestic life, relationships and the nature of painting itself…’
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June 21, 2012
Sébastien Tellier (b. 1974) is a French singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. He is currently signed to Record Makers, a French independent record label. He sings in English, French, and Italian. Tellier’s first album, ‘L’incroyable Vérité’ (‘The Incredible Truth’), was released in 2001.
Tellier’s sophomore album ‘Politics’ was released in 2005. A particularly popular song from Politics was ‘La Ritournelle,’ a string-led tune, which featured Nigerian drummer, Tony Allen of Fela Kuti fame. ‘La Ritournelle’ was remixed by various artists, notably in Britain by Metronomy. Tellier has also recorded an acoustic album of his more popular songs, ‘Sessions’ in 2006. His third studio album ‘Sexuality’ was produced by Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo of Daft Punk.
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June 21, 2012
Neuroesthetics is a relatively recent sub-discipline of aesthetics (a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty), which received its formal definition in 2002 as the scientific study of the neural bases for the contemplation and creation of a work of art. With the aim of discovering general rules about aesthetics, one approach is the observation of subjects viewing art and the exploration of the mechanics of vision. It is proposed that pleasing sensations are derived from the repeated activation of neurons due to primitive visual stimuli such as horizontal and vertical lines.
The link between specific brain areas and artistic activity is of great importance to the field of neuroesthetics. This can be applied both to the ability to create and interpret art. A common approach to uncover the neural mechanisms is through the study of individuals, specifically artists, with neural disorders such as savant syndrome or some form of traumatic injury. It is argued that the sense of beauty and aesthetic judgment presupposes a change in the activation of the brain’s reward system.
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June 21, 2012
In ethology (the study of animal behavior), a fixed action pattern (FAP) is an instinctive behavioral sequence that is indivisible and runs to completion. Fixed action patterns are invariant and are produced by a neural network known as the ‘innate releasing mechanism’ in response to an external sensory stimulus known as a ‘sign stimulus’ or ‘releaser’ (a signal from one individual to another).
A fixed action pattern is one of the few types of behaviors which can be said to be hard-wired and instinctive. Many mating dances, commonly carried out by birds, are examples of fixed action patterns. In these cases, the sign stimulus is typically the presence of the female. Another example of fixed action patterns is aggression towards other males during mating season in the red-bellied stickleback. A series of experiments carried out by Dutch ornithologist Niko Tinbergen showed that the aggressive behavior of the males is a FAP triggered by anything red, the sign stimulus. The threat display of male stickleback is also a fixed action pattern triggered by a stimulus.
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June 21, 2012
A supernormal stimulus is an exaggerated version of a stimulus to which there is an existing response tendency, or any stimulus that elicits a response more strongly than the stimulus for which it evolved. The idea is that the elicited behaviors evolved for the ‘normal’ stimuli of the ancestor’s natural environment, but the behaviors are now hijacked by the supernormal stimulus.
British art scholar Nigel Spivey demonstrates the effect in a 2005 BBC documentary series ‘How Art Made the World’ to illustrate neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran’s speculation that this might be the reason for the grossly exaggerated body image demonstrated in works of art from the Venus of Willendorf right up to the present day.
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June 21, 2012
Hyperreality, according to French sociologist Jean Baudrillard is, ‘A real without origin or reality.’ Italian philosopher called it, ‘The authentic fake.’ More recently, Hungarian filmmaker Pater Sparrow forwarded the term ‘virtual irreality.’ The term is used in semiotics (the study of symbols) and postmodern philosophy to describe an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced post-modern societies. Hyperreality is a way of characterizing what our consciousness defines as ‘real’ in a world where a multitude of media can radically shape and filter an original event or experience. Most aspects of the concept can be thought of as ‘reality by proxy.’
Baudrillard in particular suggests that the world we live in has been replaced by a copy world, where we seek simulated stimuli and nothing more. He borrows, from Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘On Exactitude in Science’ (which borrowed from Lewis Carroll), the example of a society whose cartographers create a map so detailed that it covers the very things it was designed to represent. When the empire declines, the map fades into the landscape and there is neither the representation nor the real remaining – just the hyperreal. Baudrillard’s idea of hyperreality was heavily influenced by phenomenology, semiotics, and Marshall McLuhan.
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June 21, 2012
‘Simulacra and Simulation‘ [sim-yuh-ley-kruh / sim-yuh-ley-shuhn] is a philosophical treatise by French sociologist Jean Baudrillard seeking to interrogate the relationship among reality, symbols, and society. A simulacrum (singular form of simulacra) in an imperfect simulation (a recreation of something). Baudrillard claims that our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that human experience is of a simulation of reality.
Moreover, these simulacra are not merely mediations of reality, nor even deceptive mediations of reality; they are not based in a reality nor do they hide a reality, they simply hide that anything like reality is irrelevant to our current understanding of our lives. The simulacra that Baudrillard refers to are the significations and symbolism of culture and media that construct perceived reality, the acquired understanding by which our lives and shared existence is and are rendered legible; Baudrillard believed that society has become so saturated with these simulacra and our lives so saturated with the constructs of society that all meaning was being rendered meaningless by being infinitely mutable. Baudrillard called this phenomenon the ‘precession of simulacra.’
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June 21, 2012
Simulacrum [sim-yuh-ley-kruhm] (Latin: ‘likeness, similarity’) was first recorded in the English language in the late 16th century, to describe a representation, such as a statue or a painting, especially of a god. By the late 19th century, it had gathered a secondary association of inferiority: an image without the substance or qualities of the original.
Philosopher Fredric Jameson offers photorealism as an example of artistic simulacrum, where a painting is sometimes created by copying a photograph that is itself a copy of the real. Other art forms that play with simulacra include Trompe l’oeil, Pop Art, Italian neorealism, and the French New Wave.
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June 21, 2012
The digital dark age is a possible future situation where it will be difficult or impossible to read historical digital documents and multimedia, because they have been stored in an obsolete and obscure digital format.
The name derives from the term ‘Dark Ages’ in the sense that there would be a relative lack of written record. An early mention of the term was at a conference of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) in 1997. The term was also mentioned in 1998 at the ‘Time and Bits’ conference, which was co-sponsored by the Long Now Foundation and the Getty Conservation Institute.
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June 21, 2012
The term Network Society describes several different phenomena related to the social, political, economic, and cultural changes caused by the spread of networked, digital information and communications technologies. A number of academics are credited with coining the term since the 1990s and several competing definitions exist.
The intellectual origins of the idea can be traced back to the work of early social theorists such as Georg Simmel who analyzed the effect of modernization and industrial capitalism on complex patterns of affiliation, organization, production, and experience.
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June 21, 2012
Information pollution is the contamination of information supply with irrelevant, redundant, unsolicited and low-value information. The spread of useless and undesirable information can have a detrimental effect on human activities. It is considered one of the adverse effects of the information revolution. Pollution is a large problem and is growing rapidly in e-mail, instant messaging (IM), and RSS feeds.
The term acquired particular relevance in 2003 when Jakob Nielsen, a leading web usability expert, published a number of articles discussing the topic. However, as early as 1971 researchers were expressing doubts about the negative effects of having to recover ‘valuable nodules from a slurry of garbage in which it is a randomly dispersed minor component.’
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