Electronic Super Highway – so 90s

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All images by Nam June Paik appropriated without permission

Mechanical Enlightenment Part 2

bug alien 2005 David Opie

In wondering what an ‘enlightenment machine’ might look like, neurophilosopher suggested Persinger’s Shakti Coil.  Further explorations revealed that this coil was demonstrated by Todd Murphy at Art and Mind’s Religion, Art and the Brain Festival in Winchester last year, and was reviewed in The Times.

That article answered some of the questions that I posed about this subject in Mechanical Enlightenment, particularly the fact that the British arch-atheist Professor Richard Dawkins tried it and he experienced nothing, whereas
“What others have experienced  depended on their cultural or religious beliefs. Some saw Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Muhammad, or the Sky Spirit. Others, with more than a passing faith in UFOs, tell of something that sounds more like a standard alien-abduction story.”

hmm, doesn’t sound very universal to me, but I am still curious!

Sublime

JMW Turner
Shields, on the River Tyne (1823)

In thinking about the posts and comments from yesterday, and how that might relate to art production, I was reminded of ideas of the sublime. I had a rather fuzzy idea that it was associated with the Romantics during the 1800s, and was based on the idea that humans feel awe and insignificance when confronted by “nature red in tooth and claw” (Tennyson).

According to the article in Wikipedia, “In aesthetics, the sublime (from the Latin sublimis (exalted)) is the quality of transcendent greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation. This greatness is often used when referring to nature and its vastness.”

The Tate glossary refers to the sublime as ” Theory of art put forward by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful published in 1757. He defined the Sublime as an artistic effect productive of the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling and wrote ‘whatever is in any sort terrible or is conversant about terrible objects or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the Sublime’. In landscape the Sublime is exemplified by Turner’s sea storms and mountain scenes. The notion that a legitimate function of art can be to produce upsetting or disturbing effects was an important element in Romantic art and remains fundamental to art today. “

I find the Tate definition quite funny, because romanticism and the sublime fell out of fashion quite dramatically during the modernist period, and ideas of transcendance and awe are considered a bit quaint in this post-post everything age, whereas being upsetting and disturbing (or just sensationalistic) is still very ‘avant-garde’.

Fast forward two hundred years, to the technological sublime, a term coined by Perry Miller, referring to feelings of awe inspired by large-scale applications of technological prowess and examined in American Technological Sublime by David Nye. More reading needed!

Neuroesthetics

After being inspired by neurotheology earlier today, and neurotechnology last week, I started wondering if there is such a thing as neuroesthetics.
I am happy to report that there is, and in fact Semir Zeki
has founded the Institute of Neuroesthetics, based in Berkely and UCL in 1994. This is very exciting to me, because the Slade is part of UCL too!

Expect more thoughts about this soon.

The Mind Expander

This 1967 structure from Haus-Rucker-Co is quite wierd, although there aren’t really any indications that it does indeed expand the mind.  From the description, it sounds like sitting in a giant hairdryer-kaleidascope.

For a more contemporary design which makes no claims for mind expansion but does for musical stimulation, see the beautiful prototype for Acconci Studio’s Sound Shell.

Mechanical Enlightenment

Pureland 1996, Mariko Mori
The search for enlightenment has traditionally been an arduous path, involving all sorts of discipline: years of prayer, meditation and mantras, solitary mountaintops, fasting, perhaps the odd bit of flagellation, doing good deeds, undergoing purification and spending lifetimes on the karmic wheel.

But now perhaps enlightenment is just a short, sharp shock to the temporal lobe away.  The inimitable neurophilosopher describes recent findings in neurotheology

the cognitive neuroscience of religious experience and spirituality.  I have a few questions about these findings though: would such stimulation provide self-declared atheists with a spiritual experience?  Would these experiences be completely different for different people, or would certain commonalities occur?  How would one’s cultural background shape one’s experience?  And lastly, what would the enlightenment machine look like?

For an possible iteration, see Mariko Mori’s Wave UFO installation that she did for the 2005  Venice Biennale. Although the artist was using EEG monitoring, she wasn’t actually administering shocks to the viewers …

Transgressions of Vito Acconci

Grasp 1969

There is a fascinating interview with Vito Acconci, New York poet, conceptual artist and architect on designboom. The interviewer describes Acconci as the ‘godfather‘ of transgression.

While this strikes me as art/designspeak that tries to rescuscitate the tatty corpse of the avant garde with a good pinch of sexualised sensationalism thrown in for good measure and extra ratings, Acconci’s own words are very inspiring.

In particular, I feel inspired by the way he describes the evolution of his work, and his fluid movement from writing to performance to architecture and design:

“can you describe an evolution in your work from your first projects to the present day?
there is a line but it has been through so many forms.
as a writer I became very conscious of the space on a page,
I started to get obsessed with questions such as
- what makes you move from left margin to right margin?
- from top of the page to bottom of the page?
in other words, I saw the page as a field over which I as
a writer could move and you as the viewer could move too.
I then figured that if I was so concerned with space why
was I limiting myself to a piece of paper when there is a
floor or a street to work with.
so things then went to an art context.
I started off the process by thinking how do I move in real space
and what makes me move.
I began by using my own person. I realized that I had to focus
on myself – it became ‘I’ and ‘me’…
but there are other people in the world.
so later I focused on how do I concentrate on him/her,
or how do I concentrate on you while you concentrate on me?
I think that it all began with that notion of movement.
in that you move through the page, you move within yourself,
you move within a space and back and fourth.
gradually it becomes clear that you /the people are in a space.
the question then is how to react to a space.
the great thing about architecture and design is that people
are aware of it even if they think that they aren’t.
everyone has passed through a doorway,
sometimes you may not even notice the doorway but sometimes
you might, be it because the doorway is a little to narrow or a little
to low. it’s great that we get to experience these things everyday. “

Perhaps this neatness of being able to see how one thing led to the next is something that comes with the perfection of hindsight, of looking backwards to find the unifying thread of moving through space?

I really do relate strongly to this description though, because too often I feel that we are expected to be just one thing: only an artist, or a banker, or a dancer, or that we have to undergo radical retraining to be something different when maybe it is more important to just go and do that thing. Perhaps that is the most radical transgression.

For a feast of acconci studio design, visit www.acconci.com although be warned the flash design is a bit odd.

Pirates, Pixies and Pasties

Turner
Cornwall is beautiful – well worth a visit. As you know we went in search of pirates, but the good old swash-buckling, raping and pillaging, mayhem-producing pirates of old seem to have been replaced by eco-hippy pirates. Freshly squeezed organic vegetable juice has replaced rum as the grog of choice, and bicycles and bio-diesel are the favored transportation options.

We took the train from London Paddington to Penzance – a journey of six hours, which is quite far. We could get to Paris or Sardinia more quickly, although there is something quite soothing about traveling on a train. I have always disliked the fact that it is so hard to drive and read at the same time, but on a train you can read furiously, and look up occasionally to see something new and possibly beautiful. And then of course there is the sound of the wheels on the track and the fresh air.

We hoped to rent a car for the weekend, but the car rental places were all closed when we arrived, and would remain closed for the rest of the long weekend other than a brief four hour period on Saturday morning, with no possibility of after-hours drop off. (Note to Cornwall Tourist Board – this is quite silly). There is a fairly decent local bus service, if by decent one understands that the bus one needs is usually only every two hours …. After we took the bus a few times though, I was really glad that we hadn’t rented a car. The lanes in Cornwall are very narrow, bordered on either side by 6 foot tall hedgerows, which are dense, prickly banks of shrubs. The average car is too small to let you see over the tops of these hedgerows, whereas the #300 open-top doubledecker tourist bus gives you wonderful views over the fields. It is a nerve-racking roller-coaster bus too, and because the lanes are so narrow, if the bus meets a car coming the other way, the car must back up to allow the bus past. This can result in very long lines of cars trying to reverse, while the bus accelerates by, usually missing the cars by a hair’s breadth.

We stayed at the Commercial Hotel in St Just and our room was clean, big and relatively quiet. We had dinner there one night, and while the cook’s mastery of the deep fat fryer was superb, overall the meal did very little to combat the international stereotype of British food ie grey peas cooked almost to pulp, sad bits of lettuce masquerading as ’salad’, overcooked fish and gristly steak. Not recommended. Fortunately there was a great little cafe across the square that served delicious organic egg and farm bacon sandwiches with fresh cracked pepper and decent espresso. It wasn’t always open, but when it was it was definitely the best place to eat in St Just.

St Just is near the coast, and is the main center of the cornish tin and copper mining industry (which is now defunct). It is an unpretentious little villiage that hasn’t really hit the top of the tourist charts yet, unlike St Ives, which is worth a visit but is very crowded and commercial. Penzance is more of a working town than St Ives, but again I wouldn’t recommend spending much time there. Perhaps my opinion of Penzance is largely shaped by the fact that we spent a number of hours in the bus stop waiting for various buses, but I think that there are much better places to go.

Our favorite place was Mousehole (pronounced Mowzel – does this mean that one should say ‘arzel’?), which is an hour walk or a short bus ride from Penzance – a tumble of fishing cottages and twisty alleys overlooking a harbor. We had an excellent dinner at The old coastguard hotel, which apparently used to be a bohemian hippy hangout up until the 80’s, but which is now quite minimalist and up-market. On our last day we went back to Mousehole to have lunch at The Cornish Range, a reclaimed pilchard processing factory, which was so good that we almost missed the train back to London!

The other fantastic highlight of our weekend was hiking 10 kms along the cliff path from St Just to Sennen. It was a long walk, and we wandered through various fields with bulls before we found the path, but the scenery was breathtaking and the main path is well maintained. The purple heather and yellow prickly flowering gorse was in bloom on the cliffs, and the Atlantic ocean swirled and crashed below. The sun was shining and we felt far away from urban sprawl and crowds. We finally made it to Sennen beach, which is a lovely gold sand beach with waves big enough for surfing.

By then we were truly ravenous and devoured our first authentic cornish pasty – which is like a little folded over pie, filled with meat, potatoes or cheese.  They are quite good, but very heavy, and can tend to sit like a lead weight in the stomach.  Perhaps they make hearty sustaining ballast for fisher-miner-walker-pirate types, although I am amazed that people don’t drop dead from all the lard.  We also tried mead, which i was quite excited about, having imagined that it tasted like honey in some way, but it mostly tasted like the bad kind of cough syrup.  Yet another celtic myth lies in the dust.  More successful was the Cornish rattler cider, named after the well-known cornish rattle snake.  Now that is good grog.

Hunting for Pirates

image by Jack Davis
As a child growing up in South Africa, many of the books I read were English books, set in the English country-side.  In fact I had a much better mental landscape of England than I did of South Africa.  I knew more about badgers and hedgerows than I did about the dusty veldt of Gauteng.  When I say ‘knew’, perhaps I mean I had language for.  Of course living in Johannesburg, I knew the heat and the dust and the bright bowl of the sky, the itch of gleaming grass and the manic laugh of giant ha-di-das through my senses, my skin, rather than through stories and words.

I loved reading Swallows and Amazons by Arhur Ransome.  It is influenced by  Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island, and has tales of storms, pirates, battles at sea and ashore on Wild Cat island, treasure-hunting, camping out, and making startling discoveries.  For some reason, now that I am older, these stories, and all the Enid Blyton books, have convinced me that Cornwall is a lair for pirates.

JB and I are heading off on the train this afternoon to spend the bank holiday week-end in St Just, where we will be unplugged and in search of pirates, hidden treasure and possibly  good weather.

Weedy Seadragons

The Weedy Seadragon is closely related to another of my marine favorites, the seahorse and is only found in southern Australian waters. What a magical creature. For video clips, visit Dragon Search

The last fish in Gould’s Book of Fish. While I enjoyed reading this book, and found a few passages that resonated strongly with me, I would agree with some critics of the book that there was a certain amount of wankosity that I had to skip over.

I think that one of the most interesting aspects of the book was Flanagan’s depiction of Empire, which he elaborates on in an interview with the Guardian.

The whole notion of empire and commonwealth is quite current for me now as a South African Canadian currently living in London