""The basic findings are exciting enough, but you can't help but speculate on what they might mean in a deeper context," says Weliky. "It's one thing to say a ferret's understanding of reality is being reproduced inside his brain, but there's nothing to say that our understanding of the world is accurate. In a way, our neural structure imposes a certain structure on the outside world, and all we know is that at least one other mammalian brain seems to impose the same structure."" (context weblog | real-world processing )
""A lot of people have been interested in what changes in the brains of animals and people when they are learning things," Potter said. "We're interested in getting down into the network and cellular mechanisms, which is hard to do in living animals. And the engineering goal would be to get ideas from this system about how brains compute and process information."" (context weblog | li...
Posts
W.I.P.
"System Override: In a society where technology is becoming increasingly more important how do we define the differences between man and machine? This Matrix inspired dance piece fuses athletic and acrobatic movement and fight choreography together in a unique look at our struggle for individuality. " ( FreeflowDanceCo. )
:: note :: . . . the richly textured Garden of the Spirit "named for the Joe Fafard sculpture" Mind's Garden captived . . . the praire caged within/out the sculpture and the hand processed black&white film haunted like some memory or innerscape all the while danced with the solo artist as her words impressed her body . . . "inner impulse" sculptured into a architecture of the spirit . . . what appears to be a collaboration between TES Dahms, Robin Poitras and Gerald Saul honours the power of the land as it interacts with the territory of the spirit in the sphere of contained place . . .
. . . private . . . downstairs in the storage area beneath the stage . . . that's where I teach . . . occasionally we stream up the vomitoriums into the house onto the stage and even into the light&sound booth . . . most of the time we bunker down safe in our studies . . . the walls concrete around us . . . we are few . . . but a loyal bunch . . . the lights are soft or harsh transforming the space at will . . . sometimes we light fires . . . most of the time there's music . . . and always voices . . . words, words, words . . . matter . . .
"Leon Golub's work is about power and the recurring misuse of power through violence, not as an isolated inhuman phenomenon but as an expression of organised, often state-sponsored, oppression and brutality. A fundamental tension is at the heart of his paintings a tension literally between the figure and the ground of the canvas, between the individual and the group within a painting and also between the role of the artist and the wider background of society. Galub has described his work as "a definition of how power is demonstrated through the body and in human actions, and in our time, how power and stress and political and industrial powers are shown... I' m painting citizens of our society, but I'm putting them through certain kinds of experiences which have affected them. I can describe some of them - Dachau, Vietnam, autamatized war, I would even say such a phrase as Imperial America, in a way."" ( Leon Golub )
:: note :: . . . there is a pla...
"how we 'value' culture in the public realm...or how we attach value to creative expression and experience when confronted with the question: 'why should you be supported as an industry, as an organization, as an endeavor, when there are so many other needy causes for the public purse?'" (theArtfulmanager | Value and the arts )
:: note :: . . . an on going discussion . . . another facet of this discussion . . . yesterday faced a decision by an administrator banning Ryga's The Ecstasy of Rita Joe from the high school stage . . . a fundamental misunderstanding of the value of drama . . . is the performing of plays really nothing more than a showcase of talent - a public relations vehicle . . . not! . . .
"aboriginal story in digital media"
"pê-âcimohk. Let us tell you a story. For Aboriginal people, storytelling is a way of using metaphor to understand our roles and responsibilities on the planet. Recently, Aboriginal storytellers from across Canada and around the world have been carrying their traditional and contemporary narratives into the world of digital media. Starting from a foundation based on a Cree worldview (nêhiyawin), TELL explores a variety of contemporary issues related to Aboriginal new media storytelling, giving a voice to all our relations by profiling the work of Indigenous storytellers from across North America and the globe." ( horizon )
Last Sunday John Livingstone Clark gave the first Temple Reading:
Program:
miles had been a pimp once -
stars like priaire dogs -
leave the mind behind -
running wild -
ecstasy factor -
one last toss of the old fedora -
don't say god -
:: note :: . . . a beautiful afternoon . . . an emotional landscape fused to an always pulsing rhythm . . . the music and spoken word wove a magical place . . .
"I regularly see people making art or running theaters or doing a million other things for virtually no money with no resources on the force of sheer will and hard work. It would take the corporate world untold amounts of money - and human resources - to pull of the things we do. So there you have it."
"Art Workers of the World Unite!" (Culturebot.org | The Art worker's Party )
:: note :: . . . me too . . . but we have to be really careful about the whole Art as business model that seems to so dominate America . . .
"On World Teachers' Day, and on any other day for that matter, the basic message that a teacher needs to receive is quite simple. "We appreciate you"."
"That message cannot be repeated often enough, by those of us in the United Nations family and by those who interact with you every day."
"We highly appreciate you having chosen this profession, one so fundamental to society, and the fact that you continue in it, despite - and often because of - the challenges you face. We value the initiatives you take in opening doors of knowledge and tolerance for each girl and boy. We are aware of what your profession demands of you, of your responsibilities and of your rights. We acknowledge the difficulty of your task, and the fact that it takes professional training and a decent work environment to teach well. We appreciate the care you take to direct your knowledge at children with special needs, and your awareness that all students have individual ...
. . . he was a muscian and i was an actor . . . when speaking about play we agreed that we play to celebrate the "timeless space" . . . & then i thought about the process . . . the process of existential imagination . . . play
is . . . re creating and re envisioning the experienced timeless space . . . an act ivity . . . a vibrating energy pattern . . . a set of relationships that reach out to other regions within a larger whole . . .
"What Pollock does in these abstractions, as a result of his actions in the studio, is to disrupt our expectations regarding the role of skill in the final marks on the canvas. In an essay on "Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art," Gregory Bareson called Pollock's paintings, along with "natural landscapes, 'found objecs,' inkblots, scattergrams, [...] exceptions to the almost universal linage in aesthetics between skill and pattern" (1972:148). In Pollock's case, as in these others, " a larger patterning seems to propose the illusion that the details must have been controlled," when, in actuality they have not been (148). It is this lack of control of the medium in its traditional sense, along with a yielding to more ritual actions that has been so invisible to most interpreters of Pollock. The illusion of control has effected an account of Pollock at odds with ritual and in concert with historical art practices, even if ava...
"For the first time in Saskatchewan, artists are being recognized as workers in the sense that most people are. The act’s recognition of “the important contribution of artists” and “the value of artistic creativity” to the cultural, social, economic and educational life of Saskatchewan, is pretty much motherhood – who would disagree? – but its nod toward “the importance to artists of being fairly compensated for the creation and use of their artistic works” is downright revolutionary. So too is its recognition of the “the right of artists to enjoy the same economic and social benefits that are available to other workers in Saskatchewan.”"
"In one fell swoop, the government gave to artists rights – on paper, at any rate – that most other residents of Saskatchewan have enjoyed for years."
"But now, as Kutz says, it’s time to actually make some of that happen." ( Status of the Artist - An Update |Dave Margoshes )
:: note :: . . . hmmm . . .
"The earth moved for me in Santiago last week. Pottering about my hotel room, I suddenly felt the floor shudder and reverberate. I even had a fantasy of filing a story to match the famously boring headline once concocted by Claud Cockburn for the Times: Small Earthquake in Chile. While the tremor left me mildly shaken, it had its metaphorical uses. Later that day, a Chilean dramatist told me it symbolised the fragility of democracy in his country. For me the tremor came to represent, rather more optimistically, the signs of artistic upheaval I saw in my short stay." ( Guardian unlimited arts features |On with the show |Michael Billington reports )
:: note :: . . . artistic optimism felt from south to north . . . please stand up for artists . . .
Jerzy Grotowski says in his writing "tu es le fils de quel qu'un":
"Art is deeply rebellious. Bad artists talk about the rebellion, but true artists do the rebellion. They respond to the consecrated order by an act...... art as rebellion is to create the fait accompli which pushes back the limits imposed by society or in tyrannical systems, imposed by power. But you can't push back these limits if you are not credible. Your fait accompli is nothing but humbug if it is not fait competent. Yes, it is blasphemous. but it's precise. You know what you are doing, you have worked out your weapons, you have credibility, you have created a fait accompli which is of such mastery that even your adversaries cannot deny it. (295)"
. . . needed to . . . wanted to . . . decided not to . . . there was the ancient banished scholar who in his youth fled hiding in the streets - sleeping in the ghetto by the river during the day . . . his time had come, the gods determined, and though he longed for the mountains it was the sky which beckoned . . . the northern sky of artic dreams and a forest of hidden saplings . . . he thought he was alone yet the sound of drumming was never far off . . . someone very gaunt and thin was playing or ready to play or had just finished an unearthly music . . . like heaven maybe . . . years ago he had dreams now lost in the blue and the blue green . . . further ahead it rained . . . he could have sung but didn't . . . could have danced . . . a fragment of text floated by unspoken . . . the wind whispered goodbye . . . into gold . . .