Nick Montford of Grand Text Auto unveils his students’ beautiful new Web edition of the first anthology of Imagist poetry, edited by Ezra Pound and published in 1914. “Des Imagistes was not (as far as I could determine) previously available online, isn’t in print, and is not even very easily found in libraries. We don’t have a copy of it here at MIT, for instance.”
Before asking “How would the activity of sublimation be solicited?” Jodi Dean of I cite isolates a provocative passage from Zizek that begins: “What if, however, this very choice between the dissolution of a symptomal knot and its acceptance as a positive condition is, again, a false one? What if the very structure of a drive (as opposed to instinct) provides a solution? We are stuck on a knot around which drive circulates, yet it is this very stuckness that pushes us again and again forward to invent ever new forms to approach it.”
Neurophilosophy points us to a study, conducted by Vilayanur Ramachandran and David Brang of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, that found a new form of synaesthesia: tactile-emotion synaesthesia.
Emily Yoffe of Slate makes the case that Obama tapped into a new “powerful – and only recently studied – human emotion called ‘elevation.’” Quintilian and Vico would be proud.
Referencing a new Harvard study, Discover Magazine tell us what we already know: a punch hurts more when your attacker really means it.
Focusing on Deleuze and Kant, respectively, Larval Subjects explains the profound difference between the transcendent and the transcendental.
Matt Kinsman of Folio prepares us for a return, in the tough economic years ahead, of community publishing and new multimedia workflow strategies.
Farhang Erfani of Continental Philosophy links to Simon Critchley’s latest salvo in his battle with Zizek, entitled: “Critchley’s Violent Thoughts about Slavoj Zizek”.
Thomas Söderqvist of Biomedicine on Display ruminates over two projects concerning the auditory space of contemporary medicine: Øystein Horgmo’s work on the sounds of the operating room, and “sound artist John Wynne’s recordings of the medical soundscape at Harefield heart hospital, aired in BBC3’s Between the Ears slot in June.”
In case you’re having a tough time getting a hold of Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell’s edited volume Interpreting Visual Culture: Explorations in the Hermeneutics of the Visual – it’s notoriously expensive ($180), usually checked-out, and unavailable for preview on Amazon – you can view a good chunk of it on Google Books.
In a remarkable post on Concurring Opinions, Mark Edwards explains how a 1642 case, Paradine v. Jane, taught in every property law class, is suddenly relevant. Just as the King’s court found back rent to be owed on a lease despite that property’s recent occupation by a foreign army, after the 9/11 attacks on the WTC, when “lessees were deprived of use and possession of land through no fault of their own, and would be for years [...] the question arose: who should bear the cost?”
Putting people first links to a pamphlet in which authors Adam Greenfield and Mark Shepard provide an overview of “the key issues, historical precedents, and contemporary approaches to designing situated technologies and inhabiting cities populated by them.”
Brita d’Agostino of Wired tips us off to the new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art retrospective exhibit The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now, which shows “how artists have dabbled in two-way communication with viewers over the past 60 years.”
In a timely post on the “occupation” – his quotes – of a Republic Windows and Doors plant in Chicago, Patrick S. O’Donnell of Ratio Juris responds to Professor Slater’s observation that some “labor historians have a tendency to romanticize and exaggerate the importance of certain forms of worker ‘militancy.’”
In a two post response, Michael Drake of Strange Doctrines eloquently dismantles Nadeem Hussain’s argument that “Nietzsche’s criticisms of value cannot generally be so restricted—that we should ascribe to him an error theory about all evaluative judgments.”
A new study, conducted by Friederike Range of the University of Vienna, Austria, shows that dogs have a sense of fairness. As for humans, the jury’s still out.
Alex Leo catalogs five sexist trends the advertising world just can’t shake. If only they were trying.
Thinking of having that iPod engraved for a loved one? Better hope they like it, because it can’t be returned. So reveals the Consumerist.
Called Muxlim Pal, the first virtual world aimed at the Muslim community has just been launched, and shut down by “griefers”, “organized bands of anonymous idiots whose goal is to harass and annoy other users.” Rose Springvale of Dispatches from the Information Age gives background in a post on “Understanding Islam Through Virtual Worlds”.
Christopher Green of Advances in the History of Psychology points us to an article by Herbert A. Friedman, published in the British Psychological Society’s journal The Psychologist, on the failed use of sex in World War II propaganda.
Molly Wright Steenson, doctoral student of architecture at Princeton, just announced the topic of the project that will undergird her dissertation, and it sounds rather brilliant: Postal services and pneumatic tube systems in the late 19th and early 20th century, especially in Paris. “I’m reading these services in terms of their urban interfaces, their material qualities and the interest in the 1870s-1890s of physical networks across cities.”
Julie Robotham of The Sydney Morning Herald reports that because of a company’s patent on a gene, “Babies with a severe form of epilepsy risk having their diagnosis delayed”. “It is the first evidence that private intellectual property rights over human DNA are adversely affecting medical care.” (via Chris Williamson of Blogging the Singularity)
Simon Pegg of The Guardian makes a convincing case for why, in film, the undead shouldn’t run: “The fast zombie,” she writes, “is bereft of poetic subtlety.” “Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable.”
Before asking, politely if disingenuously, “Should art museums remain purely temples to art? Are interactives in an art museum condescending to the primary audience?”, Paul Orselli of ExhibiTricks praises The Detroit Institute of Arts’ recent “reinvention” of itself, and links to a “report from the radio show Studio 360 that details an interactive ‘virtual dining’ experience that serves to highlight some of the DIA’s decorative arts collection.”
Christine L. Borgman, professor of information studies at the University of California at Los Angeles and author of the recently published Scholarship in the Digital Age, explains to The Chronicle of Higher Education how the new “scholarly information infrastructure” demands that the accumulation of data “be considered a scholarly act as well as the publication that comes out of it.”
An enRoute article by Craille Maguire Gillies profiles curator Scott Burnham, who has a knack for taking the gallery to the street.
Ian and Alex from The Art of the Title Sequence find the True Blood intro to be inspired by Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, and a commenter notes that the decaying fox clip was used in the Nine Inch Nails live music video for “Hurt”.
Recent Comments