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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Sally is off the grid for a couple of weeks,
, but she would like to point out two recent, interesting posts about art writing: Leah Sandals drawing connections between the double rainbow guy and art criticism and Art Fag City taking on Trembling's academic style.
Sally says:
Enthusiasm, empathy and speculation seem to get short shrift in a lot of discussion about art writing. Both Leah and Paddy seem to be worrying about art writers reading things into the work that aren't empirically there. I agree that there's nothing worse than narcissistic art writers who just ramble on cause they like the sound of their own words (and I do it myself far too often). But it seems to me that people who are writing about art are necessarily conscious of the fact that there is always an element of speculative fiction in any verbal art interpretation. Language is its own medium that can never exactly reproduce the specificity of an artwork. It's humbling, and it should be, but there's no need for writers to pretend that it isn't also fun. Like artworks, words take on a life of their own.
Jeff Baij - can my software distinguish friends from foes
found Hoser GIF via lalblog
Marianne Lovink and Scott Eunson - Lansdowne Fence Streetscape - Lansdowne and Paton Road, Toronto, ON.
Sunday - Lou Christie
I'm Gonna Make You Mine
Two Faces Have I
Lightnin' Strikes
Email from Anthony Easton
:
Adam Medley - The pleasure is back Launching Thursday, July 22, 7 - 9 p.m. at Art Metropole, 788 King Street West 2nd Floor, Toronto.
blingee by L.M.
In light of the experimental challenges already facing the science of consciousness, the problem of a collapse between subject and object in the experience of art is not necessarily a deal breaker in considering it as an experimental model for consciousness. Plus, art experience offers an empirical, material experience of contingent knowledge formulation as it plays out under infinitely variable conditions. Art deals with the framing problem in ways that are damn hard to replicate in a lab. Art can’t be digitally parsed and controlled like a computer program, but at the same time it is not bound by the limits of computer models.
THREE YEARS OF BAT BOY
Carlo Lowfi on webjam
Sunday - The Isley Brothers
Summer Breeze (my guiltiest pleasure in the universe)
That Lady
It's Your Thing
Lay Lay Lady
blingee by L.M.
Could an artwork actually function as an empirical experiment to study consciousness? If so, the viewer would be simultaneously situated as both the subject of the experiment and the scientific observer. This might sound fishy from a scientific perspective, seeing as the scientific method is structured specifically in order to bracket subjectivity off from observation. But scientists who study consciousness are faced with the epistemological problem that consciousness can only be directly observed by the subject who is conscious.
Even if we set aside the problem of AI, the science of consciousness is particularly challenged in the pursuit of empirical evidence. Because we cannot directly experience another’s conscious state, even neuroscientists using MRI are forced to rely on self-report, meaning that subjects tell the observers how they feel, and the observers then correlate that information with the imaging data they collect. And of course this only works for humans. Monkeys provide the most detailed imaging data on neurons and synapses because invasive experiments are done with them that aren't done with humans. But monkeys can’t tell the scientists how they think or feel. So there is another order of correlation going on, which is that between less precise MRI imaging in humans and more precise imaging in monkeys. Much of what neuroscientists understand about the fine structures of the brain are based on inter-species extrapolations. To add to the complexity of the problem, even within species, as Gerald Edelman points out, “no two brains are identical, even those of identical twins.” Gerald Edelman, Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge, 2006. pg.28
Jade Rude and Bruno Billio in Empire of Dreams, Phenomenology of the built environment, Contemporary Artists from Toronto at the MOCCA, 952 Queen Street W., Toronto. Until Aug. 15, 2010.
Curated By David Liss.
Russian Mountain and Yellow-Black Tower 2010 Russian Mountain: Canadian lumber, gold acrylic mirror
Yellow-Black Tower: Styrofoam, lacquer
Yes, I like this show.
David's The Oath of the Horatii is in Toronto right now and so is the sketch treatment of the painting by Ingres. They are part of the AGO show Drama and Desire: Artists and the Theatre, "featuring artwork inspired by the theatre, presented 'on stage' with live performers, full-scale sets and period lighting." It's a fantastic summer show. There's a bunch of hilarious Neo-Classical paintings, over-the-top romantic paintings and etchings of scenes from Shakespeare, there's work by Ingres, Delacroix, Degas, Aubrey Beardsley...tons and tons of really canonical drawings and paintings from the history books. The whole thing is staged in a fabulously cheesy theatrical setting with velvet drapery, proscenia and chandeliers, interactive props, and actors in costume wandering around spouting sonnets. When I'd just read the promo I didn't really get the concept. Well, actually I was expecting something sort of exactly like what it is, only bad. But the art is really worth looking at, with or without the theatrical theme, so there's no sense that the curators are trying to force an idea. Instead, the theatrical context is just a really fun environment for spending time with a bunch of great art and enjoying all the cheese factor that's also in the work.
blingee by L.M.
The limitations of the Computational Theory of Mind might seem kind of obvious — while the syntactical structure of language may be formally discrete, context, memory and shifting paradigms are inherently necessary to the construction of meaning. A computer may be programmed with an extensive vocabulary of terms, but the meanings of each unit would have to be computed against a background environment of infinitely variable conditions. This framing problem has proven to be a serious set-back. As computational cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor points out...
The failure of AI is, in effect, the failure of the Classical Computational Theory of the Mind to perform well in practice. Failures of a theory to perform well in practice are much like failures to predict the right experimental outcomes (arguably, indeed, the latter is a special case of the former). For well-known Duhemian reasons, neither shows straight off that the theory in question is false. But neither, on the other hand, do they bode the theory in question an awful lot of good. If having such failures doesn’t keep you awake at night, you’re a lot more sanguine about your theories than I am about mine.Computational Theory is to neuroscience what String Theory is to theoretical physics — a compelling idea that has lost significant scientific credibility due to its failure, over time, to produce empirical results.
Jerry Fodor, The Mind Doesn't Work That Way: The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology, 2001. pg. 38
Sunday - Habanera
Maria Callas 1962 Covent Garden
Beaker (courtesy of Beth Stuart)
Carmen Amaya - Zambra
R.M. Vaughan reviews Mary Ann Barkhouse’s The Reins of Chaos at the Latcham Gallery in Stouffville, Ont. He closes with this paragraph:
"A side note: The Reins of Chaos is related to a series of Barkhouse installations that situate animal sculptures in disjointed, otherworldly domestic settings. Her last touring exhibition, Boreal Baroque, tucked rabbits, owls and other woodland creatures into tidy, chintz-draped parlours. One can’t help wondering why or how these powerful and charming works were overlooked by Adaptation: Between Species, the Power Plant’s new, and very large, humans-meet-animals show. Surely one Barkhouse work is worth any two European videos?"
That of course, begs the question, how did the Power Plant's out-going curator, Helena Reckitt, manage to exclude so many First Nation's artists from Adaptation: Between Species currently on at the Power Plant?
Mary Ann Barkhouse harvest 2009 Bronze, wood, porcelain, taffeta
Mary Ann Barkhouse Boreal Baroque 2009
blingee by L.M.
Neuroscientist Gerald Edelman (who works on robotic consciousness) explains why brains and computers are not analogous.
To function, a computer must receive unambiguous input signals. But signals to various sensory receptors of the brain are not so organized; the world (which is not carved beforehand into prescribed categories) is not a piece of coded tape.
Gerald Edelman, Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge, 2006. pg.21
An Te Liu in Empire of Dreams, Phenomenology of the built environment, Contemporary Artists from Toronto at the MOCCA, 952 Queen Street W., Toronto. Until Aug. 15, 2010.
Curated By David Liss.
blingee by L.M. (of course)
The function of syntax is a central problem for computational neuroscience. For many years, artificial intelligence (AI) was the holy grail for both computer engineers and neuroscientists who wanted to unlock the secrets of consciousness. Working with Chomskian ideas of universal grammar, it was believed that meaning in the brain was derived in a similar way to meaning in a sentence. The syntactical structure of a sentence can be broken down into components which are then computed in combination to produce a composite unit of knowledge or understanding. Following from this, a detailed understanding of the component structures of the brain and how they interrelate should make it possible to create an analogous structure with computer circuits that would result in a thinking machine. Unfortunately that particular project (1st-wave AI) failed.
Josh Thorpe in Empire of Dreams, Phenomenology of the built environment, Contemporary Artists from Toronto at the MOCCA, 952 Queen Street W., Toronto. Until Aug. 15, 2010.
Curated By David Liss.
Subtractive Mural for MOCCA (after Asher and Huyghe) 2010 layers of latex paint removed to reveal historical wall colours 2005-2008
Oh shit, I forgot that RMV hated horses, and there I go posting a horse, damn. Now what do I do. Fuck. The stupid thing is up there taunting him and I'm no help at all. Fuckety.
AND you 
AND you 
we are no longer on speaking terms, I've unfriended you on Facebook, Foursquare, Flickr, Twitter, Linked-In, and I no longer follow you on Tumblr)
AND you we are no longer on speaking terms, stop standing in front of my house making puppy eyes at me)
we are no longer on speaking terms, I'm throwing all your stuff out the window right now, except I'm keeping the stereo speakers)As our friend, Hannah Evans, recently pointed out, July 1st is the anniversary of the passage of the British-North America Act, and we are celebrating
AN ADMINISTRATIVE SUCCESS!
YES!
