Decisiones…

22 March 2011 • out of context
tags: analysis, brain, perception, quotes, uncertainty

“(…) las emociones están situadas en el lóbulo temporal del cerebro. Si éste está dañado, el individuo afectado puede volverse incapaz de tomar decisiones, incluso las más intrascendentes, como en la consulta del médico escoger día y hora para la próxima visita, ya que analiza interminablemente los pros y los contras de esa decisión sin darse cuenta de la necesidad de tomar al menos una ya”.

La inteligencia emocional de los jueces
Angel Puyol

La herida únicamente puede curarse con la lanza que la hizo

20 January 2011 • out of context
tags: analysis, articles, civilization, earth, nature, quotes, science

O, como dice un párrafo de Parsifal, de Wagner, “la herida únicamente puede curarse con la lanza que la hizo”. (…) Entren al perverso placer del martirio prematuro: “¡Ofendimos a la Madre Naturaleza, así que recibimos lo que merecemos!”. Estar dispuesto a asumir la culpa de las amenazas a nuestro medio ambiente es algo engañosamente tranquilizador. Si somos culpables, entonces todo depende de nosotros; podemos salvarnos simplemente cambiando nuestro estilo de vida. Desesperada y obsesivamente reciclamos papel viejo, compramos comida orgánica, lo que sea para asegurarnos de que hacemos algo, que contribuimos. (…) El hecho de que las cenizas del modesto estallido volcánico en Islandia hicieran aterrizar a la mayoría de los aviones en Europa es un muy necesitado recordatorio del grado en que nosotros, los humanos, con nuestro tremendo poder sobre la naturaleza, no somos nada más que otra de las especies vivientes sobre la Tierra, y dependemos del delicado equilibrio de sus elementos.

2010: El fin de la naturaleza by Slavoj Zizek

Toxic Ideas

8 January 2011 • outer
tags: analysis, brain, capitalism, civilization, conscience, control, perception, politics, religion

Akrasia

14 October 2010 • out of context
tags: analysis, brain, conscience, control, desire

Akrasia (ancient Greek ἀκρασία, “lacking command (over oneself)”), occasionally transliterated as acrasia, is the state of acting against one’s better judgment.

The problem goes back at least as far as Plato. Socrates (in Plato’s Protagoras) asks precisely how this is possible – if one judges action A to be the best course of action, why would one do anything other than A?

Wikipedia

Readings

8 August 2010 • readings
tags: aesthetics, analysis, books, death, history, humour, murder, perception, religion, senses, situationism, suicide, zen

• Panegírico
Guy Debord

• Del asesinato considerado como una de las Bellas Artes [read in English]
Thomas de Quincey

• Consciousness and Perception: The Point of Experience and the Meaning of the World We Inhabit [read]
Sérgio Roclaw Basbaum. Revista Eletrônica Informação e Cognição, v.5, n.1, p.181-203, 2006.

• Preguntes a un mestre Zen
Taisen Deshimaru

Cryptoamnesia

4 August 2010 • out of context
tags: analysis, articles, brain, perception, quotes, texts

“Cryptoamnesia is characterized by having a thought you’ve had before without realizing that you have had the thought before. The easiest way to observe cryptoamnesia is in episodes of plagiarism where the plagiarist is completely unaware that the text existed previously. (…) These anecdotes elucidate a common underlying mechanism of memory. Every time we recall a memory it is immersed in a narrative context. Usually the context of the memory is correctly recalled, however, in certain circumstances, it can be forgotten. Without a narrative context for an idea or memory, we tend to make one up. Therefore we may consider a memory remembered out of context a novel idea.”

The Neuroscience Journal of Cliff Rodgers

Fragmentation, meta-narrative, liquidity and blood

6 May 2010 • watchings
tags: analysis, cinema, comedy, fantasy, fiction, humour, television, tv series

When I was a little girl, I was already fascinated by the moving image, but I loved films and TV series than were not exactly for kids, I don’t mean ‘adult films’, but I was more interested in Gene Kelly and Moonlighting than in the typical films for children. Some years later, I had a flatmate who one day told me that my ‘problem’ is that I’m a post-modernist. I’ve never seen myself as a post-modernist, or as anything else, but the truth is that some of my personal obsessions are very related to post-modernism: fragmentation, codes, meta-narratives, the absence of an objective truth, etc. And in a way I think that the films and TV series that fascinated me as a kid were quite post-modern.

Musical films as Singing in the Rain (1952) or Les Girls (1957) and TV series as Moonlighting (1985-89) play with concepts, gags and narratives which in the visual context of a child living in the Eighties were quite absurd and strange. Obviously, in the Eighties existed films much more ‘post-modern’ than that, but I didn’t know about its existence until years later, and we should remember that Singing in the Rain, Les Girls and Moonlighting were mainstream/commercial products, not experimental pieces. The thing is that now I realized that I liked those audiovisual products because of its fragmentation and its meta-cinematographic aura.

Nowadays, I don’t think there’s anything in the TV comparable to Moonlighting, but we have Lost, maybe the paradigm of fragmentation, or I should say better the paradigm of liquidity —if, as Zygmunt Bauman states, we live in a ‘liquid time’, I guess that we need some liquid audiovisual products. Lost could be described as a quantum soap opera: first it was the flashback, then it was the flashforward, after it was the time travelling and now we have the parallel realities. Even if in some moments the script is really mushy and touchy-feely, it’s also fragmented, ambiguous and remarkably liquid —fortunately, I think that we are getting over those classical flat narratives in which good is good, bad is bad and there’s nothing more in between; real life is much more complicated than that.

The truth is that although I don’t see Lost as a masterpiece, right now mainstream TV (is there a non-mainstream TV?) is much more interesting than mainstream cinema. A film from the Fifties like Singing in the Rain is much more ‘iconoclast’ that any of the blockbusters of the recent years, but in the television we are watching some interesting changes.

My favourite TV series right now is True Blood. I know, I know… It’s kitsch and excessive, but it’s also a surrealistic mix of everything you can imagine, name any genre! Drama, comedy, action, adventure, crime, horror, science-fiction, romance, eroticism… It can jump from the most tacky to the most gory in a second with an astounding audacity and self-confidence. Have you ever watched before a bloody Viking vampire murdering in jogging suit, flip flops and with tinfoil in the hair because he was having some highlights done? It’s quite hilarious. And even everything is extravagant and way-out, at the same time it has an astonishing natural/realistic quality. Thanks to True Blood, TV vampires (really lame until now) are not just post-mortem, are also post-modern.

Readings

7 November 2009 • readings
tags: analysis, articles, brain, cinema, dreamachine, flicker, hallucinations, television, video, videoart, visualmusic

• From Stroboscope to Dream Machine: A History of Flicker-Induced Hallucinations
B.C. ter Meulen, D. Tavy and B.C. Jacobs b. European Neurology Vol. 62, No. 5, 2009.

• Décor by Timothy Leary [read]
Mark Alen. The New York Times. January 20, 2005.

• The Touch through Time: Raoul Hausmann, Nam June Paik and the Transmission Technologies of the Avant-Garde
Ina Bloom. Leonardo – Volume 34, Number 3, June 2001.

• Gnosis and Iconoclasm: A Case Study of Cinephilia
Annette Michelson. October, Vol. 83 (Winter, 1998).

• Review: Yann Beauvais (ed.), Paul Sharits
Federico Windhausen. Animation: An interdisciplinary journal. July 2009, Volume 4, No. 2.

• The Films of Peter Kubelka
Earl Bodien. Film Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Winter, 1966-1967).

Readings

1 November 2009 • readings
tags: analysis, articles, brain, cinema, flicker, magazines, music, reviews, structuralism, texts

• What’s in a flicker film?
Edward S. Small and Joseph Anderson. Communication Monographs, Volume 43, March 1976.

• His African Journey: An Interview with Peter Kubelka
Scott MacDonald. Film Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 3 (Spring, 2004),.

• Structural Film: Ten Years Later
Regina Cornwell. The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 23, No. 3, Structuralist Performance Issue (Sep., 1979).

• Special effects in Martin Arnold’s and Peter Tscherkassky’s cinema of mind
Michele Pierson. Discourse, 28.2 & 3, Spring and Fall 2006.

• Biomusic and the Brain: An interview with David Rosenboom
David Paul. Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1986).