One of my films, A Singing Comet, will be screened at Rencontres Internationales Sciences et Cinémas (RISC) – 9e édition (Marseille, France) on Sunday 22 November – 14h.
You can check the complete program of the festival on their website.
science
There are 22 posts tagged science (this is page 1 of 2).
Anhedonia
In psychology and psychiatry, anhedonia (/ˌænhiˈdoʊniə/ an-hee-doh-nee-ə; Greek: ἀν– an-, “without” and ἡδονή hēdonē, “pleasure”) is defined as the inability to experience pleasure from activities usually found enjoyable, e.g. exercise, hobbies, music, sexual activities or social interactions. While earlier definitions of anhedonia emphasized pleasurable experience, more recent models have highlighted the need to consider different aspects of enjoyable behavior, such as motivation or desire to engage in an activity (“motivational anhedonia”), as compared to the level of enjoyment of the activity itself (“consummatory anhedonia”).
Every disease is a musical problem
“Every disease is a musical problem; every cure is a musical solution.”
Novalis (I don’t know the origin of the quote, I’ve read it in Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks).
Londonitis
“The medical writer Edwin Ash suggested that the industrial age and its background noise had created a new disease. He called it ‘Londonitis.'”
Megan Garber, “Sonic Boom: How digital technology is transforming our relationship with sound.”
Seconds (1966)
When a film starts like this, it must be good (Saul Bass, of course). A paranoia, a dystopian history about who we are and who we would like to be. And, like all good science fiction films, with a lot of reflections between the lines.
Prometheus (2012)
Hysteria (2011)
Is this what love feels like?
“Chemistry deals with the reactions between elementary forms of matter. Separate the elements, and you negate the reaction. (…) when some chemicals mix, they combust, and explode. (…) When some elements come together, they create a reaction that can’t be reversed. They transcend chemistry.”
Dexter, Chemistry (episode 7, season 7)
Just because you don’t hear a sound doesn’t mean it’s not out there
“Our senses? Our senses are wrong a lot more often than they’re right. This has been proved in the laboratory. Don’t you know about all those theorems that say nothing is what it seems? There’s no past, present or future outside our own mind. The so-called laws of motion are a big hoax. Even sound can trick the mind. Just because you don’t hear a sound doesn’t mean it’s not out there. Dogs can hear it. Other animals. And I’m sure there are sounds even dogs can’t hear. But they exist in the air, in waves. Maybe they never stop. High, high, high-pitched. Coming from somewhere.”
White Noise, Don DeLillo.
Readings
• Technology and the novel, from Blake to Ballard [read]
Tom McCarthy, The Guardian, Saturday 24 July 2010
• El elogio de la sombra [leer]
Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
• Lenore #1-13
Roman Dirge
• Psychogeography [read]
Merlin Coverley
• Words Made Flesh. Code, Culture, Imagination [read]
Florian Cramer
• Jacques Attali, author of Noise (1977). Speaking at the ICA, London, May 2001 [read]
Bandwagon effect
“The bandwagon effect, closely related to opportunism, is a phenomenon —observed primarily within the fields of microeconomics, political science, and behaviorism— that people often do and believe things merely because many other people do and believe the same things. The effect is often called herd instinct, though strictly speaking, this effect is not a result of herd instinct. The bandwagon effect is the reason for the bandwagon fallacy’s success.”
Engram
“Engrams are a hypothetical means by which memory traces are stored as biophysical or biochemical changes in the brain (and other neural tissue) in response to external stimuli.
They are also sometimes thought of as a neural network or fragment of memory, sometimes using a hologram analogy to describe its action in light of results showing that memory appears not to be localized in the brain. The existence of engrams is posited by some scientific theories to explain the persistence of memory and how memories are stored in the brain. The existence of neurologically defined engrams is not significantly disputed, though their exact mechanism and location has been a focus of persistent research for many decades.”
Antennapedia
“Antennapedia is a HOM-C gene first discovered in Drosophila which controls the formation of legs during development. Loss-of-function mutations in the regulatory region of this gene result in the development of the second leg pair into ectopic antennae. By contrast gain-of-function alleles convert antenna into ectopic legs.
This is just one illustration of the tendency of organisms to exhibit variations on a theme, modulated repetition. Legs and antennae are related to one another as much as molars are to incisors, fingers are to toes, and arms are to legs.”
La herida únicamente puede curarse con la lanza que la hizo
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
Watchings
• Fringe, Seasons 1-2 (2008-2010)
J. J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci
• Человек с киноаппаратом / Man with a Movie Camera (1929) [watch]
Dziga Vertov
• Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly
• The Ghost Writer (2010)
Roman Polanski
• El Abecedario de Gilles Deleuze. A de Animal (1988) [watch]
• Some Like It Hot (1959)
Billy Wilder
• Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
Sidney Lumet
Arithmomania
Arithmomania is a mental disorder that may be seen as an expression of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Sufferers from this disorder have a strong need to count their actions or objects in their surroundings.
Sufferers may for instance feel compelled to count the steps while ascending or descending a flight of stairs or to count the number of letters in words. They often feel it is necessary to perform an action a certain number of times to prevent alleged calamities. Other examples include counting tiles on the floor or ceiling, the number of lines on the highway, or simply the number of times one breathes or blinks.
Arithmomania sometimes develops into a complex system in which the sufferer assigns values or numbers to people, objects and events in order to deduce their coherence.
(…)
Folklore concerning vampires often depicts them with arithmomania, such as a compulsion to count seeds or grains of rice. More lightheartedly, the muppet Count von Count from Sesame Street appears to be a fellow “sufferer”.
Campos electromagnéticos
“El cuerpo humano genera un campo electromagnético que se extiende alrededor de un metro hacia fuera, con un polo en la cabeza y el otro en el perineo.
(…)
El campo energético humano recibe la influencia directa de otros campos electromagnéticos naturales de todo tipo (como los del sol, la luna, los planetas y las estrellas, y también los del propio campo terrestre), y además se puede contaminar con los campos negativos producidos por cables de alta tensión y transformadores, aparatos eléctricos, torres de radiodifusión, construcciones con armazones metálicos, radiación de microondas y otras fuentes artificiales.
(…)
Ciertos tejidos humanos, sobre todo los huesos, los ligamentos y otros tejidos conectivos, presentan una estructura cristalina característica, con propiedades piezoeléctricas; esto significa que, igual que todos los cristales, ante un estímulo físico o una tensión producen una pulsación del campo electromagnético. Como estructuras cristalinas, los huesos sobre todo poseen la capacidad única de transformar la energía en onda vibratoria, como la luz, el sonido y la palpación física, en pulsaciones energéticas electromagnéticas que el sistema energético humano puede asimilar y utilizar. Esto explica, por ejemplo, que se pueda usar la energía sonora de un mantra o de la música para proporcionar energía al organismo humano y sanarlo. Las estructuras cristalinas del cuerpo absorben las vibraciones y las convierten en señales energéticas electromagnéticas que influyen directamente en el sistema energético humano.
(…)
En inglés, para decir que uno tiene un presentimiento se utiliza la expresión ‘sentirlo en los huesos’, lo cual es literalmente cierto para aquellos que han desarrollado una especial sensibilidad a las pulsaciones energéticas generadas en sus estructuras óseas cuando escuchan, por ejemplo, una música que los conmueve, o cualquier otro sonido dulce, o cuando experimentan pensamientos y emociones conmovedores, o están expuestos a fuertes vibraciones energéticas externas, porque todo esto produce poderosas ondas energéticas que los huesos recogen enseguida y transforman en pulsaciones electromagnéticas”.
Medicina tradicional china by Daniel Reid
Readings
• Sensational technologies [read]
Annet Dekker and Vivian van Saaze. Digital Creativity 2005, Vol. 16, No. 2.
• Speaking of Art as Embodied imagination: A Multisensory Approach to Understanding Aesthetic Experience
Annamma Joy and John F. Sherry, Jr. Journal of Consumer Research, Inc. Vol. 30, September 2003.
• The Aesthetics of Smelly Art
Larry Shiner and Yulia Kriskovets. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65:3 Summer 2007.
• (Re)Confirming the Conventions – An Ontology of the Olfactory [read]
Helen Paris.
Get lost!
…and today I’ve discovered the truth about something that I was suspecting from some time ago: Lost is not a contemporary intellectual science fiction tv series, it’s a christian soap opera…
No such thing as human nature
“Science has proven that there’s no such thing as “human nature”. Just as water takes the shape of its container, so human nature is relative to its past and present conditioning.”
Expended Cinema by Gene Youngblood
Never sure
“There is no more greater error in science than to believe that just because some mathematical calculation has been completed some aspect of nature is certain.”
Alfred North Whitehead