sugimoto’s history of history
hiroshi sugimoto has a show up at the japan socoety which i’ll wager money is an impressive one. it’s called a history of history. morgan meis of 3 quarks daily mused on the subject today, saying: His concern for history sometimes feels like a tribute to its struggle against time. But, then again, the mood of Sugimoto’s inquiry suggests that he is an observer from outside, peering at history from the vantage point of eternity. How else could he dare contend that he is producing a history of history. Such is the stuff of gods or extraterrestrials or brains in a vat. Indeed, a person could be forgiven for thinking that Sugimoto is one of Epicurus’ gods, surveying the course of history from the intermundus, the space between worlds, with a sublime indifference. if you are unfamiliar with sugimoto work see below for a sampling.
the images above span many years of sugimoto’s career collecting pieces from a slew of different series. there is the portrait series taken of wax dummies of historical figures. the theater series in which long exposure shots were taken of screens for the duration of a film’s showing. the Hall of Thirty Three Bays series made in a 13th Century Buddhist temple in Japan. the architecture series which consists of slightly out-of-focus monochrome prints of classic modern buildings. his seascapes series. his early museum dioramas series. as well as the more recent methematical forms and mechanical forms.
in my view sugimoto’s not only creates great images from everything he lays his eye on but he’s got the conceptual chops to match. seems he’s just that type of artist. home-run after home-run without pause. he’ll almost certainly be remembered as a master.
for more on him and his work try the following:
the art 21 page from pbs which includes slideshows and audio.
a bio and decent interview via eyestorm.
slow dissolve from the guardian.
some words about his portrait series.
and 18 pages of images from artnet.
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case 95
and now we continue with our series of case studies from psychopathia sexualis richard von krafft-ebinng’s 1886 catalog of all the sexual “perversions” fit to print. (see earlier cases 116, 225, 123, 98 / 99, and 88). i suppose it warrants mentioning for those of you just joining us that dr. krafft-ebinng, though certainly a trailblazer, was ultimately a man of his age. a summation of the book’s possition might be as follows: if your own tastes stretch beyond monogamous “missionary work” you are likely a tainted psycopath begotten by maniacs. if you also happen to be a woman… well, head directly to the assylum, do not pass go, do not even think about sexual fullfilment. i’ll get deeper into all that in a future installment. for now…
we bring you case 95 in which a gentleman named z struggles with a very “particular” fetish.
z, gentleman, family tainted. even in early childhood he always felt great sympathy with the lame and crippled. he used to limp about the room on two brooms in lieu of crutches or, when observed, go limping about the streets: at the same time, however, no sexual significance was coupled with the idea. gradually, the thought supervened that he would like “as a pretty lame child” to meet a pretty girl who would express sympathy for his affliction. sympathy from men he disdained. z was brought up in a rich man’s house by a private tutor, and claimed that up to his twentieth year he was unaware of the differences between sexes. his feelings were confined to the idea of being pitied by a pretty girl for being lame, or extending the same sympathy to a lame girl himself. gradually, erotic emotions associated themselves with this fantasy and at the age of twenty he succumbed to temptation and masturbated for the first time. from then on he practiced this act often. sexual neurasthenia supervened nd an irritable weakness took hold of him, to such an extent that the very sight of a girl with a halting gait induced ejaculation. when masturbating, or in his erotic dreams, the idea of the limping girls was always the controlling element. the personality of the limping girl was a matter of indifference to z, his interest being solely centered on the limping foot. he never had coitus with a girl thus afflicted. he never had the inclination for it and did not think he could be potent under the circumstances. his perverse fantasies revolved only around masturbating against the foot of a lame female. at times he anchored his hope on the thought that he might succeed in winning and marrying a chaste lame girl; that, because of his love for her, she would take pity on him and free him of his crime by “transferring his love from the sole of her foot to the root of her soul.” he sought deliverance in this thought. his present existence was one of untold misery.
happy story that. though if you change a few of the words here and there sounds like it could be any average 21st century guy-
the personality of the limping girl was a matter of indifference to z, his interest being solely centered on her (fill in blank).
see what i mean? just like a man aint it girls?
and now as a special bonus we present the related story of
case 96:
mr v, aged thirty, civil servant; parents neuropathic. from the age of seven he had, for many years, a lame girl of the same age as a playmate. at the age of twelve, nervously disposed and heterosexually inclined, the boy began to masturbate spontaneously. at that time puberty set in, and undoubtedly the first sexual emotions toward the other sex coincided with the sight of a lame girl. subsequently only limping women excited him sexually. his fetish was a pretty lady who, like the companion of his childhood, limped with the left foot. always heterosexual, but abnormally sensual, he promptly sought relations with the opposite sex, but was absolutely impotent with women who were not lame. virility and gratification were most strongly elicited if the prostitute limped with the left foot, but he was also successful if the lameness was on the right foot. due to his fetishism, the opportunities for coitus seldom occurred, so he resorted to masturbation, but found it a disgusting and miserable substitute. he sexual anomaly rendered him very unhappy, and he was often close to committing suicide, but regard for his parents prevented him. this moral affliction culminated in the desire for marriage with a sympathetic lame lady. unfortunately, because he could not love the soul of such a wife, but only her defect of lameness, he considered such a union a profanation of matrimony and an unbearable, ignoble existence. on this account he had often thought of resignation and castration.
poor mister v. the silly bastard. not too bright was he? any self respecting man would have married a nice girl then paid the carriage driver to run over her foot just before they made it to the honeymoon suite. castration? uh, i think not.
so there you have it folks. hope you enjoyed the oddly tame sexual deviancy. a bent left foot? if only it were so simple.
(btw that first thumb was taken from susan hagen’s wood carvings page.)
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turkey day after-action report
Like usual we trooped over to the in-laws for Thanksgiving. You go light on breakfast because you know you’ll be eating yourself into a stupor after noon. There were parades on the TV; wonder what it’d be like to live right next to the parade route? I bet that would be groovy, huh? But, anyway, once we were over there…
Took the dog with us (there were five dogs in all underfoot).
They get along so well…
Thanksgiving is a celebration of togetherness and race relations…
But some people try to drag religion into it.
The food was ***awesome!!!***
The centerpiece being, of course, that noble bird.
Lazily watched a bit of football…
Atlanta slaughtered Detroit 27 to 7.
But I didn’t care. Why would a stupid football game bother me? All in all, an excellent day, unless you’re an overworked stomach.
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the cloud appreciation society
manifesto of the day- quote: At the cloud appreciation society we believe that clouds are unjustly maligned and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them. We pledge to fight ‘blue-sky thinking’ wheresoever we find it. Life would be dull if we had to look up at monotonous blue every day. We acknowledge that the clouds are the most egalitarian of Nature’s displays since everyone has an equally fantastic view of them. We fear that they are so everyday as to be in danger of being overlooked. And so we seek to remind people that the clouds are expressions of the atmosphere’s moods that can be read like those of a person’s countenance. We’re in danger of becoming meteorologically autistic – of becoming ignorant of the meanings of these expressions. They are the Rorschach images of the sky, and if you consider the shapes you see in them you will save on psychoanalysis bills.
hey garfield! leave them kids alone.
to be honest i’m finding it hard to concentrate this morning. unlike most days where the reasons are mysterious and possibly myriad today the reason is all too obvious. it’s the thousands of people surging past my living room window, no more than 20 feet from where i’m sitting. you see i live half a block from the thanksgiving day parade. this in effect makes my front “yard” a parade ground. complete with balloons, strains of marching band horn sections, endlessly circling news helicopters, traffic barricades, signs which read “please have bags ready for inspection,” screaming parents, and of course, the cause for screaming parents everywhere, screaming children.
i’m sure this will shock no one but i am not fond of parades. i do not despise them. they do not fill me with an all consuming dread. they do not make me break out in cold-sweat covered hives. i’m not a card carrying member of parade destroyers national or anything like that. i have just never understood the appeal. now before you explain parades are meant for the children and cite the big balloon animals as evidence let me underscore the “never” in that last sentence. even as a child the parades appeal escaped me.
on television parades are dull, like watching an impossibly flamboyant bank line shuffle past toward an unseen teller window. in person parades are dull but also cold, loud, crowded, and if there are elephants or horses involved possibly stinky as well. the only upside i can imagine is that in person you are spared the explicitly spelled out product endorsements and other inane commentary by those most disgust worthy creatures the t.v. talking heads (i am actually a member of talking-head destroyers national as it happens. i’ll stem the tide of horse shit exiting your mouth katie couric if the the last thing i do! just try and stop me lauer!). ‘course i don’t need to actually attend the parade to avoid the broadcast pap i can simply leave the television off.
now an admission- as with many instances of going against the crowded cultural grain there is an undercurrent of regret in all the humbug. human nature i’ll assume. you see all the people, the pomp, etc ,and though you find yourself uninterested, even in many cases repulsed, you wonder what it is you lack, what failing you have, what fundamental flaw you hold within your breast which prevents you from joining in, from being apart of the “fun,” from actually enjoying that which everyone else seem to revel in. ah well.
that being said allow me a moment to giggle publicly at a small blessing fate provided. directly outside my window, unbeknownst to me, operatives of parade destroyers (or perhaps a troop of humbug elves) installed a child trap. they must have. because in the past two hours no less than 7 screaming children have tripped and taken a spill in the same exact spot directly in front of me! a flaw in the sidewalk or a thanksgiving miracle? haha. now now, you head shakers out there, none of them were hurt! i’m not a monster. but to hear the sudden silence accompanied by that “rug pulled out from under me” face… why it’s priceless.
well it seems that the tail end of the parade has finally made it past my street. the crowds are now surging in the opposite direction. strangely what comes to mind instantly is the video for pink floyd’s another brick in the wall. i find myself imagining a meat grinder just over the horizon with all the scarved and bundled parade zombies singing “we don’t need no inflated garfields…”
i spy with my mind’s eye…(pause for a bit of photoshopery)
there you go. the parade lovers among you are of course welcome to state your case in comments.
anyhow… now that the parade has ended i can relax again, look for something relevant to post, and say- happy thanksgiving.
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etchasketchathon etcetera
jake and dinos chapman have a new show up at the white cube gallery in london called like a dog returns to its vomit. as the title suggests it’s not new work as such, but rather the complete corpus of their revised etchings. hundreds of them. on the surface, which is to say to hear them and their work described, the chapman’s would seem primary candidates for the yawn treatment and yet more often than not i enjoy their work. perhaps it’s because, as a recent guardian article puts it, unusually in contemporary art, they have this thing called talent. see the work, hear what they’ve got to say, and decide for yourself.
a thanksgiving po-em.
So there it was, on the cover of the Journal of the American Medical Association magazine, a Jan Steen painting called “As the old ones sing, so the young ones pipe.” Steen is quite the genre painter, and his 17th century Holland is more Tarantino than Norman Rockwell. This, one of his more over-the-top efforts, moved me to poetry…
A Thanksgiving Poem,
by Tom Buckner.
It’s another festive thanksgiving
In our festive house
We’re all of us half in the bag
And mom is half out of her blouse.
Here’s the whole picture:
TheOldOnesSing.jpg
That’s Steen in the red hat, laughing his arse off, and for a few more of his hard-drinkin’, whore-gropin’, bar-fightin’ subjects, here ya go: Jan Steen Paintings
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adventures in nonism: asemic art
our name, the nonist, was originally (for our purposes) coined as a half joking, half serious, (all drunk no doubt) reaction to the chain rattling ghost of art past and the verbose zombie of art present. i for one had gotten tired of all the manifestos and texts i was expected to care about, all the explanations i was obliged to stay awake through, not to mention the boundaries which a knowledge of art history sneakily laid down. “been done.” “reminds me of so-and-so.” “that’s so passe!” simply put “isms” were a drag. who needed em? nonism was a way of saying fuck you politely. we were young and full of wine so what else would you expect?
the term was never used seriously but the sentiments it clumsily expressed remained a vital part of my opinions about art influencing not only my way of experiencing it but my method of creating it as well. there was a fairly simple main thrust- remaining willfully ignorant about certain things could, contrary to accepted wisdom, prove beneficial.
when looking at art i employed a simple mental algorithm. if a piece struck me, tickled me, wowed me, grabbed me, mystified me, etc, it was, to my mind, good. if a piece did not wow me and required a 40 minute lecture complete with schematic diagrams and interpretations by 6 leading critics to make an impact then it was bad art. simple as that. in my mind there were too many illustrated paragraphs out there masquerading as art with an explanation. some people love that stuff. i do not.
when creating art the imperative was simply to do whatever the hell i wanted, trends and art history be darned. it seemed too easy to trap yourself in an effort to be relevant and to do something new. those concerns are more than anything a way of imposing boundaries on oneself. life is too short to play those games. they say “those who don’t know the past are doomed to repeat it.” i’d say if history has proven anything it’s that even those who know it full well repeat it anyhow. and in terms of art why should i be denied a certain style or subject or method just because someone else already tread that ground a hundred years ago? what’s that got to do with me? sure i won’t become wealthy and world renowned but who says that’s why i create things?
anyhow this brings me to asemic art. when i was creating the pieces which now make up the archeography section i remember chatting with people excitedly, explaining what it was i was doing. i never once used the word asemic because until last week i’d never heard it.
and them’s the wages of “nonism” folks. for good or bad i built a small body of work without ever being aware of the tradition it followed, the category it fit in, or the name which so succinctly described it.
last week i came across a link to asemic magazine at coudal. it’s an unassuming little mag but it pretty quickly clued me in that what i’d been doing was best described as asemic.
tim gaze, creator of the mag (and asemic artist himself) offered this definition:
The word “asemic” means “having no semantic content”. Illegible writing or pretend writing could be described as asemic.
elsewhere he had this to say-
[Hand]writing does not just contain semantic information. It also contains aesthetic information (when seen as a shape or image) and emotional information (such as a graphologist would analyze.) Because it eliminates the semantic information, asemic writing brings the emotional and aesthetic content to the foreground. By contrast, e-mail is writing almost devoid of aesthetic and emotional content, apart from what the words contain. Asemic works play with our minds, enticing us to attempt to “read” them. Some asemic works make the viewer hover between “reading” (as a text) and “looking” (as a picture).
as it turns out the list of related artists and groups and styles is pretty lengthy. cobra, kruchonykh, zaum, georges mathieu, bryon gysin,tao magic diagrams, ulfert wilke, mirtha darmisache, ungolee, guy de cointet, antoni tàpies, mark tobey, lyrical abstraction, cy twombly just to skim the surface. really it’s just a matter of where you draw the line. (no pun)
i found it a bit ironic that i’d find my own interests allied so closely with cobra, practitioners of automatic drawing, inism, zaum, lettrisme, etc since they are manifesto lovers one and all. it seems to me though taken as a whole, this kind of work was done in so many era’s, in so many contexts, by members of vastly different artistic cultures, that perhaps all the fevered-artist revolutionary tracts used to rationalize it were not strictly necessary. course it’s art we’re talking about and what is?
anyhow i thought i’d offer up a gallery of related works. as it turns out many of the artists who did / are doing asemic art are very underrepresented on the net. there was almost no bryon gysin calligraphy for instance. how can that be? almost no Rachid Koraichi work… so i just did the best i could. see below.
one thing i find fascinating is that huge swaths of the world’s texts masquerade as asemic art. what i mean is that to me, islamic, chinese, and japanese calligraphy are all, through my own ignorance, without semantic content. as are hieroglyphs, aztec Logographs, and every other ancient writing system. and of course this is exactly the reason they inspire me. i can look over a korean man’s shoulder on the subway, glance at his newspaper, and be inspired. i’d say ignorance has a definite benefit in that respect.
if you happen to be an artist working in this vein and you’ve happened upon this post to be rudely awakened… “hey! you mean i’m not blazing a new trail? i’m not doing something new? i’m not necessarily a genius?” just think of it this way- your an artist, even at your worst you still know more about art than the average joe, you go to shows, you read histories, you’ve taken some classes most likely, so if
you are only now hearing about “asemic art” then i’d say it’s safe to assume there is still a lot of ground to be covered since those who came before didn’t make certain your aunt in trenton had a “deformed letter sequence” poster over her couch. either that or it’s a dead end. so long as your enjoying yourself.
lastly for those interested in this sort of thing i’d like to recommend dbqp: visualizing poetics a fine blog i’ve only just discovered which covers this turf well.
g’night and sweet dreams.
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differentiating between stupidities
chances are you’ve been calling other people stupid since you first discovered the existence of insults. it’s a natural extension of “no” that most popular word among the learning to speak crowd. “no” is a way of asserting power. insults take it to the next level by essentially saying “no” to the totality of another human’s being. anyhow not long after such zingers as doody-head and jerk-face began losing their potency you most likely began indiscriminately tossing about two old favorites- idiot and moron. what’s more i’m willing to bet those two have managed to stay dog-eared in your lexicon to this day. all of which is simply to say you’ve been calling people idiots and morons for a loooong time.
sure belittling the mental capacity of others is grand but do you ever think about the words you accomplish the task with?
i was thumbing through the latest issue of mental_floss magazine and came upon some specifics concerning these words which i thought id’ share with you, namely what the difference is between the two. quote:
in 1911, french psychologists alfred binet and theodore simon put the finishing touches on the first modern intelligence test, which calculated smarts based on weather children could accomplish tasks such as pointing to their noses and counting pennies. the concept of intelligence quotient and corresponding classification systems soon followed. any child with an i.q. above 70 was considered “normal” while kids with scores above 130 were considered “gifted.” to deal with children below 70, psychologists nomenclature of retardation. those with an i.q. between 51 and 50 were called “morons” and were categorized as having learning skills just good enough to complete menial tasks. “imbeciles” with an i.q. between 26 and 50, never progressed past a mental age of about 6. and the lowest were the “idiots,” those with an i.q. between 0 and 24, who were characterized by poor motor skills, extremely limited communication, and little response to most forms of stimuli.
evidently this “moron/imbecile/idiot” classification system remained in place until the 1970’s when people realized that the developmentally disabled have enough troubles without being called hurtful names. today these particular insults are only suitable for slinging at everyone else.
political correctness or no i think it’s safe to say that “idiot” and “moron” remain popular because calling other people stupid never goes out of style. does it? it seems almost a biological imperative practiced the world over. the list of synonymous insults for just this exact purpose, nimbly switched between for maximum effect by the more wordy of us, is long indeed:
nouns: ass, blockhead, boob, cretin, dimwit, dork, dumb ox, dumbbell, dunce, dunderhead, fool, halfwit, ignoramus, imbecile, jackass, jerk, meathead, mental defective, moron, nincompoop, ninny, nitwit, pinhead, simpleton, stupid, twit, yo-yo
adjectives: brainless, dazed, deficient, dense, dim, dodo, doltish, dopy, dotterel, dull, dumb, dummy, foolish, futile, gullible, half-baked, half-witted, idiotic, ill-advised, imbecilic, inane, insensate, laughable, loser, ludicrous, meaningless, mindless, moronic, naive, nonsensical, obtuse, pointless, puerile, senseless, simple, simple-minded, slow, sluggish, stolid, stupefied, thick, thickheaded, unintelligent, unthinking, witless… etc.
those are just out of the stodgy ol’ thesaurus, not even accounting for the billion variations being spat in office places, war-zones, on subways, and in living rooms which have not been made “official” as of yet.
so where do all the rest of these come from? well, i can’t possibly track down the history of all these words for one blog post but i’ll offer the etymology of a few-
ass
from Latin asinus, probably of Middle Eastern origin. Since ancient Greek times, in fables and parables, the animal typifies clumsiness and stupidity hence asshead, fist usage 1550.
blockhead
translation of the yiddish word zlob which lead to schlub which itself means worthless oaf.
cretin
1779, from french Alpine dialect crestin, “a dwarfed and deformed idiot,” from latin christianus “a Christian,” a generic term for “anyone,” but often with a sense of “poor fellow.”
ignoramus (mentioned here previously by member antonia)
1577, Anglo-French legal term, from latin ignoramus “we do not know,” first person present indicative of ignorare “not to know.” The legal term was one a grand jury could write on a bill when it considered the prosecution’s evidence insufficient. Sense of “ignorant person” came from the title role of George Ruggle’s 1615 play satirizing the ignorance of common lawyers.
jerk
1935, “tedious and ineffectual person,” American English carnival slang, perhaps from jerkwater town (1878), where a steam locomotive crew had to take on boiler water from a trough or a creek because there was no water tank. This led 1890s to an adj. use of jerk as “inferior, insignificant.” Probably also influenced by verb jerk off, slang for “perform male masturbation” (first recorded 1916). Jerk off as an emphatic form of jerk first attested 1968.
nincompoop
1676, nicompoop. Despite similarity to the latin legal phrase non compos mentis “insane, mentally incompetent” (1607), the connection is denied by etymologists because the earliest forms lack the second -n-. first element (nincom) may be a proper name. Nicodemus? which was used in French for “a fool,” or Nicholas.
lastly the story of the word dunce (also taken from mental_floss. quote:
dictionaries don’t play fair, and john duns scotus is proof. the 13th/14th century thinker, whose writings synthesized christian theology and aristotle’s philosophy, was considerably less dumb than a brick. unfortunately for scotus, subsequent theologians took a dim view of all those who championed his viewpoint. these “scotists,” “dunsmen,” or “dunses” were considered hairsplitting meatheads and, eventually, just “dunces.”
so there you have it. hopefully now you’ll be able to differentiate the stupidities which assail you just a bit more precisely, allowing you to choose the perfect insult. that ought to have you feeling even more superior as you spit your clever venom.
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design!
a team from the london college of communication has made my day. (thank you unnamed team members. heartily.) they have scanned and made available every issue of the u.k.‘s design magazine from 1965 - 1974 available online your your browsing, reading, (thieving, cough cough) and inspirational pleasure. and inspirational it is. 120 issues of champion style design folks, all fo free. and happily it’s not just a cover archive, every interior page is available and every article has been retyped and indexed for easy reading and searching. good stuff. now if someone would just get around to doing this for omni magazine all would be peaches and herbs. (via)
the secret history of the revolving door
The revolving door is most often thought of today, symbolically, in connection to various forms of workplace related dread. as cause of early morning pavlovian groans (christ! here I am again at this hell-hole) or as metaphoric short-hand for conflicts-of-interest, ethical oversight, and corruption. like snapshots from your last colonoscopy or a million dollar damien hirst painting the images conjured aint pretty. The revolving door was not always saddled with such negative connotations. There was a time when it was a symbol of modern man’s ingenuity, an artifact from our energized drive toward the future. Yet surprisingly, even in the glow of the revolving door’s youth, few people were aware of its true origins.
german door historians or “Türherstellers” will offer the following concerning the revolving door:
• H. Bockhacker of Berlin was granted German patent DE18349 on December 22, 1881 for “Thür ohne Luftzug” or “Door without draft of air.”
that’s about as far as their interest in the subject goes.
all the great door histories (like de grote geschiedenis van deuren and il glory dei portelli) mention Bockhacker but then shift focus to Theophilus Van Kannel, of Philadelphia who 7 years later was granted US patent 387,571 for a “Storm-Door Structure.” in many ways the story of the revolving door, known and forgotten, is really the story of Van Kannel.
commonly known facts about Van Kannel and his revolving door include:
• it is perfectly noiseless.
• it effectually prevents the entrance of, snow, rain or dust.
• it cannot be blown open by the wind.
• it excludes street noise.
• persons can pass both in and out at the same time.
• it prevents a direct path between the interior and exterior making it useful as a partial airlock to minimize heat loss from the building.
• it circumvents all that annoying “you first” “no you first” stuff.
• the world’s first revolving door was installed at Rector’s, a restaurant on Times Square in Manhattan, located on Broadway between West 43rd and 44th Streets in 1899.
largely forgotten facts about Van Kannel and his revolving door include:
• the original slogan for his door was “Always Closed.”
• it was marketed (in the victorian manner) as helping to avoid “noxious effluvia” and “baleful miasmas.” from a pamphlet put out by van kannel: It will save life, by preventing those deadly lung and throat diseases which are sure to overtake the unfortunate salesman, cashier or clerk whose duty keeps him near the constantly opening front door.
• van kannel was an irritable sort. in response to the customary reaction to his door he had this to say: ‘Just like a turn-stile,’ so say nine out of ten persons who first see it. As well may we say a tea-kettle is like a locomotive boiler.”
• van kannel originally intended his invention to be installed not only in public buildings but in private homes as well.
which brings us to the crux of things-
that van kannel’s invention turned out to be useful, in the ways we consider it to be so today, is something of a happy accident. that’s not to say van kennel didn’t have a purpose in mind, he spent years perfecting his idea after all, but if you run down the list of its supposed benefits you won’t come upon the intended one.
more than anything the world owes the invention of the revolving door to revenge.
it seems that when van kennel was a boy, still in the care of his mother but just on the cusp of cultural manhood, he found the rules of chivalry bothersome. in particular he refused to accept that he was expected to open the door for women and allow them to cross the threshold before him. a silly sort of quirk certainly but it was taken seriously enough by his mother that she eventually felt compelled to take action. family histories have it that at some point in his twelfth year she administered a bare bottomed spanking, during a salon in the family drawing room, in full view of 37 local mothers and daughters.
this very public shaming over matters of chivalry stuck with van kannel (no wonder- “spankophilus” being a whisper that seemed to follow his steps everywhere) and embittered him further toward the gentlemanly behavior society required.
had this been the only episode the world may have never had a revolving door to shuffle through. as it so happens, however, theophilus van kennel married a woman, who though beautiful and clever had an odd quirk of her own. young abigail van kennel refused to pass from one room of their apartments to another without the assistance of theophilus. she was willing to make many concessions to the new modern ways but her mother had taught her to take matters of chivalry very seriously indeed. “it is the measure of a man!” she’d said “not his inseam!”
theophilus had once tried to put his foot down over the matter, telling his wife one morning, “all this opening doors twaddle just will not do! i can not be rushing around my own home to usher you from room to room!” but he returned home in the evening to find abigail sitting defiantly just inside the bedroom door, right where he’d left her.
after this bit of cruelty on fates part became evident van kennel devoted his full focus to finding some way to sidestep this rule of chivalry or even perhaps create cause for a revision of the rules. he eventually found his answer in what we now call the revolving door.
you see the revolving door was not designed not to keep out snow, or to minimize heat loss, though it does both, but it was designed specifically so that whomever enters the door first is obliged to do all the pushing. so in point of fact, in th erevolving door’s case it would actually be most chivalrous for the man to proceed through the door first. he assumed people would rocognize this and presto- no more door holding! if of course tradition proved irrationally tenacious, as it traditionally did, at the very least the act of obliging women first passage would forever after be obliging them to open the door for you! a sneaky win / win proposition which was tremendously satisfying for such as he.
his own home, as well as the home of his mother, were outfitted with the first 14 revolving doors ever assembled.
in the years that followed, after his invention had taken root, though the rules of chivalry showed no sign of adapting, this little loophole in chivalry amused him to no end. he imagined all the women all over new york, being ushered dutifully into revolving doors by browbeaten sons and husbands “no, no, after you my dear!”
and
that my friends is the true, very nearly forgotten, secret history of the revolving door.
note: all factual bits are from James Buzard’s piece perpetual revolution while all exceptionally silly untruths are my own. i’ll leave it to you to sort out which is which.
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running the circus from the monkey cage
h.l. mencken had a lot to say. he was an extremely quotable fellow. for instance: democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage. course just about anyone is good for at least one quote and quotes themselves, as a general rule, though often pithy and clever, don’t usually offer enough meat for a good teeth sinking. luckily in mencken’s case he not only let fly some memorable one liners (not quite as many as o.wilde or d.parker perhaps though certainly more than say… marcel marceaux) but he also set down a metric ton of paragraphs which expound on his eensy-weensy witticisms. so why is democracy like a monkey running the circus from his cage you ask? as answer i offer last words from 1926
I have alluded somewhat vaguely to the merits of democracy. One of them is quite obvious: it is, perhaps, the most charming form of government ever devised by man. The reason is not far to seek. It is based upon propositions that are palpably not true and what is not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true. Truth has a harshness that alarms them, and an air of finality that collides with their incurable romanticism. They turn, in all the great emergencies of life, to the ancient promises, transparently false but immensely comforting, and of all those ancient promises there is none more comforting than the one to the effect that the lowly shall inherit the earth. It is at the bottom of the dominant religious system of the modern world, and it is at the bottom of the dominant political system. The latter, which is democracy, gives it an even higher credit and authority than the former, which is Christianity. More, democracy gives it a certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth. The mob man, functioning as citizen, gets a feeling that he is really important to the world - that he is genuinely running things. Out of his maudlin herding after rogues and mountebanks there comes to him a sense of vast and mysterious powerówhich is what makes archbishops, police sergeants, the grand goblins of the Ku Klux and other such magnificoes happy. And out of it there comes, too, a conviction that he is somehow wise, that his views are taken seriously by his betters - which is what makes United States Senators, fortune tellers and Young Intellectuals happy. Finally, there comes out of it a glowing consciousness of a high duty triumphantly done which is what makes hangmen and husbands happy.
All these forms of happiness, of course, are illusory. They don’t last. The democrat, leaping into the air to flap his wings and praise God, is for ever coming down with a thump. The seeds of his disaster, as I have shown, lie in his own stupidity: he can never get rid of the naive delusion - so beautifully Christian - that happiness is something to be got by taking it away from the other fellow. But there are seeds, too, in the very nature of things: a promise, after all, is only a promise, even when it is supported by divine revelation, and the chances against its fulfillment may be put into a depressing mathematical formula. Here the irony that lies under all human aspiration shows itself: the quest for happiness, as always, brings only unhappiness in the end. But saying that is merely saying that the true charm of democracy is not for the democrat but for the spectator. That spectator, it seems to me, is favoured with a show of the first cut and calibre. Try to imagine anything more heroically absurd! What grotesque false pretenses! What a parade of obvious imbecilities! What a welter of fraud! But is fraud unamusing? Then I retire forthwith as a psychologist. The fraud of democracy, I contend, is more amusing than any other, more amusing even, and by miles, than the fraud of religion. Go into your praying-chamber and give sober thought to any of the more characteristic democratic inventions: say, Law Enforcement. Or to any of the typical democratic prophets: say, the late Archangel Bryan. If you don’t come out paled and palsied by mirth then you will not laugh on the Last Day itself, when Presbyterians step out of the grave like chicks from the egg, and wings blossom from their scapulae, and they leap into interstellar space with roars of joy.
I have spoken hitherto of the possibility that democracy may be a self-limiting disease, like measles. It is, perhaps, something more: it is self-devouring. One cannot observe it objectively without being impressed by its curious distrust of itselfóits apparently ineradicable tendency to abandon its whole philosophy at the first sign of strain. I need not point to what happens invariably in democratic states when the national safety is menaced. All the great tribunes of democracy, on such occasions, convert themselves, by a process as simple as taking a deep breath, into despots of an almost fabulous ferocity. Lincoln, Roosevelt and Wilson come instantly to mind: Jackson and Cleveland are in the background, waiting to be recalled. Nor is this process confined to times of alarm and terror: it is going on day in and day out. Democracy always seems bent upon killing the thing it theoretically loves. I have rehearsed some of its operations against liberty, the very cornerstone of its political metaphysic. It not only wars upon the thing itself; it even wars upon mere academic advocacy of it. I offer the spectacle of Americans jailed for reading the Bill of Rights as perhaps the most gaudily humorous ever witnessed in the modern world. Try to imagine monarchy jailing subjects for maintaining the divine right of Kings! Or Christianity damning a believer for arguing that Jesus Christ was the Son of God! This last, perhaps, has been done: anything is possible in that direction. But under democracy the remotest and most fantastic possibility is a common-place of every day. All the axioms resolve themselves into thundering paradoxes, many amounting to downright contradictions in terms. The mob is competent to rule the rest of usóbut it must be rigorously policed itself. There is a government, not of men, but of laws - but men are set upon benches to decide finally what the law is and may be. The highest function of the citizen is to serve the state - but the first assumption that meets him, when he essays to discharge it, is an assumption of his disingenuousness and dishonour. Is that assumption commonly sound? Then the farce only grows the more glorious.
I confess, for my part, that it greatly delights me. I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down. Is it inordinately wasteful, extravagant, dishonest? Then so is every other form of government: all alike are enemies to laborious and virtuous men. Is rascality at the very heart of it? Well, we have borne that rascality since 1776, and continue to survive. In the long run, it may turn out that rascality is necessary to human government, and even to civilization itself - that civilization, at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle. I do not know: I report only that when the suckers are running well the spectacle is infinitely exhilarating. But I am, it may be, a somewhat malicious man: my sympathies, when it comes to suckers, tend to be coy. What I can’t make out is how any man can believe in democracy who feels for and with them, and is pained when they are debauched and made a show of. How can any man be a democrat who is sincerely a democrat?
-h.l. menken
found via the the h.l. mencken page
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the myth of ironus
and I could feel the rumblings of ironus in his endless torment, his prodigious surface area being pushed upward by two revoltingly soft human hands. With all his power he tried to embrace gravity, to become heavier and denser, to resist the human’s force and return to the valley floor. just as it seemed he could summon no more weight the pitiless human would lose his grip and ironus would come thundering down again on to the plain, triumphant! but not so. each and every time the human would return laying those soft hands upon him and begin forcing him up the hill again, and the sweat which ran off him and the steam which rose after him wet ironus’ surface and seeped into his tiny cracks and fissures…
that is a section from a well known account of the myth of ironus about an iron ore boulder who was punished by the gods. as the story goes, ironus was a proud boulder, so proud as to be cruel and even blasphemous. you see he was a grecian rock. and in greece it was none too common to find a huge mass of iron ore just lying there. greece was limestone country. no chalk, calcarenite, coquina, or travertine could remember how ironus came to rest there among their layers but everyrock counted the forgotten day of his arrival as a bad one.
rocks are a steady, solid folk. they do what they do well and are very nearly single minded about it, reason being rocks are extremely devout. any god would count himself lucky to have a world full of rocks as his worshippers. now though rocks would be hard pressed to deny that there is an entire pantheon of gods at work out there, shaping the universe, getting up to their mischief, the truth is rocks are near monothiestic in practice. sure they’ll embrace one of death’s trinkets if asked and bow to fire if they must, no reason to start trouble, but above all other gods the rocks adore gravity. they would follow gravity anywhere.
this brings us to ironus. he was a big, heavy, maganese rich lump of iron ore who had not moved an inch or been eroded a millimeter for as long as anyrock could remember. he just sat there, which would be very admirable, had he just done so quietly. instead ironus continually taunted the limestones around him-
“you weakling limestones will erode to nothing and i’ll still be here! you will be broken down bit by bit until your so small a weak little draft could blow you away. some tribute to gravity that will be! you’ll become tiny grains of sand getting dragged here and there by the tides moving about in solution for eternity! haha. you’ll end up weightless bits of dust, continually blown about. you’ll probably spend most of your time up in a cloud somewhere praying a raindrop will form around you so you can feel gravity again. pathetic limestones! look at me, i’m as heavy and massive and motionless as i ever was. why you’re barely true rocks at all!”
now that was pretty cruel. it was not the limestones’ fault after all that they’d erode long before that most glorious day of days, the day they were waiting for, when gravity would take it’s rightful place as the king of all gods, compressing everyrock and everything into itself. fire would no longer melt them, water would no longer wear them down! huzzah! there were legends among the rocks of places where gravity was so strong not even fleet footed light could escape him! they’d be reunited with every one of their lost particles. they’d be whole again. all things crushed into an impossibly dense point under gravity! heaven. every limestone new it’d most likely only make it there as disparate particles spread far and wide or worse as microscopic passengers clinging to the bones of some disgusting animal. ironus took every chance to remind them of this.
cruelty in and of itself is hardly a punishable offense where the gods are concerned. it would be ridiculously hypocritical considering all the cruelty they’ve been known engage in. but it so happened that one day in a fit of self congratulation ironus crossed the line. some humans had been by chipping at the limestones with little sticks. he taunted them and when they seemed to take no notice he began again taunting the limestones-
“ah look how easily you are chipped and pulverized! you pathetic collections of sediment. see how the soft ones don’t dare approach me! they sense my power. they can feel the gravity on me. they are scared! they know i am too strong. take heed little limestones! i am gravity incarnate! mysterious and vast and eternal. when the great crush comes it will be me floating here in space an impossible density with a spiraling galaxy spinning around me!
well at this gravity had heard enough. cruelty is one thing but putting oneself on equal footing with a god and shouting it to anyrock within sensing distance, well that was another. that was hubris of the worst kind. gravity contrived to have a small earthquake occur and used it’s shaking and shifting pomp to draw the big mouthed ironus into the underworld, surrounding limestones, humans with sticks and all. such was his annoyance.
it is said that as punishment gravity sentenced ironus to an eternity of being rolled up a hill. each day a small soft human would move him from his resting place, violate his claim to gravity, and push him further and further from the plain and up the hillside. if ironus gave in and allowed the puny human to move him he’d go over the hill’s peak and in a great rumbling roll be accepted again into gravity’s bosom. if he allowed himself to be pushed he’d be invited to rest unmolested forever in the valley on the other side of the mountain. but gravity knew what a prideful creature ironus was, knew that his ego would never allow him to perceive this means of release, and knew that day after day he would resist. and each day he did resist. did all he could to lower his center of gravity, to shift and slide from the human’s wet pink hands.
ironus, weighty and massive though he was, could never lay claim to any sort of intelligence. every day the human began again unperturbed and every day ironus struggled against him all the while being acted upon by friction and moisture from the man’s toil. each day he resisted and each day he eroded a little bit more. gravity knew full well this chunk of ore would resist until he found himself in a cloud, a microscopic dust particle, praying for rain.
and it was so.
turns out the great poignant myth of sisyphus was in fact somewhat misconstrued by we humans. it was ironus who was being punished. but after countless millennia of toil poor sisyphus simply switched to another rock and kept on going.
for some interesting related reading on the great story of sisyphus check out the following:
the basic myth from mythweb.
the myth of sisyphus by alber camus.
the absurd hero a reaction to camus’ famous essay.
the myth of sisyphus: a cycle by samanera bodhesako.
sisyphus, in his own words as posted to kiro5hin by one “friedrich dionysus.”
and here’s the section of homer’s odyssey which contains the text from which the first paragraphed was based. (4th paragraph from the bottom)
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luca brazzi sends his greetings from the fishes
Am I funny? Funny how? Do I amuse you? Am I a clown for your fuckin’ entertainment? Just what the fuck is so amusing? Oh, the greeting cards? You wanna see the fuckin’ greeting cards? Like if the family had its own line of fuckin’ greeting cards, what would they say? All right, all right, wise guy, here they are, and I hope ya fuckin’ choke on ‘em!
Front: So I hear you’re not feelin’ so fuckin’ good…
Inside: I hope your fuckin’ malady disappears like Johnny Two Fingers after he done that thing he shoulda never fuckin’ done, about which I know nothin’ about.
Congratulations on your kid graduatin’ college…
I would sure like to know what college let that little retard pass. No, really, I’d like to know. Because my nephew, he makes your kid look like a fuckin’ supercomputer, and he gotta learn an honest trade, ‘cause I ain’t lettin’ that mouth-breathin fucknut anywhere near my business.
Merry Fuckin’ Christmas!
My gift to you is although you still owe me ninety large, you got until the twenty-sixth before I break your fuckin’ knees and burn down that shithouse you call a diner.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Massacre. Valentine’s Day Massacre, get it? I seen that on the History Channel. It was fuckin’ sweet. Brains all over the fuckin’ place.
You got laid? Way to fuckin’ go!
Unless you’re my sister, in which case this will fuckin’ kill our mother, and he’s a dead man.
My regards on your birthday.
And best wishes that you should get a severe case of bad fuckin’ memory in front of the grand jury if you wanna see any more goddam birthdays.
My condolences on your truck gettin’ hijacked with all them IPods and Blackberries…
By the sheerest fuckin’ coincidence, I have recently acquired a supply of these highly coveted items that I can let you have for a very good price.
Welcome to Your New Home!
Bet you thought we couldn’t find you out here in Shitlick, Montana, eh, stugots? Now let’s go for a little walk in the woods…
You have a new baby! We’re so happy for you!
It was nice doin’ business with you, and if you want any more: just call Scarabino’s Fish Market, ask about the ‘live imported minnows,’ and small unmarked bills, please.
Happy New Year’s! Happy Fourth of July! Happy Chinese New Year!
‘Cause any fuckin’ holiday that people don’t fuckin’ notice no gunshots is a happy day, know what I mean?
My Condolences On The Loss Of Your Loved One.
It is always tragical when an untimely demise comes to one who was skimming fifteen percent, but he was askin’ for it, the rat bastard.
So sorry to hear you unexpectedly lost the big title fight!
Cheer up, ya big palooka, these fine engraved portraits of President Benjamin Franklin will make you forget all about losing the match, just like I told ya they would.
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meatyard the primitive
the facts, culled from the encyclopedia of photography: ralph eugene meatyard did not begin to photograph until 1950. he made his living as an optician photographing mostly on weekends. he was a “sunday photographer” who exhibited with Ansel Adams, Aaron Siskind and workshopped with Minor White. his photographs present a world of somnambulistic mystery, a realm of disquieting intimations. Children appear as masked figures in decrepit rooms, enacting inscrutable dramas or charades. In every image there is something askew. his work was often accompanied by written texts. he was an avid reader, deeply influenced by modernist literature, especially Pound, Stein, and William Carlos Williams. He died in kentucky in 1972.
an opinion from Contemporary Photographers, St James Press, 1985:
He was a good-looking man with a mildly saturnine air and an unexpected history of ill-health. He never spoke of such troubles, or said a word about his photographs. But, he’d happily show you 200 new prints in the family parlor if you asked him. He had a pretty wife and three kids. He worked as an optician, grinding lenses, and had a company called “Eyeglasses of Kentucky” in a little shopping center. Just an ordinary guy. Like Franz Schubert or Henry James, he could make the “ordinary” scare you to death or sing like a bird.
Gene’s reading was all over the ballpark but his attentions were very honed down. If you wrote poetry, he read it- there are few people like that on the planet. He seemed thoroughly at ease in Blue-Glass Limbo. A rube he wasn’t. He rode quietly around in “The Strange,” like city folks used to ride out to “The Country.”
concerning the posthumous embrace of postmodernism, from mario cutajar:
The basis for this induction of Meatyard into the postmodernist pantheon is the blatant theatricality of his staged images, and his quite evident disdain for the objectivity of photography. That these qualities distinguish his work from that of his anti-pictorialist contemporaries (Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and other proponents of “pure” photography) is unquestionable. But there are other qualities (or lack of) in Meatyard’s work that make it equally resistant to postmodernist affiliation. For one thing, it is neither ideologically motivated nor self-consciously subversive. It is not constrained by the petty resentments of identity politics. It is free of both smarty pants irony and the cheap, cultivated anomie of the unattached (Meatyard was a family man). It is personal in the way personal used to mean before Americans started to flock to talk shows to compete at being freaks.
The images he is justly renowned for (among 25 on display) are the ones of children and adults wearing dime-store Halloween masks. The device is so transparent that part of the pictures’ intrigue is why they work at all. They do because of Meatyard’s eye for setting and pose, because of his ability to extract startling black-and-white contrasts from the silver-rich photographic paper he used (contrasts that create amorphous voids out of which the masked figures materialize like apparitions), but just as importantly because Meatyard never tried to disguise his artifice. Later on toward the premature end of his life when he shot the Lucybelle Crater series, he even dispensed with the murky backgrounds and relied entirely on the transgressive impact of his masked figures nonchalantly inhabiting the daylit world like regular folk—as if they belonged.
from the horse’s mouth (via scheinbaum & Russek LTD):
Meatyard once wrote: “I work in several different groups of pictures which act on and with each other—ranging from several abstracted manners to a form for the surreal. I have been called a preacher—but, in reality, I’m more generally philosophical. I have never made an abstracted photograph without content. An educated background in Zen influences all of my photographs. It has been said that my work resembles, more closely than any photographer, ‘Le Douanier’ Rousseau—working in a fairly isolated area and feeding mostly on myself—I feel that I am a “primitive photographer.”
my opinion? creepy, poetic, disconcerting, silly, weird, and beautiful, in context of its time or out. also quite possibly the greatest surname in the history of the arts.
for more check out the george eastman house still photograph archive, the masters of photography site, the village voice, and artnet. hope you enjoyed.
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the last frontier of tourism
new meandering content at monochrom. quote: space tourism bends the whole scientific mission of space conquest, and hurls in your face- the fact that exploration missions were always political missions, with the flag waving under zero gravitation, giving it the appearance of flying in the inexistent breeze. We could say we always behaved like tourists, staying speechless in front of space missions, like a couple of idiotic tour-travellers. All the data, the mission details, when and if we understood trickled down to this - why the yoyo doesn’t spin on the end of the loop in zero gravity or how sex is going to affect space crews on long, intimate, and ultimately boring missions…
the building blocks of a new intelligence?
From new scientist, quote: the infant crawls across a floor strewn with blocks, grabbing and tasting as it goes, its malleable mind impressionable and hungry to learn. it is already adapting, discovering that striped blocks are yummy and spotted ones taste bad. Its exploration is driven by instincts: an interest in bright objects, a predilection for tasting things, and an innate notion of what tastes good. This is how babies explore the world and discover that pink, perky objects exist, and that they produce milk. Hands-on exploration moulds their billions of untrained brain cells into a fully functioning brain…
so begins an interesting story i came across today in new scientist and allusions to perky nipples aside it’s not about biology per se. This particular curious baby isn’t a quivering dollop of lovable milk-fat it’s a trash-can shaped robot a with a mere 20,000 brain cells to call it’s own. it’s a bit more complex than an EG-6 “Gonk” but not quite a FX-7... as far as trash-can esthetics go. its name is darwin 7, another in a line of bots being tinkered with at the neurosciences institute (NSI) in la jolla, california. humble though their looks and brain cell count may be these darwin bots (and their cousins) are pretty fascinating.
here take a gander-
what sets darwin 7 and his kin apart from the gazillion other robotic projects out there is the philosophy behind their a.i. Essentially the focus is on emulating both the structure and the function of living brains in detail, using a neural-style of processing in combination with robotic movement rather than the elaborately modeled systems most common for the last couple of decades.
quote: The key to Darwin’s abilities is its brain. This is an amalgam of rat and ape brains, encoded in a computer program that controls its actions. Darwin tastes blocks by grabbing them with its metal jaws to see if they produce electricity. It likes the ones that do and dislikes the ones that don’t. Within half an hour of being switched on it learned to find the tasty blocks and has managed to master the abilities of a 18-month-old baby - a pretty impressive feat for a machine.
robots like Darwin might one day be seen as the ancestors of something much bigger. Some researchers, and even the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, are gambling that robots like Darwin will be the forebears of an entirely new approach to artificial intelligence: building intelligent machines by copying the structures of living brains.
The dream is that these new brains, embedded in robotic bodies of silicon and steel, will go to a level beyond today’s artificial intelligence systems. By sensing their environments as they explore and learn, they will develop the ability to survive in the constantly changing real world of imperfect information that we navigate so effortlessly, but which computers have yet to master. They will learn to do anything from mundane household chores we’d rather not do, to driving the kids to school, and even autonomously explore Mars or run nuclear waste facilities, all without human intervention. All you would have to do is teach them.
(click thumb for larger version) it may sound like the same ol’ thing, neural nets, etc, but in fact it’s different in a key aspect. these bots are not programmed by instructions like most computer a.i. systems, but instead, like biological systems, they operate according to selectional principles that allow them to adapt to the environment. in this way they form categorical memory, associate these categories with innate value, and adapt. in a certain sense they are more akin to automata than typical robots- simple instructions leading to complex behavior. Most A.I. robots of the past two decades use elaborate modeling systems to describe the real world around them, but these types of a.i. have tend to fail at simple “common-sense” tasks. To make them function, programmers have to tackle the monumental task of anticipating all the likely objects in a robot’s environment and how they might change. the neural robots learn for themselves, develop appetites through conditioning (eventually showing neural “recognition” of these appetites by sight of desired objects alone!) and interestingly continually activate different neural connections to achieve the same task.
quote: Similar to biological organisms, different Darwin VII subjects (i.e. instantiations of the simulated nervous system with slight variations in initial conditions) and cloned Darwin VII subjects with different experiences never displayed identical patterns of neural activity, even during repetitions of the same behavior. However, the adaptive behaviors tend to remain similar. In this respect, Darwin VII is an example of a degenerate system: different circuits and dynamics can yield similar behavior. Degeneracy is a ubiquitous property of biological systems and is necessary for natural selection.
the adaptive, flexible behavior these early “brain-based” systems seem to be exhibiting, which traditional neural nets do not, makes you wonder wether this is the avenue which might eventually lead to true machine intelligence or even sentience? not a fast track to the singularity i wouldn’t think in that “brain-based” robot systems are limited to our own understanding of the real -biological- deal, and it just so happens the brain remains one of the least understood gadgets going.
as with all such stories its import is by no means clear yet. interesting in any case.
the new scientist piece is subscription only but if you’d like to read some more on the subject the (extremely) technical aspects are covered in detail at oxford’s cerebral cortex journal.
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