RE: [-empyre-] December 2005 on -empyre- Art and Cognition

["Dirk Vekemans" <dv@vilt.net>]

 "The evolution of Loligo vulgaris shows that it moved from the
calcareous-shelled mollusc stage to a translucent communicative state after
consuming its own shell."
(Louis Bec in Squids, Elements of Technozoosemiotics @
http://framework.v2.nl/archive/archive/node/text/default.xslt/nodenr-70091)


Hi there, 

A warm welcome to my mailbox to you and the other distinguished guests on
this months topic. 
I started this note with another Bec quote a bit jokingly because what i
wanted to ask was could you please have a bite of your own shell and direct
us poor artists to some uptodate resources that you think are essential to
an understanding of this months discussion? Now i know discussing art and
cognition is never gonna be easy, but i think many empyrians might feel more
comfty if we had something to fall back on in case you all suddenly plug in
your cephalopods and start diving to OML levels. After all, it's december
and we all have this Santa Claus business taking big chunks out of this
months processing quota.

For instance, i find your introduction of the theme a bit problematic : from
my own fabulatory hypocrisics running wild in my Cathedral and some research
i did in preparing it, i was inclined to believe that there might also be a
field within cognitive science dealing with the cognition of art (having
art-sensing as its object, the perception of art-as-art)and most of us will
have witnesses discoveries from cognitive science finding its way as an
inspiration, building blocks, or even as live streaming resources within the
art practice of outstanding contemporary artists, but i could only fully
relate to the texts quoted here after having a glance at Bec's essay in the
V2 archives. There i could actually witness the process at work, how "the
cognitive sciences [come to function as ] a creative well-spring, a take-off
point for the imagination" and how new artistic dimensions could be
introduced. If we know you're talking 'squid', we can talk squid ar at least
grab a tentacle or two.

So squid-wise, i totally agree any dichotomy should be avoided, that
<unsquid> "Art and cognition" is somehow an incorrect starting point
</unsquid> and that the study of cognition and the practice of art can
nowadays be seen as tightly knotted processes that are subject to the same
amount of acceleration in the historic momentum.

Beyond that i believe a further transvergence is (urgently) needed because
both art and science need it to cope with the matters at hand. Artists need
it to better understand (appercept) their art and how to keep it less
infected and more infectuous. As for scientists my thread runs dry quickly,
so i can only dubiously infer they need it to recover fast from an age in
which their own successes have lead to an arrestive global faith in disaster
containment that disables those very scientist to adequately communicate the
proven fictional status of such faith. 

As a Builder of Sorts i engaged in an idiosyncratic attempt at artistic
research on how to instantiate poetic processes, that is <de-Cathedralised>,
how to use my very private, obscure knowledge of my idem dito world to
firmly establish how a creative process can yield instances of poetic
awareness, to get to some (re)usable code of the damn thing.  Other artist
are more succesful, in perhaps less explicit attempts, but the same drive is
present in anything of value, imho. Because i think all true artists share
the belief that it might help to try 'n get to the bottom of what Vilayanur
S. Ramachandran so eloquently denoted with the Sanskrit term 'rasa' in his
essay 'The neurological basis od artistic universals' available @
http://www.interdisciplines.org/artcog/papers/9 : 
"Capturing the very essence, the very spirit of something, in order to evoke
a specific mood or emotion in the viewer?s brain". 

What i've learned so far is very little but the one thing i'm sure of is
that instead of demystifying or disintegrating the halo of art as we might
conceive it through our culturally defined perspectives, infusing the art
process with some scientific method and offsetting the reality of its daily
routine against such popular fabrications as the cult author endowed with
genius or the ant worker engaged in a global community, in other words; just
looking at the facts, at what is the case in ongoing creativity, what can be
scientifically assessed, well it only makes the art come out more shining
when it does,  a rare (extremely rare in my case) occasional purity with the
humble author as an incidental part in the process of producing it.

Art,it seems, is a tale wanting to get told, and yours, i believe, is an
urgent one, so please, never mind this and continue. I'm looking forward to
close reading yet another month's worth of empyrian quality discussion and i
thank the empyre people warmly for enabling it. 

Best wishes,

dv @ Neue Kathedrale des erotischen Elends
http://www.vilt.net/nkdee



> -----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
> Van: empyre-bounces@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au 
> [mailto:empyre-bounces@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] Namens Raquel Renno
> Verzonden: vrijdag 2 december 2005 7:42
> Aan: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> Onderwerp: [-empyre-] December 2005 on -empyre- Art and Cognition
> 
> Art and cognition
> 
> 
> There are many approaches to the art and cognition theme that 
> we hope that will take place according to the different 
> points-of-view of the guests (Luigi Pagliarini, David 
> Cuartielles, Andy Gracie and Raquel Paricio) and empyre 
> members. The approach initially proposed here refers to a 
> searching for new ways of representation and creation in 
> digital technologies. It is important to leave the real 
> (science) vs imaginary (art) dichotomy for another one that 
> provides for art and cognitives sciences as a whole. 
> Understanding the relation between art and cognition does not 
> take place by means of dichotomies, but by means of elements 
> in a state of constant tension of a kind which does not tend 
> towards the equilibrium. Sometimes, it?s a question of 
> finding a generative model more than the appearance of the 
> thing. This is valid in the translation of physical phenomena 
> as well as in the realm of the symbolic.
> The work developed by Louis Bec during the last decades is 
> one of the important contributions in this discussion. His 
> project Arapuca, explores the potentialities of water as a 
> way to transmit information. Some electric impulses from a 
> electric fish are captured, digitalized and transformed in 
> database that are reinterpreted by a Puredata programming 
> that creates sound and image, receiving, information from a 
> user. This? a back and forth system relating 
> fish/machine/man. Another part of the project connects two 
> electric fish of different families to communicate from the 
> digitalisation of the data. Upokrinomenologic Aberrations, on 
> the other hand, explore the creation of imaginary living 
> creatures, through the distortion of some laws of the medium 
> where a ?real? animal lives:
> 
> ?The Upokrinomenologic Aberrations project finds its process 
> through an alternative to the Artificial Life. Until now, 
> several researches have been trying to reproduce artificial 
> conditions of life, which resemble it, through the modelling 
> of cellular automatons, genetic algorithms, collective 
> intelligence, dynamic morphogenesis, robotic, without 
> nevertheless being able to escape the biomimetic conditions 
> of the earthbound surrounding.
> Beginning with the inherent laws of a defined reality, it 
> becomes possible to model non trivial situations, in which 
> the multiple activities of the living can develop according 
> to twisted parameters, over the frequent adaptive and 
> co-adaptive situations. Factors like gravity, pressure, 
> temperature, humidity, viscosity, density, luminance... by 
> modulating, crossing, interconnecting, twisting their 
> parameters, can become operators producing deciding 
> consequences on the morphogenesis, the behaviors, the 
> technozoosemiotic modes of communication. 
> Then a non-cooperative modelling of virtual environments and 
> universes can generate a strategy to avoid the constraints of 
> the ordinary and introduce new artistic dimensions..? (Bec 
> 2002: unnumbered)
> 
> On the contrary, in Arapuca the element of chance has been 
> included by random sequencing in an effort to integrate 
> causality in the ordered structure of the work. It is known 
> that there are rules in how living creatures organize 
> themselves, but rules, which Peirce called ?evolutionary?, 
> not defined a priori, as a rationalized variety. Still quoting Bec:
> 
> ?While there is every possibility that the cognitive sciences 
> can come up with new interpretations of the mechanics of 
> creativity, it is equally true that they can no longer ignore 
> the extent to which artistic advances are penetrating and 
> transforming them via an input that is no less important on 
> the theoretical than on the practical level. Conversely 
> artistic practise, in its representation or interpretation of 
> the perceived world, cannot expect to escape the influence of 
> the cognitive sciences, especially if it is art is considered 
> as a means to knowledge; especially if it is considered as 
> capable of imparting form to matter in all possible contexts; 
> and especially if the artistic enterprise is considered as a 
> conscious exploration of the now and why of creativity, the 
> how and why of those symbolic representations through which 
> the making of all artefacts must pass. See thus the cognitive 
> sciences cease to be merely explicative and become a  
> creative well-spring, a take-of  f point for the imagination? 
> (Art Cognition, Pratiques artistiques et sciences cognitives, 
> Aix-en Provence: Cyprès/Ecole d?art d?Aix en Provence, 1994 p.20-21).
> 
> It is not a question of assessing referential or 
> non-referential pieces using value judgments where the 
> referential is ?bad? because it deceives and the 
> non-referential is ?good? because it is a liberating truth. 
> In fact, it is a matter here of putting in question 
> unilateral approaches for constructing digital art works 
> which would merely offer one single channel for the 
> perception of how human/machine relate and discuss if art and 
> cognition can propose alternatives for this vision. 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>