Re: R: [-empyre-] David Cuartielles Presentation

["David Cuartielles" <David.Cuartielles@k3.mah.se>]

Hej from Sweden,

>> I don't really consider myself an artist, since I never studied to
become
one 

>art, fortunately, is quite knowledge-free! or, at least, it pretends
to
be...an artist is (or should be?) that human being who makes artifacts
that the
public, as well as art professionals, point at as art.

I couldn't agree more with you ... as far as the non-educated artist
tries to look for grants to support his/her work. Knowledge is free, but
the means of production of art is something completely different. It is
possible to do a lot of things without resources, but how would you
create if your main problem is to get access to food and shelter in a
country like Sweden? The situationistic right to become an artist
doesn't really apply to the institutions giving away grants.

>> When referring to cognition and perception I always try to 
>> make a clear distinction between both. Cognition to me 

>The biggest difference between artist and scientist is that the last
one HAS
to explain everything, while the former doesn't. Even worse, the
scientist, before explaining needs to categorize and name things, events
and phenomena and to do so it tries to push them in to cages, and boxes,
with very well defined borders. 


>This scientific process, often forgets about the infinite implicit in
the continuity which is represented and rules nature. Indeed, in my
opinion, when talking about perception and (or vs.) cognition we often 
fall in this trap! Somehow...

This in an interesting statement, but even in the basic rules of
thermodynamics you can find that temperature is a continuum, it is
impossible to make the temperature of a body shift in an infinitely
short time slot. There is a misconception about the scientific view of
the world and the language we need to use to describe phenomena.
However, going back to the discussion of cognition vs. perception, I
defined my own understanding of those as a bartender can define what is
"sex on the beach" and not. I used terms to divide issues at different
levels and construct a system to discuss about. 

Yet another example could be to remember that there is a continuum
between red and blue, but we still distinguish red as red and blue as
blue.

>>Oppositely, I'm not that sure that perception stops at the retina
level and, more than that, I'm quite confident that cognitions start at
the "perceptual" level.
This happens, if not at an "individual" (ontogenetic) perception level,
at a
phylogenetic one, at least. 

Buff, we could discuss this one for hours ;-) Let's take a different
case, yesterday I was in a PhD course about academic writing. There we
were discussing about how to reduce the length of a sentence like the
following without affecting its meaning:

"The dimensional inconsistencies between eye images are mainly due to
the streching of the iris caused by pupil dilation from varying levels
of illumination."

Well, this sentence shows a chain of cause-effect situations: the
amount of light affects the size of the pupil, which streches provoking
that the images our brain is sampling present dimesional differences.
Can you tell me where is that everything starts? Is it the amount of
light, or just the pupil dilation provoking the incosistency? With
cognition and perception happens the same thing we can spend hours
trying to find the one responsible for processing data in this or that
way. Anyway, in order to get a chance to speak about it, we need to put
some limits to the terms. To admit that everyone has a different
cognition system is easy, but even science is ready to shift the
understanding of where the limit between perception and cognition are.
We just need to decide on one that suits us.

>On the other hand, I do with you agree on the existence of the two
levels (cognition and perception), levels that I identify as two
different processes in which the "input processing" and the
"computational processing" are stressed in different ways!

This is great :-) we are at a start, I agree in the way you define it
here.

>> SOCIAL ART IS COGNITIVE ART

>I don't understand, but I really want to.
Please, try and define "antisocial art", so that I can realize of what
we're talking about.

Again this is all about words. Contemporary art academies are producing
a whole bunch of "social artists" dedicated to disciplines that cover:
street art, graffiti, documentary of social situations, social critic,
etc ... They do contemporary culture explorations, trying to unveil the
tension between culture groups, or to express the hierarchy chain in our
different realities. In a way they work with contemporary multi-faceted
culture. If there is a relationship between cognition and culture
(something we haven't agreed upon yet) those doing social art as defined
by the academies are also doing cognitive art.

I hope you like this one,

David