[-empyre-] recapitulating...

["Luigi Pagliarini" <luigi@artificialia.com>]

Dears,
 I guess, we're all lowering our mental noise and getting ready for the St.
Klaus indigestions!
 : )

 Well: I wish I could talk, more than answer by email, to each&everyone,
but, vice versa, I'm rushing... (and so, please forgive, the linguistic,
conceptual and diplomatic mistakes I'm going to place here!).

 Here few statements/questions to try and decrease any risk of of <truth>
reaching. : )

> I couldn't agree more with you ... as far as the non-educated 
> artist tries to look for grants to support his/her work... 

 David, there are two answers.
 The artistic one is: academy is always late (almost by definition) in
regards of vanguards (and therefore are quite useless).

 The "other" one is, David, pleeeease!, don't take me to a political
discussion..

> how would you create if your main problem is to get access to food and
shelter in a 
> country like Sweden? 

 ...else, explain me how to survive in Africa, first. (After all, Sweden is
one of the most richest countries in the world ...so to speak : ))

> 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.

and..

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

 %^)
 Therefore, we perfectly agree, in both cases.
 Don't we?!?

> 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 

 Unfortunately, I do not agree with that definitions...
 My believe is that any artist is somehow "social", but that would veryvery
hard to explain by email, without getting divorced and make of my little son
an orphan! :) 

> I'm not sure that this months theme is the correct place for 
> a discussion on the labyrithine and problematic theme of art 
> and science as bedfellows or studiofellows.....

 Andy: didn't get that! what's, in your opinion, the relation between the so
called cognition ("cognitio" the Latin for "knowledge") and science? 
 In other words, can it be that there is any 'meta-cognition' we,
bedfellows, are interested in?
 I mean: how do we know we are (good?) artists AND/OR a scientists OR (as
most often it happens) nothing like that? : )

Btw..

> There's a gap,I must agree...
> As José Luis Brea pointed out, digital art needs galleries
> as much MP3 needs records stores...
> They are the result of the research of people who are envolved
> in transdisciplinary approaches and cannot deal with the gallery/lab
division.
> Your own project (Peam http://www.artificialia.com/peam2005/ ) as many of
the
> projects developed by guests and empyre members
> would be a good example  of  it.

Raquel, I agree, too (even if I don't like the definition o "digital art"
because it confines things to the computer science scene and I, therefore,
prefer using "electronic art") but, nevertheless, despite of Mr. Brea, when
we walk along any street in the world we mostly find oil on canvas galleries
and .wav music stores.. don't we? : )
To be honest, I think of all of those projects (PEAMs included) as
exceptions and to exceptions as the strangest fruits of our living.
Indeed, (Andy: I need you as a judge and a witness! ;^) in science the rules
generate exceptions, while in art exceptions generate rules.
 :D


> My approach with GCS is close to the polar opposite. I am 
> developing artificial 'creatures' bottom-up, using cells and 
> molecules as the atomic elements. Quite a bit of literature 
> now exists extolling the bounty of intelligence of such 
> simple objects as cells. From slime molds that can solve 
> mazes to trees that attack each other and communicate with 
> their neighbors, cells exhibit much more intelligence than 
> science ever imagined. The creatures in GCS are no more than 
> independent systems of cells, prokaryotic or eukaryotic, 
> bacterial or neuronal that communicate not only with each 
> other through electrical and chemical signals, but with the 
> external world. 

 Brian, what's then the use of hundreds millions years evolution if we just
need prokaryotic or eukaryotic cells to reach cognition?
 Or why we switch on computers(?) talk through the internet(??) instead of
using homeostasis?
 Hyper Kidding...! : ))   
Look: one of the most recent (2004) art productions of mine is in that
specific direction. It is called "Energies Visualiser" by which I'm
investigating color molecular attraction in images and elaborated the
concept of "algorithmic video", in which starting from a still image I
obtain a never ending sequence of images. We can talk about that on a
private basis, in future, if you like!
 
> I personally find a great satisfaction in the idea of life as 
> a bunch of information processing machines all interacting *
> and reprocessing each others information. the networks and 
> emergent situations that result from these interactions are 
> the stuff of wonder that art can so beautifully engage.

 Andy: shall we, for example, think of war like: "a bunch of information
processing machines all interacting and reprocessing each others
information"? 
: ) Kidding... of course!! 
But, at what level, talking about life, shall we fit individuality in?
 Or is it so that cognition has nothing to do with personality, and we
simply don't consider it?

> At all scales of existence, (cellular, molecular,
> universal) activity involves awareness (the differentiation 
> of sodium ion channels is a useful example) which involves 
> appraisal and even if it is not autonoetic in the form we 
> conventionally find in human cognition seems to be conscious.

Jhave, help! 
I was proud of me being conscious of most of my personality and life! 
I feel... much smaller now!! :)

> With this I'm meaning that the point is not to "relax the 
> attention" but to lower the "mental noise" in order to 
> increase the attention. Attention to other spaces in our 
> mind; attention to more inputs, or quality of inputs that 
> happen inside and outside us. That is called "QUALIA".
> Well...next step...have the experience :-)

Raquel, of course, in my mind, I have a lot of noise to lower down! 
Especially after all of this! :D 
When this happens, what shall I do then? 
Relax or increase my attention? 
Or, can it be that we're confusing attention with perception here?

> Well, in fact I don't believe in the unconscious mind. I 
> believe in different levels of consciousness, from the deep 
> sleep to the highest vigil state.

OK, Raquel! 
Then... shall we quit talking about Freudian theories to my students and
explain them phobias, schizophrenia, psychosis(!!!) and so forth with
qualia?!
Again, kidding! : ))
But, let's be careful!
It seems to me that when we "confess" the existence of attention, whatever
it is, we do admit the existence of unconsciousness. could it be?


> I'm certainly very interested in process - or at least the 
> objectifying of methods of becoming. I guess I'm coming from 
> a desire to develop new forms of resistance to systems and 
> processes that lock in the individual and reduce agency 
> within a certain (often highly complex) civilization. It's 
> probably obvious that the rights of individuals seem to be 
> diminishing due to bureaucratic, diplomatic, and purely 
> invented global threats.
> How does this affect art and cognition? I can see many 
> opportunities for representing process as a mean to 
> understanding liberty and constraint - experimental models 
> expressed in aesthetic terms that offer 'readable' conditions 
> for identifying the lesions of a 'civilizing' process. 
> Perhaps we'll discover how little democracy we really have?

Chris, isn't it too much? I mean: to ask art to work out all of that? :
))))))) 
Apart from jokes, in 2000 I've made a software called "Globalization" (you
should be able to find some description over the Internet through any search
engine), trying to formalize and simulate something similar! It is an Alife
Art sw, so it resembles, in part, what has here been called collective
cognition or so. 
Now, in spite of the fact that I do love that art piece of mine, I must
confess that reality is much+much richer than the one I've tried to
simulate. : )
(Btw, If you ever come across it, please, let me know how far this is from
your feelings). 
Now what I mean is I like virtual words for what they are.
In other words, I believe that we should use simulations (or art) to work
out a semplification of reality, since reality is too chaotic to our minds
(sometimes or always? : ). 
Viceversa, if we are to put in to simulations that many variables (and /or
expectations?) then, wouldn't it be more convenient to us to analys reality
itself? 

Luigi Pagliarini (copyleft)

 PS: I trust in you reading in the right way my "superficiality" and.. 
 NB: this email was <evidently> made out of recycled bits! ;^) Luigi