Not a Thought Experiment

Say no to procrastination!

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The Ethiopian Caterpillar is a bejeweled automaton from the year 1820. Attributed to Henri Maillardet, only six automaton caterpillars are known to exist and the other five are in prestigious collections in Europe

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As you read the effortless and insightful prose of the luminaries in your discipline, do you ever wonder how they do it? We certainly have, and as part of the Writing Across Boundaries project, we decided to ask them.

Includes Michael Carrithers, Alan McFarlane, and Anna Tsing. The luminaries are endless.

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One of the world’s most important persons passed on today. This was his last lecture.

Benedict Anderson’s work lit up the world like no other. Thank you, sir.

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It seems ironic to find the Guerrilla Art Action Group and the Living Theatre mentioned in the pages of a journal whose editorial board is best known for supporting the more obliquely politicized practices of the late 1960s, such as that of Marcel Broodthaer's. This brings us to the contradictory kernel of this questionnaire. While it's laudable to ask respondents to identify examples of oppositional collectives, web sites, and research-led practices that form important pockets of cultural and political resistance, such groups do not produce works of art or academic publications that would usually be recognized by this journal. These practices seem to have an uncomfortable and overlooked relationship to the framework of October, which seems torn-- as many of us are between a respect for direct activism and a desire for complex, multivalent art.

Claire Bishop in “Questionnaire: In What Ways Have Artists, Academics, and Cultural Institutions Responded to the U.S.-Led Invasion and Occupation of Iraq?”

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An Excuse to Look into Tactical Media

Hannah Arendt passed away on 4 Dec 1975. I thought I'd use this date as an excuse to remember her work and look into how thinking enters my present favourite genre of tactical media. Notwithstanding the definition fragmentation (did I just coin/use a double noun phrase?) of the term, here are seven easy pieces that have come up in the past week and which I like:

Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri's Camp Campaign tried to figure how Guantanamo could even have come to pass. A cross-country piece that drew in all manner of voices. I love the idea and its execution, but here we are in 2015 facing more or less (probably more) the same situation all over again.

Festival Mencari Haryadi, in which Jogja's denizens couldn't seem to find their mayor, who was probably in Harvard or somewhere like that when he was supposed to be governing the city.

Beatriz Da Costa used pigeons to track pollution. Suggested by Brian. I love how the reputation of these sky rats were inverted, though I wonder if they lost any equipment to pigeon killers.

"In 2000, Mexico's Zapatista Army of National Liberation social movement decided to launch a "tactical air force". The Zapatistas' air force consisted of hundreds of paper airplanes. After throwing the planes over the fence of a federal barrack, confused troops were quick to point their rifles at the paper intruders, creating an image that conveyed a very strong message of peace versus war—the target ultimately being the government."

I've played Molleindustria's games before without realising who or what they were, until Samik clued me in on it. This game in particular deals with pedophilia. I like their work, although perhaps in part because, as both Scott, the CAE and others might predict, their initially radical script is bound to be subsumed into that of status quo.

Oliver and Vasiliev do a lot of amazing things but this one that uses the man-in-the-middle attack to expose people's private activities in a cafe sticks in my mind, for some reason. First saw this one in a talk Honor gave, I think as part of a Post-Museum thing.

Ztohoven's Moral Reform trolled the entire Czech parliament. For me, it raises a couple of key questions, including whether or not this particular piece, spectacular as it was, changed anything.

There would have been more pieces but I've been busy and only one other person contributed. And I wasn't particularly taken by the feminist and LGBTQ ones. I guess I would add maybe Toxic Titties if we get into that. Maybe. I don't know. As you can see, my bias shows itself quite plainly here.

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Architecture of Radio. Visualise wifi and other signals with this app.

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Interview with Anna Tsing, by Maija Lassila.

Excerpt:

Maija Lassila: What drives you on? What is this fundamental interest that you have in thinking about all these topics we have spoken of? What is kind of the thing that connects in your interest all this research together? What makes you want to keep going on with this?

Anna Tsing: That's a really hard question! I don't know what the right answer to that question is. Um... How about if I explain something I love about anthropology. Because, it's not the answer to your question at all but... One of the things I love about anthropology is that we are asked to stay curious about the world and about little details in the world and to use those to ask really big questions. And that combination of the big questions and the curiosity about particular details is something that continues to draw me.

Maija Lassila: And finally, there are many young and starting anthropologists. What would you give as advice, for example, students who are thinking about their topic or, kind of, choosing their interests and maybe being uncertain about how they should go on? What would you give as advice as to which things...

Anna Tsing: I'm going to follow up on the things I just said... I would love to encourage students and young scholars to stay interested in the world. I think sometimes, anthropology gets very, kind of, involuted and people just want to debate theoretical questions. And I would like to tell young people that while that seems like the smartest thing you could do right now, actually in five years, nobody is going to care about those little fights and debates about how to define a term or what some theoretical point is. Nobody is going to care anymore. Five years is a very short timeline. Before you even get your degree, nobody cares. But if you're curious about the world and you tie that ability to know the world to a set of big questions and theoretical points, then your work continues to matter. So, I want to encourage students and young people to stay curious about the world even as they as they're asking the theoretical questions... You can't but help but bring the theorising with it... It's not that I don't want people to do theory because I do, but I don't want them to become so trapped in a small place with nothing but theory that the world disappears and it's just theory... We get obsessed with these little debates but we don't necessarily make things happen in those little debates. And we feel so excited about them in the moment that they're happening. But, I think you can have that same excitement and have your empirical work too. And the empirical work should never be seen as a drag, as a kind of bag of bricks you have to carry along with you. It's what makes the theory sing.

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Spider jumping with and without draglines, and then robot doing the same. Cool technique!

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Rewiring the Brain to Create New Senses

Sensory substitution reveals the ability of our brains to have a profound relationship with technology.

The earliest demonstrations of work in this space were pioneered by neuroscientist Paul Bach-y-Rita, whose research allowed for sight to be substituted for touch. Known as tactile-vision sensory substitution (TVSS), it involved taking images from a camera and converting them into touch sensations. One example is a device developed by his research group which allowed stimuli to be delivered to the tongue via a flexible electrode in the mouth. This tongue display unit (TDU) was connected to a head-mounted camera and the video feed was converted to a pattern of pulses that could be picked-up by the tongue. Each of these pulses corresponded to a pixel in the image with the user experiencing the final result as a stream of sensations.

We’re going to get more sensory organs as we become cyborgs!

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East-India Company ship routes

We transcribed daily positions, temperature, pressure and wind observations from the logbooks of ships in the service of the English East-India Company (EEIC) in the years 1798-1834. The logs were in the collection of the British Library and the observations collected are being used to increase understanding of global climate variability and change.

The logbooks used were limited to those containing thermometer and barometer observations: About 10% of the total collection of EEIC logbooks in the BL, covering only the later years of the EEIC.

Cool.

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Superwolves, new butterflies, and all the hybrid species evolving before our eyes

Some scientists and conservationists see the coywolf as a nightmare of the Anthropocene—a poster child of mongrelization as plants and animals reshuffle in response to habitat loss, climate change and invasive species. Golden-winged warblers increasingly cross with blue-winged warblers in the U.S. Northeast and eastern Canada. Southern flying squirrels hybridize with northern flying squirrels as the southern species presses northward in Ontario. Polar bears mate with grizzlies in the Canadian Arctic along the Beaufort Sea to produce “pizzly bears.”

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Imperfect produce is good too.

I don’t see anything wrong with these. I suppose we’re either more forgiving in Singapore or just plain WEWANNAEATEVERYTHING.

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Jonathan Fletcher Moore’s “Artificial Killing Machine” pops a toy gun every time an actual drone strike occurs in real time. It is abrupt. You don’t know when it’s going to happen, and you can lie under the installation to get a small sense of the fear.

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What happens to your bag when you check it in. Why do bags get to do all these fun things?

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Tesla’s new tentacle fuel conduit finds its way into your car. Auto-erotica, says the first comment.

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New camera technology that reveals the world through the eyes of animals has been developed by University of Exeter researchers.

You can use it too. Get it here!

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Carl Sagan’s pale blue dot animated.