[Swiss Biennial on Science, Technics + Aesthetics]

The Large, the Small and the Human Mind
The 8th Swiss Biennial on Science, Technics + Aesthetics

Saturday, January 16, 2010, 12 – 7 p.m.
Sunday, January 17, 2010, 12 – 7 p.m.

Swiss Museum of Transport, Lucerne Early Register: http://www.neugalu.ch/e_bienn_2010.html#9

Roger Penrose’s hotly disputed book The Large, the Small and the Human Mind (1997) contributed to a new scientific world-view of physics and a more complete understanding of conscious minds at the boundary between the physics of the small and the physics of the large. In a similar vein, the Swiss Biennial 2010, The Large, the Small and the Human Mind, will trigger debate about the unequal status that we have attributed to the physical world “out there” and our many beliefs and mental conceptions “in us” about this world, and it explores the fingers of science, rationality, ontology, epistemology, reflexivity, ethics, ecology, and politics that point to the realities of our beliefs.

The New Gallery Lucerne organises this two-day conference which brings together a group of internationally renowned scientists, sociologists, philosophers, ecologists, writers, artists, and policy-makers. From the debate about the pursuit of a “Theory of Everything” (TOE) in physics, extreme objectivity, our relationship to the “Universe,” to “human,” “nature,” “human culture,” and the “human mind,” The Large, the Small and the Human Mind will touch on the world’s first climate war, the destructive side of globalization, and the contradictions of our striving for unlimited economic growth and consumption. “When the sage points at the Moon,” says the Chinese proverb, “the fool looks at his fingertip.” The Large, the Small and the Human Mind offers a critical look at the fingertip, and from it to the Moon. From the question of how to free Pandora’s Hope, to the meaning of Leonardo’s science for our time, and the significance of the Space Age for humanity, the Swiss Biennial will reflect on these topics from an interdisciplinary perspective with the aim to create a deeper and finer sense of possibility.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers
Michel Bitbol (physicist and philosopher of mind, Director of Research, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique [CNRS], Paris)
Fritjof Capra (physicist and systems theorist, Berkeley)
John Horgan (science writer/author, Director of the Center for Science Writings [CSW], Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, USA)
Kevin W. Kelley (artist, author, and entrepreneur, San Rafael / USA)
Bruno Latour (sociologist, Scientific Director and Professor at Sciences Po, Paris)
Pier Luigi Luisi (Professor Emeritus ETH Zurich, Professor at the Dipartimento di Biologia, Università degli Studi di Roma)
Robert Poole (historian, University of Cumbria, Lancaster / UK)
Harald Welzer (social psychologist, Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Memory Research, Essen)
Margaret Wertheim (science writer, curator, cultural historian of physics, Director of the Institute for Figuring, Los Angeles)

Confirmed Presenter
David McConville (artist, Director of Noospheric Research, The Elumenati, Asheville / USA)

Confirmed Chairpersons
Christina Ljungberg (University of Zurich)
Josef Mitterer (University of Klagenfurt)
Isabelle Stengers (Free University of Brusells)

Confirmed Leader of the Panel Discussions
Peter Weibel (Chairman and CEO, Center for Art and Media [ZKM], Karlsruhe)

A New Gallery Lucerne conference in association with the Swiss Museum of Transport, the City of Lucerne, the Swiss Federal Office of Culture (BAK), and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).

Swiss Museum of Transport, Lucerne, Coronado Hall

CHF 90.00 (CHF 65.00 concessions) – Booking required http://www.neugalu.ch/e_bienn_2010.html#9

The Large, the Small and the Human Mind continues the Swiss Biennial’s aim to involve people from all faculties, schools of thought and walks of life in a critical dialogue concerned with science, technological innovation, art, and society which they have long sought themselves but for which there has been no point of contact to date. The Swiss Biennial sees its role as that of a touchstone for such dialogues. Its interdisciplinary activities and projects are concerned with new challenges posed by widely varying fields of knowledge and research. Find the Swiss Biennial on Science, Technics + Aesthetics on http://www.neugalu.ch

New Gallery Lucerne and The Swiss Biennial on Science, Technics + Aesthetics
P.O. Box 3501, 6002 Lucerne / Switzerland, Tel. +41 (0) 41 370 38 18
Image credit: Jacket photograph, Earth, from Apollo 4 (November 1967) © NASA.

[influence of new media]

[Médias et transdisciplinarité- Michel Cazenave]

As all of you know, my current post as research fellow is dedicated to studying transdisciplinarity which will culminate in the creation of a new academic journal dedicated to transdisciplinary studies in creative technologies. I have been blogging about my journey so far and serendipitously Basarab Nicolescu (can we say "father" of transdisciplinarity...at least in it's contemporary sense?) read a blog post, commented, and since them we have maintained a dialogue. It is this online dialogue which has brought me from the virtual world into the physical (which is Paris) to join the EHESS's annual sessions of seminars in transdisciplinarity (co-organised with Alfredo Pena-Vega).

Michel Cazenave's seminar gave me lots to think about; as I said lastnight when we went to coffee to dissect the talk: "je dois penser encore!" The talk was very philosophical but I suppose that is to be expected from someone who is ecrivain, poète and philosophe. Something that kept coming up was the idea that science (with a capital S) has specific demands and methods which means it operates on a different level of being than transdisciplinary enquiries (one might say this holds also for spiritual, moral, or more "humanities" driven questions).


After the talk there was some time for questions and one came from a woman at the back who asked something that has been posed to me: "give a concrete example of a transdisciplinary..." and in this case it was of a film. Cazenave had a good answer: how to give a concise example for something that is so complex and complicated?




NB: that catchy title of "studies in..." is thanks to Basarab Nicolesu who, while chatting about transdisciplinarity (but of course), noted that aptness of the word "studies."

NB: The top photo is Salle 1 in the EHESS before we began. At the front of the room on the left is Basarab, in the middle with the book is Michel and on the right by the green door is Alfredo.




Addition 23 Jan. 2009: I found this report on an interdisciplinary conference:

[A Digital Humanities Manifesto]

There are 29 separate points in the UCLA Digital Humanities Centre's manifesto but these stood out for me:

"The first wave was quantitative, mobilizing the vertiginous search and retrieval powers of the database. The second wave is qualitative, interpretive, experiential, even emotive. It immerses the digital toolkit within what represents the very core strength of the Humanities: complexity.

Interdisciplinarity/transdisciplinarity/multidisciplinarity are empty words unless they imply changes in language, practice, method, and output.

The digital is the realm of the open: open source, open resources, open doors. Anything that attempts to close this space should be recognized for what it is: the enemy."

Each paragraph has links to comments from readers too...quite a few are critical...but good for discussion (say hello Digital Cultures' students!!)

[unscientific teaching in louisiana *science* classes]

In May last year I blogged about the Creation musueum that had just opened in Kentucky devoted to telling the history of the world...according to the bible. Well, know there's the Louisian State Education Act "is designed to slip ID in "through the back door", says Forrest, who is a professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University and an expert in the history of creationism. She adds that the bill's language, which names evolution along with global warming, the origins of life and human cloning as worthy of "open and objective discussion", is an attempt to misrepresent evolution as scientifically controversial.

Forrest's testimony notwithstanding, the bill was passed by the state's legislature - by a majority of 94 to 3 in the House and by unanimous vote in the Senate. On 28 June, Louisiana's Republican governor, Piyush "Bobby" Jindal, signed the bill into law. The development has national implications, not least because Jindal is rumoured to be on Senator John McCain's shortlist as a potential running mate in his bid for the presidency.

***

Supporters of the new law clearly hope that teachers and administrators who wish to raise alternatives to evolution in science classes will feel protected if they do so. The law expressly permits the use of "supplemental" classroom materials in addition to state-approved textbooks. The LFF is now promoting the use of online "add-ons" that put a creationist spin on the contents of various science texts in use across the state, and the Discovery Institute has recently produced Explore Evolution, a glossy text that offers the standard ID critiques of evolution (see "The evolution of creationist literature"). Unlike its predecessor Of Pandas and People, which fared badly during the Dover trial, it does not use the term "intelligent design".

Because the law allows individual boards and teachers to make additions to the science curriculum without clearance from a state authority, the responsibility will lie with parents to mount a legal challenge to anything that appears to be an infringement of the separation of church and state. "In Dover, there were parents and teachers willing to step forward and say, this is not OK," says Rosenau. "But here we're seeing that people are either fine with it or they don't want to say anything because they don't want to be ostracised in their community."

Read the full article at New Scientist.

NB some of the comments in relation to this article in NS are hilarious while others are deeply saddening.

[new media literacy: principles]

Dan Gillmor: Principles of a New Media Literacy via Jos Schuurmans

An interesting read but I'm not sure about painting "teenagers and children" as "digital natives." Lots of teens I have met don't "already" know how to create media...they need to learn. Some "digital immigrants" aren't old...I don't think this is an age-thing. Imporantly though, Gillmore highlights some important issues: anonymity and transparency.

"Be skeptical of absolutely everything. This means not taking or granted the trustworthiness of what we read, see or hear from media of all kinds, whether from traditional news organizations, blogs, online videos or any other form.

But don’t be equally skeptical of everything. We all have an internal “trust meter” of sorts, largely based on education and experience. We need to bring to digital media the same kinds of parsing we learned in a less complex time when there were only a few primary sources of information. A news article in New York Times or Wall Street Journal starts out in strongly positive territory on that trust meter. An anonymous comment on a random blog, by contrast, starts with negative credibility. Anonymity is an important thing to preserve, because it protects whistleblowers and others for whom speech can be unfairly dangerous. But when people don’t stand behind their words, a reader should always wonder why and make appropriate adjustments.

Understand and learn media techniques. Teenagers and children already know how to create media; they are digital natives. Older people are learning. But younger and older alike are, for the most part, less clear on how communications are designed to persuade if not manipulate. It’s
fine, if not essential, to know how to snap a photo with a mobile phone. It’s just as important to know — and to teach our children — how media creators push our logical and emotional buttons.
Ask more questions. This goes by many names: research, reporting, homework, etc. The Web has already sparked a revolution in commerce, as potential buyers of products and services discover relatively easy ways to learn more before the sale. We need to recognize the folly of making any major decision about our lives based on something we read, hear or see — and the need to keep reporting, sometimes in major ways but more often in small ones, to ensure that we make good choices.

All of the principles above are part of the toolkit of every responsible journalist. So are a few more, including the ones that every traditional journalist of any honor would embrace, namely thoroughness, accuracy, fairness and independence. They boil down to simple but important
notions: Get as much information as possible. When you say something, be sure your facts are correct. Be fair to people and interests from all angles. And be as independent as possible, especially as an independent thinker who knows how to listen, not just lecture.

In the digital world, even more than the analog one, we need to add transparency to that list, because the thinking behind the media deserves exposure in addition to the work itself. Nowhere will this be more important than with citizen journalists — though the traditional media need to
adopt more transparency as well, for their own sakes. They may be paid, individually, not to have conflicts of interest. But that doesn’t mean they work without bias.

Transparency in the traditional ranks has scarcely existed for most the past century. It’s difficult, in fact, to name a business as opaque as journalism, the practitioners of which insist that others explain their actions but usually refuse to amplify on their own.

Scandal, for the most part, has forced open the doors to a degree. The Jayson Blair debacle at the New York Times led the newspaper to describe in lurid detail what had happened. It also led to the creation of a “public editor” post — also called ombudsman in other cases.

Bloggers, through their own relentless critiques, have made traditional-media transparency more common as well. However unfair bloggers’ criticism may often be, it has also been a valuable addition to the media-criticism sphere.

Bloggers, too, need to adopt more transparency. Some, to be sure, do reveal their biases. That gives readers a way to refract the writers’ world views against the postings, and then make decisions about credibility. But a distinctly unhappy trend in some blog circles is the undisclosed or poorly disclosed conflict of interest. Pay-per-post schemes are high on the list of activities that deserve readers’ condemnation — and, one hopes, less readership."

[rosi braidotti lecture: b/w the longer and the not yet]

BETWEEN THE NO LONGER AND THE NOT YET: NOMADIC VARIATIONS ON THE BODY

"The embodied structure of the subject is a key-term in feminist struggle. It is to be understood as neither a biologically nor sociologically fixed category, but,rather as a point of overlapping between the physical, the symbolic and the material social conditions. The body is an inter-face, a threshold, a field of intersecting material and symbolic forces, it is a surface where multiple codes (race, sex, class, age, etc.) are inscribed; it's a cultural construction that capitalizes on energies of a heterogeneous, discontinuous and affective or unconscious nature. This vision of the body contains sexuality as a process and as a constitutive element. Embodiment provides a common but at best very complex ground on which to postulate the feminist project. On the luna-park that marks the website of this conference, the body would definitely be on the roller-coaster.

Being embodied means being in and of sexualized matter. This sexual fibre is intrinsically and multiply connected to social and political relations; it is anything but an individualistic entity. Sexuality is simultaneously the most intimate and the most external, socially-driven, power-drenched practice of the self. As a social and symbolic, material and semiotic institution, sexuality in singled out by feminism as the primary location of power, in a complex manner which encompasses both macro and micro relations. Sexual difference - the sexualized bi-polarity, is another word for power in both the negative or repressive (potestas) and the positive or empowering (potentia) meaning of the term.

[...]

The sort of `figurations' of alternative subjectivity, which feminism has invented, like the womanist/ the lesbian/ the cyborg/ the inappropriate(d) other/ the nomadic feminist etc. etc differ from classical `metaphors' in calling into play a sense of accountability for one's locations. They express materially embedded cartographies and as such are self-reflexive and not parasitic upon a process of metaphorization of `others'. They provide, on the critical level, materially embedded and embodied accounts of one's power-relations.



Feminist theory is about multiple and potentially contradictory locations and differences, among women but also within each woman. To account for them, locations are approached as geo-political, but also as time-zones, related to memory. Feminism is not about restoring another dominant memory, but rather about installing a counter-memory, or an embedded and embodied genealogy. Feminist thinking takes place between the no longer and the not yet, in the in-between zone between wilful , conscious political practice and the not-necessarily conscious yearning for transformation and change. I see feminist theory as the activity aimed at articulating the questions of individual gendered identity with issues related to political subjectivity, the production of knowledge, diversity, and epistemological legitimation."


Or listen to the lecture here.

AUDIO LECTURE

Braidotti gave this lecture at the 4th European Feminist Research Conference which took place September 28 and October 1, 2000 in Bologna.

An interesting question and response (in Italian) - Braidotti proposes that women in humanities and sciences develop an alliance through new technologies:


Il lavoro delle donne nei new media e nelle nuove tecnologie può portare a cambiamenti di metodo e di contenuti?

Rosi Braidotti propone un'alleanza tra donne umaniste
e donne scienzate.

[ ascolta 56k ascolta ADSL ]

[zig-zag philosophy]

I'm editing my introduction to the thesis and re-reading Haraway and her notion of situated knowledges and cyberfeminism as well as going through Braidotti's Nomadic Subjects (which must be one of my favourite academic reads). Braidotti also has her own site which I check on frequently, hoping for a blog I suppose so that I might keep up with her theorising. Although no blog, I have just found her most recent article, published in Italian. In it she makes a comment about an aspect of her work which is dedicated to constructing *real* communities and discourses within and outside of her written works, all the while leaving "ample" space for others thereby provoking multiple encounters (nb. my *loose* translation). This kind of theorising that moves between other theories as well as being a political strategy is essentially "non-linear" and thus becomes a "zig-zag" philosophy.

"Se il discorso teorico infatti funziona in un’ economia non-lineare, in modo eterogeneo e complesso, allora anche la resistenza politica deve assumere questo stile a zig zag."

[los de abajo]

Los de Abajo were great live! Lots of enthusiasm and excitement and really got the crowd going. The venue, The Borderline in London was perfect. A well-hidden basement/cantina that seemed to add to the reverberation of the bass-heavy merengue and mamba beats. Their name, loosely translated as "those from below" encapsulates their theory that there are no underdogs: "That's all, that's all, we're all just human. We're all just human."

From the Los de Abajo manifesto:

Identity - is knowing who you are. And that's what this is all about - our Mexican identity. We are indefinable as a people. Our blood is restless, because we are the bastard children of a forced marriage between Jesús and Coyolxauqui. We have a demented uncle named Sam, and our brother is Emiliano. On one side of the Rio Grande we are ilegales and on the other we aliens. Aliens in our own country.Equality - is something the West likes to talk about a lot but there are just four words to describe it - We Are All Equal.

[renewals: other than academic]

Interspersed with the thought-provoking panels, papers, presentations, escapes to the library, and myriad conversations, I had the pleasure of roaming Royal Holloway's beautiful campus, poking my head in the extravagant chapel, and dining in the Picture Gallery.

One night Sue and I embarked on a game of pool prompted much thinking (on my part) as to why I enjoy a game at which I'm so embarrassingly poor. I enjoyed the concentration required to hold the cue and the drive to sink my yellow ball. I found myself mentally tracing the patterns that we created with the balls crashing and then diverging. Then I did some reading and it seems, according to some scientists that we don't actually see the touching/colliding/smashing of balls but rather only the after-effect. It sounds like we only see that which causes collision rather than collision itself.

Kind of like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: you might know the speed of a quantum particle, but you won't know its exact location.

On Friday evening we enjoyed live Jazz while we sipped Pimms within Founder's North Quad. It was (finally) lovely weather and the notes seemed to float along with the breeze and murmuring of voices. Once I figure out how to transfer sound files from my blackberry I'll add some music here.

Update: Catherine, the blogger in residence for the Renewals conference, has added a slew of posts on panels and presentations. Check it out.

[la mort d'un philosophe]

Some people might know of Baudrillard in relation to hypertext or philosophy or postmodernism or questions of hyperreality or that oft' used word: "simulacra."

For Baudrillard, there are four "successive phases of the image" in the transition from representation to simulacrum but it is the final stage that bears

"no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum."

Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994) 6.


However you came to know Baudrillard, his texts and thinking have undoubtably had strong impact on critical thinking. I would have to agree with Kroker and Levin, Baudrillard continues to be "a talisman: a symptom, a sign, a charm, and above all, a password into the next universe." (See Baudrillard's Challenge," CJPST 8:1-2 (1984): 5). His death on 5th March 2007 marks the loss of "une pensée singulière."

Article and image below from Le Figaro.

Sociologue de formation et philosophe de vocation, auteur de livres traduits dans le monde entier, Jean Baudrillard est mort hier à Paris à l'âge de 77 ans. Cet inclassable opposait volontiers la liberté de l'esprit au confort intellectuel de ses contemporains. Refusant de s'identifier à un quelconque esprit de système, récusant la figure de l'intellectuel donneur de leçons et prescripteur de morale, cet anti-Bourdieu était né à Reims en 1929. Après avoir acquis une formation de germaniste et de sociologue, il fut nommé à la faculté de Nanterre en 1966, puis au CNRS.

Sensible à la pensée de la déconstruction de la métaphysique chère à ses compatriotes Jacques Derrida et Jean-François Lyotard, mais aussi influencé par les théories structuralistes du langage, il imposa une pensée singulière en quelques livres. On se souvient notamment du Système des objets (1968), de La Société de consommation (1970) et surtout de L'Échange symbolique et la mort (1976), peut-être son texte le plus ambitieux, réflexion sur les notions de don et de dépense, à partir des grands travaux des anthropologues, en particulier ceux de Marcel Mauss. Resté à l'écart du marxisme, très critique à l'égard des modes intellectuelles issues des années 1968, il a élaboré une critique acerbe et ironique de la postmodernité marquée selon lui par l'érosion des grandes explications du monde et l'hégémonie d'un mode de vie consumériste.

Pour Baudrillard, nous sommes partie prenante d'un univers où, non seulement, tout référent transcendant s'est évanoui, mais où la définition même de la « réalité » objective est devenue problé­matique, ce dont témoigne la prédominance des représentations virtuelles du monde sur les valeurs qui mettent en avant les notions de sens et de vérité.

Une dépression symbolique qui explique un abstentionnisme politique croissant que nous cherchons à conjurer par une exhortation, elle-même significative de l'apathie ambiante. Étayées dans Simulacres et simulations (1981), De la séduction (1982) ou Les Stratégies fatales (Grasset 1984), les thèses de Baudrillard vont connaître un retentissement considérable aussi bien en France qu'à l'étranger, notamment aux États-Unis. À partir des an­nées 1990, le penseur va prendre des positions publiques qui vont susciter une polémique récurrente, notam­ment à partir de son livre La Guerre du golfe n'a pas eu lieu (Galilée) en 1991 où Baudrillard affirmera que la première guerre contre l'Irak, qui avait donné lieu à une surenchère de « performances technologiques », n'en avait pas été une, à proprement parler, la guerre supposant un principe de sacrifice incompatible avec l'idée du « zéro mort » mais aussi la reconnaissance d'un ennemi non réductible à la fonction de « voyou ».

Au-delà des guerres contre l'Irak, Baudrillard conteste la notion même d'ordre mondial, parce que celui-ci suggère l'idée d'un achèvement historique et d'une conception de l'universel où la figure de l'autre est par définition rétrograde, barbare ou archaïque.

Pour lui, comme pour l'essayiste Philippe Muray, théoricien critique de L'Empire du bien, le laxisme et la permissivité de la société démocratique occidentale ne sont pas incompatibles avec un hypermoralisme qui nous rend incapable d'appréhender la fonction du « mal » et du « négatif », dont témoignent la violence ou encore les radicalités politiques ou idéologiques, réduites à des pathologies qu'il faut éradiquer.
Il récidivera dans le rôle de « mauvais sujet » en affirmant, dans une tribune parue dans Le Monde que « nous avions tous rêvé » l'attentat du 11 septembre 2001 qui a détruit les tours de Manhattan, symbole, selon lui, d'une prétention mortifère à la toute-puissance.

Intervention qui lui vaudra de déclencher les foudres de ceux pour qui ce genre de rhétorique est, par définition, irresponsable. Inclassable politiquement et éclectique dans ses domaines d'intervention, il écrira aussi beaucoup sur la photo et sur l'art, notamment contemporain, qu'il qualifiera de « nul », Jean Baudrillard est, à certains égards, un moraliste désabusé comme en témoigne la prose parfois mélancolique de Cool-mémories (Galilée), livre de mémoires et de réflexions dont cinq volumes paraîtront entre 1987 et 2005.

En suggérant l'évidence et l'irréversibilité de sa civilisation, l'Occident légitime paradoxalement, à ses yeux, cet « ailleurs » irréductible que représente l'islam des fondamentalistes.
Une série de prises de position qui contribuera à « démoniser » jusqu'à un certain point un intellectuel atypique, aussi radical dans son style et ses intuitions que détaché des débats conventionnels.