Category Archives: consciousness
Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings
Borges’s stories are redolent with an intelligence, wealth of invention, and a tight, almost mathematically formal style that challenge with mysteries and paradoxes revealed only slowly after several readings. Highly recommended to anyone who wants their imagination and intellect to be aswarm with philosophical plots, compelling conundrums, and a wealth of real and imagined literary references derived from an infinitely imaginary library.
Posted in consciousness, philosophy
Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness by Roy Ascott
Long before e-mail and the Internet permeated society, Roy Ascott, a pioneering British artist and theorist, coined the term “telematic art” to describe the use of online computer networks as an artistic medium. In Telematic Embrace Edward A. Shanken gathers, for the first time, an impressive compilation of more than three decades of Ascott’s philosophies on aesthetics, interactivity, and the sense of self and community in the telematic world of cyberspace. This book explores Ascott’s ideas on how networked communication has shaped behavior and consciousness within and beyond the realm of what is conventionally defined as art.
Posted in art, consciousness, education, media, science, technology, theory
Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination and the Construction of the Underworld
This arresting diptych of verse and philosophical prose charts a twenty-five-year obsession with the prehistoric cave paintings of southwestern France. The region’s enigmatic art work, dating from the Upper Paleolithic era, has been a constant muse for Eshleman, whose wildly discursive style mirrors the superimposed scenes of animal herds and shamanistic figures that populate the cave walls. Breathless accounts of cave exploration appear in counterpoint with poems in eerily primordial voices. Although his thesis that all art results from the separation anxiety between human and animal is unpersuasive, there is an impressive exuberance to his efforts to trace back to this common source everything from Greek myth to Allen Ginsberg. For Eshleman, it seems, the artist’s imaginative predicament is something of a cave itself, both maze and refuge.
Posted in art, consciousness, history, philosophy, poetry
Searchlight: Consciousness at the Millennium
This book is an unprecedented exploration of the nature of consciousness and its embodiment in many forms of contemporary art including painting, sculpture, installation, video, film, and computer media. At what is possibly the most portentous moment in recent history–the turn of the millennium–Searchlight reveals the threads of a new aesthetic, reaching from the early nineteenth century through its extraordinary fulfillment in the art of the present. Consciousness is the bedrock of all experience, the foundation of all perception and interaction, the source of meaning. As such, it may be said to have been the primary subject of art for the past 125 years, ever since the Modernist revolution of the nineteenth century shifted artists’ goals from the direct representation of the seen world to the expression of felt experience. As art increasingly focused on the perceiver rather than the perceived, the consciousness of the artist and the viewer moved to the foreground of the artistic event.
Posted in art, consciousness, exhibition, philosophy, science, theory
A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History
De Landa attacks three domains that have given shape to human societies: economics, biology, and linguistics. In every case, what one sees is the self-directed processes of matter and energy interacting with the whim and will of human history itself to form a panoramic vision of the West free of rigid teleology and naive notions of progress, and even more important, free of any deterministic source of its urban, institutional, and technological forms. Rather, the source of all concrete forms in the West’s history are shown to derive from internal morphogenetic capabilities that lie within the flow of matter-energy itself.
Posted in consciousness, history, language, philosophy, science, theory