In the News
communicake:
Marshall McLuhan - ‘Notes on Burroughs’ (1964)
11 November 2008
Today men’s nerves surround us; they have gone outside as electrical environment. The human nervous system itself can be reprogrammed biologically ... Burroughs uses what he calls “Brion Gysin’s cut-up method which I call the fold-in method.” ... The Burroughs diagnosis is that we can avoid the inevitable “closure” that accompanies each new technology ...
Rotating lampshade, whirling mind
27 November 2008
... Only now is he getting his due. The Dream Machine is widely seen as much more than a mere device, as Gysin himself described it, but as an art piece, blending the Arabic patterns that influenced his work with his idea of a kind of almost mechanical abstraction that ran throughout his artistic work. For instance, Gysin is primarily known (and increasingly being rediscovered) for his “cut-ups,” pieces of newspaper joined randomly together.
What Burroughs and Gysin wanted was to fight societal control, to fight the middle-class normality that pervaded postwar America. ...
Standing in Someone Else’s Shoes, Almost for Real
1 December 2008
The brain is so easily tricked, they say, precisely because it has spent a lifetime in its own body. It builds models of the world instantaneously, based on lived experience and using split-second assumptions — namely, that the eyes are attached to the skull. ...
Jeremy Bailenson, director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University, and his colleague Nick Yee call this the Proteus effect, after the Greek god who can embody many different self-representations. ...
In one experiment, the Stanford team found that people inhabiting physically attractive avatars were far more socially intimate in virtual interactions than those who had less appealing ones. ...
6 December 2008
"An artist who is interested in all the structural problems of sensation and who examines with great objectivity and curiosity the possibility of sensorial enrichment innate in the perceptive capacity of man. His search, in short, is parascientific; he ventures into very particular areas, not limiting himself to theoretical discussion, as the dadaists did, but going into an actual examination of the semantic links to which we entrust ourselves daily with our senses. Obsessive repetition, the upsetting of our relationships, unconventional stimuli etc., constitute the instruments that permit us to examine the novelty of the reflexes of our conscience, and therefore also the novelty of the ways that they reveal themselves." (Notes on Painting)
