On Hammers and Feathers as the Artist’s Epistemic Weapons

Legend has it that around 1590 Galileo Galilei dropped cannon balls and other munition from the tower of Pisa and thus discovered the law of ‘free fall’: The fall velocity of an object in a vacuum is independant of its form and mass. Due to air resistance, the fall velocity of an object in the Earth’s atmosphere is slowed down in accordance with its form and mass. … More On Hammers and Feathers as the Artist’s Epistemic Weapons

Audacities of Memory

Memory is a subject of timely and far-reaching import. As postmodernists query the nature of truth, memory, and history; as history books are rewritten to reflect multiculturalism, polyvocality, and the decentering of knowledge; as the humanities become increasingly reflexive; and as issues of memory loss and retrieval are researched, debated, and litigated, it is appropriate to consider how other cultures conceive of and use memory. … More Audacities of Memory

Of Maps and Memory: How the brain’s GPS helps us to replay the past and imagine the future

The impossibility of creating a map on a scale of 1:1 has been a favourite subject for scientists and artists over the years. However we look at the problem, every map must reduce the infinity of reality to a finite representation of the world… … More Of Maps and Memory: How the brain’s GPS helps us to replay the past and imagine the future

The Gimzo and the Gaze: Discerning VR, the Virtual and Virtuality through a Select Micro-History—1977 to the present.

In 1988, Bay Press in Seattle published “Vision and Visuality,” edited by the cultural writer and art historian, Hal Foster. The book is a collection of transcripts and essays by historians, teachers and theorists who participated in a 1987 symposium, organized by Foster and the Dia Foundation on the “modes of vision.” “Vision and Visuality” was part of a series of publications called, “Discussions in Contemporary Culture.” … More The Gimzo and the Gaze: Discerning VR, the Virtual and Virtuality through a Select Micro-History—1977 to the present.

Genealogies of the New Aesthetic

Christiane Paul and Malcolm Levy

Whether or not you believe in the theoretical and art-historical value of the concept of a New Aesthetic – and the related buzz surrounding the labels of post-digital, post-Internet, post-medium – their rapid spread throughout art networks testifies to a need for terminologies that capture a certain condition of cultural and artistic practice in the early 21st century … More Genealogies of the New Aesthetic

“It’s not a joke!” Bio-art and the aesthetics of humour

Isabel De Sena Cortabitarte

In this paper I assert that in bio-art, the use of humour as a rhetorical tool holds the potential to bring ambiguous, non-normative perspectives into ethical questions that arise from developments in the life sciences (that field concerned with the study of living organisms and the advancement of life-altering interventions, such as bioengineering and genetic manipulation). … More “It’s not a joke!” Bio-art and the aesthetics of humour

Whimmydiddles, Whirligigs, and Capital Punishment: A History of Toys and Games, Being A Partial and Idiosyncratic Exploration of Several Centuries of Developments, Focusing Largely on Europe and North America.

Tyler Calkin

Toys are for everyone, not just the young: models, miniatures and replicas are as much for adults as they are for children. And the function of a toy extends beyond a moment’s amusement. Throughout history and across cultures, toys have been created to serve as tools for teaching. Indeed, they are almost always instructive in some capacity, eve if they have not been built with a primarily pedagogical intent. Toys are reflectors and propagators of a culture’s ideology, and variably serve as teachers of moral lessons, mathematics, imperialist narratives, class distinctions, and spirituality. … More Whimmydiddles, Whirligigs, and Capital Punishment: A History of Toys and Games, Being A Partial and Idiosyncratic Exploration of Several Centuries of Developments, Focusing Largely on Europe and North America.

Play: Active – A curatorial project in the form of a workshop

Tom Leeser

The political theorist, Hannah Arendt stated that we “define labor as the opposite of play.” However the predominant value of labor has evolved from physical activities embedded in a manufacturing economy to a form of indexical finance that is decoupled from the production and exchange of things. This digitally based “fiat” economy has fractured the definitions of labor and play that was articulated by Arendt. … More Play: Active – A curatorial project in the form of a workshop