Wednesday, March 26, 2008

About the readings

A few things that caught my attention:

The first paragraph says that human brains defend against the state of boredom by conjuring hallucinations. How does this relate to the hallucinatory states that happen in extreme meditation and the like?

In the Ecocentric Interpretation, the line about keeping "the cultivated crops from feeding any species other than humans" really opened my eyes. I hadn't thought about "pest" extermination practices in that way before. Not only does mass agriculture grow only one crop, but it wants this crop to ONLY feed humans.

The description of the installation of Kac's Genesis made a nice play on scale -- between the cosmos and the petri dish. The manipulation of the text caused by mutations in the genetic code is a spectacular metaphor/image about the shifting nature of linguistic communication over time and through translations. (Can any document ever have the exact same meaning in a different time or different language to a different person?)

I wondered what Kac's personally-devised code was and why he chose the order of English-->Morse Code-->Personal Code-->ATCG.

In reference to the intersection between art and science, Design and the Elastic Mind is currently on view at the MoMA. The exhibition has a huge interactive online portion that's definitely worth checking out. I bought the exhibition catalog and will bring it to class.

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