Philoctetes Center

The Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination

Talks here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/philoctetesctr

Homepage here:

http://philoctetes.org/Home/

Empathy ansd Conditioning Violence

Not so long ago, video games were considered to be a harmless distraction for young people. Now, they're being blamed for unhealthy addictions, acts of violence, and parental neglect. But is that really the whole story? With these ongoing reports, GameSpot will investigate how video games really affect us--how they affect our culture, how we perceive ourselves and other people, and how ongoing issues like game-related lawsuits and legislation affect us.

Neuroscience and video games. What do they have to do with each other? Aside from whatever research went into crafting games like Psi-Ops and Psychonauts, it doesn't seem like the two subjects have much in common. Sure, neuroscience is the study of the brain, and despite what everyone tells you, you do use your brain when you're playing video games. But what are the chances that the latest neuroscientific research is going to be of any interest to the game industry? Well, if you've been following the (relatively) recent work on mirror neurons, then you would realize that neuroscience is about to have a huge impact--if not on video games, then on the discussions we have about them--for a long time to come.

What Is a Mirror Neuron?
Motor functions, such as grasping a game controller or punching a friend in the shoulder after you lose a Tekken match, have always been understood as the result of a fairly straightforward process. There are cells in our brain that fire off signals to the muscles, and then we perform the appropriate actions. But 15 years ago, scientists studying monkeys noticed that the cells in the brain that fire when a monkey holds a peanut fire in the exact same way when the monkey simply sees someone holding a peanut. Called mirror neurons because they behave as if the monkey were watching itself in the mirror, these neurons allow the monkey to empathize, or automatically understand the experience of holding the peanut, without actually having to hold the peanut itself.


If we see ourselves as DOA4 characters, then we'd probably be feeling both a lot of pleasure and a lot of pain.

This discovery, which some scientists are lauding as the most significant neurological finding in recent history, explains why we so easily relate to the actions of others, even if their actions are not always obvious. We can tell if someone is watching a television by the way that person is facing it--even if we can't see or hear if the television is even on. It also means that we can experience the mental states associated with actions without ever having to perform those actions. In video games, in particular, it's like we're automatically empathizing with what is happening on the screen as if we were the video game characters ourselves. If you've ever had a particularly heart-palpitating race in Burnout, surely you can relate.

More.

NEW MEDIA EVENTS AND THE IMAGE OF CHINA: THE BEIJING OLYMPIC GAMES

Välkommen till seminarium i serien KOMMUNIKATION: KULTUR, TEKNOLOGI,
VETENSKAP


Tid: Torsdag den 14 maj, 2009, kl. 14.15-16

Plats: Torget, Lindstedtsvägen 5, plan 6, Skolan för datavetenskap och
kommunikation, KTH

-----

Föredragshållare: Professor Gong Wenxiang, Peking University


Titel: NEW MEDIA EVENTS AND THE IMAGE OF CHINA: THE BEIJING OLYMPIC GAMES

Abstract:

This paper borrows and revises the theory of Dayan & Katz from their book
Media Event: the Live Broadcasting of History, and views China's mass
media coverage of 2008 Olympic Games as a major media event for the
Government to propagate its ideology, values, policy, and political goals,
and the utmost purpose is to present the bright image of China to the
whole world. The paper goes further to argue that with the advent of the
Internet Age, and the unprecedented growth of Internet users in China,
things have changed. The monopoly of traditional media is being eroded or
even replaced at times by the active participation of the newly emerging
Netizens mainly composed of the educated younger generations. Rules
governing the working of Dayan’s Media Events have been altered by the
interruption of New Media Events initiated not by the Authorities, but by
NGOs, sub-cultural groups, or simply individuals. The paper presents
several cases, such as the case of condemning the CNN commentator
Cafferty, the case of boycotting Carrefour, etc, to illustrate the
characteristics of new media events, and to compare the similarities and
differences of Media Events old and new. Both types of media events during
the Beijing Olympic Games are analyzed as persuasive campaigns especially
for constructing the good Image of China. Since the construction of the
State image is a very complicated process, goals always are not easily
reached, and so would be the case with the Beijing Games. The final
question, have the events online created the potential for a sort of
E-democracy, remains to be answered.


Mer information om vårens seminarier inklusive vägbeskrivning finns på:
http://xml.nada.kth.se/media/Research/k-sem/k-sem-aktuell/

Bakom seminariet står Leif Dahlberg, Per-Anders Forstorp, Eva-Maria
Jacobsson,Francis Lee, Daniel Pargman, Minna Räsänen, Jenny Sundén.
Kontaktperson under VT 2009 är Per-Anders Forstorp (forstorp@kth.se).

Call for Articles

JOURNAL CONTRIBUTION
Call for Articles: Special Thematic Issue of the SOUTH AFRICAN JOURNAL OF ART HISTORY. The third 2009 issue of the South African Journal of Art History will be a special thematic issue dealing with the theme ART / ARCHITECTURE / MUSIC (in any combination). The purpose is to focus on the integration, interdependence andmutual enhancement of these arts. Closing date for the receipt of articles: 31 August 2009. Send articles by e-mail (not exceeding 10MB) to the editor: Estelle A. Maré, If the article exceeds 10MB send two hard copies to the following postal address: Prof EA Maré, 431 Farenden Street, Clydesdale, Pretoria 0002, South Africa

SENSEWALKING: SENSORY WALKING METHODS FOR SOCIAL SCIENTISTS

RGS-IBG Annual Conference SENSEWALKING: SENSORY WALKING METHODS FOR SOCIAL SCIENTISTS in Manchester, 26-28 August 2009. Convenors: Mags Adams (University of Salford) and Kye Askins (Northumbria University). In recent years there has been a growing interest in the role of non-visual senses in the relationships between people and places, in particular how 'sense of place' involves complex corporeal encounters with our environments - how we 'sense' place in terms of sound, smell, touch, taste (alongside sight) as well as understand it through social constructions and circulated texts (Wylie, 2005; Butler, 2006; Edensor, 2006; Pink, 2007). Researchers from across disciplines have worked with the 'sensory walking' concept, utilising sensewalks, soundwalks, listening walks and smell walks as a means to involve participants in discussion, interview, photo-survey, GIS mapping and sound recording, among other innovations/ adaptations. While a recent ESRC seminar series addressed 'Sensescapes' more broadly there has not been a concerted effort to bring together researchers working with beyond-the-visual senses as method. This session seeks to rectify such a gap and welcomes papers from geographers, sociologists, artists, anthropologists, planners, landscape architects and designers (amongst others), acknowledging the multi-disciplinary nature of much of the work in this area. More information:

Creativity and Innovation Workshops: Risk and Innovation

Thursday, 16 April
09:00 - 17:30
Location: CRASSH, 17 Mill Lane
The first in the series of AHRC-sponsored workshops on Creativity and Innovation. Click here to download the AHRC Report on Humanities Research and Innovation

Convenors: Dr Lee Wilson (CRASSH)
Dr James Leach (Aberdeen)

Competitive pressures generate heterogeneous forms of innovation. Is it possible to evaluate unconventional projects? The term innovation is heavily associated with products and technologies. These may be evaluated in terms of patents and econometrics, but intellectual processes and organisational transformations are more elusive. Successful solutions to problems in the fields of science and technology often come from different disciplines (Lakhani et al, The Value of Openness, 2007), while artistic creativity can stimulate shifts in traditional patterns of analytical thinking. How do we measure these aspects of innovation in the Arts and Humanities?

How can public organisations foster creativity without risking investment in areas that may not produce immediate outputs? The open-endedness of creative innovation poses a challenge to traditional modes of evaluation, since an element of risk is inherent in creative processes and innovative research. While the risk associated with open-ended innovation has gained acceptance in the economic world, there is little tolerance for risk in the Arts and Humanities, where it is often written out of funding proposals and replaced by specified goals and cost-effective outputs. A tension exists between public funding regimes and practices of research that call for ‘open innovation’ or long-term prospects.

Questions to be posed include:
• Are existing metrics adequate for assessing innovation?
• How can we assess the impact of knowledge transfer processes on the innovation economy?
• How far do instrumental ideas about knowledge apply to humanities research and practice-based innovation?
• Does an emphasis on goals and outputs constrain innovative practice?
• Can innovation in the Arts and Humanities be assessed in terms of economic impact? What are its transferable benefits?
• What is the cultural value and meaning of creative innovation?

Confirmed Speakers
Robert Dingwall (Professor and Director, Institute for Science and Society, Nottingham)
Alan Hughes (Director, Centre for Business Research, Cambridge)
Pat Kane (Author The Play Ethic)
Giles Lane ( Proboscis)
Ruth Levitt (RAND Europe
Nell Munro (School of Law, Nottingham)
Sally Jane Norman (Director, Culture Lab, University of Newcastle)
Kate Oakley (City University, Demos)
Seymour Rowarth-Stokes (Pro VC, University for the Creative Arts)
Dani Salvadori (Director of Entreprise and Innovation, Central St Martins College of Art and Design)
Calvin Taylor (Professor of Cultural Industries, University of Leeds)
Brenden Walker (Director, Aerial

More.

It's a Knockout

A look back at the game show It's A Knockout, which originally ran from (1966 - 1982).

Climate Hack

Climate Hack! | a collaborative hacking workshop

Joint venture with Pixelache, and Tinker.it and KIBU

What the heck?
Climate Hack is a workshop for emerging researchers, designers and artists dedicated to reframing the international political climate using means well-outside the traditional political rhetoric. Using both old and new technologies, live internet data streams and a diverse collection of hacking skills, workshop participants will produce a series of projects for public exhibition during the finals days of the Transmediale festival in Berlin, Germany.



Driven by the often-absurd nature of politics and the collective creativity often generated from equally absurd artistic mediums, the workshop will rally around the task of hacking Cotton Candy machines. Custom and hacked electronics, connected to live political news and weather feeds, will inform and animate the project. The result will be a set of dynamic and playful art objects designed to invert our perception of "everyday politics".

Pixelache, a network for electronic culture, Tinker LTD, innovative consultancy for interactive experiences and Kitchen Budapest, a lab for young innovators based in Hungary, will facilitate the international workshop by providing a structure for innovation, advising and moderation throughout the collaborative event. The event will consist of brainstorming and design sessions, hardware and software hacking sessions, and the completion of several new works. This workshop, its participants and its products will also serve as the starting point for a second workshop dedicated to similar themes at the PixelACHE festival in Helsinki April 5-9, 2009.

Here.

Bureau for Open Culture at Columbus College of Art & Design: Of Other Spaces

Mary Jo Bole, Michael Brown, Alain Bublex, Robert Buck, Gregory Crewdson, Dan Graham, Candida Höfer, Guillaume Leblon, Laura Lisbon, Gordon Matta-Clark, Eva Meyer and Eran Schaerf, Laurent Montaron, Marylène Negro, TJ Norris and Scott Wayne Indiana, Sarah Schönfeld, Maya Schweizer, Suzanne Silver, Christian Tomaszewski, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Jane and Louise Wilson

Curated by James Voorhies

Of Other Spaces explores how space affects human behavior and experience. The exhibition asks us to consider the ways in which spaces are charged with authority, and both serve and suppress our actions and ways of relating. The concept of "other spaces" is drawn from the philosophy of Michel Foucault, especially his thoughts on social relations and cultural practices expressed in the intersection of space, architecture, and history. In a rarely cited 1967 text by Foucault, entitled "Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias," he introduces what he calls heterotopias—different or other spaces.

Hospitals, prisons, schools, libraries, museums, fairgrounds, cinemas, beaches, cemeteries, gardens, hotel suites, train stations, and even mirrors have the potential to be other spaces. Other spaces are essentially virtual. They function in accordance with personal memories, associations, experiences, and imaginings that one has of these very real sites. By making common practices strange, Foucault's writing often initiates conversations about habitual actions, in this case, in relation to space. The collection of works of art on exhibition and the reprinting of Foucault's text on "heterotopias" in the exhibition catalogue form the visual and philosophical catalyst for thinking about the function and meaning of space in everyday life.

Of Other Spaces continues a discussion on the origins, uses, histories, influences, and current and past activities that accompany our personal experiences of space.

128-page catalogue accompanies the exhibition.


About the Bureau for Open Culture

Bureau for Open Culture at Columbus College of Art & Design is an exhibition-making philosophy that transcends traditional notions of exhibition display. It is an initiative that uses the gallery as a site for presenting thematic exhibitions, bringing together works of art to further knowledge about relationships with one another and with general concepts. The bureau also expands the exhibition model to include off-site projects, workshops, screenings, informal talks, publications, and short-term residencies. It embraces experimental and open approaches of supporting artistic and curatorial trajectories that responds to a multidisciplinary contemporary culture. Taking a position somewhere between a gallery and an alternative space, Bureau for Open Culture challenges traditional exhibition formats while respecting historical sources for those investigations.

Support for Bureau for Open Culture and Of Other Spaces has been provided by Greater Columbus Arts Council, Ohio Arts Council, and a curatorial research grant by Etant donnés: The French-American Fund for Contemporary Art.

Bureau for Open Culture
Columbus College of Art & Design
107 N. Ninth St.
Columbus, OH 43215
(614) 222-3270
http://www.bureauforopenculture.org

Assignment for Synthesis Studios (Week 17)

PLAY STUDIO 2009

Assignment for Synthesis Studios (Week 17):
Working individually, identify a site that you wish to explore for its potential for triggering play. From this context you will define a theme that will engage people in playing. This theme will be then developed in two directions:

1. On Monday 20 April:
You will present a way to engage in play by using performance + space. Audience or participants? Space or place? You decide, but be prepared to justify your decisions.

2. On Wednesday 22:
You will present the same theme, but this time the emphasis will be placed on the artefact – i.e. the materials that mediate that engagement. Incorporate also the feedback you received from the Monday (20 April) seminar to refine further your design for triggering play, now involoving site, agency and materials/media.

Deliverables:
Monday (20/4), a film, play or performance that enacts the play(ing).
Wednesday (22/4), a scenario that incorporates a 2D-3D model of the design that triggers play(ing).

Reading
See handout.

Reinventing Innovation

By ALICE RAWSTHORN
Published: April 5, 2009

LONDON — Some words just wear themselves out. They are used — or misused — so often that they lose their meaning. “Design” is one, “creative” is another, and if I see “contemporary” used to describe one more stick of furniture that looks as if it has been sequestrated from a 1980s porn palace, I will scream.

gDiapers
When the gDiaper, which consists of a biodegradable insert worn inside a pair of underpants, is soiled, you can flush it down the toilet. If it is only wet, you can compost it and it will decompose within a few months.
A recent recruit to the endangered list is “innovation.” Once hailed as a panacea, it has been so diminished by hyperbole that it risks seeming irrelevant. (“Transformation” is the fashionable favorite to replace it.) Yet just like “design” and “contemporary,” “innovation” is losing credibility as a word at the very time when it is needed most urgently.

As the economic and environmental crises deepen, there is a growing recognition that many aspects of our lives need to be reinvented. Politicians routinely call for the “redesign” of society, and urge businesses to “innovate” their way out of recession. This readiness to embrace change — even radical change — coupled with advances in science and technology, is unleashing a stream of innovations. Here are some of the most exciting ones.

More.

Mapping the Cultural Buzz: How Cool Is That?

By MELENA RYZIK
Published in NYT: April 6, 2009

Apologies to residents of the Lower East Side; Williamsburg, Brooklyn; and other hipster-centric neighborhoods. You are not as cool as you think, at least according to a new study that seeks to measure what it calls “the geography of buzz.”

The research, presented in late March at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, locates hot spots based on the frequency and draw of cultural happenings: film and television screenings, concerts, fashion shows, gallery and theater openings. The buzziest areas in New York, it finds, are around Lincoln and Rockefeller Centers, and down Broadway from Times Square into SoHo. In Los Angeles the cool stuff happens in Beverly Hills and Hollywood, along the Sunset Strip, not in trendy Silver Lake or Echo Park.

More.

Call for Articles

JOURNAL CONTRIBUTION
Call for Articles: Special Thematic Issue of the SOUTH AFRICAN JOURNAL OF ART HISTORY. The third 2009 issue of the South African Journal of Art History will be a special thematic issue dealing with the theme ART / ARCHITECTURE / MUSIC (in any combination). The purpose is to focus on the integration, interdependence andmutual enhancement of these arts. Closing date for the receipt of articles: 31 August 2009. Send articles by e-mail (not exceeding 10MB) to the editor: Estelle A. Maré, If the article exceeds 10MB send two hard copies to the following postal address: Prof EA Maré, 431 Farenden Street, Clydesdale, Pretoria 0002, South Africa

SENSEWALKING: SENSORY WALKING METHODS FOR SOCIAL SCIENTISTS

RGS-IBG Annual Conference SENSEWALKING: SENSORY WALKING METHODS FOR SOCIAL SCIENTISTS in Manchester, 26-28 August 2009. Convenors: Mags Adams (University of Salford) and Kye Askins (Northumbria University). In recent years there has been a growing interest in the role of non-visual senses in the relationships between people and places, in particular how 'sense of place' involves complex corporeal encounters with our environments - how we 'sense' place in terms of sound, smell, touch, taste (alongside sight) as well as understand it through social constructions and circulated texts (Wylie, 2005; Butler, 2006; Edensor, 2006; Pink, 2007). Researchers from across disciplines have worked with the 'sensory walking' concept, utilising sensewalks, soundwalks, listening walks and smell walks as a means to involve participants in discussion, interview, photo-survey, GIS mapping and sound recording, among other innovations/ adaptations. While a recent ESRC seminar series addressed 'Sensescapes' more broadly there has not been a concerted effort to bring together researchers working with beyond-the-visual senses as method. This session seeks to rectify such a gap and welcomes papers from geographers, sociologists, artists, anthropologists, planners, landscape architects and designers (amongst others), acknowledging the multi-disciplinary nature of much of the work in this area. More information: