22.4.07

Nobody said anything about the blogosphere

The geosphere includes all the lifeless things of the universe. The dust, rocks, fireballs, and icycles.

The biosphere refers to those things in the cosmos that are living. It is said that the geosphere gives rise to the biosphere.

The noosphere is the realm of the human mind. It suggests a topography of human reason and belief, complete with the graceful beaches and rocky coastlines in between.

13.4.07

Six New Categories for Contemporary Art

Hoorah for Roberta Smith, Arts columnist for the NYTimes, for finally redefining and rearranging the boxes into which we divide this culture's post-postmodern, post-medium art! She did so in today's review of goings-on in Chelsea.

I paraphrase:

Messy : food and drink and maybe spray paint allowed
Clean : no food and drink allowed
Full : art comprised of lots of things
Fuller : work that overflows
Empty : it's (mostly) not things
Giant : when Oldenburg's scale is used

So, the next time I'm asked, "What kind of art do you do?," I'm tossing "multimedia installation" aside, and responding "Messy Full"! Brilliant! Thank you Roberta!

9.4.07

Thirteen Galleries

Add to these definitions of the word "gallery" the model name of our Frigidaire front-loading washing machine.

1 . spectators in a tennis match
2 . a long porch or veranda
3 . rooms for art exhibition
4 . covered corridor or hallway
5 . nearly horizontal passageway in a mine
6 . decorative upright molding on the edge of a table or tray
7 . narrow outdoor balcony
8 . passageway over the aisle of a church, opening onto the nave
9 . upper, sloped section of an auditorium or theater--the cheapest seats
10 . a collection or assortment
11 . a burrowing insect or animal's tunnel
12 . a balcony at the stern or quarters of early sailing ships

Frigidaire, incidentally ranks up there in the most unfortunate corporate names.

4.4.07

On the Rich and the Powerful

Both of these quotations are from today's New York Times Opinion pages.
"Not since the Roaring Twenties have the rich been so much richer than everyone else. In 2005, the latest year for which figures are available, the top 1 percent of Americans — whose average income was $1.1 million a year — received 21.8 percent of the nation’s income, their largest share since 1929. Over all, the top 10 percent of Americans — those making more than about $100,000 a year — collected 48.5 percent, also a share last seen before the Great Depression."

...and, from a different column...

"Researchers led by the psychologist Dacher Keltner took groups of three ordinary volunteers and randomly put one of them in charge. Each trio had a half-hour to work through a boring social survey. Then a researcher came in and left a plateful of precisely five cookies. Care to guess which volunteer typically grabbed an extra cookie? The volunteer who had randomly been assigned the power role was also more likely to eat it with his mouth open, spew crumbs on partners and get cookie detritus on his face and on the table."

2.4.07

Emet! & ting-yin

EMET is the Hebrew word for TRUTH.

The utterance activates the Golem.

.................................................................

ting-yin

in which the pulse of the bloodstream in the fingers of the guqin instrumentalist alters the timbre of the note

Peirce's Cenopythagorean Categories

Charles Sanders Peirce, American philosopher, mathematician, scientist, author of such works as "How to Make Your Thoughts Clear," formulator of the Maxim of Pragmaticism, and a lifelong friend of William James, in 1867 presented a paper entitled "On a New List of Categories" to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, published the following year, in which he laid the groundwork for a Theory of Three Categories that pervades much of his work.

The scheme is a trichotomous architectonic, organizing the essentials of the pragmatic philosophy to which Pierce is credited as founder. The paper follows readings of Kant, Aristotle, and Hegel, and it is notedly dense.

FIRSTNESS
Quality of feeling. Ideas, chance, possibility. Vagueness, ephemeral. Reference to a ground, a pure abstraction of a quality. Essentially monadic. The Quale.

SECONDNESS
Reaction. Resistance. Dyadic relation. Brute facts, actuality. Singularity, discreteness. Reference to a correlate by its relate.

THIRDNESS
Representation. Habits, laws, necessity. Generality, continuity. Reference to an interpretation. Essentially triadic: sign, object, content of interpretation.