Wednesday, October 31, 2007
VANITAS
http://www.vmfa.museum/vanitas.html
VMFA logo
Exhibitions title
Vanitas: Meditations on Life and Death In Contemporary Art
April 4 - June 18, 2000
Every Touch
Every Touch (detail), 1998, by Jim Hodges is made of silk, cotton, polyester and thread and measures 168 by 192 inches.
Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art Combining tradition with the experimental and featuring an international selection of work by 14 contemporary artists, Vanitas: Meditations on Life and Death in Contemporary Art is on view April 4 through June 18, 2000 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
A reference to the theme may be found as far back as Biblical times: “Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun? A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.” (Ecclesiastes 1:2-4, New Revised Standard Version.)
“Vanitas” is a Latin word used since the Renaissance to describe the transitory nature of life. The term characterizes the appreciation of life’s pleasures and accomplishments joined with the awareness of their inevitable loss, according to John B. Ravenal, curator of art after 1900 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and organizer of the exhibition. “This theme has long been the inspiration for some of the Western civilization’s most significant works of art and literature. It is especially apparent in 17th-century Dutch still lifes, with their abundant flowers, overripe fruits, snuffed candles, skulls and timepieces,” he explains.
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Interim Director Richard B. Woodward says, “It is fitting to look at artists of our own time as we mark the beginning of a new millennium. This moment inevitably prompts us to think about lasting values. The venerable ‘vanitas’ theme continues to captivate today’s artists in their contemplation and expression of the dynamic tension between life's beauty and its fleeting nature.
The exhibition will introduce museum visitors to some of the most important contemporary artists working today, none of whom have been presented before in this region.
Ravenal says Vanitas will focus on sculpture and installation art and will feature works that use unconventional forms, materials and processes:
Zoe Leonard (American, b. 1961) has created for the exhibition a new installation of sewn fruit, the idea for which grew out of a meditation on the death of a friend. The installation features peels carefully sewn together after the fruit has been removed. The result evokes the human body as a fragile container and suggests both loss and repair, Ravenal says. Leonard herself says, “This act of fixing something broken, repairing the skin after the fruit is gone, strikes me as both pathetic and beautiful - at any rate, as intensely human.” Detail of Strange Fruit
Strange Fruit (for David) (detail), 1992-’97; by Zoe Leonard; fruit peel (orange), thread, needle, variable dimensions.
Photo by Vivien Bittencourt from a 1995 installation at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Black Kites
Black Kites, 1997, is by Gabriel Orozco. It is a human skull with graphite markings.
Photo: Graydon Wood, 1998. Black Kites, a work by Gabriel Orozco (Mexican, b. 1962) uses a human skull covered with a harlequin pattern as a reminder of death. Ravenal says the alternating black and white squares on the top of the skull “resemble a chessboard, recalling the game’s traditional symbolism of the conflict between dualities, including life and death.” Orozco emphasizes the work’s formal qualities, suggesting the closest parallels are found in computer imagery.
Yukinori Yanagi (Japanese, b. 1959) has also created a new installation for Vanitas. His One Dollar presents an image of a U.S. dollar bill sculpted in colored sand inside shallow plastic boxes. Over the course of the exhibition, a colony of live ants will tunnel through the image. “The ants’ ceaseless labor paradoxically undermines this symbol of American economic might, creating a kind of morality play on the fickleness of wealth and power,” Ravenal explains. When the erosion of the work reaches a balance between recognition and disintegration, the artist will remove the ants and release them outdoors. One Dollar
One Dollar, 1999, is by Yukinori Yanagi, who will create a much larger version of the work for Vanitas. This version consists of colored sand, plastic boxes, plastic tubes and live ants.
Mona Hatoum (Palestinian, b. Lebanon, 1952) used a platinum-based silicone product manufactured for breast implants to make Entrails Carpet, creating a tense standoff between seduction and repulsion. Displayed in a low, rectangular format, the “carpet” of viscera “invites the desire to touch and even to walk upon it,” Ravenal says. The work's unusual material and intricate pattern prompt a fascination that “soon turns to fear as the spectacle of human organs - even in simulation creates a powerful reminder of human vulnerability,” he explains.
The exhibition also includes works by Miroslaw Balka (Polish, b. 1958), Christian Boltanski (French, b. 1944), Leonardo Drew (American, b. 1961), Tony Feher (American, b. 1956), Robert Gober (American, b. 1954), Felix Gonzalez-Torres (American, b. Cuba, 1957- 1996), Jim Hodges (American, b. 1957), Anish Kapoor (British, b. India, 1954), Jac Leirner (Brazilian, b. 1961) and Rachel Whiteread (British, b. 1963).
Monday, October 29, 2007
Como somos productores de objetos...
... pienso que esta discusion es un bosquejo al tipo de pensamiento al que se someten los objetos.
*******
********
H-Net Announcement 2008 ASCA International Workshop: Engaging Objects
Things in the world, objects of art and of everyday use, have functioned as core referents in contemporary cultural theory.
Since the “linguistic turn”, technological devices and philosophical texts, dirty windows, typewriter-erasers, and cyber-space, have been proposed and contested as possible sites for re-encountering material reality.
The 2008 ASCA International Workshop is a space open to reflect on the methodological nuances, theoretical consequences and political implications of engaging objects within the humanities.
“Engaging Objects” refers to the object’s possibilities of seduction and resistance, of compromise and failure.
Objects engage researchers: they attract our interest, involve us and position us as scholars in relation to their cultural emergence.
Similarly, while engaging with objects we, as theorists, also produce them as objects of study.
We further engage with culture at large through artistic or mundane, actual or virtual objects—they work as mediators of social relationships and as translators between imaginary and lived culture.
This sense of engagement can be found in the root of the verb “to engage”. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a gage is “a valued object deposited as a guarantee of good faith”, as well as “a pledge, especially a glove, thrown down as a symbol of a challenge to fight”.
Thus, engagement can be understood as an object’s promise, its act of commitment or provocation.
The concept of engagement gains its sense metaphorically, developing from a concrete action in which the object stands in for a socially charged gesture.
The mediatory role of objects may also be abused, although objects are always already engaged with the world in ways that exceed our scholarly framing of them.
The relationship between object and researcher is not only limited to a metaphorical promise; it is also an actual intervention.
“Engaging Objects” is thus concerned with the act of engagement. This engagement is not with the respective parties of a relation, but with the relationship itself.
“Engaging Objects” aims to investigate the politics of relating within scholarly practices.
Thinking of this relationship as a site where the known and the knower are partly produced, we may focus on the fractures, irregularities and inconsistencies that are constitutive of our own production of knowledge today within fields such as visual culture, literature, history, art, music, performance, anthropology, theory, and politics.
These issues will be discussed in four panels:
Engaging theory
This panel seeks to position theory as an object of study.
In considering theory as an object, its material aspects are brought to the fore. Yet the material aspects of theory are not the same for scholars across different disciplines or schools of thought.
Post-structuralist scholars, for example, might locate theory’s materiality in the actual language used to construct abstract concepts.
Their more Marxist-oriented critics, however, might use the term “material” to name the wider socio-cultural and political networks within which the theoretical text is inserted.
Creatively re-articulating these different traditions may make our own engagements with theory more politically and intellectually productive.
This panel invites participants to think through the metaphor of the “engaging object” in order to explore theory as a literary text, as a cultural object, as a social promise and as a political act.
Sensory disruptions
Sensory perception is the primary way in which we encounter objects.
The senses are culturally conditioned, and each society tends to privilege certain types of sensory engagement.
Modernity has often been characterized by the dominance of visuality, which posits a distant, distinct and disembodied viewer, and as such is presumed to underlie Western epistemology and theories of subjectivity. ‘
This panel seeks to explore alternatives to this, arguably still prominent, mode of sensory engagement.
How can it be disrupted through the intervention of other senses (as in haptic visuality)?
What kinds of engagement do the other senses, and their different interrelations, bring about? What alternative relationships between the object and the researcher do they generate (e.g. affective, ethical, erotic)?
These questions imply a change of sensibility that is both perceptual and conceptual.
What are the theoretical consequences of this shift from the visual to the aural, the tactile, to kinesis and proprioception?
What can be gained from thinking synaesthetically? And, more generally, what art of knowing is produced in this new, sensuous engagement?
Bodily interventions
The living body has, as Crary and Kwinter (1992) state, a “menacing and delirious concreteness” and serves as a complex and fascinating object of study in cultural theory.
Especially within academic research around minority subjectivities (including queer and feminist theory, disability and race studies), the body acquired an important role: it became a site for alternative modes of knowledge production.
This focus on extraordinary forms of embodiment politicized certain traditions of thought. But to the extent that specifically marked bodies might feature as seductive and spectacular objects of study, it is essential to reflect on the relationship between the shape of our theories and our conceptions of embodiment.
This panel further aims to explore how a critical analysis of the “unmarked” (white, male, “standard”) body helps to investigate the failures of cultural theory. Where are the limitations of treating the body in theory as meaningful object? How do particular cultural engagements with the body expose and/or expand the boundaries of theory?
Comparison engagée
No matter what discipline we work in, when we engage with our objects of study, we are always involved in some form of comparison.
With “parity” at its etymological root, comparison is usually understood as a methodology based on similarity and equality. But comparison is a dangerous activity, one that often conceals universalist and essentialist suppositions and whose terms are never neutral.
To deal with comparison in an engaged (engagé) way, it is important to reflect on our terms of comparison. How do we decide on these terms and how do we incorporate this decision process within the practice of comparison itself?
This draws attention to the necessity for scholars to acknowledge their own role in positioning objects in relation to each other and themselves. Is it possible to stand back and let objects engage with each other, or is this engagement only possible through us?
If so, how does such a mediating role affect our research position? In this panel, we would like to discuss ways of dealing with the politics of comparison and to explore how and to what extent the objects we study can affect both our terms and methodologies of comparative engagement.
This workshop is the latest in a series of ASCA International Workshops and is inspired by the 2006-2007 ASCA theory seminar “Ways of Writing: The Object Speaks Back”. We welcome participants from any discipline. Please e-mail or send your one-page proposal (300 words maximum) and a short biographical note by October 31, 2007 to the ASCA office: asca-fgw@uva.nl, Dr. Eloe Kingma (Managing Director), Oude Turfmarkt 147, 1012 GC, Amsterdam, tel: +31 20 525 3874. Please indicate which panel theme (out of the four mentioned above) you believe your proposal would best fit in.
Selected participants will be asked to send their 3000 words papers by January 31, so that papers can be distributed among participants in advance. To allow enough time for discussion, papers will not be read during the workshop. Instead, participants are expected to give a 10 minute summary, relating their argument to that of their fellow panelists.
We are also looking for performances to be presented during the workshop that are relevant to the workshop theme of “engaging objects”. Please send a proposal (500 words maximum) indicating duration, number of participants and technical requirements. We also require a sample of your work (hard copy or electronic reference). Please send your proposals by October 31, 2007 to the ASCA office: asca-fgw@uva.nl, Dr. Eloe Kingma (managing Director ASCA), Oude Turfmarkt 147, 1012 GC, Amsterdam, tel: +31 20 525 3874.
Organizers: Paulina Aroch Fugellie, Tereza Havelkova, Jules Sturm, Astrid Van Weyenberg
Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA)
Dr. Eloe Kingma (Managing Director)
Oude Turfmarkt 147
1012 GC Amsterdam
The Netherlands
tel: +31 20 525 3874
Email: asca-fgw@uva.nl
Visit the website at http:///www.hum.uva.nl/asca
*******
********
H-Net Announcement 2008 ASCA International Workshop: Engaging Objects
Things in the world, objects of art and of everyday use, have functioned as core referents in contemporary cultural theory.
Since the “linguistic turn”, technological devices and philosophical texts, dirty windows, typewriter-erasers, and cyber-space, have been proposed and contested as possible sites for re-encountering material reality.
The 2008 ASCA International Workshop is a space open to reflect on the methodological nuances, theoretical consequences and political implications of engaging objects within the humanities.
“Engaging Objects” refers to the object’s possibilities of seduction and resistance, of compromise and failure.
Objects engage researchers: they attract our interest, involve us and position us as scholars in relation to their cultural emergence.
Similarly, while engaging with objects we, as theorists, also produce them as objects of study.
We further engage with culture at large through artistic or mundane, actual or virtual objects—they work as mediators of social relationships and as translators between imaginary and lived culture.
This sense of engagement can be found in the root of the verb “to engage”. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a gage is “a valued object deposited as a guarantee of good faith”, as well as “a pledge, especially a glove, thrown down as a symbol of a challenge to fight”.
Thus, engagement can be understood as an object’s promise, its act of commitment or provocation.
The concept of engagement gains its sense metaphorically, developing from a concrete action in which the object stands in for a socially charged gesture.
The mediatory role of objects may also be abused, although objects are always already engaged with the world in ways that exceed our scholarly framing of them.
The relationship between object and researcher is not only limited to a metaphorical promise; it is also an actual intervention.
“Engaging Objects” is thus concerned with the act of engagement. This engagement is not with the respective parties of a relation, but with the relationship itself.
“Engaging Objects” aims to investigate the politics of relating within scholarly practices.
Thinking of this relationship as a site where the known and the knower are partly produced, we may focus on the fractures, irregularities and inconsistencies that are constitutive of our own production of knowledge today within fields such as visual culture, literature, history, art, music, performance, anthropology, theory, and politics.
These issues will be discussed in four panels:
Engaging theory
This panel seeks to position theory as an object of study.
In considering theory as an object, its material aspects are brought to the fore. Yet the material aspects of theory are not the same for scholars across different disciplines or schools of thought.
Post-structuralist scholars, for example, might locate theory’s materiality in the actual language used to construct abstract concepts.
Their more Marxist-oriented critics, however, might use the term “material” to name the wider socio-cultural and political networks within which the theoretical text is inserted.
Creatively re-articulating these different traditions may make our own engagements with theory more politically and intellectually productive.
This panel invites participants to think through the metaphor of the “engaging object” in order to explore theory as a literary text, as a cultural object, as a social promise and as a political act.
Sensory disruptions
Sensory perception is the primary way in which we encounter objects.
The senses are culturally conditioned, and each society tends to privilege certain types of sensory engagement.
Modernity has often been characterized by the dominance of visuality, which posits a distant, distinct and disembodied viewer, and as such is presumed to underlie Western epistemology and theories of subjectivity. ‘
This panel seeks to explore alternatives to this, arguably still prominent, mode of sensory engagement.
How can it be disrupted through the intervention of other senses (as in haptic visuality)?
What kinds of engagement do the other senses, and their different interrelations, bring about? What alternative relationships between the object and the researcher do they generate (e.g. affective, ethical, erotic)?
These questions imply a change of sensibility that is both perceptual and conceptual.
What are the theoretical consequences of this shift from the visual to the aural, the tactile, to kinesis and proprioception?
What can be gained from thinking synaesthetically? And, more generally, what art of knowing is produced in this new, sensuous engagement?
Bodily interventions
The living body has, as Crary and Kwinter (1992) state, a “menacing and delirious concreteness” and serves as a complex and fascinating object of study in cultural theory.
Especially within academic research around minority subjectivities (including queer and feminist theory, disability and race studies), the body acquired an important role: it became a site for alternative modes of knowledge production.
This focus on extraordinary forms of embodiment politicized certain traditions of thought. But to the extent that specifically marked bodies might feature as seductive and spectacular objects of study, it is essential to reflect on the relationship between the shape of our theories and our conceptions of embodiment.
This panel further aims to explore how a critical analysis of the “unmarked” (white, male, “standard”) body helps to investigate the failures of cultural theory. Where are the limitations of treating the body in theory as meaningful object? How do particular cultural engagements with the body expose and/or expand the boundaries of theory?
Comparison engagée
No matter what discipline we work in, when we engage with our objects of study, we are always involved in some form of comparison.
With “parity” at its etymological root, comparison is usually understood as a methodology based on similarity and equality. But comparison is a dangerous activity, one that often conceals universalist and essentialist suppositions and whose terms are never neutral.
To deal with comparison in an engaged (engagé) way, it is important to reflect on our terms of comparison. How do we decide on these terms and how do we incorporate this decision process within the practice of comparison itself?
This draws attention to the necessity for scholars to acknowledge their own role in positioning objects in relation to each other and themselves. Is it possible to stand back and let objects engage with each other, or is this engagement only possible through us?
If so, how does such a mediating role affect our research position? In this panel, we would like to discuss ways of dealing with the politics of comparison and to explore how and to what extent the objects we study can affect both our terms and methodologies of comparative engagement.
This workshop is the latest in a series of ASCA International Workshops and is inspired by the 2006-2007 ASCA theory seminar “Ways of Writing: The Object Speaks Back”. We welcome participants from any discipline. Please e-mail or send your one-page proposal (300 words maximum) and a short biographical note by October 31, 2007 to the ASCA office: asca-fgw@uva.nl, Dr. Eloe Kingma (Managing Director), Oude Turfmarkt 147, 1012 GC, Amsterdam, tel: +31 20 525 3874. Please indicate which panel theme (out of the four mentioned above) you believe your proposal would best fit in.
Selected participants will be asked to send their 3000 words papers by January 31, so that papers can be distributed among participants in advance. To allow enough time for discussion, papers will not be read during the workshop. Instead, participants are expected to give a 10 minute summary, relating their argument to that of their fellow panelists.
We are also looking for performances to be presented during the workshop that are relevant to the workshop theme of “engaging objects”. Please send a proposal (500 words maximum) indicating duration, number of participants and technical requirements. We also require a sample of your work (hard copy or electronic reference). Please send your proposals by October 31, 2007 to the ASCA office: asca-fgw@uva.nl, Dr. Eloe Kingma (managing Director ASCA), Oude Turfmarkt 147, 1012 GC, Amsterdam, tel: +31 20 525 3874.
Organizers: Paulina Aroch Fugellie, Tereza Havelkova, Jules Sturm, Astrid Van Weyenberg
Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA)
Dr. Eloe Kingma (Managing Director)
Oude Turfmarkt 147
1012 GC Amsterdam
The Netherlands
tel: +31 20 525 3874
Email: asca-fgw@uva.nl
Visit the website at http:///www.hum.uva.nl/asca
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Pensando en que es el trabajo...
...basado en el conflicto de la obra de Fede...
*
Una cita de George Bernard Shaw:
"This is the true job in life,
The being used for a purpose recognised by yourself
As a mighty one,
The being a force of nature instead of a feverish,
Selfish little clod of ailments and grievances
Complaining that the world
Will not devote itself to making you happy.
I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the
Whole community and as long as I live it is my
Privilege to do for it whatever I can.
I want to be thoroughly used up when I die,
For the harder I work the more I live.
I rejoice in life for its own sake;
Life is no brief candle to me,
It is a sort of splendid torch
Which I have got hold of for the moment,
And I want to make it burn as brightly
As possible before handing it on
To future generations.
George Bernard Shaw
*
Una cita de George Bernard Shaw:
"This is the true job in life,
The being used for a purpose recognised by yourself
As a mighty one,
The being a force of nature instead of a feverish,
Selfish little clod of ailments and grievances
Complaining that the world
Will not devote itself to making you happy.
I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the
Whole community and as long as I live it is my
Privilege to do for it whatever I can.
I want to be thoroughly used up when I die,
For the harder I work the more I live.
I rejoice in life for its own sake;
Life is no brief candle to me,
It is a sort of splendid torch
Which I have got hold of for the moment,
And I want to make it burn as brightly
As possible before handing it on
To future generations.
George Bernard Shaw
the nature of beauty
http://www.ru.org/81gablik.html
"Can making art include more than just ourselves? Can art actually build community?” I could sense that my questions were like gigantic, harrowing waves breaking on the beach of everyone’s inherited experience. I went on to give many examples of art which speaks to the power of connectedness and which establishes bonds; this “connective aesthetics” that calls us into relationship, that is not about power..."
"Can making art include more than just ourselves? Can art actually build community?” I could sense that my questions were like gigantic, harrowing waves breaking on the beach of everyone’s inherited experience. I went on to give many examples of art which speaks to the power of connectedness and which establishes bonds; this “connective aesthetics” that calls us into relationship, that is not about power..."
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
De donde vienen las ideas?
Posted by Cindy Erickson:
HOW TO MAKE ART in elementary language
CREATE A SYMBOL– DRAW A SYMBOL OF SOMETHING THAT IS MEANINGFUL TO YOU
TRANSFORM = TAKE AN ART MATERIAL AND MAKE IT (TRANSFORM IT) INTO SOMETHING
VARY = TAKE AN OBJECT AND SEE HOW MANY WAYS YOU CAN CHANGE IT, ADD TO
IT, DO IT DIFFERENTLY
USE IMAGINATION = USE YOUR BRAIN TO IMAGINE A PERSON, AN ANIMAL, A
PLACE, A THING
INVENT = THINK UP SOMETHING NO ONE ELSE HAS EVER THOUGHT OF OR A
BETTER WAY TO DO SOMETHING
FRAGMENT = TAKE A PICTURE AND REDRAW ONLY A PART OF IT
METAMORPH IT = TAKE AN IDEA OR A PERSON OR AN OBJECTS AND MAKE THEM
ALIVE OR NOT ALIVE, OR IN A DIFFERENT SPACE OR IN A DIFFERENT TIME
HYBRIDIZE IT = TAKE TWO DIFFERENT THINGS OR TWO DIFFERENT IDEAS AND FUSE
THEM TOGETHER
REPEAT = TAKE AN OBJECT OR A DESIGN AND REPEAT IT OVER AND OVER
DISTORT = TAKE A PERSON OR AN OBJECT AND MAKE PART OF IT MUCH SMALLER
OR MUCH LARGER OR MUCH FATTER OR MUCH SKINNIER OR MUCH ???
FANTASIZE = USE IMAGINATION BUT ADD SOMETHING REALLY UNREALISTIC OR UNUSUAL
ANALYZE = REDO SOMETHING YOU HAVE DONE BEFORE BUT MAKE IT BETTER BY
RETHINKING IT
Developing Ideas - From Robert Genn - The Painters Key Newsletter August 6, 2004
Advice to a college student for developing her portfolio
Here are a few ideas that might give you a few ideas:
You need to do some "web-thinking." Using large sheets of paper and starting in the middle, jot down some random ideas and potential projects. Start with your current interests and add
fantasies, secret passions and ambitions. Let one idea lead to another and connect them with lines like a spider's web so they begin to "breed." Let your thoughts range from simple exploratory sets of works to complex mind-bending installations. You need clear time to take this task seriously so that the process becomes natural to you. Evolved artists habitually and actively bounce ideas between hemispheres. Natural to some, the art of yin-yanging can also be learned. Don't share with anyone. Live for a while in the embrace of your imagination, no matter how outrageous. Mind-test and envision but don't give in to early rejection. Associate freely. Anything goes.
Think about your web-thinking at night, while you dream, while putting out the cat. If you are drawing a blank, check out the cat, or the wall behind the cat. Also, think how your ideas might move people, mountains, nations. When you have several sheets filled start evaluating and modifying with a pen of a different colour. Pick out a selection of ten or more and rewrite as if you were proposing film-treatments. Make them short and punchy. If they run from the practical to the impossible, so much the better. As part of your application, present this material using the heading: "Ideas I am currently developing."
PS: "Stop sometimes and look into the stains of walls, or ashes of a fire, or clouds, or mud or like places--you may find marvelous ideas." (Leonardo da Vinci)
Esoterica: Give value to your best ideas forged alone. Charles Brewer, the founder of MindSpring, said: "The good ideas are all hammered out in agony by individuals, not spewed out by groups."
What an artist does with her own web may be the most valuable exercise of her creative life. Web-thinking teaches personal creativity and individualist vision. "I suppose it is because
nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas." (Agatha Christie) Art teachers know this.
© Copyright 2004 Robert Genn (used here with permission)
Monday, October 22, 2007
fisiologia de la musica...pa'ti Mario
How your brain calls the tune
Oliver Sacks, the thinking man's neurologist, talks to Robert Everett-Green about how music can enslave - and save - us
ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
October 20, 2007 at 9:38 AM EDT
My mother's second husband was a professional flute player, who practised every day in a music room in the basement. For months after he moved out, my sisters, my mother and I would sometimes look at each other and say, "Do you hear it too?" We could still hear him practising.
I thought of our phantom flute player while reading Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks's new book about music and the brain. His chapter on musical hallucinations includes several clinical tales of people who hear persistent music from what they first imagine to be an external source, before realizing they're tuned to the mind's own radio.
"The original part of memory is the memory of actions and procedures and sequences, starting with crawling and walking," said Sacks, during a phone interview from his New York office. "This part of memory also includes musical and textual sequences." It seems to be involved in the way some tunes replay themselves in our minds even after we're tired of them. It may also account for the way that musical and textual memory tends to work best with long units of information - on whole phrases in sequence, rather than on individual notes and words.
We tend to think of hearing as something that works more or less well, and that an ear for music is something you're born with or never acquire. But Sacks's book is full of stories of people whose experience of sound and music is dramatically changeable. A doctor, after being struck by lightning, develops a craving for music so intense that he teaches himself piano and becomes a composer. An elderly woman begins to sing all day long, so compulsively that she can't maintain a conversation for more than a minute or two.
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* Cool under pressure? It's all in your head
The Globe and Mail
Sacks, the author of such books as Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, has been meeting and treating such people for decades in his daily practice as a neurologist. He has touched on some of their experiences in his previous books, and now has devoted a volume to the many ways in which music can save or enslave us.
It's a topic that has earned itself firm footing in pop culture - Musicophilia comes on the heels of last year's successful This Is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel J. Levitin, the paperback edition of which has been on The New York Times bestseller list for five weeks. This Is Your Brain offers a beginner's guide to concepts such as pitch and rhythm, and a rough guide to which parts of the brain seem to be involved in musical memory, pitch placement and timbre recognition. Levitin considers such puzzles as why we like repetition in music, why many people's musical tastes are formed for life by the age of 20, and how we recognize a Beatles song even when played at different speeds by a bluegrass band or on a pennywhistle. He wants to know the origins of musical preference, how our brains suppress or extrapolate musical detail, and why some people are more musical than others.
Sacks's book deals with people of unusual deficits and abilities, including those with Williams syndrome, a rare congenital disorder associated with low IQ and poor spatial sense, but also with high sensitivity to music. He writes of people who develop epileptic reactions to music, of those (including the composer Michael Torke) for whom some sounds and keys are permanently fused with colours, and of a few (Che Guevara was a case in point) who are deaf to both musical pitch and rhythm. He describes a composer with Tourette's syndrome who regards his musicality as "a congenital disorder," and a French neurologist who, when he heard music, "could say only that it was The Marseillaise or that it was not."
On many of the book's pages, music appears as a lifeline for patients who can otherwise scarcely react to their surroundings or retrieve memories. The Parkinson's patients Sacks wrote about in Awakenings (and to which he returns in Musicophilia) were for the most part "frozen in a trance-like state" when he first encountered them in 1966. But when music was played, patients who could barely walk or speak on their own initiative would begin to dance or sing "with full vocal force and a normal range of expressiveness and tone." For the duration of the music, they were returned to their former capacities, and to aspects of themselves that had been buried by their illness.
Years ago, I attended a one-man performance by the actor and playwright Joseph Chaikin, who had suffered a stroke that made him aphasic - unable to put words together in speech. He performed his text smoothly and dramatically, though when I met him after the show for an interview, he could barely speak. Had he been around today (he died in 2003), he might have benefited from a recently developed type of music therapy described in Musicophilia, in which songs are used as a bridge back to language use for aphasic patients.
"There are about 20 parts of the brain that are recruited for one's musical experience, which is more than for one's experience of language," Sacks says.The extent of the brain's involvement in music was scarcely imagined until the early nineties, says Sacks, when functional brain imaging became possible. "Before 1985, there was no neuroscience of music. One couldn't visualize the brain as people were listening to music or responding to it. And now one can.... In this book, I've really tried to bring in the latest in neuroscience."
One of the subjects in Musicophilia is a composer who experiences a sudden, drastic distortion in his perception of higher pitches. The change was based in a deterioration in his hearing, but through conscious training, he somehow induced an area of his brain that receives musical data to reinterpret the sounds that the ear was misperceiving. His experience of pitch distortion gradually decreased. His case, said Sacks, illustrates the brain's ability to remap its functions (a phenomenon Levitin calls "neuroplasticity") so that defective sensory signals can be corrected even when the primary source of the dysfunction (in the composer's case, a tiny site in the ear) can't be repaired.
"This is a very hot subject, and something that was scarcely considered possible 20 years ago," says Sacks, who adds that such retunings have contributed to an enormous change in his own view of the brain. "I no longer think of the brain as a fixed entity, but as a very wily, resourceful creature that can adapt to many situations."
His books have made him the best-known of any person writing on medical matters (he was famously portrayed by Robin Williams in the film version of Awakenings). But Sacks, who is now 74, sees no reason to slow down his regular rounds as a practising neurologist.
"I think medical practice is endlessly fascinating, and I hope to go on seeing patients till my dying day, as my father did till well past the age of 90," he says. "I expect to be astonished, to hear things I haven't heard before, or haven't paid attention to before, or that I understand in a new way. After more than 40 years in practice, so much is about revisiting experiences and people I see, and reinterpreting information in different contexts. In this sense, I'm never finished with anything, nor do I think one should be.... My motive forces are wonder and curiosity, and I think these are good motive forces. People want to know about the wonders of the world, whether it's white tigers or the total wonderland of being human."
In Sacks's wonderland, there's no end of rabbit holes, and all of them lead to interesting places. No doubt there will be more cases to revisit, and more patients for him to write about, with a degree of sympathy that ought to be a model not just for other doctors, but for all of us who see a damaged human being who can still, through a rhythm or a song, express what otherwise can't be said.
Oliver Sacks speaks at the Danforth Music Hall in Toronto (416-778-8163) on Nov. 12, and at McGill University's Leacock Building in Montreal (514-398-8356) on Nov. 29.
MUSIC ON THE MIND
When we listen to music, it's processed in many different areas of our brain. The extent of the brain's involvement was scarcely imagined until the early nineties, when functional brain imaging became possible. The major computational centres include:
CORPUS CALLOSUM
Connects left and right hemispheres.
MOTOR CORTEX
Movement, foot tapping, dancing, and playing an instrument.
PREFRONTAL CORTEX
Creation of expectations, violation and satisfaction of expectations.
NUCLEUS ACCUMBENS
Emotional reactions to music.
AMYGDALA
Emotional reactions to music.
SENSORY CORTEX
Tactile feedback from playing an instrument and dancing.
AUDITORY CORTEX
The first stages of listening to sounds. The perception and analysis of tones.
HIPPOCAMPUS
Memory for music, musical experiences and contexts.
VISUAL CORTEX
Reading music, looking at a performer's or one's own movements.
CEREBELLUM
Movement such as foot tapping, dancing, and playing an instrument. Also involved in emotional reactions to music.
From Stevie Wonder to the wonders of the brain
Daniel J. Levitin spent the first part of his career helping musicians sound good. Then he quit the recording studios of Los Angeles, where he had worked as a consultant with Stevie Wonder and many others, and started trying to figure out why things sound good, why music matters to us, and how it is handled by the brain.
His book This Is Your Brain on Music is in many ways a complementary volume to Oliver Sacks's Musicophilia. Sacks is fascinated by the often rich musical lives of his neurologically damaged patients. For Levitin, individuals such as Sacks's patients are interesting mainly to the extent that they may help him understand the norm.
Levitin's inquiries throw off many intriguing details. In his chapter on the brain's tendency to supplement what the ear really perceives, he mentions a type of Sardinian vocal music in which, if the four male voices are balanced just right, a fifth female voice appears in the mind's ear (the Sardinian explanation: It's the Virgin Mary). Levitin is also very good at explaining how certain features of well-known songs and singers contribute to their emotional appeal. R.E.-G.
Oliver Sacks, the thinking man's neurologist, talks to Robert Everett-Green about how music can enslave - and save - us
ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
October 20, 2007 at 9:38 AM EDT
My mother's second husband was a professional flute player, who practised every day in a music room in the basement. For months after he moved out, my sisters, my mother and I would sometimes look at each other and say, "Do you hear it too?" We could still hear him practising.
I thought of our phantom flute player while reading Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks's new book about music and the brain. His chapter on musical hallucinations includes several clinical tales of people who hear persistent music from what they first imagine to be an external source, before realizing they're tuned to the mind's own radio.
"The original part of memory is the memory of actions and procedures and sequences, starting with crawling and walking," said Sacks, during a phone interview from his New York office. "This part of memory also includes musical and textual sequences." It seems to be involved in the way some tunes replay themselves in our minds even after we're tired of them. It may also account for the way that musical and textual memory tends to work best with long units of information - on whole phrases in sequence, rather than on individual notes and words.
We tend to think of hearing as something that works more or less well, and that an ear for music is something you're born with or never acquire. But Sacks's book is full of stories of people whose experience of sound and music is dramatically changeable. A doctor, after being struck by lightning, develops a craving for music so intense that he teaches himself piano and becomes a composer. An elderly woman begins to sing all day long, so compulsively that she can't maintain a conversation for more than a minute or two.
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The Globe and Mail
Sacks, the author of such books as Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, has been meeting and treating such people for decades in his daily practice as a neurologist. He has touched on some of their experiences in his previous books, and now has devoted a volume to the many ways in which music can save or enslave us.
It's a topic that has earned itself firm footing in pop culture - Musicophilia comes on the heels of last year's successful This Is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel J. Levitin, the paperback edition of which has been on The New York Times bestseller list for five weeks. This Is Your Brain offers a beginner's guide to concepts such as pitch and rhythm, and a rough guide to which parts of the brain seem to be involved in musical memory, pitch placement and timbre recognition. Levitin considers such puzzles as why we like repetition in music, why many people's musical tastes are formed for life by the age of 20, and how we recognize a Beatles song even when played at different speeds by a bluegrass band or on a pennywhistle. He wants to know the origins of musical preference, how our brains suppress or extrapolate musical detail, and why some people are more musical than others.
Sacks's book deals with people of unusual deficits and abilities, including those with Williams syndrome, a rare congenital disorder associated with low IQ and poor spatial sense, but also with high sensitivity to music. He writes of people who develop epileptic reactions to music, of those (including the composer Michael Torke) for whom some sounds and keys are permanently fused with colours, and of a few (Che Guevara was a case in point) who are deaf to both musical pitch and rhythm. He describes a composer with Tourette's syndrome who regards his musicality as "a congenital disorder," and a French neurologist who, when he heard music, "could say only that it was The Marseillaise or that it was not."
On many of the book's pages, music appears as a lifeline for patients who can otherwise scarcely react to their surroundings or retrieve memories. The Parkinson's patients Sacks wrote about in Awakenings (and to which he returns in Musicophilia) were for the most part "frozen in a trance-like state" when he first encountered them in 1966. But when music was played, patients who could barely walk or speak on their own initiative would begin to dance or sing "with full vocal force and a normal range of expressiveness and tone." For the duration of the music, they were returned to their former capacities, and to aspects of themselves that had been buried by their illness.
Years ago, I attended a one-man performance by the actor and playwright Joseph Chaikin, who had suffered a stroke that made him aphasic - unable to put words together in speech. He performed his text smoothly and dramatically, though when I met him after the show for an interview, he could barely speak. Had he been around today (he died in 2003), he might have benefited from a recently developed type of music therapy described in Musicophilia, in which songs are used as a bridge back to language use for aphasic patients.
"There are about 20 parts of the brain that are recruited for one's musical experience, which is more than for one's experience of language," Sacks says.The extent of the brain's involvement in music was scarcely imagined until the early nineties, says Sacks, when functional brain imaging became possible. "Before 1985, there was no neuroscience of music. One couldn't visualize the brain as people were listening to music or responding to it. And now one can.... In this book, I've really tried to bring in the latest in neuroscience."
One of the subjects in Musicophilia is a composer who experiences a sudden, drastic distortion in his perception of higher pitches. The change was based in a deterioration in his hearing, but through conscious training, he somehow induced an area of his brain that receives musical data to reinterpret the sounds that the ear was misperceiving. His experience of pitch distortion gradually decreased. His case, said Sacks, illustrates the brain's ability to remap its functions (a phenomenon Levitin calls "neuroplasticity") so that defective sensory signals can be corrected even when the primary source of the dysfunction (in the composer's case, a tiny site in the ear) can't be repaired.
"This is a very hot subject, and something that was scarcely considered possible 20 years ago," says Sacks, who adds that such retunings have contributed to an enormous change in his own view of the brain. "I no longer think of the brain as a fixed entity, but as a very wily, resourceful creature that can adapt to many situations."
His books have made him the best-known of any person writing on medical matters (he was famously portrayed by Robin Williams in the film version of Awakenings). But Sacks, who is now 74, sees no reason to slow down his regular rounds as a practising neurologist.
"I think medical practice is endlessly fascinating, and I hope to go on seeing patients till my dying day, as my father did till well past the age of 90," he says. "I expect to be astonished, to hear things I haven't heard before, or haven't paid attention to before, or that I understand in a new way. After more than 40 years in practice, so much is about revisiting experiences and people I see, and reinterpreting information in different contexts. In this sense, I'm never finished with anything, nor do I think one should be.... My motive forces are wonder and curiosity, and I think these are good motive forces. People want to know about the wonders of the world, whether it's white tigers or the total wonderland of being human."
In Sacks's wonderland, there's no end of rabbit holes, and all of them lead to interesting places. No doubt there will be more cases to revisit, and more patients for him to write about, with a degree of sympathy that ought to be a model not just for other doctors, but for all of us who see a damaged human being who can still, through a rhythm or a song, express what otherwise can't be said.
Oliver Sacks speaks at the Danforth Music Hall in Toronto (416-778-8163) on Nov. 12, and at McGill University's Leacock Building in Montreal (514-398-8356) on Nov. 29.
MUSIC ON THE MIND
When we listen to music, it's processed in many different areas of our brain. The extent of the brain's involvement was scarcely imagined until the early nineties, when functional brain imaging became possible. The major computational centres include:
CORPUS CALLOSUM
Connects left and right hemispheres.
MOTOR CORTEX
Movement, foot tapping, dancing, and playing an instrument.
PREFRONTAL CORTEX
Creation of expectations, violation and satisfaction of expectations.
NUCLEUS ACCUMBENS
Emotional reactions to music.
AMYGDALA
Emotional reactions to music.
SENSORY CORTEX
Tactile feedback from playing an instrument and dancing.
AUDITORY CORTEX
The first stages of listening to sounds. The perception and analysis of tones.
HIPPOCAMPUS
Memory for music, musical experiences and contexts.
VISUAL CORTEX
Reading music, looking at a performer's or one's own movements.
CEREBELLUM
Movement such as foot tapping, dancing, and playing an instrument. Also involved in emotional reactions to music.
From Stevie Wonder to the wonders of the brain
Daniel J. Levitin spent the first part of his career helping musicians sound good. Then he quit the recording studios of Los Angeles, where he had worked as a consultant with Stevie Wonder and many others, and started trying to figure out why things sound good, why music matters to us, and how it is handled by the brain.
His book This Is Your Brain on Music is in many ways a complementary volume to Oliver Sacks's Musicophilia. Sacks is fascinated by the often rich musical lives of his neurologically damaged patients. For Levitin, individuals such as Sacks's patients are interesting mainly to the extent that they may help him understand the norm.
Levitin's inquiries throw off many intriguing details. In his chapter on the brain's tendency to supplement what the ear really perceives, he mentions a type of Sardinian vocal music in which, if the four male voices are balanced just right, a fifth female voice appears in the mind's ear (the Sardinian explanation: It's the Virgin Mary). Levitin is also very good at explaining how certain features of well-known songs and singers contribute to their emotional appeal. R.E.-G.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Un repaso rapido a las tecnicas y lo basico de la pintura...
http://www.bigblackpig.com/painting/special.html
Monday, October 15, 2007
Creo conveniente citar a una reunión...
con Eileen Pérez para que todas estas ideas que están surgiendo a raiz de la evaluación del comité las registren directamente, (aunque yo ya las he trasmitido). Hoy me reuniré con ella para pedirle si me puede dedicar unos 30 a 45 minutos de su tiempo el miércoles para resolver estos problemas antes de la evalucion final. Ya les mantendré informados.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Pintura en el supermercado...residencia no tradicional
Published: September 18, 2007 12:00 am print this story email this story
'Attention Shoppers,' artist in aisle four
By Gail McCarthy , Staff writer
Gloucester Daily Times
View as a multiple pages
Many artists look for inspiration from natural beauty, objects or an abstract source.
But Gloucester's Lara Lepionka sought inspiration from the worker whose job often goes unnoticed in a project titled "Attention Shoppers."
She spent a week observing and photographing the workers at Shaw's Eastern Avenue store as they worked at everything from cutting meat to operating a cash register.
When she approached the manager, David Kenney, he paused a moment to think about her request to be an artist-in-residence because it was so unusual. But he supported her idea and received corporate approval for the weeklong residency.
Kenney presented Lepionka, who calls herself a community artist, with her own Shaw's name tag with the title "artist." She set out to be as unobtrusive as possible while capturing images of the employees last May.
Those images would ultimately be carved into small Styrofoam trays, in a filigree-type work. But the final work could not be easily displayed because of its fragile nature.
So the artist transferred the images onto banners, which now hang at the supermarket checkouts. They will remain through the end of the month.
"My work centers around acknowledging everyday work that we don't pay attention to or consider," Lepionka said. "I went behind the scenes and photographed the people who package meat, chop up fruit in the back room, slice bread, the cashiers and people who work in the office. It was informal and fast because people are working and you can't get into an enormous discussion about what you are doing."
The work she sought to highlight is usually repetitive or labor intensive.
"My work is about communication and being open and sharing," said Lepionka, who has a master's degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
When approached by Lepionka, Kenney said he was intrigued by the idea and impressed with the artist's sincerity.
"She wanted to photograph ordinary people at work and carve the images into Styrofoam. She showed me other pieces of her work," he said. "Not being an artist, I was fascinated by the whole process. What we liked about this project was that it was just art for art's sake. There was no political message, just art. With her artist's eye, she looked around, and I'm sure she found enough suitable subjects doing their common everyday jobs. She was discreet and didn't interrupt anything."
He called her completed work "amazing."
"Art is one of those things that is in an entirely different category than what I do. But it was interesting to see an artist working," Kenney said. "Artists have a different way of looking at the world, and it was great to see the finished project of people I know doing their jobs, looking like themselves. It's seeing the art in everyday life."
Lepionka's work sparked discussion among some of the staff.
Jim Johnson, the meat cutter on one of the banners, said he enjoyed seeing the artist at work.
"She wanted to see people in motion," said Johnson, who chose to slice rib-eye by hand so the artist could see the full picture of his work. Johnson, who ran Ernie's Market on Broadway in Rockport for 15 years, has worked at Shaw's for the past 20 years, since he closed his store.
"In the break room, we all talked about it," he said. "The project was interesting, and the thing we talked about was recognizing the motions that we make. It sparked conversation about what we do every day, which we don't usually talk about."
Lepionka, who was accepted into a two-week art residency in the Czech Republic, did the carving overseas in the town of Tabor. She carved the images of five workers on five Styrofoam plates that measure about 7 by 9 inches and on which meat, fruit and other foods are packaged.
"I used the photograph as a template to carve the images of the workers into the plate," she said. "I went half deep into the Styrofoam. I first carved the image and then created a delicate filigree around the image."
Both the artist and workers at the store said the customers have enjoyed seeing the unusual display of art in what is described as a unique community art project.
'Attention Shoppers,' artist in aisle four
By Gail McCarthy , Staff writer
Gloucester Daily Times
View as a multiple pages
Many artists look for inspiration from natural beauty, objects or an abstract source.
But Gloucester's Lara Lepionka sought inspiration from the worker whose job often goes unnoticed in a project titled "Attention Shoppers."
She spent a week observing and photographing the workers at Shaw's Eastern Avenue store as they worked at everything from cutting meat to operating a cash register.
When she approached the manager, David Kenney, he paused a moment to think about her request to be an artist-in-residence because it was so unusual. But he supported her idea and received corporate approval for the weeklong residency.
Kenney presented Lepionka, who calls herself a community artist, with her own Shaw's name tag with the title "artist." She set out to be as unobtrusive as possible while capturing images of the employees last May.
Those images would ultimately be carved into small Styrofoam trays, in a filigree-type work. But the final work could not be easily displayed because of its fragile nature.
So the artist transferred the images onto banners, which now hang at the supermarket checkouts. They will remain through the end of the month.
"My work centers around acknowledging everyday work that we don't pay attention to or consider," Lepionka said. "I went behind the scenes and photographed the people who package meat, chop up fruit in the back room, slice bread, the cashiers and people who work in the office. It was informal and fast because people are working and you can't get into an enormous discussion about what you are doing."
The work she sought to highlight is usually repetitive or labor intensive.
"My work is about communication and being open and sharing," said Lepionka, who has a master's degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
When approached by Lepionka, Kenney said he was intrigued by the idea and impressed with the artist's sincerity.
"She wanted to photograph ordinary people at work and carve the images into Styrofoam. She showed me other pieces of her work," he said. "Not being an artist, I was fascinated by the whole process. What we liked about this project was that it was just art for art's sake. There was no political message, just art. With her artist's eye, she looked around, and I'm sure she found enough suitable subjects doing their common everyday jobs. She was discreet and didn't interrupt anything."
He called her completed work "amazing."
"Art is one of those things that is in an entirely different category than what I do. But it was interesting to see an artist working," Kenney said. "Artists have a different way of looking at the world, and it was great to see the finished project of people I know doing their jobs, looking like themselves. It's seeing the art in everyday life."
Lepionka's work sparked discussion among some of the staff.
Jim Johnson, the meat cutter on one of the banners, said he enjoyed seeing the artist at work.
"She wanted to see people in motion," said Johnson, who chose to slice rib-eye by hand so the artist could see the full picture of his work. Johnson, who ran Ernie's Market on Broadway in Rockport for 15 years, has worked at Shaw's for the past 20 years, since he closed his store.
"In the break room, we all talked about it," he said. "The project was interesting, and the thing we talked about was recognizing the motions that we make. It sparked conversation about what we do every day, which we don't usually talk about."
Lepionka, who was accepted into a two-week art residency in the Czech Republic, did the carving overseas in the town of Tabor. She carved the images of five workers on five Styrofoam plates that measure about 7 by 9 inches and on which meat, fruit and other foods are packaged.
"I used the photograph as a template to carve the images of the workers into the plate," she said. "I went half deep into the Styrofoam. I first carved the image and then created a delicate filigree around the image."
Both the artist and workers at the store said the customers have enjoyed seeing the unusual display of art in what is described as a unique community art project.
Felix, pensé en tu pintura...
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/10/11/china.artist/
Vamos a analizar como este pintor consigue el effecto de la burla...
Vamos a analizar como este pintor consigue el effecto de la burla...
Friday, October 12, 2007
La proxima semana
Empezamos esta parte dos con una clase de trabajo en clase. Traiganse sus aperos de labranza (:-o
y vamos a trabajar en clase...como hacen las otras clase de dia...y hablaré con cada uno individualmente.
y vamos a trabajar en clase...como hacen las otras clase de dia...y hablaré con cada uno individualmente.
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
ULTIMA ENTRADA DE PRIMER TRIMESTRE
Bueno, pues esta noche se vió el trabajo que se hizo, (o no se hizo) en un trimestre.
En general, las críticas mostraron que habían absobido los comentarios que se habían hecho, y que el trabajo había progresado. Esta noche vamos a redondear individualmente, poner metas de ejecución para este último trimestre, ya que el comentario más frecuente fue que fue muy poco el trabajo que se presentó.
Sin embargo, yo enseño pensando en que hay una curva de ejecución que empieza despacio y se acelera vertiginosamente hacia el final. Pues nada, que llegó el momento vertiginoso.
Crean que todos los comentarios son ofrecidos en el espíritu pedagógico más alto, aún aquellos que no piensen que son acertados. Esa es la crítica más valiosa--- la que nos corta, pues con esa crecemos. La positiva nos alienta y la que corta nos hace crecer y re-examinarnos.
Si somos valientes, y honestos, re-examinamos lo que hacemos, definimos o redefinimos el problema y cambiamos y ajustamos lo necesario. (dije lo necesario, no TODO...)
En general, las críticas mostraron que habían absobido los comentarios que se habían hecho, y que el trabajo había progresado. Esta noche vamos a redondear individualmente, poner metas de ejecución para este último trimestre, ya que el comentario más frecuente fue que fue muy poco el trabajo que se presentó.
Sin embargo, yo enseño pensando en que hay una curva de ejecución que empieza despacio y se acelera vertiginosamente hacia el final. Pues nada, que llegó el momento vertiginoso.
Crean que todos los comentarios son ofrecidos en el espíritu pedagógico más alto, aún aquellos que no piensen que son acertados. Esa es la crítica más valiosa--- la que nos corta, pues con esa crecemos. La positiva nos alienta y la que corta nos hace crecer y re-examinarnos.
Si somos valientes, y honestos, re-examinamos lo que hacemos, definimos o redefinimos el problema y cambiamos y ajustamos lo necesario. (dije lo necesario, no TODO...)
Monday, October 8, 2007
Arte y ciencia...
http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article3035931.ece
Art & science: Turner's message from the skies
Research links painter's sunsets to volcanic eruptions
By Geoffrey Lean
Published: 07 October 2007
To most of us this is a brilliant sunset, from the brush of the man who painted them best, Joseph Mallord William Turner – a precious work of art, immensely valuable for its own sake.
To Christos Zerefos, however, it is an "intense optical phenomenon", a priceless piece of scientific evidence for working out the world's climatic history. And it is just one of more than 500 paintings by famous artists that a team led by the Greek professor has been analysing to work out the impact of giant volcanic eruptions.
Where the rest of us see beauty in a fine sunset or sunrise, atmospheric scientists see dirt and dust. For these particles help daub the brilliant reds and golds of these skies.
Evenings and mornings take on these hues, rather than the blue of the day, because the slanting sunlight has further to go through the atmosphere before it reaches our eyes. The longer it has to travel through the atmosphere, the more it is scattered by the molecules of the air. The shorter wavelengths – violet, blue and green – are dispersed the most, leaving yellow, orange and red to get through.
Particles – and tiny droplets of sulphuric acid – magnify the process, and volcanoes, which throw vast quantities of both up into the stratosphere, have long been known to produce amazing sunsets. The giant eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 produced particularly brilliant sunsets, as did that of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991.
And both the dust and the droplets also help to cool the Earth by bouncing the sun's rays back into space; in recent years they have helped to offset global warming.
This is where Professor Zerefos, of the National Observatory of Athens, and his team came in. They reckoned that paintings of sunsets before and after volcanic eruptions could help to show how much these had affected the climate of their times.
So they studied 554 pictures depicting sunsets, produced between 1500 and 1900 by 181 artists, including Rubens, Rembrandt, Reynolds and Renoir – taking images from the websites of 109 galleries and museums.
Five artists – Copley, Turner, David, Ascroft and Degas – were particularly useful, as they depicted different sunsets before, during and after major volcanic eruptions. Turner was in a class of his own because he painted so many – in all, 115 of the studied canvasses were his – and his career spanned three such events, in 1813, 1831 and 1835.
Sure enough, the scientists found that the artists had faithfully reproduced what they saw – or, as their paper, just published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics puts it, they "appear to have simulated the colours of nature with a remarkably precise coloration".
The sunsets they painted were reddest in the three years after major eruptions, and confirmed what was already known from other records about their effects.
Professor Zerefos's team is now hoping to study 40 works in the Tate, painted in the last century, to see what they can tell us about air pollution at the time – a trickier task as the effects of man-made dirt on sunsets are less straightforward than those of volcanoes.
Art & science: Turner's message from the skies
Research links painter's sunsets to volcanic eruptions
By Geoffrey Lean
Published: 07 October 2007
To most of us this is a brilliant sunset, from the brush of the man who painted them best, Joseph Mallord William Turner – a precious work of art, immensely valuable for its own sake.
To Christos Zerefos, however, it is an "intense optical phenomenon", a priceless piece of scientific evidence for working out the world's climatic history. And it is just one of more than 500 paintings by famous artists that a team led by the Greek professor has been analysing to work out the impact of giant volcanic eruptions.
Where the rest of us see beauty in a fine sunset or sunrise, atmospheric scientists see dirt and dust. For these particles help daub the brilliant reds and golds of these skies.
Evenings and mornings take on these hues, rather than the blue of the day, because the slanting sunlight has further to go through the atmosphere before it reaches our eyes. The longer it has to travel through the atmosphere, the more it is scattered by the molecules of the air. The shorter wavelengths – violet, blue and green – are dispersed the most, leaving yellow, orange and red to get through.
Particles – and tiny droplets of sulphuric acid – magnify the process, and volcanoes, which throw vast quantities of both up into the stratosphere, have long been known to produce amazing sunsets. The giant eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 produced particularly brilliant sunsets, as did that of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991.
And both the dust and the droplets also help to cool the Earth by bouncing the sun's rays back into space; in recent years they have helped to offset global warming.
This is where Professor Zerefos, of the National Observatory of Athens, and his team came in. They reckoned that paintings of sunsets before and after volcanic eruptions could help to show how much these had affected the climate of their times.
So they studied 554 pictures depicting sunsets, produced between 1500 and 1900 by 181 artists, including Rubens, Rembrandt, Reynolds and Renoir – taking images from the websites of 109 galleries and museums.
Five artists – Copley, Turner, David, Ascroft and Degas – were particularly useful, as they depicted different sunsets before, during and after major volcanic eruptions. Turner was in a class of his own because he painted so many – in all, 115 of the studied canvasses were his – and his career spanned three such events, in 1813, 1831 and 1835.
Sure enough, the scientists found that the artists had faithfully reproduced what they saw – or, as their paper, just published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics puts it, they "appear to have simulated the colours of nature with a remarkably precise coloration".
The sunsets they painted were reddest in the three years after major eruptions, and confirmed what was already known from other records about their effects.
Professor Zerefos's team is now hoping to study 40 works in the Tate, painted in the last century, to see what they can tell us about air pollution at the time – a trickier task as the effects of man-made dirt on sunsets are less straightforward than those of volcanoes.
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