| This is the text of the press release I can't figure out how to import into jpeg format |
[May. 22nd, 2012|11:19 am] |
From Cosmology to Neurology and Back Again
featuring works by various artists
curated by Dr. Jerry Cullum
"From Cosmology to Neurology and Back Again" explores the ways in which cognitive sciences drive the discussion about the nature of investigation in the sciences and humanities and the resulting impact on artists. The show is about our new understanding of the neurological underpinnings that make it difficult for us to imagine the extended relationships among complex systems of order, whether natural or cultural. Using "water" as an example that relates to both nature and culture, the relevant scientific and cultural variables make it extraordinarily difficult to understand the implications of the conditions of the world's rivers, oceans and glaciers. Everything from economic interests to our own mental presuppositions make it almost impossible to re-envision the complex systems involved. The "default settings" of our own brains have to be overcome, in order to survey such complex systems in new and responsible ways.
Cognitive sciences offer a new perspective on perception: on why we cannot seem to grasp more than a fraction of the implications of complex systems, on why we tend to overvalue whichever parts of the system we ourselves take as our area of specialization, on why human frailty and emotion tend to affect or infect all our efforts at what used to be called "pure rationality." "From Cosmology to Neurology and Back Again" is a metaphor-laden exhibition meant to provoke reflection about these complex sets of interactions and the reasons we find it so difficult to keep all of them in mind at the same time. The show includes works by a variety of international and local artists, including Terri Dilling, Sissi Fonseca, Hugo Fortes, Todd Murphy, Rachel Rosalen, Seana Reilly, Ann Stewart and Marcia Vaitsman.
Jerry Cullum (Ph.D. in interdisciplinary studies, Emory University) is a freelance critic and curator whose essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, from Art in America to the Journal of Architectural Education and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. He has curated exhibitions throughout the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom. His most recent publications include portions of Noplaceness: Art in a Post-Urban Landscape (co-authored with Catherine Fox and Cinqué Hicks) and In the Eye of the Muses: Selections from the Clark Atlanta University Art Collection (co-authored with Tina Dunkley).
Exhibition dates: July 6 - August 4, 2012
Opening reception: Friday, July 6 | 7-10 pm
Gallery hours: Wednesday - Saturday | 11 am - 5 pm or by appointment
Location: 814 Edgewood Avenue | Inman Park
Seana Reilly, FractureGradient (detail), graphite on dibond, 12 x 12 inches
Julie Sims, Eruptive Fissure, Hippocampal Subfields, color photograph, 20 inches by 20 inches in exhibition print |
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| widen the area of consciousness (yes, that again) |
[May. 20th, 2012|11:24 am] |
The exhibition at Susan Bridges' Edgewood gallery (which I frequently wish had been called Edgewood Gallery, located as it is in the onetime carriage house of a house that seems to have expanded in indeterminate ways since its birth as an elegant home in the late nineteenth century)...as I was saying, the exhibition I am curating will attempt to illustrate the structure of our mental limitations that keep us not just from comprehending complex systems but acknowledging that they exist: in other words, that the world is interlinked in ways we never quite grasp and our understanding of it is structured by motives that we only partly understand, and even though this fact has been the subject of literature for almost as long as there has been literature (or even storytelling), we still don't quite understand what it is we don't understand.
This has been the topic of the joculum blog from its inception, of course.
I am working on the question of how to present the visual metaphors without reams of commentary. The visuals have to communicate in and of themselves, on a preverbal level that works for a variety of audiences who are likely to come to an art gallery in a Southern city of the early part of the twenty-first century. |
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| eventually |
[May. 19th, 2012|08:51 am] |
A reviewer states that a recent book that begins with the probable chemical sources of the origin of life and ends with the problem of the generation of consciousness from neural networks is simultaneously banal and the most unreadable volume he has ever encountered.
Point noted and taken. In the meantime I find minimal evidence of any extended reading of this journal recently apart from the numerous spammers, who presumably are bots unless they are underpaid work-from-home flunkies, so I shall reserve more extended comments for my catalogue essay. |
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| too much world, not enough time |
[May. 8th, 2012|12:02 pm] |
Hence cometh the crime of coyness, to finish the literary allusion. Only in this case the coyness is with regard to so many topics that ought to be explicated if there were not a living to earn and a life to clean up on the literal level.
I am stunned, for example, that Cornel West would find it in his heart to praise Hans-Georg Gadamer for anything (Gadamer's hermeneutics having for so long been tarred with the Heidegger brush): http://nymag.com/news/features/cornel-west-2012-5/index2.html
For the record, I still prize West's essay on African-American perspectives on the Frankfurters and the French Freudians, originally a handwritten page that he dashed off for the January/February 1986 issue of Art Papers, "The Crisis in Knowledge: Poststructuralism, Postmodernism, Postmodernity." Never republished in his collected essays, it was a top-of-the-head jeu d'esprit written at my request, so I'm prejudiced in its favor.
And this short exchange in the Guardian is illuminating but fails to get at why David Eagleman's misleadingly-named "possibilianism" is so much more intriguing an interdisciplinary point of entry into the nexus between neuroscience and the humanities than it might seem at first encounter. Its soberly epigrammatic nature, however, at least provides succinct evidence that Eagleman is not actually as sappy as he can sometimes make himself sound in his more self-consciously[!] over-the-top provocative moments: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/29/neuroscience-david-eagleman-raymond-tallis
And this business of neuroscience and the humanities feeds into the peculiar debate wherein China Miéville is reported (by Jeffrey Cohen) to have recently trashed Quentin Meillassoux in a keynote address "On Monsters": http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2012/03/monstrous-fantastic.html . The only extensive discussion of Miéville's related ideas I can find online, however, is a lecture on "The Weird" that takes us in considerably different epistemic directions (today's hyper-hippest philosophers love H. P. Lovecraft): http://hypertiling.wordpress.com/2011/05/13/thats-weird/. An interview with Miéville, however, offers clues as to where the keynote address was presumably going, starting with the sublime vs. the beautiful (with the weird as the backwash of the sublime) and going from there: http://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/03/china-mieville-and-monsters-unsatisfy-me-frustrate-me-i-beg-you/.
This whole business has been recognized to tie into the stuff of the Eagleman-Tallis debate (and by implication into Barbara Maria Stafford's take on neurology and the humanities in her anthology A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field) as long ago as 2008, in the "Concept Horror" volume of Collapse: http://urbanomic.com/pub_collapse4.php. Collapse is an interdisciplinary journal, the driving motives of which I celebrate highly even as I disagree with the premises of their brand of philosophy. (They were prescient in singling out Deleuze as the poststructuralist who actually had useful things to say about how the world works—if only because he acknowledged that there is a world in which historical events diverge in multiple directions simultaneously from a single causative root, with the result that divergent strands survive and send out multiplex strands of their own when severed from the original cause. This rhizome metaphor helps us comprehend the dynamics of any number of present-day social phenomena—which are grounded in physical needs as mediated by socially inherited...oh, hell, let's not go there right now.)
Clark Atlanta University launched In the Eye of the Muses: Selections from the Clark Atlanta University Art Collection (Tina Dunkley's book to which I contributed the section on "Hale Woodruff's Art of the Negro Murals") yesterday with a ringing keynote address by Johnnetta Cole on the collective ownership and need for conservation of the art collections of the HBUCs (Historically Black Universities and Colleges). So now that enterprise is properly underway. I recommend the volume highly, and hope it stimulates renewed scholarship on the legacy of Hale Woodruff, whose role in the birth of Abstract Expressionism—at the very moment that he was working on the proto-globalist Art of the Negro murals—has been insufficiently analyzed. (Woodruff was right re those murals, which were unveiled almost exactly sixty years ago, a time when murals were out of favor: "They were either behind their time, or way ahead of it." They were and are both at once, a remarkable harbinger of things to come even as they made use of a then-unfashionable medium of expression.)
Next for me comes "From Cosmology to Neurology and Back Again," the art exhibition I am curating for Susan Bridges' gallery over on Edgewood Avenue.
Now I gotta go try to empty out some boxes. I wish there really were world enough and time. |
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| and now for something completely different |
[May. 3rd, 2012|11:06 am] |
Although I am writing typically dense posts friends-only that I may eventually decide to make public, I want to mention my delight at discovering that LJ Friend lizjonesbooks has won commendation for her contribution to Arthouse's Sketchbook Project, an international venture that involves creating a library of art solicited from and produced at the grassroots level rather than the gallery level:
http://www.arthousecoop.com/
I knew the Arthouse collective and its Sketchbook Project before the founding members moved from Atlanta to New York in 2008, so it is pleasant to have my various lives intersect in this fashion. They very seldom overlap. |
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| footnote to the foregoing |
[May. 1st, 2012|09:02 am] |
One problem with this journal, apart from the fact that statistics suggest it is mainly being read by an unknown number of LJ Friends and a host of ex-East Bloc spam bots, is that the core readership otherwise comes from completely different realms of life and scholarship. Most of the Friends found me via a shared interest in the fiction of John Crowley (about which and whom Lisa Yaszek said some very complimentary things in her 2008 book Galactic Suburbia...she would doubtless have done so at the Neuro Humanities Entanglement Conference also had she had more than ten minutes in which to summarize and analyze the entire history of science fiction). I have a few professional friends from the history of religions who remember to check in every once in a great while. A greater number of people from the art world drop by more often. And the posts are often addressed to none of these, but to scholars who would stumble across them in the process of doing web searches for keywords. (I avoid certain keywords for the same reason.)
I made the mistake, which I usually don’t allow myself, of citing specific unfashionable names in the original version of the previous post, now amended to remove them. More than one of my mentors taught me the futility of trying to re-examine individuals who have come under scholarly dismissal for whatever reason, since all it does is stir up the emotions involved in the original controversy. The dialogue is almost never advanced thereby.
It makes far more sense to reinterpret specific ideas and insights without ascribing them to any one individual, since the point is to rethink them for the present day, in any case. There is no reason to send people to books that need to be translated into a contemporary idiom (and corrected in minor or major details, sometimes utterly crucial ones) unless those books have been framed in a fresh context that allows the contemporary reader to understand why the books might still be worthy of their attention. |
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| revision of an earlier deleted post |
[May. 1st, 2012|08:45 am] |
One of the panel discussions in the three-day Neuro Humanities Entanglement Conference at Georgia Tech ended with the observation that the cognitive sciences are still in a very early stage of their development. (I would add, “Even if their proponents engage in rhetoric that would lead us to think or believe otherwise.”)
These sciences have, however, advanced sufficiently that we can now (or so I think) begin to engage in some efforts of historical re-interpretation...such as recognizing the lineaments of proto-versions of the cognitive sciences that would not have recognized themselves as such. (Examples occur to me that I wouldn’t necessarily recommend spending time on...just because even the least useful system contains a kernel of authentic discovery doesn’t mean that it is worthwhile for anyone other than historians to analyze that kernel of authentic discovery.) It ought to be possible to begin to study the physiology of all these aspects of the inner life more systematically than it has hitherto been.
The problem, as an encounter at the very beginning of the Conference made clear, is that the physiological researchers often don’t know how to interpret the relevant historical documents and the folks who know how to ferret out the implications of historical texts and material objects often have only the most rudimentary and metaphoric knowledge of the physiology. Barbara Maria Stafford brought some of these types together in a setting that occasionally allowed participants to correct the naive errors of other specialists, and more often gave rise to efforts to fill in some of the gaps in personal knowledge that most of the participants were all too ready to admit.
If I ever get my own current interdisciplinary projects sufficiently resolved before their deadlines, I look forward to returning to Stafford’s anthology of essays on bridging the divide between the humanities and the neurosciences. I wish the gulf between the neurosciences and the sociology of knowledge had been bridged a bit more intensively, since it is in that juncture that it becomes possible to rethink our least comprehended mental limitations. |
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| metaphors and their dissed contents |
[Apr. 21st, 2012|10:40 am] |
I have been reflecting again on the easy rejection by the literal-minded of the frequent misuses of such metaphors from physics as "uncertainty" and "entanglement."
If I recall what Werner Heisenberg wrote many decades ago about uncertainty in everyday life, he described quite valid functions of uncertainty in interpretation theory and the social sciences, even though these functions had nothing to do with his own Uncertainty Principle. Likewise, "entanglement" is one of those potent metaphors that allows people to describe operative principles in any number of complex systems, even though those systems are socially determined for the most part and have nothing at all to do with quantum entanglement.
What intrigues me is that no one seems to have been using the metaphor to perform perfectly valid conceptual work in the other intellectual disciplines until they had the opportunity to borrow the metaphor for their own purposes of productive misprision or simple misunderstanding.
This has all been dealt with by any number of theorists already, but in spite of that, folks still satisfy themselves with sneering "that's not what entanglement means," instead of noticing that valid intellectual work is getting done that was not getting done before the misunderstanding or deliberate misuse of the term occurred.
Problems only arise when the use of the metaphor is taken to imply some actual measurable correlation between the behavior of subatomic particles and the behavior of complex social and cultural systems. The two may somehow be related by virtue of being part of the same universe or corner of the multiverse, but one is mathematically describable, the other is not, in spite of the futile efforts to undo sociology's physics envy (cf. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/opinion/sunday/the-social-sciences-physics-envy.html ) by trying to render the discipline mathematical in ways that the interaction of complex systems and individual methods of investigation simply doesn't permit. Anthropologists know far better what the epistemological limitations of their discipline are; economists don't seem to know this at all.
Anthropologists have their own epistemological problems when it comes to going beyond phenomenological description of the functions of opinions held by different communities. Obviously it matters what kind of correspondence to physical reality the opinions have (if nothing else, some of them get the holders of the opinions killed more rapidly than others) but correlating all the variables is singularly challenging without imposing the grid of pre-existing ideologies imported to the situation by the anthropologist. How to wear our analytical grids lightly, and to consider that they may be as wrong as anything else even as we make use of them, is a paramount difficulty that takes us back to the functions of metaphor, if not to some updated and more analytically articulated version of Philip Wheelwright's "assertorial lightness." I am quite certain that such analytical articulations exist, and have been applied to the relevant disciplines, but most of the writers I find in present-day op-ed writing seem not to have read these updates, either.
What all this relates to in the practical ramifications of my own present-day intellectual life, I'll leave unsaid. |
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| anniversaries |
[Apr. 7th, 2012|10:31 am] |
Painful that the newest in-the-open ethnic conflict (of longstanding duration but invisible to the world at large) broke into the headlines on the day that Sarajevo finally chose to mourn on the twentieth anniversary of the siege. (And that there are other not-so-symbolic conflicts much closer to home, or to my onetime home, anyway.)
I prefer to leave all of those references oblique and ambiguous, since it will continue to apply to so many conflicts yet to come anyway.
I thought I should have posted the link to my collaboration with Carol Lafayette on "Skateboarding in Sarajevo," but of course couldn't get around to it in time:
http://vimeo.com/6837107
I have resisted with difficulty the temptation to insert still images from the video, because, you know, that would help people decide whether or not they want to click through to watch it. |
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| My job here is done. Not. |
[Apr. 6th, 2012|10:28 am] |
There is the entire other half of the joculum blog left to deal with. Which is the half that I have been concerned with lately. But here, following fast upon Georgia State University's recent science-and-art symposium and the focus on the Tibet-Emory Science Project during Emory University's annual Tibet Week, is:
http://www.coa.gatech.edu/event/georgia-tech-neuro-humanities-entanglement-conference-and-neuro-salon
"Emerging research in the brain sciences has set into motion fundamental questions relating to social, political, aesthetic, and scientific discoveries. This is an exciting research moment because it opens the opportunity for crafting theoretical and practical convergences between major issues that have long bedeviled the Liberal Arts with those arising in the Neurosciences. For example: what does it take to persuade—to move people from one position to another, or to get them to care about an event that never before stirred their interest? The old rhetorical and sociological conundrum of how one spurs a critical mass of people to alter their vision of themselves as individuals is now entangled with neural circuitry, empathetic processing, and legal disputes over conscious actions. Cognition, in short, has been brought into the heart of everyday life. Such new and unusual types of cross-disciplinary engagement offer a bold opportunity to rethink our educational programs and institutions in light of major research initiatives held in common.
"To help foster, as well as model, these new kinds of humanities/neurosciences engagements, we are organizing a two-day conference at the Georgia Institute of Technology [Spring 2012] to explore the current state of neuroscience/humanities interactions. The purpose of the conference is to highlight the exciting encounters among cognitive science, neuroscience, biological sciences and engineering with the Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts at the level of key issues we both share.
"Topics include: Self-assembling the Self, Mirroring and Social Cognition, Literature and the New Sciences of Human Nature, Hallucinogenics and the Visionary, Brain Imaging and Non-Discursive Media, The Digital Business of Memory, Attention and Its Disorders, Experience-Driven Media and Devices, Neurophilosopy and the New Spirituality.
"A Neuro-Salon, held in conjunction and amplifying the message of the conference by making the conceptual collaborations visible in material objects, is also planned. This second Salon would further the thrust to establish a permanent temporary exhibition space at Georgia Tech that we initiated last year [2010/11] with the inaugural Salon for Vision. It is hoped these thought-provoking installations will stand at the beginning of a series of interdisciplinary Salons demonstrating the creative and innovative art-science-engineering-technology intersections uniquely possible at Georgia Tech--to broad communities both inside and outside of Georgia Tech." |
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