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Punk Ethos & the Blog: An Interview with A D Jameson, pt. 1
Read pt. 2 here. I first read A.D. Jameson’s criticism on litblogs like HTMLGiant and Big Other, where he wrote about the New Sincerity, Russian formalism, and cinema. I was interested back then in irony and sincerity, especially because I was in an environment where a lot of people I knew were doing molly on weekends, were…
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Nasime Aghdam’s Compelling Aesthetics
Aghdam was a vegan, bodybuilder, activist, dancer, and video artist. She took her own life on April 3, 2018 in a shooting at the YouTube headquarters.
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New Fiction is Psychic Occupation
“How then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another about people, sealed as they were?” (Woolf, To the Lighthouse) Fiction—or more generally, longform narrative text—has long been the handyman of culture, serving whatever functions are needed at a historical moment. The Greek oral tradition, famously, functioned in part to preserve cultural…
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Predictive Processing & Art as Cognitive Remodeling
Visual art — representational imagery — begins somewhere between fifty and one-hundred thousand years ago, overlapping with the Upper Paleolithic Transition. The period consists of rapid gains in tool technologies alongside the beginnings of modern symbolic thought, with human societies developing currency systems, dispersed social organizations, and increasingly sophisticated religious belief.
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Art vs. Design, a follow-up
Pictured above, the Krebs Cycle of Creativity, just to toss another conceptual carving into the mix. * My post from earlier this week, “Art as the Antithesis of Design,” received a fair amount of pushback.
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Art as the Antithesis of Design
From the footnotes of an upcoming piece examining predictive processing and Alva Nöe’s 2015 work on aesthetics, Strange Tools: Nöe makes [his] argument through exclusion: art practices which are not interrogative, which do not challenge existing structures and practices are not, technically speaking, art. Pop songs, to Nöe, aren’t musical art, they’re a first-level human practice (or “organized activity”)…
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On the Erotics of Interpretation
by Suspended Reason w/ James Wood In Antonioni’s film L’eclisse, the luminous Monica Vitti visits the Rome stock exchange, where her fiance, played by Alain Delon, works. Delon points out a fat man who has just lost 50 million lire. Intrigued, she follows the man. He orders a drink at a bar, barely touches it,…
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Origins of “Future Nausea”
1966, Susan Sontag, “Anthropologist as Hero” in Against Interpretation: “The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, of intellectual vertigo.” (also, 1999, William Gibson, No Maps for These Territories, 15:00 in: “I think we all have…
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Girls, Broad City, and Over-the-Topness
“By their power of intimate close-up, movies reveal the subtleties of facial expression and the ambiguities of mood and motivation.” (Paglia) I recently re-watched Girls, and then off a recommendation, chased it with half a season of Broad City. The latter struck me as artless and also socially valueless in comparison with Dunham’s HBO…
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The Mask is the Face: Self-Design in the Age of the Algorithm
We wear our souls in here. Second Life resident Biology’s offspring is culture, but culture feels little allegiance to its heritage. It has become rabid, turns back to devour its father. But culture is a Cronus, a middle way, a transitory stage. Culture in turn gives birth to the algorithm, but the algorithm feels little…
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Backgrounding Techniques in Cinema and Literature
“In his later works, Klee began to erase the lines that typically distinguish a painting’s foreground image from its background, and he populated this background with numerous other figures that enter into a viewer’s awareness to greater and lesser degrees. Thus Klee’s late works… paint the usually inconspicuous tension of emerging and withdrawing, the usually…
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Mental Imagery 1
Disclaimer: Most of the insights in this post have already been addressed by semiotics, and won’t strike anyone familiar with that discipline as novel. This is more just an attempt to reframe and re-analogize a process than to advance actual arguments. Delving into the world of machine learning has me interested in encoding as an…
A D Jameson all communication is manipulation Alva Nöe ambiguity chords compression Erving Goffman fitness games generalized reading hermeneutic circle institutional theory Interpretation Jürgen Schmidhuber Karl Friston language games linguistics literary theory literature Maggie Nelson maps meaning modernism music music criticism New Sincerity nostalgia opticratics Peli Grietzer Pierre Bourdieu pop music poptimism pragmatism predictive hermeneutics predictive model predictive processing Sarah Perry selection games signaling strategic interaction surrogation the inexact sciences Thomas Schelling vibe theory visual art
Suspended Reason 