Tag: modernism
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Will Nature Always Win?
“Only a fool swallows myths,” reads a protester’s sign, near Westminster, morn. “Keep the story of England alive,” counters a Parliament plaque, mere paces. Drenched in Medievalism lately. Picked up Ivanhoe at a Hythe charity shop. The chivalric figure, at least in Scott’s telling, is fundamentally generous—and yet (it is like a magic penny) the more…
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Cake, Calories, & Cartographic Pleasures
An Ecosystem of Effects. Let us posit a simplification, which will hopefully seem less arbitrary and less reductive as we further describe it. The simplification is this: that the two poles of concern, when it comes to what we call “art,” are the production of pleasure and the production of models. This is a bit…
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Predictive Hermeneutics
A preprint of “A Bayesian hermeneutic” — the cogsci paper Thomas Rutten & I worked on last summer in Mexico City — is available at Research Gate here. It aims to introduce a new subfield of hermeneutics we term “predictive hermeneutics.”
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Abstraction & Processing
The art historian Jack Flam (2014) refers to this aspect of abstraction as “a new claim on truth.” By dismantling perspective, abstract art requires our brain to come up with a new logic of bottom-up processing. The work of Mondrian relies heavily on the brain’s early steps in processing objects, steps that depend on line…
Suspended Reason 