View allAll Photos Tagged certainty
Scientific Name: Cladonia macilenta Hoffm.
Common Name: Lipstick Powderhorn
Certainty: not sure (notes)
Location: Northwestern California; Trinity Mts
Date: 20070220
Or is this an apotheciate C. umbricola?
Google, Apple, Inter-IKEA Group and McDonald's would welcome more clarity and certainty about their tax liabilities in the EU, but they are concerned about the administrative compliance costs and reluctant to see tax data being made public. So said their representatives at a public hearing, held by Parliament's Special Committee on Tax Rulings II on Tuesday, to elicit their views on recent and upcoming proposed legislation on corporate tax.
MEPs were keen to hear the multinational companies' views on the proposed directive against base erosion and profit shifting (anti-BEPS), which follows an agreement struck at OECD and G20 levels. They specifically asked about the proposed requirement for country-by-country reporting of profits, taxes and subsidies and whether such information should be made public.
But the anticipated common consolidated corporate tax base (CCCTB) and company specific tax structures - such as Google's “Bermuda” structure, IKEA's “royalties” one, Apple's tax arrangements in Ireland and McDonalds' franchises – were also subject to intense debate.
www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/news-room/20160314IPR19295...
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For bigger HR files please contact: webcom-flickr(AT)europarl.europa.eu
October 27, 2018 at 12:00pmuntil November 11, 2018 at 5:00pm at GENERATOR Projects
The exhibition, “Flesh and Finitude”, has borrowed its title from Cary Wolfe’s book, What is Posthumanism (2010). It explores the boundaries of human life and body. What is the end of the human and where does something else begin? This year’s NEoN festival’s theme is ‘Lifespans’ and our exhibition’s aim is to investigate the ‘posthuman condition’, the lifespan of ‘human’ as we know it.
Five artists were invited to provide different points of enquiry into what it means to be human in relation to other species, Nature, objects, technology, and humanity itself.
“Not all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that.” (Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (2013) p.1) Today, when artificial intelligence, 3D printed organs and genetic engineering are a reality, what it means to be human is extended and redesigned. At the same time, technological advancement also reflects on our relationship (and most importantly similarities) with the Other.
Digital and sculptural works reflect on different aspects of human and its boundaries, its uncanny symbiotic relationship with others, held together by a melancholic sense of uncertainty.
Curated by Zsofia Jakab
Artists:
Caitlin Dick (UK) – Caitlin Dick recently graduated from her Master’s in Contemporary Art from Edinburgh College of Art and previously studied a BA (Hons) in Contemporary Art Practice at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen. Caitlin’s most recent work The Problem Begins When…, shown in Embassy Gallery Edinburgh, has focussed on the fusion of the technological and the human, creating an uncomfortable hybrid through digital and kinetic sculpture.
Give in to that Easy Living expands upon this previous work, attempting to explore these matters in a playfully cynical way, experimentally introducing an object-based installation which highlights our relationship with the bizarre, posthuman form that technology has created. Mobility assistance devices, kinetic sculpture and film create a sad scene of near total technological integration. Technology has become an extension of ourselves, no longer a separate entity; we feel lost or uneasy without it. The expectation of connection to anything and anyone at any time and for it then to be reciprocated immediately is an assumed part of capitalist consumer culture. Not only do we need to be accessible 24/7, we also believe that it is essential to be constantly active as part of our techno-ego. Our technological addiction has melted into everyday life, becoming monotonously accepted as part of normality. Website
Caitlyn Main (UK) – Caitlyn Mains practice operates from a state of uncertainty: through sustained linguistic unravelling and temporal installation, she presents works that speak of intimacy, agitation and balance. She accommodates, and indeed, propagates conditions encouraging fragility: every piece has the potential to collapse in on itself, and contains obvious indications of temporality. The work is a physical manifestation of precariousness – the use of dangling, leaning, bound and suspended elements serves to underline the flimsiness of matter.
Mains compositions reverberate between a situation of familiarity and abstraction. As firm edges become dissolved, or ignored, the parameters of her work seem to become floppy, saggy, and fluid – seeping outward to be absolved into the daily mass of visual information that surrounds us. The flesh of her assemblages is that of the world – the bones and tendons extrapolated from the domestic and the detrital, from our illuminated back lit phone screens and the phrases uttered to one another. Her frantic constellations continually oscillate between contradictory states: they are simultaneously saturated and empty, humorous, pathetic, sexual, exquisite and insignificant. Website
Rodrigo Arteaga (CHILE) – Rodrigo’s work aims to redefine some notions and ideas around nature and culture, considering what sort of division can exist between them. He has used material culture that comes from science and its varied systematic methods in the form of books, maps, diagrams, furniture and tools. There is some inherent contradiction in this effort to bring together order and disorder, the useful and the useless, unearthing the coded enigmas of our relationship to the environment. He has responded to scientific culture in an attempt to embrace its limits, maybe turn it back onto itself, finding a crack, subjectivizing something meant to be objective. Website
Alicia Fidler (UK) – Alicia’s practice expands how aesthetics of an object can be used to allude to the presence of action and a premise for performance. Functionality and Agency are contexts, which she employs to transcend an object’s still state. Adopting motifs such as handles, hooks, hinges, nets, harnesses and hoops, she dips into our preexisting relationships with objects and actions. Using Function as a guide for how the body enters the work. ‘Where the handle meets the hand to produce the thing’.
The work’s interaction is the crux, the genesis. She is fascinated by the anticipation and desire for engagement with sculpture. Changing and twisting the nature of the body and the object, into a moment caught in time. She makes works, which in every sense give instructions and demand usage but are so still. Wrapped up in potentiality. Stalling the moment of activity, producing an object that screams its performative past and future out. Recently working with visual suggestion, she has begun to use photographs of past performances. Distorting them with pattern and abstraction. Absorbing images directly onto materials. Re-digesting the echoes of action, presenting a twisted instruction. Through self-referencing, function and performance my work has become anthropomorphic. The sculptures embody their own Agency through visual clues.
They play out their own situations and actions extending beyond the tools, objects and apparatus they resemble. She moves from the realms of interaction, into works that represent a single moment; Bodilyobjects. Website
Callum Johnstone (UK) Callum Johnstone’s practice explores environmental collapse and the implications it will have on humanity. Knowing that our environment is changing at an accelerated pace due to climate change, humanity must quickly adapt by re-imagining and re-designing the structures in which we live. Johnstone aims to show that it is not the physical structures alone which must change, by also the underlying structures of our society which need to be rethought.
Though his work is primarily understood as sculpture, it often verges on the boundaries of architecture and design. His structures often incorporate repeating modular elements which allow the potential for a continuation, acting simply as a beginning component to a much larger superstructure. These ideas can then extend to the actions of the individual which as a collective become a greater movement and have the potential to alter society as we know it. Johnstone sees himself not only as a commentator and illustrator of current events but also as a module of the superstructure we call society. As a catalyst of ideas, the artist intends to inspire a conversation on ways in which humanity may adapt to imminent environmental threats.
Image Credit: Kathryn Rattray Photography
It cannot be said with certainty when the Lahore Fort was originally constructed or by whom, since this information is lost to history, possibly forever. However, evidence found in archaeological digs gives strong indications that it was built long before 1025 A.D
1241 A.D. - Destroyed by Mongols.
1267 A.D. - Rebuilt by Sultan Ghiyas ud din Balban.
1398 A.D. - Destroyed again, by Amir Tamir's army.
1421 A.D. - Rebuilt in mud by Sultan Mubark Shah Syed.
1432 A.D. - The fort is occupied by Shaikh Ali of Kabul who makes repairs to the damages inflicted on it by Shaikha Khokhar.
1566 A.D. - Rebuilt by Mughal emperor Akbar, in solid brick masonry on its earlier foundations. Also perhaps, its area was extended towards the river Ravi, which then and up to about 1849 A.D., used to flow along its fortification on the north. Akbar also built Doulat Khana-e-Khas-o-Am, the famous Jharoka-e-Darshan (Balcony for Royal Appearance), Masjidi Gate etc.
1618 A.D. - Jehangir adds Doulat Khana-e-Jehangir
1631 A.D. - Shahjahan builds Shish Mahal (Mirror Palace).
1633 A.D. - Shahjahan builds Khawabgah (a dream place or sleeping area), Hamam (bath ), Khilwat Khana (retiring room), and Moti Masjid (Pearl Mosque).[6]
1645 A.D. - Shahjahan builds Diwan-e-Khas (Hall of Special Audience).
1674 A.D. - Aurangzeb adds the massively fluted Alamgiri Gate.
(Sometime during) 1799-1839 A.D. - The outer fortification wall on the north with the moat, the marble athdera, Havaeli Mai Jindan and Bara Dari Raja Dhiyan Singh were constructed by Ranjit Singh, Sikh ruler from 1799-1839 A.D.
1846 A.D. - Occupied by the British.
1927 A.D. - The British hand over the Fort to the Department of Archaeology after demolishing a portion of the fortification wall on the south and converting it into a stepped form thus defortifying the fort.
There's no doubt, I'll not keep asking myself '' Am I really love him?''
my emotions might be out of control, I think it's called '' passion''
as Jess said'' love it's simple'' I guess it means if you really into someone,
you would not doubt your feeling, you don't even think about any questions
about what your real feel about him,cuz you just want him. that's simple.
It's sort of instinct or body reaction.
After we getting older, It's really hard to in love with someone. we always think too much, too rational,maybe we still got some feeling for someone easily, but we might also take it off right away.
For me, LOVE is a beautiful song.
A period of time, I wasn't touched by any songs.
I feel nothing and numb, at the same time, I'm afraid that I'll not touched by any songs,
as I'm afraid I will not fell in love with someone till an amazing song show up
unconsciously. When the first beat drop, my heart pumps,
right at the moment, I found my joy again, and all the panic and worries were gone.
I guess I'm just looking for a beautiful song.
and It's just so special and wonderful that I have to taking more time to searching for.
It's worth to wait. I will wait.
Cuz most of songs were flat and disappointed.
Part of the Crab Brittlegill group smelling strongly of shellfish. The colouring suggests R. graveolens although not possible to say with certainty.
For Britain’s biggest bus operator, co-operation with Scania and the Keltruck dealership means freedom and certainty. Freedom to focus on its core business and the certainty of knowing exactly what its day-to-day operations will cost.
Text: ÅSA LARSBO
Photos: CARL-ERIK ANDERSSON
National Express Group is one of the world’s largest public transport companies. Every year more than one billion passengers use its buses, trolleys, city and express buses in the UK, America and Spain.
With more than 1,000 destinations and 16 million passengers per year, the group’s UK-based express bus company National Express Ltd is Europe’s largest, and its distinct white buses are a common sight on British roads. The group also operates local transport systems around the UK through a number of local companies.
Several of the group’s companies are also Scania customers. For Travel West Midlands, with an 80 percent market share of public transport in the Birmingham area, co-operation with Scania began with the need to replace an ageing double-decker fleet.
“We move a million people a day so we mainly need double-deckers,” says Jack Henry, Engineering Director of the city bus division at National Express. “The original plan was to replace like for like, but in my discussions with Scania we started looking at the Omni articulated bus, which was attractive because it is an integral bus which we could buy from a single supplier.”
With his background in trucking, Mr Henry also had a relatively unorthodox approach to buying buses.
“Traditionally, when buying buses we used to have to be very prescriptive, to say I want these particular bolts,” he says. “But I turned the specification around to output and performance, saying ‘This is the performance I want from it, you tell me what I need.’ And Scania preferred working like that. They had confidence in their products; they knew the components to give the longevity, ensuring that the vehicles are available and reliable all the time.”
Mr Henry bought eleven Scania Omni buses, with a five-year service and maintenance contract at Scania dealer Keltruck in West Bromwich.
Under the contract, Keltruck handles everything related to the buses, from the monthly inspections required under British law to repairs and parts supply ? an arrangement Jack Henry is so pleased with that he is increasingly working the same way with his other bus suppliers as well.
“Scania was the first manufacturer we have built this type of long-term partnership with. They were very capable and willing to take on the responsibility, and from my perspective it has worked very well. We can concentrate on providing the service we are here to provide, and we have a fixed cost.”
Good example
Partnering with Keltruck to take care of Omni buses for Travel West Midlands served as a good example. When National Express Ltd bought a number of Scania Irizar PB coaches for its express services, it was natural to leave servicing and maintenance to Keltruck.
According to National Express Operations Director Bill Cahill, the bus industry lags behind the truck industry when it comes to thinking in terms of total fleet operating costs, but it is definitely moving in that direction. “Personally, I think the vehicles are now getting so complicated that doing it yourself will be history in the near future. They require expertise in areas that fall outside our core business. So it is a natural step to buy from experts the services you need to keep your vehicles in top-notch condition.”
Keeping a high profile is important in order to compete both with other express coach operators and other modes of transport, such as trains and cars. Traditionally, coaches have been viewed in the UK as a transport alternative for students and pensioners, an image National Express is well on the way to changing. The company’s modern, comfortable coaches – equipped with TVs and, on some routes, wireless broadband – are steadily gaining new ground.
The Scania Irizar PB coaches are one element of the company’s deliberate investment in the “wow factor”, Mr Cahill explains. A few years ago, National Express accepted the challenge of showing that coach travel could be fun and different. It has more than achieved this with the Scania Irizar PB, which he considers the most attractive bus in the market.
“No one had noticed when we bought new coaches before, because we just replaced the old ones with similar ones. Then we put the PBs on the road starting in 2003 and immediately we had positive comments from customers.”
Aside from the “wow factor”, National Express seeks an optimal balance between operating cost and reliability. Each of the company’s 600 buses and coaches average some 225,000 kilometres a year, a workload that takes its toll.
“What you are buying effectively from Scania and Keltruck is certainty. Certainty of operating cost, and you’re also buying certainty of supply. We know that the vehicle will be available when we need it, and exactly what it will cost.”
Bill Cahill, Operations Director at National Express buys certainty...
... just like Jack Henry, Engineering Director at the city bus division.
A holistic view
Uptime and reliability mean everything to bus and coach operators in the deregulated British market. Far-sighted Scania dealer Keltruck realised this some years ago and began offering bus and coach customers comprehensive servicing and maintenance at a fixed monthly cost.
Every month, about 100 city buses and coaches pass through Keltruck’s main workshop in West Bromwich in the British Midlands. The number is increasing all the time.
“Nowadays buses and coaches account for around 30 percent of our daily sales at the West Bromwich workshop,” explains Russ Warner, Regional General Manager. “That’s a 20 percent increase just in the past year.”
A large part of the increase is due to the company’s proactive efforts to sell service and maintenance contracts, both to existing and new Scania customers. More and more bus and coach operators are discovering the advantages of one-stop shopping for all their vehicle needs.
“We don’t sell buses and coaches. Scania (Great Britain) handles that,” explains Andrew Bentley, Keltruck’s Group Aftersales Business Development Manager. “But we are there as part of a comprehensive customer offer, with our service and maintenance agreements. Together we offer a complete package that gives customers a stable platform to focus on their core business.
“With our packages, customers can make decisions based on operating economy and uptime,” he continues. “A service and maintenance contract saves them money and problems in the long-term.”
With 500 employees, Keltruck is the largest independent Scania dealer in Britain. Aside from West Bromwich, the company runs twelve Scania authorised aftersales depots and five customer vehicle maintenance units. Keltruck’s West Bromwich and Nottingham workshops also belong to the network of specialised bus and coach servicing and maintenance centres that Scania (Great Britain) has created around the country.
The 25 service technicians employed by the 24-hour workshop in West Bromwich include seven Scania Master Technicians. Nearly half of the workshop’s service techs are bus and coach specialists, which Mr Warner says is necessary in order to maintain expertise.
“Buses and coaches, like all other vehicles, are becoming more technically complex to service,” he says. “So it is natural for our employees to specialise either in buses or trucks.”
Today Keltruck has some 20 bus and coach customers with full service and maintenance contracts. A major element of these contracts is the regular inspections all bus and coaches in the UK must undergo - every two weeks for tourist coaches and intercity buses and every four weeks for city buses - but repairs of any defects discovered during these inspections and any necessary parts are also covered.
“If we spot anything during an inspection, we repair it immediately,” Mr Bentley says, “in order to keep customer downtime at a minimum.”
At Keltruck the whole bus, not just the Scania components, is well cared for. The workshop has gradually expanded its expertise and can now handle repairs of air conditioning, WCs, wheelchair lifts, rear-view cameras and electronic destination signs.
“We are always open to suggestions from our customers on how we can make their lives easier,” says Mr Bentley, who is currently looking into the possibility of also cleaning customers’ buses while they are in for service. “We do everything but drive the bus. All the customer has to do is add
the driver and fuel.”
➡️ keltruckscania.com/about-keltruck/news-centre/press-relea...
It's a bit like angling; setting out with no certainty that you will succeed. A run up to the airport in the morning produced one of these Scanias heading south on the opposite carriageway working service 50 closely followed by 3056CKH. Having figured out what I thought was the diagram for the K114 I went out to get it at Ocean Park. Either I was wrong or it had been substituted. 3088BDY glided past as I walked, behind the trees.... Back to the car and 1470 appeared on a southbound 36. This I can do, and here's the result. Passing the Plaza Arucas stop working the 36 back and passing 1719 loading. (d21-0882f)
Protoblastenia incrustans (DC.) J. Steiner, syn.: Callopisma rupestre f. incrustans (DC.) Walt. Watson, Caloplaca incrustans (DC.) Flagey, Lecanora incrustans (DC.) Ach., Lecidea incrustans (DC.) Chevall., Lecidea incrustans (DC.) Chevall.
EN: no name, DE: no name
Slo.: ?
Dat.: Feb. 10. 2018
Lat.: 46.36017 Long.: 13.704108
Code: Bot_1111/2018_DSC0841
Habitat: man made stone wall delimiting former pastures, now partly overgrown with bushes and trees; slightly inclined mountain slope, southeast aspect; calcareous, colluvial/glacial ground; partly in shade; relatively dry and warm place; partly protected from direct rain by tree canopies; average precipitations ~ 3.000 mm/year, average temperature 7-9 deg C, elevations 580 m (1.900 feet), alpine phytogeographical region.
Substratum: +/- vertical hard calcareous rock surface.
Place: Lower Trenta valley; between villages Soča and Trenta; right bank of river Soča; next to the path from Trenta 2 farmhouse (now holiday cottage) to Trenta 2B cottage, East Julian Alps, Posočje, Slovenia EC.
Comment: Genus Protoblastenia is comprised by lichens living on rock (saxicolous). Their thallus is crustose or grows within solid rock (endolithic) or it is something in between these two options. These lichens have usually yellow, orange or red apothecia and simple cell spores (Ref.:3). Their similarity to Caloplaca species on macroscopic level causes frequent confusions. However, Caloplaca species have two celled spores (septate spores), which distinguish them from Protoblastenia species with certainty.
Protoblastenia incrustans is a common lichen, but it is certainly many times overlooked. Namely, thallus is usually endolithic and consequently hard to be seen. Its apothecia are very small, from only 200 to 500 microns in diameter (Ref.:3) and can also hardly be seen by naked eye in spite of the fact that they are bright yellow-orange color. Characteristically, its apothecia sit in small pits in the rock. Their surface is from slightly concave to slightly convex shape, most of them are nearly flat. This species is an arctic-alpine element (Ref.:5).
Ref.:
(1) F.S. Dobson, Lichens, The Richmonds Publishing Ca.LTD (2005), p 364.
(2) www.dorsetnature.co.uk/pages-lichen/lch-387.html (accessed 28.2.2018)
(3) C.W.Smith, et all, The lichens of Great Britain and Ireland,The British Lichen Society,(2009), p 750.
(4) V. Wirth, Die Flechten Baden-Württembergs, Teil. 2., Ulmer (1995), p 773.
(5) I.M. Brodo, S.D. Sharnoff, S.Sharnoff, Lichens of North America, Yale Uni. Press (2001), p 586.
Although it is impossible to identify this woman with any certainty, her hair style indicates she lived in the first half of the 3rd century CE. It was made fashionable by Plautilla, wife of the emperor Caracalla, and remained in style until that dynasty ended. This woman may have been one of the wives of the emperor Elagabalus, who came from the Roman province of Syria.
Many people want to lose weight and be slim, and in this, they are helped by diet. But such approaches are often exhausting and boring, so everyone wants to lose weight, to the food, allowing to lose weight, was not only useful but also delicious.We can say with certainty that everybody knows...
ジャーマンスラッシュ、KREATORの3rd。87年作。Noise International(88561-8214-2)。USオリジナル盤。ジャケ。
Matrix:88561-8214-2(V):MASTERED BY NIMBUS
再発盤と比べて、バンドロゴのデザイン、ジャケデザインの寸法、アルバムロゴが若干違います。NIMBUSプレス。
Hieronymus Bosch born Jheronimus van Aken c. 1450 – 9 August 1516) was an Early Netherlandish painter. His work is known for its fantastic imagery, detailed landscapes and illustrations of moral and religious concepts and narratives. Within his lifetime his work was collected in the Netherlands, Austria, and Spain, and widely copied, especially his macabre and nightmarish depictions of hell.
Little is known of Bosch's life, though there are some records. He spent most of it in the town of 's-Hertogenbosch, though his roots are from Aachen, Germany. His pessimistic and fantastical style cast a wide influence on northern art of the 16th century, with Pieter Bruegel the Elder his best known follower. His paintings have been difficult to translate from a modern point of view; attempts to associate instances of modern sexual imagery with fringe sects or the occult have largely failed. Today he is seen as a hugely individualistic painter with deep insight into man's desires and deepest fears. Attribution has been especially difficult; today only 35 to 40 paintings are confidently given to his hand. His most acclaimed works consist of a few triptych altarpieces, the most outstanding of which is the Garden of Earthly Delights. His best surviving panels make innovative use of oil paint and especially glazed finish.
Hieronymus Bosch was born Jheronimus (or Joen,respectively the Latin and Middle Dutch form of the name "Jerome") van Aken (meaning "from Aachen"). He signed a number of his paintings as Jheronimus Bosch (pronounced Yeronimus Bos[needs Dutch IPA] in Middle Dutch). The name derives from his birthplace, 's-Hertogenbosch, which is commonly called "Den Bosch" ('the forest').
Little is known of Bosch’s life or training. He left behind no letters or diaries, and what has been identified has been taken from brief references to him in the municipal records of 's-Hertogenbosch, and in the account books of the local order of the Illustrious Brotherhood of Our Blessed Lady. Nothing is known of his personality or his thoughts on the meaning of his art. Bosch’s date of birth has not been determined with certainty. It is estimated at c. 1450 on the basis of a hand drawn portrait (which may be a self-portrait) made shortly before his death in 1516. The drawing shows the artist at an advanced age, probably in his late sixties.
Bosch was born and lived all his life in and near ‘s-Hertogenbosch, a city in the Duchy of Brabant. His grandfather, Jan van Aken (died 1454), was a painter and is first mentioned in the records in 1430. It is known that Jan had five sons, four of whom were also painters. Bosch’s father, Anthonius van Aken (died c. 1478), acted as artistic adviser to the Illustrious Brotherhood of Our Blessed Lady.It is generally assumed that either Bosch’s father or one of his uncles taught the artist to paint, but none of their works survive. Bosch first appears in the municipal record on 5 April 1474, when he is named along with two brothers and a sister.
's-Hertogenbosch was a flourishing city in 15th-century Brabant, in the south of the present-day Netherlands, at the time part of the Burgundian Netherlands, and during its lifetime passing through marriage to the Habsburgs. In 1463, 4,000 houses in the town were destroyed by a catastrophic fire, which the then (approximately) 13-year-old Bosch presumably witnessed. He became a popular painter in his lifetime and often received commissions from abroad. In 1488 he joined the highly respected Brotherhood of Our Lady, an arch-conservative religious group of some 40 influential citizens of 's-Hertogenbosch, and 7,000 'outer-members' from around Europe.
Sometime between 1479 and 1481, Bosch married Aleyt Goyaerts van den Meerveen, who was a few years his senior. The couple moved to the nearby town of Oirschot, where his wife had inherited a house and land from her wealthy family. An entry in the accounts of the Brotherhood of Our Lady records Bosch’s death in 1516. A funeral mass served in his memory was held in the church of Saint John on 9 August of that year.
October 27, 2018 at 12:00pmuntil November 11, 2018 at 5:00pm at GENERATOR Projects
The exhibition, “Flesh and Finitude”, has borrowed its title from Cary Wolfe’s book, What is Posthumanism (2010). It explores the boundaries of human life and body. What is the end of the human and where does something else begin? This year’s NEoN festival’s theme is ‘Lifespans’ and our exhibition’s aim is to investigate the ‘posthuman condition’, the lifespan of ‘human’ as we know it.
Five artists were invited to provide different points of enquiry into what it means to be human in relation to other species, Nature, objects, technology, and humanity itself.
“Not all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that.” (Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (2013) p.1) Today, when artificial intelligence, 3D printed organs and genetic engineering are a reality, what it means to be human is extended and redesigned. At the same time, technological advancement also reflects on our relationship (and most importantly similarities) with the Other.
Digital and sculptural works reflect on different aspects of human and its boundaries, its uncanny symbiotic relationship with others, held together by a melancholic sense of uncertainty.
Curated by Zsofia Jakab
Artists:
Caitlin Dick (UK) – Caitlin Dick recently graduated from her Master’s in Contemporary Art from Edinburgh College of Art and previously studied a BA (Hons) in Contemporary Art Practice at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen. Caitlin’s most recent work The Problem Begins When…, shown in Embassy Gallery Edinburgh, has focussed on the fusion of the technological and the human, creating an uncomfortable hybrid through digital and kinetic sculpture.
Give in to that Easy Living expands upon this previous work, attempting to explore these matters in a playfully cynical way, experimentally introducing an object-based installation which highlights our relationship with the bizarre, posthuman form that technology has created. Mobility assistance devices, kinetic sculpture and film create a sad scene of near total technological integration. Technology has become an extension of ourselves, no longer a separate entity; we feel lost or uneasy without it. The expectation of connection to anything and anyone at any time and for it then to be reciprocated immediately is an assumed part of capitalist consumer culture. Not only do we need to be accessible 24/7, we also believe that it is essential to be constantly active as part of our techno-ego. Our technological addiction has melted into everyday life, becoming monotonously accepted as part of normality. Website
Caitlyn Main (UK) – Caitlyn Mains practice operates from a state of uncertainty: through sustained linguistic unravelling and temporal installation, she presents works that speak of intimacy, agitation and balance. She accommodates, and indeed, propagates conditions encouraging fragility: every piece has the potential to collapse in on itself, and contains obvious indications of temporality. The work is a physical manifestation of precariousness – the use of dangling, leaning, bound and suspended elements serves to underline the flimsiness of matter.
Mains compositions reverberate between a situation of familiarity and abstraction. As firm edges become dissolved, or ignored, the parameters of her work seem to become floppy, saggy, and fluid – seeping outward to be absolved into the daily mass of visual information that surrounds us. The flesh of her assemblages is that of the world – the bones and tendons extrapolated from the domestic and the detrital, from our illuminated back lit phone screens and the phrases uttered to one another. Her frantic constellations continually oscillate between contradictory states: they are simultaneously saturated and empty, humorous, pathetic, sexual, exquisite and insignificant. Website
Rodrigo Arteaga (CHILE) – Rodrigo’s work aims to redefine some notions and ideas around nature and culture, considering what sort of division can exist between them. He has used material culture that comes from science and its varied systematic methods in the form of books, maps, diagrams, furniture and tools. There is some inherent contradiction in this effort to bring together order and disorder, the useful and the useless, unearthing the coded enigmas of our relationship to the environment. He has responded to scientific culture in an attempt to embrace its limits, maybe turn it back onto itself, finding a crack, subjectivizing something meant to be objective. Website
Alicia Fidler (UK) – Alicia’s practice expands how aesthetics of an object can be used to allude to the presence of action and a premise for performance. Functionality and Agency are contexts, which she employs to transcend an object’s still state. Adopting motifs such as handles, hooks, hinges, nets, harnesses and hoops, she dips into our preexisting relationships with objects and actions. Using Function as a guide for how the body enters the work. ‘Where the handle meets the hand to produce the thing’.
The work’s interaction is the crux, the genesis. She is fascinated by the anticipation and desire for engagement with sculpture. Changing and twisting the nature of the body and the object, into a moment caught in time. She makes works, which in every sense give instructions and demand usage but are so still. Wrapped up in potentiality. Stalling the moment of activity, producing an object that screams its performative past and future out. Recently working with visual suggestion, she has begun to use photographs of past performances. Distorting them with pattern and abstraction. Absorbing images directly onto materials. Re-digesting the echoes of action, presenting a twisted instruction. Through self-referencing, function and performance my work has become anthropomorphic. The sculptures embody their own Agency through visual clues.
They play out their own situations and actions extending beyond the tools, objects and apparatus they resemble. She moves from the realms of interaction, into works that represent a single moment; Bodilyobjects. Website
Callum Johnstone (UK) Callum Johnstone’s practice explores environmental collapse and the implications it will have on humanity. Knowing that our environment is changing at an accelerated pace due to climate change, humanity must quickly adapt by re-imagining and re-designing the structures in which we live. Johnstone aims to show that it is not the physical structures alone which must change, by also the underlying structures of our society which need to be rethought.
Though his work is primarily understood as sculpture, it often verges on the boundaries of architecture and design. His structures often incorporate repeating modular elements which allow the potential for a continuation, acting simply as a beginning component to a much larger superstructure. These ideas can then extend to the actions of the individual which as a collective become a greater movement and have the potential to alter society as we know it. Johnstone sees himself not only as a commentator and illustrator of current events but also as a module of the superstructure we call society. As a catalyst of ideas, the artist intends to inspire a conversation on ways in which humanity may adapt to imminent environmental threats.
Image Credit: Kathryn Rattray Photography
Scientific Name: Oligonema schweinitzii
Common Name: Yellow Slime
Certainty: guess (notes)
Location: Appalachians; Smokies; CabinCove
Date: 20071120
Marble statue of a wounded warrior
Roman, Antonine period, ca AD138-181
Copy of a Greek bronze statue of ca 460-450BC
The subject of this statue has not been identified with certainty. The warrior held a shield on his left arm and probably a spear in his right hand, and he stands with his feet carefully placed on a sloping surface. The figure must have some association with the sea because a planklike form surrounded by waves is carved on the plinth of a second copy in the British Museum, London. It has been suggested that he is the Greek hero Potesilaos, who ignored an oracle's warning that the first Greek to step on Trojan soil would be the first to dies in battle. This statue might represent him descending from the ship ready to meet his fate. Following the discovery of a wound carved in the right armpit, the figure was reinterpreted as a dying warrior falling backward and identified as a famous statue by the sculptor Kresilas. Many other identifications have been suggested to explain the unusual stance and the unique iconography of this statue and of the copy in London, but none has been generally accepted.
[Met Museum]
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 5th Avenue, New York
October 27, 2018 at 12:00pmuntil November 11, 2018 at 5:00pm at GENERATOR Projects
The exhibition, “Flesh and Finitude”, has borrowed its title from Cary Wolfe’s book, What is Posthumanism (2010). It explores the boundaries of human life and body. What is the end of the human and where does something else begin? This year’s NEoN festival’s theme is ‘Lifespans’ and our exhibition’s aim is to investigate the ‘posthuman condition’, the lifespan of ‘human’ as we know it.
Five artists were invited to provide different points of enquiry into what it means to be human in relation to other species, Nature, objects, technology, and humanity itself.
“Not all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that.” (Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (2013) p.1) Today, when artificial intelligence, 3D printed organs and genetic engineering are a reality, what it means to be human is extended and redesigned. At the same time, technological advancement also reflects on our relationship (and most importantly similarities) with the Other.
Digital and sculptural works reflect on different aspects of human and its boundaries, its uncanny symbiotic relationship with others, held together by a melancholic sense of uncertainty.
Curated by Zsofia Jakab
Artists:
Caitlin Dick (UK) – Caitlin Dick recently graduated from her Master’s in Contemporary Art from Edinburgh College of Art and previously studied a BA (Hons) in Contemporary Art Practice at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen. Caitlin’s most recent work The Problem Begins When…, shown in Embassy Gallery Edinburgh, has focussed on the fusion of the technological and the human, creating an uncomfortable hybrid through digital and kinetic sculpture.
Give in to that Easy Living expands upon this previous work, attempting to explore these matters in a playfully cynical way, experimentally introducing an object-based installation which highlights our relationship with the bizarre, posthuman form that technology has created. Mobility assistance devices, kinetic sculpture and film create a sad scene of near total technological integration. Technology has become an extension of ourselves, no longer a separate entity; we feel lost or uneasy without it. The expectation of connection to anything and anyone at any time and for it then to be reciprocated immediately is an assumed part of capitalist consumer culture. Not only do we need to be accessible 24/7, we also believe that it is essential to be constantly active as part of our techno-ego. Our technological addiction has melted into everyday life, becoming monotonously accepted as part of normality. Website
Caitlyn Main (UK) – Caitlyn Mains practice operates from a state of uncertainty: through sustained linguistic unravelling and temporal installation, she presents works that speak of intimacy, agitation and balance. She accommodates, and indeed, propagates conditions encouraging fragility: every piece has the potential to collapse in on itself, and contains obvious indications of temporality. The work is a physical manifestation of precariousness – the use of dangling, leaning, bound and suspended elements serves to underline the flimsiness of matter.
Mains compositions reverberate between a situation of familiarity and abstraction. As firm edges become dissolved, or ignored, the parameters of her work seem to become floppy, saggy, and fluid – seeping outward to be absolved into the daily mass of visual information that surrounds us. The flesh of her assemblages is that of the world – the bones and tendons extrapolated from the domestic and the detrital, from our illuminated back lit phone screens and the phrases uttered to one another. Her frantic constellations continually oscillate between contradictory states: they are simultaneously saturated and empty, humorous, pathetic, sexual, exquisite and insignificant. Website
Rodrigo Arteaga (CHILE) – Rodrigo’s work aims to redefine some notions and ideas around nature and culture, considering what sort of division can exist between them. He has used material culture that comes from science and its varied systematic methods in the form of books, maps, diagrams, furniture and tools. There is some inherent contradiction in this effort to bring together order and disorder, the useful and the useless, unearthing the coded enigmas of our relationship to the environment. He has responded to scientific culture in an attempt to embrace its limits, maybe turn it back onto itself, finding a crack, subjectivizing something meant to be objective. Website
Alicia Fidler (UK) – Alicia’s practice expands how aesthetics of an object can be used to allude to the presence of action and a premise for performance. Functionality and Agency are contexts, which she employs to transcend an object’s still state. Adopting motifs such as handles, hooks, hinges, nets, harnesses and hoops, she dips into our preexisting relationships with objects and actions. Using Function as a guide for how the body enters the work. ‘Where the handle meets the hand to produce the thing’.
The work’s interaction is the crux, the genesis. She is fascinated by the anticipation and desire for engagement with sculpture. Changing and twisting the nature of the body and the object, into a moment caught in time. She makes works, which in every sense give instructions and demand usage but are so still. Wrapped up in potentiality. Stalling the moment of activity, producing an object that screams its performative past and future out. Recently working with visual suggestion, she has begun to use photographs of past performances. Distorting them with pattern and abstraction. Absorbing images directly onto materials. Re-digesting the echoes of action, presenting a twisted instruction. Through self-referencing, function and performance my work has become anthropomorphic. The sculptures embody their own Agency through visual clues.
They play out their own situations and actions extending beyond the tools, objects and apparatus they resemble. She moves from the realms of interaction, into works that represent a single moment; Bodilyobjects. Website
Callum Johnstone (UK) Callum Johnstone’s practice explores environmental collapse and the implications it will have on humanity. Knowing that our environment is changing at an accelerated pace due to climate change, humanity must quickly adapt by re-imagining and re-designing the structures in which we live. Johnstone aims to show that it is not the physical structures alone which must change, by also the underlying structures of our society which need to be rethought.
Though his work is primarily understood as sculpture, it often verges on the boundaries of architecture and design. His structures often incorporate repeating modular elements which allow the potential for a continuation, acting simply as a beginning component to a much larger superstructure. These ideas can then extend to the actions of the individual which as a collective become a greater movement and have the potential to alter society as we know it. Johnstone sees himself not only as a commentator and illustrator of current events but also as a module of the superstructure we call society. As a catalyst of ideas, the artist intends to inspire a conversation on ways in which humanity may adapt to imminent environmental threats.
Image Credit: Kathryn Rattray Photography
outside my window
a black bird sang darkly
frantically bidding me wake
there to rush into the wood
and so shabbily
I shook off but a little sleep
running out the door
to seek the company of ghosts
and when I arrived
the dawn was just breaking
and I heard the trees
breathing heavily from the rain
and when we've spent
enough time missing something
there's a peace that comes
in owning it all in silence
and so I chose
to stop in and consider
how good it feels
to lay down in the fog
and maybe it's because
of this soft pale certainity
that no one will see us
or hear us as we weep
October 27, 2018 at 12:00pmuntil November 11, 2018 at 5:00pm at GENERATOR Projects
The exhibition, “Flesh and Finitude”, has borrowed its title from Cary Wolfe’s book, What is Posthumanism (2010). It explores the boundaries of human life and body. What is the end of the human and where does something else begin? This year’s NEoN festival’s theme is ‘Lifespans’ and our exhibition’s aim is to investigate the ‘posthuman condition’, the lifespan of ‘human’ as we know it.
Five artists were invited to provide different points of enquiry into what it means to be human in relation to other species, Nature, objects, technology, and humanity itself.
“Not all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that.” (Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (2013) p.1) Today, when artificial intelligence, 3D printed organs and genetic engineering are a reality, what it means to be human is extended and redesigned. At the same time, technological advancement also reflects on our relationship (and most importantly similarities) with the Other.
Digital and sculptural works reflect on different aspects of human and its boundaries, its uncanny symbiotic relationship with others, held together by a melancholic sense of uncertainty.
Curated by Zsofia Jakab
Artists:
Caitlin Dick (UK) – Caitlin Dick recently graduated from her Master’s in Contemporary Art from Edinburgh College of Art and previously studied a BA (Hons) in Contemporary Art Practice at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen. Caitlin’s most recent work The Problem Begins When…, shown in Embassy Gallery Edinburgh, has focussed on the fusion of the technological and the human, creating an uncomfortable hybrid through digital and kinetic sculpture.
Give in to that Easy Living expands upon this previous work, attempting to explore these matters in a playfully cynical way, experimentally introducing an object-based installation which highlights our relationship with the bizarre, posthuman form that technology has created. Mobility assistance devices, kinetic sculpture and film create a sad scene of near total technological integration. Technology has become an extension of ourselves, no longer a separate entity; we feel lost or uneasy without it. The expectation of connection to anything and anyone at any time and for it then to be reciprocated immediately is an assumed part of capitalist consumer culture. Not only do we need to be accessible 24/7, we also believe that it is essential to be constantly active as part of our techno-ego. Our technological addiction has melted into everyday life, becoming monotonously accepted as part of normality. Website
Caitlyn Main (UK) – Caitlyn Mains practice operates from a state of uncertainty: through sustained linguistic unravelling and temporal installation, she presents works that speak of intimacy, agitation and balance. She accommodates, and indeed, propagates conditions encouraging fragility: every piece has the potential to collapse in on itself, and contains obvious indications of temporality. The work is a physical manifestation of precariousness – the use of dangling, leaning, bound and suspended elements serves to underline the flimsiness of matter.
Mains compositions reverberate between a situation of familiarity and abstraction. As firm edges become dissolved, or ignored, the parameters of her work seem to become floppy, saggy, and fluid – seeping outward to be absolved into the daily mass of visual information that surrounds us. The flesh of her assemblages is that of the world – the bones and tendons extrapolated from the domestic and the detrital, from our illuminated back lit phone screens and the phrases uttered to one another. Her frantic constellations continually oscillate between contradictory states: they are simultaneously saturated and empty, humorous, pathetic, sexual, exquisite and insignificant. Website
Rodrigo Arteaga (CHILE) – Rodrigo’s work aims to redefine some notions and ideas around nature and culture, considering what sort of division can exist between them. He has used material culture that comes from science and its varied systematic methods in the form of books, maps, diagrams, furniture and tools. There is some inherent contradiction in this effort to bring together order and disorder, the useful and the useless, unearthing the coded enigmas of our relationship to the environment. He has responded to scientific culture in an attempt to embrace its limits, maybe turn it back onto itself, finding a crack, subjectivizing something meant to be objective. Website
Alicia Fidler (UK) – Alicia’s practice expands how aesthetics of an object can be used to allude to the presence of action and a premise for performance. Functionality and Agency are contexts, which she employs to transcend an object’s still state. Adopting motifs such as handles, hooks, hinges, nets, harnesses and hoops, she dips into our preexisting relationships with objects and actions. Using Function as a guide for how the body enters the work. ‘Where the handle meets the hand to produce the thing’.
The work’s interaction is the crux, the genesis. She is fascinated by the anticipation and desire for engagement with sculpture. Changing and twisting the nature of the body and the object, into a moment caught in time. She makes works, which in every sense give instructions and demand usage but are so still. Wrapped up in potentiality. Stalling the moment of activity, producing an object that screams its performative past and future out. Recently working with visual suggestion, she has begun to use photographs of past performances. Distorting them with pattern and abstraction. Absorbing images directly onto materials. Re-digesting the echoes of action, presenting a twisted instruction. Through self-referencing, function and performance my work has become anthropomorphic. The sculptures embody their own Agency through visual clues.
They play out their own situations and actions extending beyond the tools, objects and apparatus they resemble. She moves from the realms of interaction, into works that represent a single moment; Bodilyobjects. Website
Callum Johnstone (UK) Callum Johnstone’s practice explores environmental collapse and the implications it will have on humanity. Knowing that our environment is changing at an accelerated pace due to climate change, humanity must quickly adapt by re-imagining and re-designing the structures in which we live. Johnstone aims to show that it is not the physical structures alone which must change, by also the underlying structures of our society which need to be rethought.
Though his work is primarily understood as sculpture, it often verges on the boundaries of architecture and design. His structures often incorporate repeating modular elements which allow the potential for a continuation, acting simply as a beginning component to a much larger superstructure. These ideas can then extend to the actions of the individual which as a collective become a greater movement and have the potential to alter society as we know it. Johnstone sees himself not only as a commentator and illustrator of current events but also as a module of the superstructure we call society. As a catalyst of ideas, the artist intends to inspire a conversation on ways in which humanity may adapt to imminent environmental threats.
Image Credit: Kathryn Rattray Photography
Human beings have been enthralled by natural phenomena since time immemorial. Alistair McClymont (UK) constructed a model of one in order to better understand it. Thus, he literally tore a tornado out of its natural surroundings, thereby reducing the phenomenon to its essential form and then using technological aids to bring it back to life. Nevertheless, there’s still that certain something—in the mockup just like in the original—that remains essentially incomprehensible to us, something upon which we humans can exert no influence.
Credit: tom mesic
Strong waves are seen at Saint Domain beaches, Dominican Republic, on 25 August 2008. Dominican Republic issued a Hurrican warning from south-southeast at the country toward the border with Haiti, due to the arrival of tropical storm Gustav, the seventh in the current hurricane season.
- photo: EPA/Orlando Barría
Climate change-related statement:
There is some observational evidence that the intensity - although not frequency - of tropical cyclones (hurricanes, tropical storms, typhoons, cyclones) has increased in recent decades, and the number of disasters associated with tropical cyclones has also increased. It is not yet determined whether this increased cyclone intensity is caused by global warming, but under climate change scenarios, the intensity of tropical cyclones predicted as being likely to increase, with higher wind speeds, more heavy rain, and sea level rise making storm surges more severe. So, although this tropical cyclone in the Dominican Republic can not be attributed to global warming, many more people in Asia, Africa, Latin America and southern North America will face similar suffering and destruction if greenhouse gas emissions are not cut.
(NB: the word 'likely' in this context means that there is a greater than 60% certainty, according to the IPCC)
Google, Apple, Inter-IKEA Group and McDonald's would welcome more clarity and certainty about their tax liabilities in the EU, but they are concerned about the administrative compliance costs and reluctant to see tax data being made public. So said their representatives at a public hearing, held by Parliament's Special Committee on Tax Rulings II on Tuesday, to elicit their views on recent and upcoming proposed legislation on corporate tax.
MEPs were keen to hear the multinational companies' views on the proposed directive against base erosion and profit shifting (anti-BEPS), which follows an agreement struck at OECD and G20 levels. They specifically asked about the proposed requirement for country-by-country reporting of profits, taxes and subsidies and whether such information should be made public.
But the anticipated common consolidated corporate tax base (CCCTB) and company specific tax structures - such as Google's “Bermuda” structure, IKEA's “royalties” one, Apple's tax arrangements in Ireland and McDonalds' franchises – were also subject to intense debate.
www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/news-room/20160314IPR19295...
This photo is free to use under Creative Commons licenses and must be credited: "© European Union 2016 - European Parliament".
(Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives CreativeCommons licenses creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
For bigger HR files please contact: webcom-flickr(AT)europarl.europa.eu
www.castelrubello.it/cr_cas.php: There are no certain dates related to its foundation, due to its name changing throughout the time and to the lack of archive documents, before 1200; however, judging by the state of the walls as well as by its architectural elements, it can be approximately estimated that the castle dates back to the 12th century. In the "Piviere di San Fortunato" (an old version of the current land register), Carpenter (pg 6 and on) individuated, with absolute certainty, the original chore of "Villa Podii", which is nowadays a tiny, enclosed village, together with "Villa Porrani" and "Villa Canale". The same structure can also be found under the name of Castel Ribello (as Ceccarelli called it, pg. 18) as well as in the 1297 parish land register, with reference to the tithe payments (Sella, pgs 801-916).
Later on, the Castle became a possession of the Monaldeschi family, who took refuge there in 1345, before gaining the entrance to the city of Orvieto, of which they previously were the Lords (Fumi, 1884, pg. 501). The Castle remained a shelter for exiles until 1420, when the Pope Martino V allowed special privileges to the inhabitants of Castel Rubello and Porano, including the exemption from paying the " heads and acres tax, as a reward for the damages suffered under the war" (Fumi, 1884, pg. 677).
The Monaldeschi family re-gained possession of Orvieto in 1437, thanks to Gentile della Sala (Gentile Monaldeschi della Vipera) who, in agreement with Pietro Ramponi, the Civical Rector of the Patrimony, entered in in Orvieto with Ugolino da Montemarte, Ranuccio da Castel di Piero as well as other "Mercorini", slaughtering the members of the opposing faction, the "Muffati". As a result of this battle, over 60 people died and numerous houses were burnt.
Many "Muffati" managed to survive by taking shelter in Castel Rubello, whose constable had been Francesco da Bologna, since 1422, a mercenary captain belonging to the "Muffati" faction, hence at the service of the Church. For record purposes, Francesco da Bologna negotiated the Pope's betrayal with Gentile Monaldeschi della Vipera, who was, at the time, one of Francesco Sforza's emissaries (b. 1400, d. 1465, a very powerful and popular troop leader and an implacable enemy of the Papacy; amongst his various roles, he also became the Duke of Milan). In 1439, della Vipera reached Castel Rubello, with 400 foot soldiers, unaware of Francesco da Bologna's imminent betrayal; he was captured and imprisoned; 36 of his soldiers were killed in the battle. Once freed in return of his treachery, della Vipera offered his services to the Papacy, but, as a traitor, he plotted in favour of the Ghibellini, who were hostile to the Pope. In February of the following year, his plot was discovered and he first was locked up in the Assisi quarterdeck, with Francesco da Carnaiola and, subsequently, incarcerated in Perugia. He was freed with Carnaiola in June, thanks to his brother's offer of Orvieto, including Castel Rubello, to the State of the Church, in return of 2000 florins worth of compensation (www.condottieridiventura.com).
Towards the end of 1400, the castle was hard-fought by various noble families, in particular the Della Rovere and the Valenti (Tommaso di Silvestro, pgs 106 and on). In 1497, Giovanni Savelli, Lord of Rignano, Flaminio and Benano, exploited Castel Rubello as a strategical base to attack the near Castel Giorgio, home of Giorgio della Rovere, who was the Bishop of Orvieto's nephew. Assaulted by 400 foot soldiers, Castel Giorgio was conquered, destroyed and the lord of the castle was chained and dragged to Castel Rubello. Brandolino Valenti, acting on behalf of the Bishop, easily obtained the release of the prisoner, as well as the handing over of Castel Rubello, in return of a consistent ransom. The Valenti family resided in Castel Rubello from 1519 to the 18th century, after having married into the Avveduti, Lords of Porano, who had dwelled in the castle at the beginning of the 15th century (Fumi, 1888).
The Valenti family restructured the castle, by turning it into a villa. Giacomo Valenti, who was amongst the judges of the great "couple joust" of the Orvieto carnival, in 1542 (Satolli, 1986, pg 157), repaired a portion of the palace, also by assigning the making of some remarkable frescos to the popular Umbrian painter Cesare Nebbia (b. 1535, d. 1614). The culminating point was the construction of a monumental fireplace, in 1541.
His son Federico, together with his wife Lucrezia Ottieri, concluded the restoration, as from 1587, by renovating another wing of the building, which he used as his own abode, and having it decorated with frescos, which have recently been ascribed to Lombardelli (Satolli, 1987, pgs 66-68).
In the 18th century, the castle was owned first by the Salvatori family, then by the Marini, whose last heiress, Emma, married in 1892 the Marques Nicola Serafini Trinci, whose direct successors are still the proprietors of the Castle.
Unfortunately, in 1944, the allied troupes shelled two of the smallest towers, perhaps as a way to discourage attempts of sharp-shooting. Which, since then, were not rebuilt anymore.
Scientific Name: Hypomyces lactifluorum
Common Name: Lobster Mushroom
Certainty: positive (notes)
Location: Southern Appalachians; Smokies; CabinCove
Date: 20060725
The name is misleading: it is actually just (admittedly colorful) mold growing on top of some poor hapless malformed mushroom. In fact the host is so badly developed it can be impossible to identify. Fortunately this particular species of mold only grows on edible mushrooms, because it is highly-esteemed by those who esteem this sort of thing.
October 27, 2018 at 12:00pmuntil November 11, 2018 at 5:00pm at GENERATOR Projects
The exhibition, “Flesh and Finitude”, has borrowed its title from Cary Wolfe’s book, What is Posthumanism (2010). It explores the boundaries of human life and body. What is the end of the human and where does something else begin? This year’s NEoN festival’s theme is ‘Lifespans’ and our exhibition’s aim is to investigate the ‘posthuman condition’, the lifespan of ‘human’ as we know it.
Five artists were invited to provide different points of enquiry into what it means to be human in relation to other species, Nature, objects, technology, and humanity itself.
“Not all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that.” (Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (2013) p.1) Today, when artificial intelligence, 3D printed organs and genetic engineering are a reality, what it means to be human is extended and redesigned. At the same time, technological advancement also reflects on our relationship (and most importantly similarities) with the Other.
Digital and sculptural works reflect on different aspects of human and its boundaries, its uncanny symbiotic relationship with others, held together by a melancholic sense of uncertainty.
Curated by Zsofia Jakab
Artists:
Caitlin Dick (UK) – Caitlin Dick recently graduated from her Master’s in Contemporary Art from Edinburgh College of Art and previously studied a BA (Hons) in Contemporary Art Practice at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen. Caitlin’s most recent work The Problem Begins When…, shown in Embassy Gallery Edinburgh, has focussed on the fusion of the technological and the human, creating an uncomfortable hybrid through digital and kinetic sculpture.
Give in to that Easy Living expands upon this previous work, attempting to explore these matters in a playfully cynical way, experimentally introducing an object-based installation which highlights our relationship with the bizarre, posthuman form that technology has created. Mobility assistance devices, kinetic sculpture and film create a sad scene of near total technological integration. Technology has become an extension of ourselves, no longer a separate entity; we feel lost or uneasy without it. The expectation of connection to anything and anyone at any time and for it then to be reciprocated immediately is an assumed part of capitalist consumer culture. Not only do we need to be accessible 24/7, we also believe that it is essential to be constantly active as part of our techno-ego. Our technological addiction has melted into everyday life, becoming monotonously accepted as part of normality. Website
Caitlyn Main (UK) – Caitlyn Mains practice operates from a state of uncertainty: through sustained linguistic unravelling and temporal installation, she presents works that speak of intimacy, agitation and balance. She accommodates, and indeed, propagates conditions encouraging fragility: every piece has the potential to collapse in on itself, and contains obvious indications of temporality. The work is a physical manifestation of precariousness – the use of dangling, leaning, bound and suspended elements serves to underline the flimsiness of matter.
Mains compositions reverberate between a situation of familiarity and abstraction. As firm edges become dissolved, or ignored, the parameters of her work seem to become floppy, saggy, and fluid – seeping outward to be absolved into the daily mass of visual information that surrounds us. The flesh of her assemblages is that of the world – the bones and tendons extrapolated from the domestic and the detrital, from our illuminated back lit phone screens and the phrases uttered to one another. Her frantic constellations continually oscillate between contradictory states: they are simultaneously saturated and empty, humorous, pathetic, sexual, exquisite and insignificant. Website
Rodrigo Arteaga (CHILE) – Rodrigo’s work aims to redefine some notions and ideas around nature and culture, considering what sort of division can exist between them. He has used material culture that comes from science and its varied systematic methods in the form of books, maps, diagrams, furniture and tools. There is some inherent contradiction in this effort to bring together order and disorder, the useful and the useless, unearthing the coded enigmas of our relationship to the environment. He has responded to scientific culture in an attempt to embrace its limits, maybe turn it back onto itself, finding a crack, subjectivizing something meant to be objective. Website
Alicia Fidler (UK) – Alicia’s practice expands how aesthetics of an object can be used to allude to the presence of action and a premise for performance. Functionality and Agency are contexts, which she employs to transcend an object’s still state. Adopting motifs such as handles, hooks, hinges, nets, harnesses and hoops, she dips into our preexisting relationships with objects and actions. Using Function as a guide for how the body enters the work. ‘Where the handle meets the hand to produce the thing’.
The work’s interaction is the crux, the genesis. She is fascinated by the anticipation and desire for engagement with sculpture. Changing and twisting the nature of the body and the object, into a moment caught in time. She makes works, which in every sense give instructions and demand usage but are so still. Wrapped up in potentiality. Stalling the moment of activity, producing an object that screams its performative past and future out. Recently working with visual suggestion, she has begun to use photographs of past performances. Distorting them with pattern and abstraction. Absorbing images directly onto materials. Re-digesting the echoes of action, presenting a twisted instruction. Through self-referencing, function and performance my work has become anthropomorphic. The sculptures embody their own Agency through visual clues.
They play out their own situations and actions extending beyond the tools, objects and apparatus they resemble. She moves from the realms of interaction, into works that represent a single moment; Bodilyobjects. Website
Callum Johnstone (UK) Callum Johnstone’s practice explores environmental collapse and the implications it will have on humanity. Knowing that our environment is changing at an accelerated pace due to climate change, humanity must quickly adapt by re-imagining and re-designing the structures in which we live. Johnstone aims to show that it is not the physical structures alone which must change, by also the underlying structures of our society which need to be rethought.
Though his work is primarily understood as sculpture, it often verges on the boundaries of architecture and design. His structures often incorporate repeating modular elements which allow the potential for a continuation, acting simply as a beginning component to a much larger superstructure. These ideas can then extend to the actions of the individual which as a collective become a greater movement and have the potential to alter society as we know it. Johnstone sees himself not only as a commentator and illustrator of current events but also as a module of the superstructure we call society. As a catalyst of ideas, the artist intends to inspire a conversation on ways in which humanity may adapt to imminent environmental threats.
Image Credit: Kathryn Rattray Photography
Onufri was a 16th century Albanian painter best known for his Byzantine-style icons. He also painted portraits, landscapes and churches. Little is known with certainty about Onufri's life and his existence only emerged in the early 20th century, through the work of Viktoria Pusanova.
He was born in the early 16th century, not long after the anti-Ottoman wars of Skanderbeg and conquest of Albania. In the climate of the time, the painting of Christian icons can be seen as an act to restore pre-Ottoman culture. He was active in Berat until 1547. Then he worked in both Berat and Kastoria (Greece) and in 1555, in Shelcan near Elbasan. After 1554, he lived and painted in the village of Valsh. His works were signed with the title "Protopapas", demonstrating a senior position in the church hierarchy.
Onufri introduced greater realism and individuality into facial expressions, breaking with the strict conventions of the time. He was the first to introduce the color pink into icon painting. The secret of this color was not passed on and died with him. His work is noted for the intense use of colours and the use of natural dyes.
Onufri founded a school of painting in Albania, which was passed on to his son Nikolla, upon his death, and by Onouphrios Cypriotes and Konstandin Shpataraku.
Many of his paintings are stored and displayed at the Onufri Iconographic Museum in a former church in the historic Albanian town of Berat.
October 27, 2018 at 12:00pmuntil November 11, 2018 at 5:00pm at GENERATOR Projects
The exhibition, “Flesh and Finitude”, has borrowed its title from Cary Wolfe’s book, What is Posthumanism (2010). It explores the boundaries of human life and body. What is the end of the human and where does something else begin? This year’s NEoN festival’s theme is ‘Lifespans’ and our exhibition’s aim is to investigate the ‘posthuman condition’, the lifespan of ‘human’ as we know it.
Five artists were invited to provide different points of enquiry into what it means to be human in relation to other species, Nature, objects, technology, and humanity itself.
“Not all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that.” (Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (2013) p.1) Today, when artificial intelligence, 3D printed organs and genetic engineering are a reality, what it means to be human is extended and redesigned. At the same time, technological advancement also reflects on our relationship (and most importantly similarities) with the Other.
Digital and sculptural works reflect on different aspects of human and its boundaries, its uncanny symbiotic relationship with others, held together by a melancholic sense of uncertainty.
Curated by Zsofia Jakab
Artists:
Caitlin Dick (UK) – Caitlin Dick recently graduated from her Master’s in Contemporary Art from Edinburgh College of Art and previously studied a BA (Hons) in Contemporary Art Practice at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen. Caitlin’s most recent work The Problem Begins When…, shown in Embassy Gallery Edinburgh, has focussed on the fusion of the technological and the human, creating an uncomfortable hybrid through digital and kinetic sculpture.
Give in to that Easy Living expands upon this previous work, attempting to explore these matters in a playfully cynical way, experimentally introducing an object-based installation which highlights our relationship with the bizarre, posthuman form that technology has created. Mobility assistance devices, kinetic sculpture and film create a sad scene of near total technological integration. Technology has become an extension of ourselves, no longer a separate entity; we feel lost or uneasy without it. The expectation of connection to anything and anyone at any time and for it then to be reciprocated immediately is an assumed part of capitalist consumer culture. Not only do we need to be accessible 24/7, we also believe that it is essential to be constantly active as part of our techno-ego. Our technological addiction has melted into everyday life, becoming monotonously accepted as part of normality. Website
Caitlyn Main (UK) – Caitlyn Mains practice operates from a state of uncertainty: through sustained linguistic unravelling and temporal installation, she presents works that speak of intimacy, agitation and balance. She accommodates, and indeed, propagates conditions encouraging fragility: every piece has the potential to collapse in on itself, and contains obvious indications of temporality. The work is a physical manifestation of precariousness – the use of dangling, leaning, bound and suspended elements serves to underline the flimsiness of matter.
Mains compositions reverberate between a situation of familiarity and abstraction. As firm edges become dissolved, or ignored, the parameters of her work seem to become floppy, saggy, and fluid – seeping outward to be absolved into the daily mass of visual information that surrounds us. The flesh of her assemblages is that of the world – the bones and tendons extrapolated from the domestic and the detrital, from our illuminated back lit phone screens and the phrases uttered to one another. Her frantic constellations continually oscillate between contradictory states: they are simultaneously saturated and empty, humorous, pathetic, sexual, exquisite and insignificant. Website
Rodrigo Arteaga (CHILE) – Rodrigo’s work aims to redefine some notions and ideas around nature and culture, considering what sort of division can exist between them. He has used material culture that comes from science and its varied systematic methods in the form of books, maps, diagrams, furniture and tools. There is some inherent contradiction in this effort to bring together order and disorder, the useful and the useless, unearthing the coded enigmas of our relationship to the environment. He has responded to scientific culture in an attempt to embrace its limits, maybe turn it back onto itself, finding a crack, subjectivizing something meant to be objective. Website
Alicia Fidler (UK) – Alicia’s practice expands how aesthetics of an object can be used to allude to the presence of action and a premise for performance. Functionality and Agency are contexts, which she employs to transcend an object’s still state. Adopting motifs such as handles, hooks, hinges, nets, harnesses and hoops, she dips into our preexisting relationships with objects and actions. Using Function as a guide for how the body enters the work. ‘Where the handle meets the hand to produce the thing’.
The work’s interaction is the crux, the genesis. She is fascinated by the anticipation and desire for engagement with sculpture. Changing and twisting the nature of the body and the object, into a moment caught in time. She makes works, which in every sense give instructions and demand usage but are so still. Wrapped up in potentiality. Stalling the moment of activity, producing an object that screams its performative past and future out. Recently working with visual suggestion, she has begun to use photographs of past performances. Distorting them with pattern and abstraction. Absorbing images directly onto materials. Re-digesting the echoes of action, presenting a twisted instruction. Through self-referencing, function and performance my work has become anthropomorphic. The sculptures embody their own Agency through visual clues.
They play out their own situations and actions extending beyond the tools, objects and apparatus they resemble. She moves from the realms of interaction, into works that represent a single moment; Bodilyobjects. Website
Callum Johnstone (UK) Callum Johnstone’s practice explores environmental collapse and the implications it will have on humanity. Knowing that our environment is changing at an accelerated pace due to climate change, humanity must quickly adapt by re-imagining and re-designing the structures in which we live. Johnstone aims to show that it is not the physical structures alone which must change, by also the underlying structures of our society which need to be rethought.
Though his work is primarily understood as sculpture, it often verges on the boundaries of architecture and design. His structures often incorporate repeating modular elements which allow the potential for a continuation, acting simply as a beginning component to a much larger superstructure. These ideas can then extend to the actions of the individual which as a collective become a greater movement and have the potential to alter society as we know it. Johnstone sees himself not only as a commentator and illustrator of current events but also as a module of the superstructure we call society. As a catalyst of ideas, the artist intends to inspire a conversation on ways in which humanity may adapt to imminent environmental threats.
Image Credit: Kathryn Rattray Photography
October 27, 2018 at 12:00pmuntil November 11, 2018 at 5:00pm at GENERATOR Projects
The exhibition, “Flesh and Finitude”, has borrowed its title from Cary Wolfe’s book, What is Posthumanism (2010). It explores the boundaries of human life and body. What is the end of the human and where does something else begin? This year’s NEoN festival’s theme is ‘Lifespans’ and our exhibition’s aim is to investigate the ‘posthuman condition’, the lifespan of ‘human’ as we know it.
Five artists were invited to provide different points of enquiry into what it means to be human in relation to other species, Nature, objects, technology, and humanity itself.
“Not all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that.” (Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (2013) p.1) Today, when artificial intelligence, 3D printed organs and genetic engineering are a reality, what it means to be human is extended and redesigned. At the same time, technological advancement also reflects on our relationship (and most importantly similarities) with the Other.
Digital and sculptural works reflect on different aspects of human and its boundaries, its uncanny symbiotic relationship with others, held together by a melancholic sense of uncertainty.
Curated by Zsofia Jakab
Artists:
Caitlin Dick (UK) – Caitlin Dick recently graduated from her Master’s in Contemporary Art from Edinburgh College of Art and previously studied a BA (Hons) in Contemporary Art Practice at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen. Caitlin’s most recent work The Problem Begins When…, shown in Embassy Gallery Edinburgh, has focussed on the fusion of the technological and the human, creating an uncomfortable hybrid through digital and kinetic sculpture.
Give in to that Easy Living expands upon this previous work, attempting to explore these matters in a playfully cynical way, experimentally introducing an object-based installation which highlights our relationship with the bizarre, posthuman form that technology has created. Mobility assistance devices, kinetic sculpture and film create a sad scene of near total technological integration. Technology has become an extension of ourselves, no longer a separate entity; we feel lost or uneasy without it. The expectation of connection to anything and anyone at any time and for it then to be reciprocated immediately is an assumed part of capitalist consumer culture. Not only do we need to be accessible 24/7, we also believe that it is essential to be constantly active as part of our techno-ego. Our technological addiction has melted into everyday life, becoming monotonously accepted as part of normality. Website
Caitlyn Main (UK) – Caitlyn Mains practice operates from a state of uncertainty: through sustained linguistic unravelling and temporal installation, she presents works that speak of intimacy, agitation and balance. She accommodates, and indeed, propagates conditions encouraging fragility: every piece has the potential to collapse in on itself, and contains obvious indications of temporality. The work is a physical manifestation of precariousness – the use of dangling, leaning, bound and suspended elements serves to underline the flimsiness of matter.
Mains compositions reverberate between a situation of familiarity and abstraction. As firm edges become dissolved, or ignored, the parameters of her work seem to become floppy, saggy, and fluid – seeping outward to be absolved into the daily mass of visual information that surrounds us. The flesh of her assemblages is that of the world – the bones and tendons extrapolated from the domestic and the detrital, from our illuminated back lit phone screens and the phrases uttered to one another. Her frantic constellations continually oscillate between contradictory states: they are simultaneously saturated and empty, humorous, pathetic, sexual, exquisite and insignificant. Website
Rodrigo Arteaga (CHILE) – Rodrigo’s work aims to redefine some notions and ideas around nature and culture, considering what sort of division can exist between them. He has used material culture that comes from science and its varied systematic methods in the form of books, maps, diagrams, furniture and tools. There is some inherent contradiction in this effort to bring together order and disorder, the useful and the useless, unearthing the coded enigmas of our relationship to the environment. He has responded to scientific culture in an attempt to embrace its limits, maybe turn it back onto itself, finding a crack, subjectivizing something meant to be objective. Website
Alicia Fidler (UK) – Alicia’s practice expands how aesthetics of an object can be used to allude to the presence of action and a premise for performance. Functionality and Agency are contexts, which she employs to transcend an object’s still state. Adopting motifs such as handles, hooks, hinges, nets, harnesses and hoops, she dips into our preexisting relationships with objects and actions. Using Function as a guide for how the body enters the work. ‘Where the handle meets the hand to produce the thing’.
The work’s interaction is the crux, the genesis. She is fascinated by the anticipation and desire for engagement with sculpture. Changing and twisting the nature of the body and the object, into a moment caught in time. She makes works, which in every sense give instructions and demand usage but are so still. Wrapped up in potentiality. Stalling the moment of activity, producing an object that screams its performative past and future out. Recently working with visual suggestion, she has begun to use photographs of past performances. Distorting them with pattern and abstraction. Absorbing images directly onto materials. Re-digesting the echoes of action, presenting a twisted instruction. Through self-referencing, function and performance my work has become anthropomorphic. The sculptures embody their own Agency through visual clues.
They play out their own situations and actions extending beyond the tools, objects and apparatus they resemble. She moves from the realms of interaction, into works that represent a single moment; Bodilyobjects. Website
Callum Johnstone (UK) Callum Johnstone’s practice explores environmental collapse and the implications it will have on humanity. Knowing that our environment is changing at an accelerated pace due to climate change, humanity must quickly adapt by re-imagining and re-designing the structures in which we live. Johnstone aims to show that it is not the physical structures alone which must change, by also the underlying structures of our society which need to be rethought.
Though his work is primarily understood as sculpture, it often verges on the boundaries of architecture and design. His structures often incorporate repeating modular elements which allow the potential for a continuation, acting simply as a beginning component to a much larger superstructure. These ideas can then extend to the actions of the individual which as a collective become a greater movement and have the potential to alter society as we know it. Johnstone sees himself not only as a commentator and illustrator of current events but also as a module of the superstructure we call society. As a catalyst of ideas, the artist intends to inspire a conversation on ways in which humanity may adapt to imminent environmental threats.
Image Credit: Kathryn Rattray Photography
Scientific Name: Tremella foliacea
Common Name: unknown
Certainty: positive (notes)
Location: Appalachians; Smokies; CabinCove
Date: 20071129
L.M. Sacasas
Technology, Culture, and Ethics
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The Interrupted Self
APRIL 21, 2018 ~ MICHAEL SACASAS
In Letters From Lake Como: Explorations in Technology and the Human Race, written in the 1920’s, Romano Guardini, related the following experience: “I recall going down a staircase, and suddenly, when my foot was leaving one step and preparing to set itself down on another, I became aware of what I was doing. I then noted what self-evident certainty is displayed in the play of muscles. I felt that a question was thus raised concerning motion.”
“This was a triviality,” Guardini acknowledges, “and yet it tells us what the issue is here.” He goes on to explain the “issue” as follows:
Life needs the protection of nonawareness. We are told this already by the universal psychological law that we cannot perform an intellectual act and at the same time be aware of it. We can only look back on it when it is completed. If we try to achieve awareness of it when we are doing it, we can do so only be always interrupting it and thus hovering between the action and knowledge of it. Obviously the action will suffer greatly as a result. It seems to me that this typifies the life of the mind and spirit as a whole. Our action is constantly interrupted by reflection on it. Thus all our life bears the distinctive character of what is interrupted, broken. It does not have the great line that is sure of itself, the confident movement deriving from the self.
It seems to me that the tendency Guardini identifies here has only intensified during the nearly 100 years since he wrote down his observations.
As an aside, I find works like Guardini’s useful for at least two reasons. The first, perhaps more obvious, reason is that they offer genuine insights that remain applicable in a more or less straightforward way. The second, perhaps less obvious, reason is that they offer a small window into the personal and cultural experience of technological change. When we think about the difference technologies make in our life and for society more broadly, we often have only our experience by which to judge. But, of course, we don’t know what we don’t know, or we can’t remember what we have never known. And this is especially the case when we consider what me might call the existential or even affective aspects of technological change.
Returning to Guardini, has he notes in the letter on “Consciousness” from which that paragraph was taken, literature was only one sphere of culture where this heightened consciousness was making itself evident.
I can’t know what literary works Guardini had in mind, but there is one scene in Tolstoy’s short novel, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), that immediately sprung to mind. Early on in the story, which begins with Ilyich’s death, a co-worker, Peter Ivanovich, has come to Ilyich’s home to pay his respects. Upon entering the room where Ilyich’s body lay, Peter Ivanovich is uncertain as to how to proceed:
Peter Ivanovich, like everyone else on such occasions, entered feeling uncertain what he would have to do. All he knew was that at such times it is always safe to cross oneself. But he was not quite sure whether one should make obeisances while doing so. He therefore adopted a middle course. On entering the room he began crossing himself and made a slight movement resembling a bow.
I’ve come to read this scene as a microcosm of an extended, possibly recurring, cultural moment in the history of modernity, one that illustrates the emergence of self-consciousness.
Here is Peter Ivanovich, entering into a socially and psychologically fraught encounter with the presence of death. It is the sort of moment for which a robust cultural tradition might prepare us by supplying scripts that would relieve us of the burden of knowing just what to do while also conveying to us a meaning that renders the event intelligible. But Peter Ivanovich faces this encounter at a moment when the old traditions are only half-recalled and no new forms have arisen to take there place. He lives, that is, in a moment when, as Gramsci evocatively put it, the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In such a moment, he is thrown back upon himself: he must make choices, he must improvise, he must become aware of himself as one who must do such things.
His action, as Guardini puts it, “bears the distinctive character of what is interrupted.”
“Peter Ivanovich,” we go on to read, “continued to make the sign of the cross slightly inclining his head in an intermediate direction between the coffin, the Reader, and the icons on the table in a corner of the room. Afterwards, when it seemed to him that this movement of his arm in crossing himself had gone on too long, he stopped and began to look at the corpse.”
He is not inhabiting a ritual act, he is performing it and badly, as all such performances must be. “He felt a certain discomfort,” the narrator tells us, “and so he hurriedly crossed himself once more and turned and went out of the door — too hurriedly and too regardless of propriety, as he himself was aware.”
I’m not suggesting that Tolstoy intended this scene as a commentary on the heightened consciousness generated by liquid modernity, only that I have found in Peter Ivanovich’s awkwardness a memorable dramatic illustration of such.
Technology had a role to play in the generation of this state of affairs, particularly technologies of self-expression or technologies that represent the self to itself. It was one of Walter Ong’s key contentions, for example, that “writing heightened consciousness.” This was, in his view, a generally good thing. Of course, writing had been around long before Tolstoy was active in the late 19th century. He lived during an age when new technologies worked more indirectly to heighten self-consciousness by eroding the social structures that anchored the experience of the self.
In the early 20th century, Guardini pointed to, among other things, the rise of statistics and the bureaucracies that they empowered and to newspapers as the sources of a hypertrophied consciousness. We might substitute so-called Big Data and social media for statistics and newspapers. Rather, with regards to consciousness, we should understand the interlocking regimes of the quantified self* and social media as just a further development along the same trajectory. Fitbits and Facebook amplify our consciousness by what they claim to measure and by how they position the self vis-a-vis the self.
It seems to me that this heightened sense of self-consciousness is both a blessing and a curse and that it is the condition out of which much of our digital culture emerges. For those who experience it as a curse it can be, for example, a paralyzing and disintegrating reality. It may, under such circumstances further yield resentment, bitterness, and self-loathing (consider Raskolnikov or the Underground Man). Those who are thus afflicted may seek for renewed integrity through dramatic and/or violent acts, acts that they believe will galvanize their identity. Others may cope by adopting the role of happy nihilist or liberal ironist. Still others may double-down and launch out on the self-defeating quest for authenticity.
“Plants can grow only when their roots are in the dark,” Guardini wrote as he closed his letter on consciousness. “They emerge from the dark into the light. That is the direction of life. The plant and its direction die when the root is exposed. All life must be grounded in what is not conscious and from that root emerge into the brightness of consciousness. Yet I see consciousness becoming more and more deeply the root of our life.”
All of this leads him to ask in conclusion, “Can life sustain this? Can it become consciousness and at the same time remain alive?”
_________________________________________________
* For example: “Now the telescope is turned inward, on the human body in the urban environment. This terrestrial cosmos of data will merge investigations that have been siloed: neuroscience, psychology, sociology, biology, biochemistry, nutrition, epidemiology, economics, data science, urban science.”
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7 thoughts on “The Interrupted Self”
davidjsimpson1952
APRIL 21, 2018 AT 12:20 PM
I actually disagree quite strongly with this analysis. Peter Ivanovich’s problem, which I think Tolstoy is describing quite clearly, is that he is a shallow social conformist (as indeed is Ivan Ilyich until his death), a ‘modern man’, who has simply forgotten, or not learned how to behave in the traditional way, but does not have the autonomy or courage to decide for himself how to behave, in any situation. So he is all at sea. Ivan Illyich on the other hand is perfectly happy to conform, and knows how to do so, and lives an utterly false, shallow, meaningless, but ‘successful’ life, albeit unhappy at a deeper level, until his death agony and spiritual liberation / resurrection (unobserved by anyone, who simply see him dying in apparent agony).
Guardini is typical of a self-conscious individual (and perhaps of many modern people, especially intellectuals) – yes, you cannot think your way down stairs, you have to physically do it, and your intellect is simply an impediment – but an accomplished sportsman is absolutely aware and conscious of what he/she is doing, they are just not doing it with their mind – they have trained and practiced their whole being – mind, body and spirit (for lack of a better term) to do a particular thing well – they are and must be undistracted, particularly by their own mind not being completely engaged in the action itself, in the present moment and nowhere else. Especially not for example thinking about what they will do to win the match, or regretting or dwelling on a previous mistake. ‘keeping your eye on the ball’ is a shorthand for being 100% engaged with the current action (not looking where you hope to hit it, or watching someone in the crowd, or admiring the skill with which your playing the shot).
There is a certain type of intellectual activity, where it is possible to both think, and be aware of what and how you are thinking – the opposite of daydreaming or fantasy. But most modern people, apart from the really happy, effective ones, are living in an almost constant state of distraction, of a lack of proper attention to what they are actually trying to do. And that is undoubtedly in part one of the more pernicious effects of modern information technology. It is designed to distract.
Reply
Michael Sacasas
APRIL 22, 2018 AT 9:00 PM
I’m not sure that I disagree with your disagreement. On the one hand, I’m not wedded to my interpretation as anything like a definitive take on what Tolstoy intended. It is more the case that Ivanovich’s interrupted, self-conscious action struck me as an image of the condition I’m trying to get at. Your reading of Ivanovich, and the general drift of the knowledge, is, as far as I’m concerned, basically correct. That said, what if we were to ask why exactly Ivanovich behaves the way he does, or, alternatively, what the sources of his shallowness may be? I wonder if the significance I’ve imported onto this scene is necessarily at odds with what your suggesting.
I also agree very much with your discussion of an embodied form of attentiveness that is characteristic of the accomplished sportsman or musician or dancer, etc. But that form of attention is, as you suggest, very different than the sort of attention to the self that I think Guardini is analyzing. Some years back, in fact, I wrote about embodied practices as an antidote to the hyper-self-consciousness that characterizes many in our time, myself not excepted: thefrailestthing.com/2012/10/05/low-tech-practices-and-id... See also: iasc-culture.org/THR/channels/Infernal_Machine/2015/04/79...
So, I’d say that, yes, distraction is clearly a problem, and modern information technology is part of the problem (addiction by design, etc.), but I’d also say that it heightens a certain kind of attention or, to put it another way, directs the attention toward the self in a way that aligns with the kind of disordered consciousness that Guardini writes about.
Reply
julian a
APRIL 21, 2018 AT 9:08 PM
I agree with @davidjsimpson1952. The cultivation of mindful awareness in Buddhism is precisely the sort of simultaneity of conscious awareness and action that it seems Guardini considered exceptional, if not impossible.
Reply
Michael Sacasas
APRIL 22, 2018 AT 9:03 PM
Thanks for the comment, Julian. See my reply above to David. The sort of awareness you describe is, I believe, of a different sort than the consciousness Guardini finds problematic, in part, I suspect, because it is not, strictly speaking, mental, or at least not merely mental.
Reply
Daniel David
APRIL 22, 2018 AT 1:19 AM
Excellent…this topic (the intensifying self-consciousness of modern humans) has preoccupied me for a few years now, and I think it’s under discussed. Your mention of irony reminded me; I frequently have the thought that the rise of the ironic attitude is tied to the need to remain ever more socially flexible. The ironic mode is an effective way to remain uncommitted to either seriousness or flippancy. It allows our remaining to remain loosely defined, like a legal contract, until the concrete details of the situation become clear enough to settle on a firmer stance.
I haven’t read a ton of sociology from the early-to-mid-twentieth century, so if you know of other sources on this I’d be interested. Some few thinkers I am aware of seemed to notice this growing self consciousness, though: I feel it lurking throughout Erving Goffman’s work, particularly when he mentions things like the “bureaucratization of the spirit,” which we all undergo “so that we can be relied upon to give a perfectly homogenous performance at ever appointed time.” Surely this new self consciousness is partially a product of a new and more intense social consciousness, born of new pressures and the feedback of new forms of representation.
Georg Simmel seems to have been convinced it was tied to the rise of the modern city. In his essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” he writes “The psychological foundation, upon which the metropolitan individuality is erected, is the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli.” And prior to that, he asserts that, of the more famous responses to modernity (Nietzschean, socialist), “the same fundamental motive was at work,
namely the resistance of the individual to being levelled, swallowed up in the social- technological mechanism.”
I’m also reminded me of a talk by Alasdair McIntyre called “A Culture of Choices and Compartmentalization,” but I haven’t read it recently enough to say more than that.
Part of the difficulty here is that even realizing the burdens of an over-abundance of self consciousness does little to cope with them; in fact, it’s much the opposite. But what I think is clear from Simmel and Goffman especially (and we’ve come some way since then, haven’t we?) is that this reserve and hyper-attentive presentation has become a fixture of social life – a necessity. Where humans once gathered resources, we now focus much more on collecting attitudes and cultural snippets as a kind of social currency. And, if that’s correct, it implies that communication is a lot more work than it used to be.
Reply
Michael Sacasas
APRIL 22, 2018 AT 9:23 PM
As it has been for you, so, too, has this been an area of interest for me for some time. I do tend to think it is a crucial aspect of the modern (post-, meta-, etc.) identity. Really, it is at the heart of all of our identity-talk, which is somehow both cause and symptom of the condition. I tend to see it as the product of the formative impact of increasingly sophisticated technologies of the self and the untethering of the self that is characteristic of modernity (the physic consequences of everything melting into air). I think it may have been you who noted in a comment (to which I never replied, my apologies if so) a certain resemblance to communitarian thought in some of what I’ve written. That would be a fair assessment. My thinking on this bears a similar stamp. Along those lines, I’ll have to look up the piece by MacIntyre, I don’t think I’ve come across it before. Several years ago, Thomas de Zengotita’s Mediated covered much of this ground in a useful way.
I used Adobe Lightroom to enhance this photo so you could see a closer version of what I actually saw while looking for the Orionid meteors. My camera does a very good job, but it needs help making some things look the way they looked through my eyes, especially at night. You can see part of the Milky Way extending from the upper-left of the image to the center. Jupiter makes an appearance at the bottom, and the Pleiades cluster is a little above it to the right.
* location not known with certainty. This photo was taken circa 1000 BC using an underwater camera and time machine. It recently resurfaced on ebay where an
Monestir Cistercenc de Santes Creus ( Cataluna )
El claustre posterior
_________________________________________________
Since we do nothing in this confused world
That lasts or that, lasting, is of any worth,
And even what’s useful for us we lose
So soon, with our own lives,
Let us prefer the pleasure of the moment
To an absurd concern with the future,
Whose only certainty is the harm we suffer now
To pay for its prosperity.
Tomorrow doesn’t exist. This moment
Alone is mine, and I am only who
Exists in this instant, which might be the last
Of the self I pretend to be.
© 1993, Ricardo Reis (Fernando Pessoa)
From: Poesia
Publisher: Assírio & Alvim, Lisbon, 2000
ISBN: 972-37-0612-1
© Translation: 2006, Richard Zenith
From: A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems
Publisher: Penguin, New York, 2006
ISBN: 0-14-303955-5
_________________________________________
Pois que nada que dure, ou que, durando,
Valha, neste confuso mundo obramos,
E o mesmo útil para nós perdemos
Connosco, cedo, cedo,
O prazer do momento anteponhamos
À absurda cura do futuro, cuja
Certeza única é o mal presente
Com que o seu bem compramos.
Amanhã não existe. Meu somente
É o momento, eu só quem existe
Neste instante, que pode o derradeiro
Ser de quem finjo ser
© 1993, Ricardo Reis (Fernando Pessoa)
From: Poesia
Publisher: Assírio & Alvim, Lisbon, 2000
ISBN: 972-37-0612-1
El claustre posterior
El claustre posterior, de planta rectangular, està compost també per arcs, però aquests són de transició, i daten del segle XVII. A l'ala sud, hi trobem la cuina, el refetor del segle XVII i el Palau Reial, manat construir per Pere el Gran l'any 1280, tot i que més endavant aquest seria el palau de l'abat.
Claustro antiguo
El monasterio contaba desde su origen con un sencillo claustro románico levantado hacia finales del siglo XII y principios del XIII. A instancias del rey Jaime II y con su patrocinio, el abad Pedro Alegre acomete en 1313 la demolición del claustro antiguo y la construcción del actual, todo ello sin alterar las dependencias que ya existían en el entorno claustral, desde la propia iglesia hasta la sala capitular y demás estancias monacales. Lo único que se conserva del claustro primitivo es el templete que alberga la pila-lavadero en la que los monjes se lavaban las manos tras las tareas agrícolas, antes de pasar al refectorio o dedicarse a los rezos. Se trata de una construcción de planta hexagonal, cada uno de cuyos lados está formado por dos arcos de medio punto sobre columnas de doble fuste. Se suprimió la columna central del lado por el que se anexa al claustro para dar mayor amplitud al acceso. La cubierta es de crucería a base de porciones de bóveda apuntada.
Santes Creus is a Cistercian monastery in Catalunya, Spain. It was started in 1158 and is today considered one of the finest preserved monastic sites in Southern Europe.
[edit] History
The monastery was started in 1158 and was finished within 50 years. In its early period, the monastery was a center of intellectual and political activity and was comparable to the Poblet Monastery. Fortified in 1375 by Pedro IV, it played an important role in the creation of the Order of Montesa, a refuge for Aragonese Knights Templar after the abolition of their order.
The activities of the monastery continued largely uninterrupted until the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, which led to its eventual demise in 1835 at which time the monastery was sacked and burned. Shortly thereafter, several ex-monks erected it as a parish Church and worked slowly toward its restoration. It is today in the hands of the Generalitat de Catalunya.
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Outlining a Theory of General Creativity . .
. . on a 'Pataphysical projectory
Entropy ≥ Memory ● Creativity ²
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Study of the day: (debating the Plato's allegory of the cavern)
thε allεgory oƒ Camεra▲Obscura . .
Once upon a time there was two small dark boxes, illuminated with certainties, two small empty heads, full of hope, and whose sensitive soul was waiting until the external light penetrates them to dazzle them with an image of the "True Reality”. At the proper time, they finally opened.
Camera in pursuit of the Absolute, wanted all to see without any reflection. All, absolutely All ! Then, at the proper time, it decided to be totally overcome by the "True Entropic Reality", all its sensitivity offered to intensely feel everything, without any prejudice, without thinking one second with all these words which darkens the mind more than they enlighten it. It installed a hypersensitive film which it will push in spite of its coarse grain. It tuned her diaphragm to the maximum aperture, a long time, and gave up itself to ecstatically feel the whole true light of the whole True Entropic Reality.
Obscura in quest of the Universal Knowledge, wanted all to know precisely, it wanted all to understand and memorize with a maximum of details and discernment. Then at the proper time, it decided to focuse a depth of field as deep as possible, to choose a pause time as short as possible, to be sure to get the highest neatness of the True Real Universal Memory. It installed a hyperfine grain film which it will develop energetically to compensate its low sensitivity. It tuned the aperture at less than anything, and adjusted the pause time at an infinitesimal fraction of nothing.
The moral of the story ? All the photographers will say it to you !
Camera obtained the most luminous image which is at ounce the fuzziest one, an immaculate uniform Absolute Entropic white 100%blank.
Obscura obtained the finest image which is at ounce the darkest one, an immaculate uniform Universal black 100%blank.
From now on, when it chooses an aperture and a time of pause suitable to create less blind images, Camera finally formed in it several suspicions of True Reality. They are images as poor of Absolute Sensitivity as weak of Universal Knowledge, but they are marvellous and magic images, illuminated by unexpected shapes and colors.
In the neighbourhood of the Absolute Entropy, each cell of Camera opens like a white sapphire prism dispersing and breaking up the Entropic light in colored iridescences. From her cells juxtaposition are emerging lines and shapes, metamorphosing the dazzling Entropic light in simple but unknowable .. shapes, only lacking some .. words to name them.
From now on, when it chooses an aperture and a time of pause suitable to create less blind images, Obscura finally formed in it several suspicions of True Reality. They are images as poor of Universal Knowledge as weak of Absolute Sensitivity, but they are marvellous and magic images, rich of ambiguous signs and senses.
In the neighbourhood of the Universal Memory, each cell of Obscura opens like a black sapphire crystal dispersing and breaking up the universal darkness in colored enlightening sparks. From her cells juxtapositions are emerging now vowels, consonants and others signs, metamorphosing the gloomy universal darkness in simple but unknowable .. words, only lacking some .. shapes to imagine them.
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| . rectO-persO . | . E ≥ m.C² . | . co~errAnce . | . TiLt . |
October 27, 2018 at 12:00pmuntil November 11, 2018 at 5:00pm at GENERATOR Projects
The exhibition, “Flesh and Finitude”, has borrowed its title from Cary Wolfe’s book, What is Posthumanism (2010). It explores the boundaries of human life and body. What is the end of the human and where does something else begin? This year’s NEoN festival’s theme is ‘Lifespans’ and our exhibition’s aim is to investigate the ‘posthuman condition’, the lifespan of ‘human’ as we know it.
Five artists were invited to provide different points of enquiry into what it means to be human in relation to other species, Nature, objects, technology, and humanity itself.
“Not all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that.” (Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (2013) p.1) Today, when artificial intelligence, 3D printed organs and genetic engineering are a reality, what it means to be human is extended and redesigned. At the same time, technological advancement also reflects on our relationship (and most importantly similarities) with the Other.
Digital and sculptural works reflect on different aspects of human and its boundaries, its uncanny symbiotic relationship with others, held together by a melancholic sense of uncertainty.
Curated by Zsofia Jakab
Artists:
Caitlin Dick (UK) – Caitlin Dick recently graduated from her Master’s in Contemporary Art from Edinburgh College of Art and previously studied a BA (Hons) in Contemporary Art Practice at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen. Caitlin’s most recent work The Problem Begins When…, shown in Embassy Gallery Edinburgh, has focussed on the fusion of the technological and the human, creating an uncomfortable hybrid through digital and kinetic sculpture.
Give in to that Easy Living expands upon this previous work, attempting to explore these matters in a playfully cynical way, experimentally introducing an object-based installation which highlights our relationship with the bizarre, posthuman form that technology has created. Mobility assistance devices, kinetic sculpture and film create a sad scene of near total technological integration. Technology has become an extension of ourselves, no longer a separate entity; we feel lost or uneasy without it. The expectation of connection to anything and anyone at any time and for it then to be reciprocated immediately is an assumed part of capitalist consumer culture. Not only do we need to be accessible 24/7, we also believe that it is essential to be constantly active as part of our techno-ego. Our technological addiction has melted into everyday life, becoming monotonously accepted as part of normality. Website
Caitlyn Main (UK) – Caitlyn Mains practice operates from a state of uncertainty: through sustained linguistic unravelling and temporal installation, she presents works that speak of intimacy, agitation and balance. She accommodates, and indeed, propagates conditions encouraging fragility: every piece has the potential to collapse in on itself, and contains obvious indications of temporality. The work is a physical manifestation of precariousness – the use of dangling, leaning, bound and suspended elements serves to underline the flimsiness of matter.
Mains compositions reverberate between a situation of familiarity and abstraction. As firm edges become dissolved, or ignored, the parameters of her work seem to become floppy, saggy, and fluid – seeping outward to be absolved into the daily mass of visual information that surrounds us. The flesh of her assemblages is that of the world – the bones and tendons extrapolated from the domestic and the detrital, from our illuminated back lit phone screens and the phrases uttered to one another. Her frantic constellations continually oscillate between contradictory states: they are simultaneously saturated and empty, humorous, pathetic, sexual, exquisite and insignificant. Website
Rodrigo Arteaga (CHILE) – Rodrigo’s work aims to redefine some notions and ideas around nature and culture, considering what sort of division can exist between them. He has used material culture that comes from science and its varied systematic methods in the form of books, maps, diagrams, furniture and tools. There is some inherent contradiction in this effort to bring together order and disorder, the useful and the useless, unearthing the coded enigmas of our relationship to the environment. He has responded to scientific culture in an attempt to embrace its limits, maybe turn it back onto itself, finding a crack, subjectivizing something meant to be objective. Website
Alicia Fidler (UK) – Alicia’s practice expands how aesthetics of an object can be used to allude to the presence of action and a premise for performance. Functionality and Agency are contexts, which she employs to transcend an object’s still state. Adopting motifs such as handles, hooks, hinges, nets, harnesses and hoops, she dips into our preexisting relationships with objects and actions. Using Function as a guide for how the body enters the work. ‘Where the handle meets the hand to produce the thing’.
The work’s interaction is the crux, the genesis. She is fascinated by the anticipation and desire for engagement with sculpture. Changing and twisting the nature of the body and the object, into a moment caught in time. She makes works, which in every sense give instructions and demand usage but are so still. Wrapped up in potentiality. Stalling the moment of activity, producing an object that screams its performative past and future out. Recently working with visual suggestion, she has begun to use photographs of past performances. Distorting them with pattern and abstraction. Absorbing images directly onto materials. Re-digesting the echoes of action, presenting a twisted instruction. Through self-referencing, function and performance my work has become anthropomorphic. The sculptures embody their own Agency through visual clues.
They play out their own situations and actions extending beyond the tools, objects and apparatus they resemble. She moves from the realms of interaction, into works that represent a single moment; Bodilyobjects. Website
Callum Johnstone (UK) Callum Johnstone’s practice explores environmental collapse and the implications it will have on humanity. Knowing that our environment is changing at an accelerated pace due to climate change, humanity must quickly adapt by re-imagining and re-designing the structures in which we live. Johnstone aims to show that it is not the physical structures alone which must change, by also the underlying structures of our society which need to be rethought.
Though his work is primarily understood as sculpture, it often verges on the boundaries of architecture and design. His structures often incorporate repeating modular elements which allow the potential for a continuation, acting simply as a beginning component to a much larger superstructure. These ideas can then extend to the actions of the individual which as a collective become a greater movement and have the potential to alter society as we know it. Johnstone sees himself not only as a commentator and illustrator of current events but also as a module of the superstructure we call society. As a catalyst of ideas, the artist intends to inspire a conversation on ways in which humanity may adapt to imminent environmental threats.
Image Credit: Kathryn Rattray Photography
October 27, 2018 at 12:00pmuntil November 11, 2018 at 5:00pm at GENERATOR Projects
The exhibition, “Flesh and Finitude”, has borrowed its title from Cary Wolfe’s book, What is Posthumanism (2010). It explores the boundaries of human life and body. What is the end of the human and where does something else begin? This year’s NEoN festival’s theme is ‘Lifespans’ and our exhibition’s aim is to investigate the ‘posthuman condition’, the lifespan of ‘human’ as we know it.
Five artists were invited to provide different points of enquiry into what it means to be human in relation to other species, Nature, objects, technology, and humanity itself.
“Not all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that.” (Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (2013) p.1) Today, when artificial intelligence, 3D printed organs and genetic engineering are a reality, what it means to be human is extended and redesigned. At the same time, technological advancement also reflects on our relationship (and most importantly similarities) with the Other.
Digital and sculptural works reflect on different aspects of human and its boundaries, its uncanny symbiotic relationship with others, held together by a melancholic sense of uncertainty.
Curated by Zsofia Jakab
Artists:
Caitlin Dick (UK) – Caitlin Dick recently graduated from her Master’s in Contemporary Art from Edinburgh College of Art and previously studied a BA (Hons) in Contemporary Art Practice at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen. Caitlin’s most recent work The Problem Begins When…, shown in Embassy Gallery Edinburgh, has focussed on the fusion of the technological and the human, creating an uncomfortable hybrid through digital and kinetic sculpture.
Give in to that Easy Living expands upon this previous work, attempting to explore these matters in a playfully cynical way, experimentally introducing an object-based installation which highlights our relationship with the bizarre, posthuman form that technology has created. Mobility assistance devices, kinetic sculpture and film create a sad scene of near total technological integration. Technology has become an extension of ourselves, no longer a separate entity; we feel lost or uneasy without it. The expectation of connection to anything and anyone at any time and for it then to be reciprocated immediately is an assumed part of capitalist consumer culture. Not only do we need to be accessible 24/7, we also believe that it is essential to be constantly active as part of our techno-ego. Our technological addiction has melted into everyday life, becoming monotonously accepted as part of normality. Website
Caitlyn Main (UK) – Caitlyn Mains practice operates from a state of uncertainty: through sustained linguistic unravelling and temporal installation, she presents works that speak of intimacy, agitation and balance. She accommodates, and indeed, propagates conditions encouraging fragility: every piece has the potential to collapse in on itself, and contains obvious indications of temporality. The work is a physical manifestation of precariousness – the use of dangling, leaning, bound and suspended elements serves to underline the flimsiness of matter.
Mains compositions reverberate between a situation of familiarity and abstraction. As firm edges become dissolved, or ignored, the parameters of her work seem to become floppy, saggy, and fluid – seeping outward to be absolved into the daily mass of visual information that surrounds us. The flesh of her assemblages is that of the world – the bones and tendons extrapolated from the domestic and the detrital, from our illuminated back lit phone screens and the phrases uttered to one another. Her frantic constellations continually oscillate between contradictory states: they are simultaneously saturated and empty, humorous, pathetic, sexual, exquisite and insignificant. Website
Rodrigo Arteaga (CHILE) – Rodrigo’s work aims to redefine some notions and ideas around nature and culture, considering what sort of division can exist between them. He has used material culture that comes from science and its varied systematic methods in the form of books, maps, diagrams, furniture and tools. There is some inherent contradiction in this effort to bring together order and disorder, the useful and the useless, unearthing the coded enigmas of our relationship to the environment. He has responded to scientific culture in an attempt to embrace its limits, maybe turn it back onto itself, finding a crack, subjectivizing something meant to be objective. Website
Alicia Fidler (UK) – Alicia’s practice expands how aesthetics of an object can be used to allude to the presence of action and a premise for performance. Functionality and Agency are contexts, which she employs to transcend an object’s still state. Adopting motifs such as handles, hooks, hinges, nets, harnesses and hoops, she dips into our preexisting relationships with objects and actions. Using Function as a guide for how the body enters the work. ‘Where the handle meets the hand to produce the thing’.
The work’s interaction is the crux, the genesis. She is fascinated by the anticipation and desire for engagement with sculpture. Changing and twisting the nature of the body and the object, into a moment caught in time. She makes works, which in every sense give instructions and demand usage but are so still. Wrapped up in potentiality. Stalling the moment of activity, producing an object that screams its performative past and future out. Recently working with visual suggestion, she has begun to use photographs of past performances. Distorting them with pattern and abstraction. Absorbing images directly onto materials. Re-digesting the echoes of action, presenting a twisted instruction. Through self-referencing, function and performance my work has become anthropomorphic. The sculptures embody their own Agency through visual clues.
They play out their own situations and actions extending beyond the tools, objects and apparatus they resemble. She moves from the realms of interaction, into works that represent a single moment; Bodilyobjects. Website
Callum Johnstone (UK) Callum Johnstone’s practice explores environmental collapse and the implications it will have on humanity. Knowing that our environment is changing at an accelerated pace due to climate change, humanity must quickly adapt by re-imagining and re-designing the structures in which we live. Johnstone aims to show that it is not the physical structures alone which must change, by also the underlying structures of our society which need to be rethought.
Though his work is primarily understood as sculpture, it often verges on the boundaries of architecture and design. His structures often incorporate repeating modular elements which allow the potential for a continuation, acting simply as a beginning component to a much larger superstructure. These ideas can then extend to the actions of the individual which as a collective become a greater movement and have the potential to alter society as we know it. Johnstone sees himself not only as a commentator and illustrator of current events but also as a module of the superstructure we call society. As a catalyst of ideas, the artist intends to inspire a conversation on ways in which humanity may adapt to imminent environmental threats.
Image Credit: Kathryn Rattray Photography
October 27, 2018 at 12:00pmuntil November 11, 2018 at 5:00pm at GENERATOR Projects
The exhibition, “Flesh and Finitude”, has borrowed its title from Cary Wolfe’s book, What is Posthumanism (2010). It explores the boundaries of human life and body. What is the end of the human and where does something else begin? This year’s NEoN festival’s theme is ‘Lifespans’ and our exhibition’s aim is to investigate the ‘posthuman condition’, the lifespan of ‘human’ as we know it.
Five artists were invited to provide different points of enquiry into what it means to be human in relation to other species, Nature, objects, technology, and humanity itself.
“Not all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that.” (Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (2013) p.1) Today, when artificial intelligence, 3D printed organs and genetic engineering are a reality, what it means to be human is extended and redesigned. At the same time, technological advancement also reflects on our relationship (and most importantly similarities) with the Other.
Digital and sculptural works reflect on different aspects of human and its boundaries, its uncanny symbiotic relationship with others, held together by a melancholic sense of uncertainty.
Curated by Zsofia Jakab
Artists:
Caitlin Dick (UK) – Caitlin Dick recently graduated from her Master’s in Contemporary Art from Edinburgh College of Art and previously studied a BA (Hons) in Contemporary Art Practice at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen. Caitlin’s most recent work The Problem Begins When…, shown in Embassy Gallery Edinburgh, has focussed on the fusion of the technological and the human, creating an uncomfortable hybrid through digital and kinetic sculpture.
Give in to that Easy Living expands upon this previous work, attempting to explore these matters in a playfully cynical way, experimentally introducing an object-based installation which highlights our relationship with the bizarre, posthuman form that technology has created. Mobility assistance devices, kinetic sculpture and film create a sad scene of near total technological integration. Technology has become an extension of ourselves, no longer a separate entity; we feel lost or uneasy without it. The expectation of connection to anything and anyone at any time and for it then to be reciprocated immediately is an assumed part of capitalist consumer culture. Not only do we need to be accessible 24/7, we also believe that it is essential to be constantly active as part of our techno-ego. Our technological addiction has melted into everyday life, becoming monotonously accepted as part of normality. Website
Caitlyn Main (UK) – Caitlyn Mains practice operates from a state of uncertainty: through sustained linguistic unravelling and temporal installation, she presents works that speak of intimacy, agitation and balance. She accommodates, and indeed, propagates conditions encouraging fragility: every piece has the potential to collapse in on itself, and contains obvious indications of temporality. The work is a physical manifestation of precariousness – the use of dangling, leaning, bound and suspended elements serves to underline the flimsiness of matter.
Mains compositions reverberate between a situation of familiarity and abstraction. As firm edges become dissolved, or ignored, the parameters of her work seem to become floppy, saggy, and fluid – seeping outward to be absolved into the daily mass of visual information that surrounds us. The flesh of her assemblages is that of the world – the bones and tendons extrapolated from the domestic and the detrital, from our illuminated back lit phone screens and the phrases uttered to one another. Her frantic constellations continually oscillate between contradictory states: they are simultaneously saturated and empty, humorous, pathetic, sexual, exquisite and insignificant. Website
Rodrigo Arteaga (CHILE) – Rodrigo’s work aims to redefine some notions and ideas around nature and culture, considering what sort of division can exist between them. He has used material culture that comes from science and its varied systematic methods in the form of books, maps, diagrams, furniture and tools. There is some inherent contradiction in this effort to bring together order and disorder, the useful and the useless, unearthing the coded enigmas of our relationship to the environment. He has responded to scientific culture in an attempt to embrace its limits, maybe turn it back onto itself, finding a crack, subjectivizing something meant to be objective. Website
Alicia Fidler (UK) – Alicia’s practice expands how aesthetics of an object can be used to allude to the presence of action and a premise for performance. Functionality and Agency are contexts, which she employs to transcend an object’s still state. Adopting motifs such as handles, hooks, hinges, nets, harnesses and hoops, she dips into our preexisting relationships with objects and actions. Using Function as a guide for how the body enters the work. ‘Where the handle meets the hand to produce the thing’.
The work’s interaction is the crux, the genesis. She is fascinated by the anticipation and desire for engagement with sculpture. Changing and twisting the nature of the body and the object, into a moment caught in time. She makes works, which in every sense give instructions and demand usage but are so still. Wrapped up in potentiality. Stalling the moment of activity, producing an object that screams its performative past and future out. Recently working with visual suggestion, she has begun to use photographs of past performances. Distorting them with pattern and abstraction. Absorbing images directly onto materials. Re-digesting the echoes of action, presenting a twisted instruction. Through self-referencing, function and performance my work has become anthropomorphic. The sculptures embody their own Agency through visual clues.
They play out their own situations and actions extending beyond the tools, objects and apparatus they resemble. She moves from the realms of interaction, into works that represent a single moment; Bodilyobjects. Website
Callum Johnstone (UK) Callum Johnstone’s practice explores environmental collapse and the implications it will have on humanity. Knowing that our environment is changing at an accelerated pace due to climate change, humanity must quickly adapt by re-imagining and re-designing the structures in which we live. Johnstone aims to show that it is not the physical structures alone which must change, by also the underlying structures of our society which need to be rethought.
Though his work is primarily understood as sculpture, it often verges on the boundaries of architecture and design. His structures often incorporate repeating modular elements which allow the potential for a continuation, acting simply as a beginning component to a much larger superstructure. These ideas can then extend to the actions of the individual which as a collective become a greater movement and have the potential to alter society as we know it. Johnstone sees himself not only as a commentator and illustrator of current events but also as a module of the superstructure we call society. As a catalyst of ideas, the artist intends to inspire a conversation on ways in which humanity may adapt to imminent environmental threats.
Image Credit: Kathryn Rattray Photography
bo-kaap, cape town, western cape- kramat of tuan sayeed alawie, in the tana baru cemetery
It is this extraordinary man, who after a prison sentence of 12 years could forgive his goaler and help him keep law and order in the very city to which he was banished. Such a man was Tuan Sayed Alawi. He became a policeman in Cape Town. He obviously had a motive in becoming a policeman. The job gave him access to the slaves, and hence an opportunity to teach them Islam.
Tuan Sayed Alawi was a citizen of Mocca in Yemen, the southern portion of the Arbian peninsula. There is no certainty as to whether he was brought here directly from Mocca, or from Indonesia where he was a missionary. Nonetheless, he and a fellow prisoner, Haji Matarism arrived at the Cape in 1744. They were classified as Mohammedaansche Priesters, who had to be kept in chains for the rest of their lives.
When Tuan Sayed Alawi died in 1803, he was buried in the Muslim cemetery at the top end of Longmarket Street. Those who loved him erected around his grave a simple wall. It was a structure very much Cape in origin, but symbolical of the simplicity of his life. The tombstone of Robben Island slate was wrapped with white cloth, stained with the oils of the atars and other scents which his devoted followers sprinkled on it.
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A Kramat is a shrine or mausoleum that has been built over the burial place of a Muslim who's particular piety and practice of the teachings of Islam is recognised by the community. I have been engaged in documenting these sites around Cape Town over several visits at different times over the last few years. They range widely from graves marked by an edge of stones to more elaborate tombs sheltered by buildings of various styles. They are cultural markers that speak of a culture was shaped by life at the Cape and that infuses Cape Town at large.
In my searches used the guide put out by the Cape Masaar Society as a basic guide to locate some recognised sites. Even so some were not that easy to find.
In the context of the Muslims at the Cape, historically the kramats represented places of focus for the faithful and were/are often places of local pilgrimage. When the Dutch and the VOC (United East India Company aka Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie) set up a refuelling station and a settlement at the Cape, Muslims from their territories in the East Indies and Batavia were with them from the start as soldiers, slaves and “Vryswarten" (freemen). As the settlement established itself as a colony the Cape became a useful place to banish political opponents from the heart of their eastern empire. Some exiles were of royal lineage and there were also scholars amongst them. One of the most well known of these exiles was Sheik Yusuf who was cordially received by Govenor van der Stel as befitted his rank (he and his entourage where eventually housed on an estate away from the main settlement so that he was less likely to have an influence over the local population), others were imprisoned for a time both in Cape Town and on Robben island. It is said that the first Koran in the Cape was first written out from memory by Sheik Yusuf after his arrival. There were several Islamic scholars in his retinue and these men encouraged something of an Islamic revival amoung the isolated community. Their influence over the enslaved “Malay” population who were already nominally Muslim was considerable and through the ministrations of other teachers to the underclasses the influence of Islam became quite marked. As political opponents to the governing powers the teachers became focus points for escaped slaves in the outlying areas.
Under the VOC it was forbidden to practice any other faith other than Christianity in public which meant that there was no provision for mosques or madrasas. The faith was maintained informally until the end of the C18th when plans were made for the first mosque and promises of land to be granted for a specific burial ground in the Bo Kaap were given in negotiations for support against an imminent British invasion. These promises were honoured by the British after their victory.
There is talk of a prophecy of a protective circle of Islam that would surround Cape Town. I cannot find the specifics of this prophecy but the 27 kramats of the “Auliyah” or friends of Allah, as these honoured individuals are known, do form a loose circle of saints. Some of the Auliyah are credited with miraculous powers in legends that speak of their life and works. Within the folk tradition some are believed to be able to intercede on behalf of supplicants (even though this more part of a mystical philosophy (keramat) and is not strictly accepted in mainstream contemporary Islamic teaching) and even today some visitors may offer special prayers at their grave sites in much the same way as Christians might direct prayer at the shrine of a particular saint.
October 27, 2018 at 12:00pmuntil November 11, 2018 at 5:00pm at GENERATOR Projects
The exhibition, “Flesh and Finitude”, has borrowed its title from Cary Wolfe’s book, What is Posthumanism (2010). It explores the boundaries of human life and body. What is the end of the human and where does something else begin? This year’s NEoN festival’s theme is ‘Lifespans’ and our exhibition’s aim is to investigate the ‘posthuman condition’, the lifespan of ‘human’ as we know it.
Five artists were invited to provide different points of enquiry into what it means to be human in relation to other species, Nature, objects, technology, and humanity itself.
“Not all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that.” (Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (2013) p.1) Today, when artificial intelligence, 3D printed organs and genetic engineering are a reality, what it means to be human is extended and redesigned. At the same time, technological advancement also reflects on our relationship (and most importantly similarities) with the Other.
Digital and sculptural works reflect on different aspects of human and its boundaries, its uncanny symbiotic relationship with others, held together by a melancholic sense of uncertainty.
Curated by Zsofia Jakab
Artists:
Caitlin Dick (UK) – Caitlin Dick recently graduated from her Master’s in Contemporary Art from Edinburgh College of Art and previously studied a BA (Hons) in Contemporary Art Practice at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen. Caitlin’s most recent work The Problem Begins When…, shown in Embassy Gallery Edinburgh, has focussed on the fusion of the technological and the human, creating an uncomfortable hybrid through digital and kinetic sculpture.
Give in to that Easy Living expands upon this previous work, attempting to explore these matters in a playfully cynical way, experimentally introducing an object-based installation which highlights our relationship with the bizarre, posthuman form that technology has created. Mobility assistance devices, kinetic sculpture and film create a sad scene of near total technological integration. Technology has become an extension of ourselves, no longer a separate entity; we feel lost or uneasy without it. The expectation of connection to anything and anyone at any time and for it then to be reciprocated immediately is an assumed part of capitalist consumer culture. Not only do we need to be accessible 24/7, we also believe that it is essential to be constantly active as part of our techno-ego. Our technological addiction has melted into everyday life, becoming monotonously accepted as part of normality. Website
Caitlyn Main (UK) – Caitlyn Mains practice operates from a state of uncertainty: through sustained linguistic unravelling and temporal installation, she presents works that speak of intimacy, agitation and balance. She accommodates, and indeed, propagates conditions encouraging fragility: every piece has the potential to collapse in on itself, and contains obvious indications of temporality. The work is a physical manifestation of precariousness – the use of dangling, leaning, bound and suspended elements serves to underline the flimsiness of matter.
Mains compositions reverberate between a situation of familiarity and abstraction. As firm edges become dissolved, or ignored, the parameters of her work seem to become floppy, saggy, and fluid – seeping outward to be absolved into the daily mass of visual information that surrounds us. The flesh of her assemblages is that of the world – the bones and tendons extrapolated from the domestic and the detrital, from our illuminated back lit phone screens and the phrases uttered to one another. Her frantic constellations continually oscillate between contradictory states: they are simultaneously saturated and empty, humorous, pathetic, sexual, exquisite and insignificant. Website
Rodrigo Arteaga (CHILE) – Rodrigo’s work aims to redefine some notions and ideas around nature and culture, considering what sort of division can exist between them. He has used material culture that comes from science and its varied systematic methods in the form of books, maps, diagrams, furniture and tools. There is some inherent contradiction in this effort to bring together order and disorder, the useful and the useless, unearthing the coded enigmas of our relationship to the environment. He has responded to scientific culture in an attempt to embrace its limits, maybe turn it back onto itself, finding a crack, subjectivizing something meant to be objective. Website
Alicia Fidler (UK) – Alicia’s practice expands how aesthetics of an object can be used to allude to the presence of action and a premise for performance. Functionality and Agency are contexts, which she employs to transcend an object’s still state. Adopting motifs such as handles, hooks, hinges, nets, harnesses and hoops, she dips into our preexisting relationships with objects and actions. Using Function as a guide for how the body enters the work. ‘Where the handle meets the hand to produce the thing’.
The work’s interaction is the crux, the genesis. She is fascinated by the anticipation and desire for engagement with sculpture. Changing and twisting the nature of the body and the object, into a moment caught in time. She makes works, which in every sense give instructions and demand usage but are so still. Wrapped up in potentiality. Stalling the moment of activity, producing an object that screams its performative past and future out. Recently working with visual suggestion, she has begun to use photographs of past performances. Distorting them with pattern and abstraction. Absorbing images directly onto materials. Re-digesting the echoes of action, presenting a twisted instruction. Through self-referencing, function and performance my work has become anthropomorphic. The sculptures embody their own Agency through visual clues.
They play out their own situations and actions extending beyond the tools, objects and apparatus they resemble. She moves from the realms of interaction, into works that represent a single moment; Bodilyobjects. Website
Callum Johnstone (UK) Callum Johnstone’s practice explores environmental collapse and the implications it will have on humanity. Knowing that our environment is changing at an accelerated pace due to climate change, humanity must quickly adapt by re-imagining and re-designing the structures in which we live. Johnstone aims to show that it is not the physical structures alone which must change, by also the underlying structures of our society which need to be rethought.
Though his work is primarily understood as sculpture, it often verges on the boundaries of architecture and design. His structures often incorporate repeating modular elements which allow the potential for a continuation, acting simply as a beginning component to a much larger superstructure. These ideas can then extend to the actions of the individual which as a collective become a greater movement and have the potential to alter society as we know it. Johnstone sees himself not only as a commentator and illustrator of current events but also as a module of the superstructure we call society. As a catalyst of ideas, the artist intends to inspire a conversation on ways in which humanity may adapt to imminent environmental threats.
Image Credit: Kathryn Rattray Photography
October 27, 2018 at 12:00pmuntil November 11, 2018 at 5:00pm at GENERATOR Projects
The exhibition, “Flesh and Finitude”, has borrowed its title from Cary Wolfe’s book, What is Posthumanism (2010). It explores the boundaries of human life and body. What is the end of the human and where does something else begin? This year’s NEoN festival’s theme is ‘Lifespans’ and our exhibition’s aim is to investigate the ‘posthuman condition’, the lifespan of ‘human’ as we know it.
Five artists were invited to provide different points of enquiry into what it means to be human in relation to other species, Nature, objects, technology, and humanity itself.
“Not all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that.” (Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (2013) p.1) Today, when artificial intelligence, 3D printed organs and genetic engineering are a reality, what it means to be human is extended and redesigned. At the same time, technological advancement also reflects on our relationship (and most importantly similarities) with the Other.
Digital and sculptural works reflect on different aspects of human and its boundaries, its uncanny symbiotic relationship with others, held together by a melancholic sense of uncertainty.
Curated by Zsofia Jakab
Artists:
Caitlin Dick (UK) – Caitlin Dick recently graduated from her Master’s in Contemporary Art from Edinburgh College of Art and previously studied a BA (Hons) in Contemporary Art Practice at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen. Caitlin’s most recent work The Problem Begins When…, shown in Embassy Gallery Edinburgh, has focussed on the fusion of the technological and the human, creating an uncomfortable hybrid through digital and kinetic sculpture.
Give in to that Easy Living expands upon this previous work, attempting to explore these matters in a playfully cynical way, experimentally introducing an object-based installation which highlights our relationship with the bizarre, posthuman form that technology has created. Mobility assistance devices, kinetic sculpture and film create a sad scene of near total technological integration. Technology has become an extension of ourselves, no longer a separate entity; we feel lost or uneasy without it. The expectation of connection to anything and anyone at any time and for it then to be reciprocated immediately is an assumed part of capitalist consumer culture. Not only do we need to be accessible 24/7, we also believe that it is essential to be constantly active as part of our techno-ego. Our technological addiction has melted into everyday life, becoming monotonously accepted as part of normality. Website
Caitlyn Main (UK) – Caitlyn Mains practice operates from a state of uncertainty: through sustained linguistic unravelling and temporal installation, she presents works that speak of intimacy, agitation and balance. She accommodates, and indeed, propagates conditions encouraging fragility: every piece has the potential to collapse in on itself, and contains obvious indications of temporality. The work is a physical manifestation of precariousness – the use of dangling, leaning, bound and suspended elements serves to underline the flimsiness of matter.
Mains compositions reverberate between a situation of familiarity and abstraction. As firm edges become dissolved, or ignored, the parameters of her work seem to become floppy, saggy, and fluid – seeping outward to be absolved into the daily mass of visual information that surrounds us. The flesh of her assemblages is that of the world – the bones and tendons extrapolated from the domestic and the detrital, from our illuminated back lit phone screens and the phrases uttered to one another. Her frantic constellations continually oscillate between contradictory states: they are simultaneously saturated and empty, humorous, pathetic, sexual, exquisite and insignificant. Website
Rodrigo Arteaga (CHILE) – Rodrigo’s work aims to redefine some notions and ideas around nature and culture, considering what sort of division can exist between them. He has used material culture that comes from science and its varied systematic methods in the form of books, maps, diagrams, furniture and tools. There is some inherent contradiction in this effort to bring together order and disorder, the useful and the useless, unearthing the coded enigmas of our relationship to the environment. He has responded to scientific culture in an attempt to embrace its limits, maybe turn it back onto itself, finding a crack, subjectivizing something meant to be objective. Website
Alicia Fidler (UK) – Alicia’s practice expands how aesthetics of an object can be used to allude to the presence of action and a premise for performance. Functionality and Agency are contexts, which she employs to transcend an object’s still state. Adopting motifs such as handles, hooks, hinges, nets, harnesses and hoops, she dips into our preexisting relationships with objects and actions. Using Function as a guide for how the body enters the work. ‘Where the handle meets the hand to produce the thing’.
The work’s interaction is the crux, the genesis. She is fascinated by the anticipation and desire for engagement with sculpture. Changing and twisting the nature of the body and the object, into a moment caught in time. She makes works, which in every sense give instructions and demand usage but are so still. Wrapped up in potentiality. Stalling the moment of activity, producing an object that screams its performative past and future out. Recently working with visual suggestion, she has begun to use photographs of past performances. Distorting them with pattern and abstraction. Absorbing images directly onto materials. Re-digesting the echoes of action, presenting a twisted instruction. Through self-referencing, function and performance my work has become anthropomorphic. The sculptures embody their own Agency through visual clues.
They play out their own situations and actions extending beyond the tools, objects and apparatus they resemble. She moves from the realms of interaction, into works that represent a single moment; Bodilyobjects. Website
Callum Johnstone (UK) Callum Johnstone’s practice explores environmental collapse and the implications it will have on humanity. Knowing that our environment is changing at an accelerated pace due to climate change, humanity must quickly adapt by re-imagining and re-designing the structures in which we live. Johnstone aims to show that it is not the physical structures alone which must change, by also the underlying structures of our society which need to be rethought.
Though his work is primarily understood as sculpture, it often verges on the boundaries of architecture and design. His structures often incorporate repeating modular elements which allow the potential for a continuation, acting simply as a beginning component to a much larger superstructure. These ideas can then extend to the actions of the individual which as a collective become a greater movement and have the potential to alter society as we know it. Johnstone sees himself not only as a commentator and illustrator of current events but also as a module of the superstructure we call society. As a catalyst of ideas, the artist intends to inspire a conversation on ways in which humanity may adapt to imminent environmental threats.
Image Credit: Kathryn Rattray Photography
I can't say with absolute certainty that I have correctly identified the location of this garage but it is highly likely. Laleham Road is close to the Thames one end and not so much the other. At the end that is very near the river there is a hand car wash with site dimensions not dissimilar to this one - hence I would reckon this is where it was www.google.com/maps/@51.4290289,-0.5088908,3a,75y,46.71h,...