by Joseph Shieber

Suppose that you’re sitting at a pristine, white desk and are presented with the following scene (graciously rendered by Google Bard from a description by me):

How would you describe what you see? Maybe something like, On the desk in front of me there’s a medium-sized, shiny green sphere in front of a large, matte red cube. 

The process by which you see, however, doesn’t involve the wholesale transmission of information about discrete objects from the environment to your consciousness. Rather, that process involves the decomposition of information into constituent components. Very roughly, the rods and cones in your eyes encode light reflectances from surfaces in your immediate environment into biochemical signals and communicate them, by way of your optic nerve, to your visual cortex, where those signals undergo further processing. Some parts of this process involve distinguishing between light and dark, other parts involve the detection of edges, lines, and orientations, while still other parts involve encoding for color, motion, depth, and object-hood.

The way that this process occurs seems to present a problem. How is it that the discrete pieces of information — shiny, matte, red, green, sphere, cube, in front, behind, etc. — get put back together in the right way when that information eventually makes its way to your consciousness? Given the scene on your desk and the process by which your sense organs and brain process that visual information of the scene, why do you become aware of the right collection of properties – the green, shininess, and spherical shape belonging to the object in front, and the red, matte surface, and cubic shape belonging to the object behind? In fact, why are the properties even connected at all in your consciousness, rather than appearing as separate impressions of color, shape, surface, etc.?

This puzzle of how it is that the visual properties that we sense are “bound” together into experiences of objects is one version of the “binding problem” in neuroscience. Merely one version, because we can easily imagine others. To take just one further example, when you then reach out your hand to grasp the object in front on your desk, why do you register your tactile experiences as belonging to the same green, spherical object that you see?

Though the binding problem is still a live problem in 21st century neuroscience, it was actually anticipated more than 2000 years ago, in the Nyāya Sutras (Sutras 3.3.1-14). There, the author of the Sutras uses what is basically the binding problem to argue against the idea that the self might consist in nothing more than a collection of all of the component parts of the living human body. This latter, materialist, view was defended by the Cārvāka school, one of the rival schools of the Nyāya. Read more »

Amar Kanwar. The Sovereign Forest, 2011- …

“The Sovereign Forest is an ongoing multimedia installation that is a creative response to crime, politics, human rights, and ecological crisis. It evolved out of the political and environmental conflict in the resource-rich, and largely tribal Indian state of Odisha. Kanwar has been observing and documenting the industrial interventions that have irrevocably altered Odisha’s landscape for more than a decade.”

More here and here.

Current show here.

by Derek Neal

1.

Three men walk across a desolate landscape. They are dressed in robes, but they might as well be rags. One is barefoot, and the ground is muddy. Who are they? Where are they going?

“There must be lots of painters in Moscow,” the one called Daniil says.

“No matter, we’ll find some work,” the one called Kirill replies.

They are monks, they paint icons. It is 1400. We understand that they have been together many years. It begins to rain, and the one called Andrei, the youngest one and the most talented, seeks shelter under a tree.

“Come on,” the others say, we’ll be alright. They move on into the storm. From this point on, their unity will begin to break.

2.

Some years later Kirill wanders into a workshop. He thinks he is alone, but he comes across another man reclining on a bench. This man is called Theophanes the Greek. Outside, a heretic is being tortured; inside, all is cool and calm. Kirill begins to admire the paintings he sees, and Theophanes realizes he is in the presence of a man of a certain intelligence. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Tamuira Reid

The last time I see Sam she’s sitting at the vanity in her bedroom, carefully examining her 16 year-old face in its lighted mirror.  

Ugh, she sighs, wiping away the lip pencil I just watched her carefully apply for over the better part of an hour. This color, what is it? Hot-rod red? More like hotdog orange. Fuck you, MAC.

Grabbing a lighter shade from her stash of pencils, Sam regroups, starts over. 

Music plays from an open laptop in the corner, haphazardly balanced on a milkcrate-turned-nightstand, The Weekend telling us to save our tears for another day. A beam of late afternoon sun finds its way through the cracked blinds, illuminating the side of Sam’s pale face. 

You’d think I’d be better at this by now, she laughs, shaking her head, chestnut curls bobbing up and down at her shoulders. 

The first lip pencil she used was stolen, straight out of mama’s make-up drawer, when Sam was just seven. She hurriedly ran into the bathroom and locked the door, giddy and nervous af. A small compact mirror in her lap. Cold tiled floor beneath her. There was a freedom in that moment for Sam, the kind of freedom that comes with spectacular acts of defiance. A girl doing girl things, because to the rest of the world, including her own family, Sam was very much a boy.

I was scared. Had a lot of shame back then. It was paralyzing. I knew my gender didn’t match my biological sex. I knew I was a girl. But I didn’t have the words to explain this to my mom and my brother. To anyone. It was a secret I held onto for a long time and it hurt. A lot. Read more »

In the woods above the village of Aicha in the South Tyrol over the weekend.

by Mike O’Brien

We are fast approaching that special day midway through February, when we are called to reflect upon the joys and sorrows of sharing our lives with certain special others. An occasion for celebration by some, and for lamentation by others. I am, of course, referring to the second anniversary of Justin Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act to quell the “Freedom Convoy” that had seized downtown Ottawa as well as Canada’s three most important border crossings.

Last year’s anniversary was marked by the release of the Rouleau report, summarizing the results of a public inquiry into the Act’s use, such inquiry being automatically triggered whenever the Act in invoked. That report, finding that the government was justified in its decision and correct in its assessment of the situation to be addressed, angered people who already disagreed with the decision and pleased people who already agreed with it. A new review of the government’s invocation of the Act was released this January, finding that the government’s decision was not reasonable and violated the rights of people affected by the measures enacted pursuant to the declaration of emergency. This new finding (the Mosley decision, or more formally “2024 FC 42”), conversely angered people who already agreed with the decision and pleased people who already disagreed with it. There are two reasons why it elicited such reactions (neither being “people read it”). Firstly, the fact that it exists at all suggests that the wisdom of using the Emergencies Act, and the measures enabled thereby, was still an open question. And secondly, the fact that it (partially) faulted the government suggests that the convoy was not as dangerous or noxious as its detractors claimed it to be. But these suggestions are misleading. Read more »

Terri Amig

by Jeroen Bouterse

Several years before C.P. Snow gave his famous lecture on the two cultures, the American physicist I.I. Rabi wrote about the problem of the disunity between the sciences and the humanities. “How can we hope”, he asked, “to obtain wisdom, the wisdom which is meaningful in our own time? We certainly cannot attain it as long as the two great branches of human knowledge, the sciences and the humanities, remain separate and even warring disciplines.”[1]

Rabi had been interested in science since his teenage years, and grown up to be a Nobel-prize winning physicist. He had also been an important player in the Allied technological effort during World War II, as associate director of the ‘Rad Lab’: the radiation laboratory at MIT that developed radar technology. The success of Rad Lab, Rabi later reflected, had not been a result of a great amount of theoretical knowledge, but of the energy, vitality, and self-confidence of its participants.[2] In general, Rabi’s views on science and technology were somewhat Baconian: science should be open to the unexpected, rather than insisting on staying in the orbit of the familiar.[3]

‘A moralist instead of a physicist’

In Rabi’s accounts of his time leading Rad Lab, he would also emphasize the way in which he insisted on being let in on military information. “We are not your technicians”, he quoted himself, adding: “a military man who wants the help of scientists and tells them half a story is like a man who goes to a doctor and conceals half the symptoms.”[4] Indeed, the key to understanding Rabi’s worries about the two cultures – he would go on to embrace Snow’s term – is his view of the role science ought to play in public life. Scientists should not just be external consultants,[5] delivering inventions or discoveries on demand or listing the options available to the non-specialist.[6] In some stronger sense, they should be involved in directing policy decisions. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

The initial syllable of the English word “island”—or rather, just its very first vowel—is descended from the Proto-Germanic *awjo, meaning “an area on the water.” The element “land” was subsequently added to differentiate the word from other inflections of the Proto-Indo-European root for water, *akwa-. Our “island” is thus cognate with its German counterpart Eiland, although these days German speakers probably prefer Insel, derived from the Latin insula, which refers less ambiguously to a land mass entirely surrounded by water and not, as Eiland can, to a territory simply suffused with water.

The “s” in our “island,” however, was inserted much later, by a process of classicizing back-formation, to associate it with its etymologically unrelated synonym “isle”: as if to establish a linguistic lineage, to give island’s humble Germanic form a noble Roman pedigree. To link it, as it were, with another, greater, more patrician history.

The desire to link islands up, to settle them down, to connect them with the mainland, is an old one. Our continents, after all, are thought to have derived from the drifting apart of an original, unitary Pangea, and perhaps we have been yearning ever since for a return to that felicitous Ur-conglomerate. “No man is an island” (or rather, “iland”), wrote John Donne in 1624. Fast forward to the Confederation Bridge, or “fixed link” that unites Prince Edward Island with New Brunswick, inaugurated in 1997, and you can trace the modern history of a venerable conviction. Read more »

Ana Mendieta. Body Tracks, 1974.

Colour photograph, 25 × 20 cm. © the estate of the artist. Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co, Paris & New York.

More here, here, and here.

by Angela Starita

New York magazine published a story about two sisters who decide to leave civilization and try surviving in the outdoors of Colorado. One has a 14-year-old son, and she brings him too. In fact, much of her motivation appears to be protecting him from dangers she perceives, existing ones and more she believes to be just on the horizon. The writer doesn’t know many of the specifics of those fears, but from text messages, she gleans that the mother, Rebecca Vance, believed that the world was on the verge of collapse and wanted to escape the ensuing survivalist brutality. Instead, the three died of malnutrition and hypothermia probably within two months of going “off grid.” In short, in trying to outrun anticipated violence, they instead faced a grueling, attenuated death.

People quoted in the article attest to the sisters’ clear lack of familiarity with the backwoods camping let alone how to build a shelter, gather or grow sufficient food, generate heat, and all the other essentials to assure long-term survival. That aside, though, the sisters were acting out a typical response to their fear of the encroaching demands of the modern world. In their own panicked, inept way, the sisters were part of a long tradition of runaways looking to escape or reconfigure the rules of society as they understood them. It’s a familiar list—New Harmony, Oneida, the Shakers, even Jonestown—born of a familiar impulse: to start over and this time get it right. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Gus Mitchell

This article is from a presentation made for the Rosemary Bechler Inaugural Memorial Lecture, an event organised by DIEM25, of which Rosemary was a founder member. It took place at the Marylebone Theatre in London on January 21st 2024. 

That music you just heard is a recording of the Aka People, recorded in the forests of the Central African Republic. The musicologist who collected it gave it the simple title: “Women Gathering Mushrooms.” I like that title because I think its literalness reveals something important. I don’t know if the Aka conceive of it as “art” in the same way that now, sitting in a theatre in London in 2024, we conceive of it. Undoubtedly though it is art in the truest sense.

Of course, it is very difficult––it is impossible––to avoid speaking in generalities when you’re using a word as general, as vast, as art. There are as many arts as there are artists. Avoiding abstraction is impossible. But that’s also part of what I’m going to try to say here. That is––that most of the ways we tend to think about art today are abstract. Too much so, I think. I think that art might in fact mean more than we currently allow it to. It might be more than we currently allow it to be. Read more »

Roadway with snow, water, salt, and a manhole in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.