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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Joester has been talking about Johan Huizinga's book Homo Ludens on a recent thread. I'm interested in how similar Huizinga's characteristics of play are to potential descriptions of art. There are differences, of course, but charming cross-overs.
voluntary: "...all play is a voluntary activity."sidenote: L.M. claims to use the following quote as an error message, "Play only becomes possible, thinkable and understandable when an influx of mind breaks down the absolute determinism of the cosmos."
not ordinary life: "...play is not 'ordinary' or 'real' life. It is rather a stepping out of 'real' life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all its own."
limitedness in time: "Play begins at a certain moment and then it is 'over.'"
repeated: "It is transmitted, it becomes tradition. It can be repeated at any time, whether it be 'child's play' or a game of chess or at fixed intervals like a mystery."
limitedness in space: "All play moves and has its being within a playground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course."
order: "...it creates order, it is order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, limited perfection. Play demands order absolute and supreme. The least deviation from it 'spoils the game', robs it of its character and makes it worthless."
aesthetics: "Play has a tendency to be beautiful."
tension: "...testing of the player's prowess"
fairness: "...despite his ardent desire to win he must still stick to the rules of the game."
rules: "All play has its rules."
 Clockwork Android |
 Central Telephone Exchange, New York City, 1880 |
Philip Lieberman (cognitive linguist), Human Language and Our Reptilian Brain: The Subcortical Bases of Speech, Syntax, and Thought, (Cambridge, Mass. & London: Harvard University Press, 2002) Historically, the most complex piece of machinery of an epoch serves as a metaphor for the brain. The metaphor seems to take on a life of its own and becomes a neurophysiological model. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the brain was often compared to a clock or chronometer. During the first part of the twentieth century the model usually was a telephone exchange, and since the 1950s a digital computer. Mechanical-biological analogies, of course, are not limited to neurophsyciology. Physicians bled feverish patients in the early nineteenth century because of a false analogy between blood temperature and steam engines. Early steem engines frequently exploded as pressure increased at high operating temperatures. Safety valves then were invented that released superheated pressure. Hence it followed that bleeding would reduce temperature. As a result of this false analogy, the chances of survival for soldiers wounded at Waterloo were greater if they had not been treated by surgeons immediately after battle. In its own way, the analogy between biological brains and digital comptuers is as fatal for understanding the neural bases of human language." (pp.23-24) | |
 The Medicinal Leech |
 Locomotive Steam Engine |
GRANNYBOOTS!!! Wednesday, February 11, from 7 to 11 pm at The Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen St. W., Toronto.
An appalling evening of Valentine's Crafting with Anthony Easton! and Kirsten Johnson!
A Naughty Bits Washing Station courtesy of Keith Cole!
Madame Zsa Zsa The 2 Dollar Psychic by Andrew Harwood!
Tarot and other magycks by FASTWÜRMS!
Plus DJ Backfat! (R.M. Vaughan)
Go there and make something insanely beautiful. Like this:
Seriously, you really can make something as beautiful as this. You just have to believe.
Issue #2 of HUNTER AND COOK, the lovely art magazine produced by Tony Romano and Jay Isaac is now online.
And today I am stealing a jpeg version of a drawing by Seth Scriver that was in the print edition.
(though the Fastwürms' page is pretty damn glorious too)
...
Daniel Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music, (p.92):
Before going any further, I have to admit a bias in the way I approach the scientific study of minds and brains: I have a definite preference for studying the mind rather than the brain. Part of my preference is personal rather than professional. As a child I wouldn't collect butterflies with the rest of my science class because life — all life — seems sacred to me. And the stark fact about brain research over the course of the last century is that it generally involves poking around in the brains of live animals, often our close genetic cousins, the monkeys and apes, and then killing (they call it "sacrificing") the animal. I worked for one miserable semester in a monkey lab, dissecting the brains of dead monkeys to prepare them for microscopic examination. Every day I had to walk by cages of the ones that were still alive. I had nightmares.
At a different level, I've always been more fascinated by the thoughts themselves, not the neurons that give rise to them.
Sunday Devotionals - Buffalo Springfield
Sit Down I Think I Love You
For What It's Worth (excerpt) and Mr. Soul (with a Young Young Neil Young)
Bonus Track - Muppets version of For What's it's Worth: