Don't you just love feeling those atoms?

"One day I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness. As I realized it was actually happening and not just in my imagination, I was frightened…"
- Y. Kusama

Live brain cutting

The world-famous H.M. died last year. He was probably one of the most important patients for the development of the neuroscience of memory formation.

H.M. suffered from intractable epilepsy that has been often—though inconclusively—attributed to a bicycle accident at the age of nine. He suffered from partial seizures for many years, and then several tonic-clonic seizures following his sixteenth birthday. In 1953, H.M. was referred to William Scoville, a surgeon at Hartford Hospital, for treatment. To treat his epilepsia parts most of his hippocampi (among other parts of the temporal lobes) were removed.

As a consequence he suffered from severe anterograde amnesia (not able to form new memories but remembering the older ones). And well, he was cured from his epileptia.

Now here is the catch: a year after his death his brain is being cut up… live!

Jacopo Annese began sectioning H.M.'s brain (slices about 70 microns thick). At this moment they are taking a break for the night (yes, I know, they don’t seem very dedicated to their work), but they will continue around 8AM PST (17.00 our time). He's expected to reach the temporal lobes tonight (where the memory systems reside).

Here's the link to the live video feed

or you can visit the Brain Observatory home site: - and click on the "view video" button in the front page.

post-osmotic universes...

Looking forward for Ouunpo !

Sarah Demeuse wrote: "Driving back from Upstate last night I came by a crossroads that had a huge fork in the middle (as if someone was ready to eat that median). Borges
meets public sculpture? And now this website with a reference to JL himself.
Next up is finding a town called Tlön."

multiple worlds...

Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths

Paris program 27-29th November

An invitation to visit several elusive parallel words of past and future, engage with rules of creation under constraint and invent further invitations.

2 PM FRIDAY, 27th NOV

A visit to Osmothèque, the only institution of its kind in the world.

"The Osmothèque, the only institution of its kind in the world, was inaugurated in 1990. Nowhere else can a perfume lover inhale thousands of fragrances created today, yesterday and even in distant history, including a Royal Perfume of the Roman era and the medieval Eau de la Reine de Hongrie.The experts at this unlikely conservatory, situated on a side street in the city of Versailles, have even reconstituted, from a formula discovered by chance in a drawer, the eau de cologne produced on Saint Helena for the exiled Napoleon.
Hundreds of perfumes once thought to have evaporated into the mists of time have been revived at the Osmothèque. Dabbed onto paper strips called mouillettes, the fragrances transport visitors to the woodland glades of their origin, or the era of their first appearances on the perfume scene: heady Blue Narcissus by Mury (1920), nostalgic Christmas Night* by Caron (1922), Chanel's sensual Russian Leather ** (1924), Millot's opulent Crêpe de Chine (1925), to mention only a few".

http://www.francetoday.com/articles/2009/08/11/scents-and-sensibility.html

Possible after-taste later the same evening in one of Ben Kinmont dinners:

http://www.airdeparis.com/benbecoming.html


SATURDAY, 28th NOV

Noon: Introduction to writing under constraint by Hervé Le Tellier, one of Oulipo writers. Kadist Art Foundation

Born in Paris, Le Tellier started his career as a scientific journalist, and joined Oulipo in 1992. As an author, he came to general attention in 1998 with the publication in France of his book Les amnésiques n'ont rien vécu d'inoubliable, a collection of one thousand very short sentences all beginning with "Je pense que" (I think that). His rather complex novel Le voleur de nostalgie is a tribute to the Italian writer Italo Calvino. He is also one of the Papous dans la tête, the cult literary quiz of France Culture, the French cultural radio station.

He became in 2002 a daily contributor to the website of the newspaper Le Monde with a short satirical chronicle called Papier de verre (glass paper).

One of his most recent publication is Esthétique de l’Oulipo (The Aesthetics of Oulipo), a very personal take on literature under constraint, considered from a linguistic perspective.

More about Oulipo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo

Perhaps lunch with Herve at Kadist

4 PM -Impromptus _ with R&Sie(n)-Francois Roche, Stephanie Lavaux

R&Sie(n) / Paris-Francois Roche:

Guest teacher in master class at Columbia-Gsapp / New-York
Guest teacher at Usc / Los Angeles
President of the laboratory of research / New-territories / Paris
Co-founder and Principal of R&Sie(n) / Studio of architectural practices / Paris
Web site : www.new-territories.com

A conference online: http://incident.net/theupgrade/13_francois_roche_r&sie/

SUNDAY, 29th NOV

TBI (to be invented) and TBC


Co-hosted by Kadist Art Foundation. (www.kadist.org)

Curated by Raimundas Malasauskas. (www.rye.tw)

Marco Raparelli
Anyone intrested in time travel meet me here last thursday, 2009

disegno dal libro “Tomorrow which is today I am going to be very very happy”

I believe in god and the multiverse

Follow the following instructions:

1. Relax and concentrate on th four small dots in the middle of the picture in about 30 – 40 secs.

2. Then take a look at any smooth single coloured surface (probably a wall) near you.

3. You will see a circle of light developing. Start blinking your eyes a couple of times and you will see an image emerging!!!

WHAT DO YOU SEE??? MOREOVER, WHO DO YOU SEE???

Cosmic Microwave Background temperature fluctuations

the image above represents "the Cosmic Microwave Background temperature fluctuations from the 5-year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe data seen over the full sky. The average temperature is 2.725 Kelvin (degrees above absolute zero; absolute zero is equivalent to -273.15 C or -459 F), and the colors represent the tiny temperature fluctuations, as in a weather map. Red regions are warmer and blue regions are colder by about 0.0002 degrees."

next workshop in Skopje

conducted by: Yane Calovski 

where: the monastery “St. Joakim Osogovski” located on the slopes of the Osogovo Mountains.
when: October 30th (Friday), 31st (Saturday) and November 1st (Sunday), 2009. Ideal arrival is October 29th (Thursday) and ideal departure afternoon on November 2nd from 2 pm onward.
contact: visionforum.rome@gmail.com for more info and full program details.

Program guests:

Stephen Whitmarsh (born in Woerden, The Netherlands, 1979) graduated in 2005 in psychology from the University of Amsterdam, specializing in psychonomics and neuroimaging and now working on his PhD at the Donders Center for Cognitive Neuroimaging of the Radboud University. Although the focus of his PhD is comprehending fundamental neural mechanisms underlying meditation practices, for an adequate understanding he also considers their cultural purposes and metaphysical premises. In collaboration with the University of Amsterdam he is continuing his experiments into the relationship between quantum physics, consciousness and brain processes, having received positive attention on several international conferences dedicated to that subject.

Dr. Sofija Grandakovska, (born in Strumica, Macedonia, 1973), PhD, Department of General and Comparative Literature at the School of Philology, University Ss. Cyril and Methodius in Skopje. Her MA thesis subjects were Intervening Aspects of the Medieval Icon, Semiotics, Theology and Abstract Art and Discourse of the Prayer. She recently completed her PhD on The Akathistos Hymn of the Mother of God in the Context of Byzantine Hymnography. Her areas of scientific interest are comparative literature and visual art, especially the semiotics of Byzantine literature and fresco painting, sacred types of discourse, anthropology, theology, and cultural heritage and contemporary culture.

images from the Roman workshop

First workshop: Rome, 1:1 projects, 25/09/09.

conducted by: Cesare Pietroiusti

Special guests: Elisa Ottaviani, Stalker, Sergio Lombardo, Lillo Romeo (Ufficio per l'Immaginazione Preventiva).

press release here (pdf)
comunicato stampa: scarica (pdf)

Sphinx

the double slit experiment

I like that quote from the last video:

Atoms are not things, they are only tendencies. So, instead of thinking of things, you have to think of possibility. They are all possibilities of consciousness...

and I follow the stream initiated by Jacopo with my favourite quantum enigma: the double slit experiment.
I never found it so well explained... maybe dr quantum isn't so bad! but I promise: we wont have a "Q" t-shirt waiting for you in rome  !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dauX8LKVizQ&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=IT&hl=it&v=pyrTHQjpuiY&feature=related

7.00pm - AGATHA ET LES LECTURES ILLIMIT�ES

Marguerite Duras (1981) 85 mins

One of Duras� most fascinating treatments of the dialectical relationship between sound & image, what is spoken & what is left unsaid, is an evocative �adaptation� of her then unperformed play, Agatha. Featuring Bulle Ogier & Yann Andr�a as the wandering protagonists, & Duras & Andr�a�s disembodied voices on the soundtrack, it is equally a haunting meditation on the relation between humanity & its geographic surroundings. Shot in Duras� beloved Trouville, whose remarkable array of beachside villas the writer-director considered �the most beautiful tracking� shot in �the history of cinema�.

Why, Lord, you're wasting a lot of money on this universe ?

Hello, here's a little story and some inspiring thoughts quoted from an interview to John A. Wheeler .  The Big (economic) Crunch knocking at heaven's door...

(...) You can say there's an efficiency expert who's come to look over the Lord's shoulder. He says,

"Why, Lord, you're wasting a lot of money on this universe. See, you've put one hundred billion (10^11) stars in the Milky Way, and you've put one hundred billion (10^11) Milky Ways in the universe -- that's ten billion trillion (10^11) stars -- that's a mighty extravagant way to get one planet (the Earth) with life on it so there'll be somebody around to be aware of this universe. Now, Lord, we efficiency people want to cut you down, but we won't cut you down to one star. Instead of 10 billion trillion stars, we'll cut you down to one hundred billion stars -- that's enough to make one galaxy. This will be a great economy move."

"The universe starts with a Big Bang, expands to a maximum dimension, then recontracts and collapses (to the Big Crunch); no more awe-inspiring prediction was ever made." Quotation from Charles W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne and John A. Wheeler in "Gravitation", W. H. Freeman, San Francisco, 1973, page 1196.

The only problem is, according to general relativity, when you cut the amount of mass down by a factor of 100 billion, you also cut the size of the universe down by the same amount, just enough universe for one galaxy. You also cut down the time from the Big Bang to the Big Crunch from 100 billion years to just one year which isn't time enough to evolve even one star, let alone evolve life.

Put it another way. There's no obvious extravagance of scale in the construction of the universe. The efficiency expert would have a right to complain if life had been created on several planets, in several parts of the universe, because then he could say that's more than you really need in order for somebody to be around to be aware of the universe. But, if you have life on one planet only (the Earth), then, it's not obvious that you're being extravagant.

The anthropic principle provides a new perspective on the question of life elsewhere in space. It puts in question the common view that the universe is a big machine; that man is unimportant in the scheme of things; that we're an accidental bit of dust that doesn't have anything to do with it all. From that point of view, it is not very important whether you're going to have life on a billion planets or on just one planet -- or no life at all. Life or no life still wouldn't matter in the scheme of the universe.

But, if we adopt this other perspective that Dicke suggests -- the anthropic principle -- then it's quite a different assessment that we make. Then the universe has to be such as to permit awareness of that universe; otherwise the universe has no meaning.

We are now nearer the Big Bang than the Big Crunch since the universe, as we observe it, is still expanding.

The anthropic principle looks at this universe, that universe and the other universe and rules out as mere meaningless machines all those in which awareness does not develop somewhere at some time. Stronger than the anthropic principle is what I might call the participatory principle. According to it we could not even imagine a universe that did not somewhere and for some stretch of time contain observers because the very building materials of the universe are these acts of observer-participancy. You wouldn't have the stuff out of which to build the universe otherwise. This participatory principle takes for its foundation the absolutely central point of the quantum:

No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed (or registered) phenomenon.

neither religious nor scientific

In the profile section "believes", among "religious" and "scientific" what would represent "other"?:

facebook news feed/Rimas Sapauskas Neblogai įsivažiuoja: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN8HwUxFouM

WWW - Who, When, Where...

If you don’t want God, you’d better have a multiverse are:

Meris Angioletti, Yane Calovski, Jacob Dahl Jurgensen, Mark Geffriaud, Raimundas Malasauskas,

Darius Miksys, Jacopo Miliani, Daniela Paes Leao and Samon Takahashi.

Together with Daniele Balit, Cecilia Canziani and Adrienne Drake from 1:1projects, Rome.

The project will be developed through the following meetings/workshops/public events:

Rome: 25 – 27 September. Hosted by 1:1projects

Skopje: 30 October – 1 November. Hosted by Yane Calovski /  press to exit project space

Paris: 27 – 29 November. Hosted by Raimundas Malasauskas

If you don’t want God, you’d better have a multiverse.

Our world could be nothing but a small grain of sand, part of an infinite number of other possible worlds that reside in parallel universes. More and more this hypothesis is investigated by physicists and cosmologists, some of whom believe that we are facing a new Copernican revolution which will radically shift our perspective. No longer does just one universe exist, but a ‘multiverse’ of varying universes, each with differing properties and their own space-time dimensions.

Physicists Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog note that if this is true, a linear vision of the history of the universe would thus be wrong. The universe doesn’t have a single history, say Hertog and Hawking, but every possible history, each with its own probability. The history of the universe cannot be interpreted as linear – with a starting point that continues until it reaches us today – but rather the result of ‘patterns of interference’ of all the possible histories of the universe. The present state of our cosmos arises, then, from the sum of all these possibilities.

Such discourse entails radical shifts in perspective and repositioning that clearly go beyond the scientific scope. When Hawking speaks of the universe originating from a quantum event, we are introduced to models of thinking where micro and macro visions enter into contact with each other. In addition, Hawking’s “Imaginary Time” concept opens up new approaches to looking at time dimension as if it were a dimension of space.

Above all, these researchers are questioning a system made up of abstract laws on which physics has been based until now. With a ‘multiverse’, the element of subjectivity overwhelmingly enters into play as a determining factor of reality. Hawking confronts us with a very suggestive hypothesis: the different histories of the universe are material which we ourselves elaborate, through the filter of observation, to be finally recomposed into a linear, personal history of the cosmos.

Through the exploration of the concepts of time, space and the role of subjectivity, If you don’t want God, you’d better have a multiverse addresses art as a place where these ideas can be translated into form and become the location for interplay between artists, curators, academics and the public. The workshops will develop as a regular series of meetings in which the participants will contribute to discussions on the issues of time, space and its perception. Individual research and collective exchange will then be developed into an exhibition which will provide a public arena for our on-going discussions and ideas.




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