Whether something is art or can be defined as ‘art’ or has artistic value is questionable and supposedly relative. It seems to me that the question of ‘artistic value’ is an economic and historical one. We could call this the historoeconomic theory of art (or the capitalist’s valuation of art).

An artwork always has an economic value, from being worthless to being highly valuable. This value changes and fluctuates over time. For instance at one point, during his lifetime, Van Gogh’s paintings were worth merely cents. Today they are worth tens of millions of dollars. The 19th century French artist Bouguereau, in his time his artworks fought over for what today would be worth millions, are now possibly equivalent to the today’s value of the price paid for them in their time (several thousand dollars).

This begs the obvious question, is an artwork’s artistic value equal or directly proportional to its historicized price (i.e. some historical and current averaging of the work’s price)? The market would say yes. If that is the case, then the greatest artists or artworks are listed here. Non- and anti-capitalists would argue otherwise, but they will have little compelling evidence to support this.

Using our eyes and brains and senses we see a skewed and highly individualized version of the world. As of this moment there are roughly 6.65 billion realities (based on the human population and not taking into account animals, our imagination, dreams and dissociative identities). 6.65 billion versions of today, of our time, of this moment.

Within and beyond this, we project ourselves into these realities and into the world. It should not be termed ‘the’ world,  unless we are talking about an objective world, otherwise ‘our’ world or ‘a’ world would be more appropriate. A visualization of this projection can be seen in some intriguing maps by Nina Katchadourian. Called ‘Geographic Pathologies‘, these ‘anatomical’ maps are a figurative way of interpreting how we project ourselves into the world. The world becomes an anthropomorphism of ourselves. Turning that around, one could argue that the world projects us, but I am not one to argue this. We could also include ‘-centrism’ into this debate and into these maps (think Euro- or Afro -centricism), and use the odd word ‘anthropocentric’, which regards mankind as the central aspect of existence or of the world, as an interpretation.

But how then do we map our reality?

An interesting linguistic phenomenon has been occurring at schools in Baltimore: the development of a gender-neutral third-person pronoun. The neologism is the pronoun Yo. It can apparently be used to describe both a he and a she. For example I could use the sentence ‘Yo reads my blog‘ to mean, ‘She reads my blog’, but I could also use it to mean ‘He reads my blog’. A comprehensive study has recently been done on the subject. An analysis of the phenomenon can be read at the Language Log.

Although use of the word Yo has apparently been going on since 2004, it’s still early days to know whether this phenomenon will stick. A potential spin-off from this development is the philosophical problem of language and meaning. Examples of this problem are the questions: does language have meaning? and how do I know what you mean when you say something? or how do I know that you really mean what I think you mean when you say something? The word Yo is a case in point. Obviously the speaker either means he or she, but without using a gender pronoun somewhere else in the sentence (such as Yo better eat her dinner), or without the speaker pointing to something, the listener has no way of knowing (without intuition or context) what the speaker means. Whether this exacerbates the philosophy of language is unknown at this point, but it gives us something to think about.

The literature of stage directions is an interesting, and mostly disregarded, subject. Brecht, the German playwright, was perhaps the only person to make his actors say his stage directions out loud, in many ways to distance (or ‘alienate’) the performers from the play and setting. In all other circumstances, stage directions are a soft or hidden aspect of literature.

Shakespeare’s most famous, and the most famous in stage direction literature, is the line “Exit, pursued by a bear” (The Winter’s Tale III.iii). It’s fame is possibly due to it’s peculiarity in sound and meaning. It’s so matter-of-fact and yet so unreal (why, for instance, the choice of the word ‘pursued’ instead of ‘followed’ or ‘chased’). (Apparently the word ‘pursue’ comes from the Latin prosequi meaning ‘prosecute’ making an interesting comparison between judges and bears.)

Perhaps the lack of interest in stage directions is because they are soporific if spoken or known. Ben Jonson’s Volpone, for instance, has the directions ‘Enter Mosca, introducing Voltore with a piece of plate’ (I.ii). Clearly very boring, and making the audience out for a bunch of shmucks by stating the obvious (thinking deeper, however, one is reminded of how the obviousness is a direct result of them being written. Similar to looking into a mirror and seeing your face).

In the modern era we have Beckett, who uses more exciting stage directions. In Beckett the stage directions take over from the words of the play, creating the sense of meaningless as the audience is left to interpret the actions. For instance at once point we read the directions ‘…Brief ring of alarm off. Enter Clov with alarm-clock. He holds it against Hamm’s ear and releases alarm. They listen to it ringing to the end. Pause’ (Endgame, Somewhere between the beginning and end). Here the interesting aspect is that the audience does not get a chance to read the directions, and the actions of the players don’t explain them any better. Beckett is thus the antithesis of Brecht, as his stage directions are the most silent of them all.

Exit.

Blog frequency is a thought going through many heads consciously and unconsciously. How often should one blog, and how much should one blog. Intrinsically it seems that frequent blogging on a daily basis is good and blogging sporadically is bad.

Too much blogging is not good either. If I blogged every minute my life would suddenly seem boring (when we break things down into pieces, like our life, things become simplistic). If I blogged every year no-one would visit my blog. And what should that yearly blog say? Surely, as compared to a minute-blog, I should then at least have something profound to say. Which would not necessarily be the case.

Some things in life can be reduced to Aristotle (some can’t, making that statement quite arbitrary). And blogging frequency is an interesting candidate. According to the golden mean the ideal blogger’s posts are somewhere in the middle of too much and too little blogging. Making this blog up till now fall outside of the golden mean. Perhaps I should change that.

I awoke one morning several days ago, switched on my computer, and watched my Windows XP splash screen freeze. I then proceeded to do what all computer technicians do when encountering computer problems, and that consists of guesswork, restarting, and looking in forums for people who have experienced similar issues. I was ‘luckily’ (Windows users regard this as luck) able to get into Safe mode to backup all my files.

But alas, nothing helped. In fact the problem got worse. When I attempted to ‘Repair’ my Windows installation, the software plunged into an endless installation loop .. When I had exhausted all the options, as well as myself, I sent my computer in with the expectation that they would tell me that the computer would need a fresh format and installation of Windows XP. They would tell me this would be the only solution in this situation because of a corrupted file or whatnot.

This is exactly what they did tell me. However, although they didn’t realize or suggest it, reinstalling Windows is not the only solution. Neither is it the best one. Whilst walking around a labyrinthine shopping center that day, I decided that this was a sign. It was time to get rid of Windows.

I recalled having received a CD of Ubuntu several months previously. Ubuntu is a free Linux distribution spearheaded by Mark Shuttleworth. It is relatively easy to use (but not simple to use) and has a user interface that rivals Windows (not as pretty as Mac OS but I don’t use computers or software for their good looks). I installed Ubuntu over my formatted hard drive, and spent some time finding software applications that are the same or similar to the ones I used in Windows (I was already using OpenOffice, and this comes preinstalled). So far I have managed to find an alternative to virtually every application I was using, and am not turning back.

Changing your work environment requires bravery, but it is always important for neural network purposes to remap your environment as often as possible. So if you’re thinking of changing, do it.

Goodbye Windows

Google Psychic is the latest experimentation out of Google Labs. It is based on Jungian theory of the collective unconscious.  It allows us to find information by tapping into the collective knowledge of the human race. The basic premise is that the user think of a keyword or phrase in his or her head, wait a couple of seconds, and allow results to flow freely either in the form of word associations, images,  sounds, or feelings. The beauty of the system is that it is platform independent, meaning that anyone, even those without the Internet or cellphones, are able to use it.

I tested the system the other night whilst at a dinner party. The couple next to me asked if I knew the name of the flying dog-like creature in the Neverending story.  I closed my eyes, tapped into Google Psychic, and asked the question. The name ‘falcon’ came to mind quite quickly. The couple smiled and said ‘Yes, Falcor, that’s it’. So it’s close to working, just needs a bit more tweaking.

I have just come across some humourous (although very serious) sites on dining etiquette . One is a list of standards and conventions that allow one to make a ‘favorable impression’ when dining. The other is a list of table manners that vary slightly to significantly from country to country. For instance many customs require hands to be washed before, some before and after, and some not at all. In Russia it is considered polite to leave a little food on your plate to show the host that the food was ‘plentiful’ (although they oddly offer second helpings). In Filipino it is considered ‘unclean’ to eat food with the left hand, whilst in India most food is eaten with both hands. Personally I believe in individualism comes before culture, and if I feel like eating all the food on my plate with my left unwashed hand, it ’should’ be perfectly acceptable. But before you accept that read the next paragraph.

Note that in many of these sites and lists the word ’should’ appears an enormous amount of times. ‘Should’ is a normative word and denotes that what follows comes from some culturally agreed vantage point. This means that within that culture there is an explicit set of rights and wrongs that by definition exclude other culture’s rights and wrongs. However one must understand that ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are humanly ascribed states of being that don’t really exist outside of the definition. In other words they are meaningless to those, myself included, who do not accept them. Now this does not mean that I do not follow codes, customs, and convention, because I am born into a society and culture that subconsciously accepts certain definitions. I can, if I so choose, consciously choose not to accept them, but for the most part I am comfortable to exist within my society and culture. However taking this argument to the extreme, one can say that if I do not accept that stealing is wrong then I should not be charged for the crime of stealing. Obviously an argument like that is wrong (again ‘wrong’ here is in our humanly constructed sense) because my crime is enacted within a society that calls it wrong. If I so choose not to accept stealing as wrong, then I must relocate to a society that calls it right.

As you can see, there is a conflict between individualism and culture. For the most part it is not a conflict because individuals find ways to exist within society, and those that can’t find other more acceptable societies. I vehemently disagree with the following custom (from Wikipedia), much to the irritation (and sometimes amusement of people I am with):

“When you’re finished, place your knife and fork together at four o’clock with your fork on the left and knife on the right, with the knife blade facing in. This signals that you are finished. “

Placing your knife and fork in such a manner ’signals’ nothing, it just signals that you’re bound to your culture’s customs. However, by choosing not to accept it I do not automatically lose membership of my culture, I just irritate people who choose to accept that definition and thus choose to be irritated.

There are some interesting services that exploit the power of data mining in the field of news and recent events. We all know sites like Google News, which have for a while used network power to find subtle (and more often not-so-subtle) connections between news items and link them together. Google News (and sites like it) are in my opinion revolutionary in how they find and utilize connections between real events. I often use the service to read the same story in several ways, attempting to go beyond the bias factor that creeps in to virtually all news reporting. There are often subtle distinctions in how stories are written that vastly alter the reality of the event to the reader.

It would be an interesting study to see how multiple versions of the same event through one of these services contribute to our understanding of history, and whether they help dilute the time necessary for an event to be understood from a historical perspective (Think of how we judge George W. Bush and the war in Iraq for instance whilst being inside the historical event, and whether this judgement is likely to change over time based on the ‘outcome’ of the war). In other words whether the connections and interplay between reportings of the same story help us judge history as it is happening.

Standing atop these services are other ones that map the news from a visual perspective. My personal favourite is Newsmap, which uses Google News to map stories and their importance. You will see stories in different colours, positions, and sizes, the differences in which are based on the recently and ‘chatter’ on particular news items. You can further filter the map based on preferences (by country, by type of news, etc). The genius of services like these make a mockery of our attempts to define them into categories such as “Web 2.0“.

Another ingenious visual take on online chatter is Universe by Jonathan Harris. He calls it our ‘modern mythology’, and in so doing transforms this chatter (news items, blogs, quotes, etc) into stars in the universe. The data mined links between them form the stars’ constellations, which you can play around with. It’s visually stunning and intellectually challenging, and something which deserves more ‘chatter’ in itself.

The Rodney of Kuhn pointed me to an interesting series of audio clips that demonstrate how the brain makes use of sense data to construct or reconstruct your reality (or sense of it). Go here and listen to the Virtual Haircut clip with stereo headphones with your eyes closed. I won’t spoil anything and altering your personal experience, so just have an open mind and see what happens. Parts of it are a bit creepy.

So what you listen to above is an example of your mind taking external data and reconstructing it, or ‘realizing’ it (i.e. making it real). Dreams follow a somewhat reverse process where the data has been constructed (or should we say reconstructed) in your subconscious, and then ‘realized’ in your consciousness. Dreams are incredibly real when you are having them because your mind cannot distinguish between internal and external reality. Once you wake up, that smudgy barrier between internal and external reality fades and you begin to realise what you thought was real was actually not. Or wasn’t it?

Popular personal improvement and psychology books speak about the need for internal visualization in order to realize goals. I hope the brief discussion above shows the truth in this and how inner reality can become transformed in to outer reality. Hopefully some serious scientists will start mainstreaming this area of psychology.