Friday, December 7, 2007
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Art serves evolution!
Scientists concur: Art creates and cements community.
And it all starts with the babies, the babies and their mothers . . .
from today's NY Times
The Dance of Evolution, or How Art Got Its Start
By NATALIE ANGIER
Published: November 27, 2007
If you have ever been to a Jewish wedding, you know that sooner or later the ominous notes of “Hava Nagila” will sound, and you will be expected to dance the hora. And if you don’t really know how to dance the hora, you will nevertheless be compelled to join hands with others, stumble around in a circle, give little kicks and pretend to enjoy yourself, all the while wondering if there’s a word in Yiddish that means “she who stares pathetically at the feet of others because she is still trying to figure out how to dance the hora.”
I am pleased and relieved to report that my flailing days are through. This month, in a freewheeling symposium at the University of Michigan on the evolutionary value of art and why we humans spend so much time at it, a number of the presenters supplemented their standard PowerPoint presentations with hands-on activities. Some members of the audience might have liked folding the origami boxes or scrawling messages on the floor, but for me the high point came when a neurobiologist taught us how to dance the hora. As we stepped together in klezmeric, well-schooled synchrony, I felt free and exhilarated. I felt competent and loved. I felt like calling my mother. I felt, it seems, just as a dancing body should.
In the main presentation at the conference, Ellen Dissanayake, an independent scholar affiliated with the University of Washington, Seattle, offered her sweeping thesis of the evolution of art, nimbly blending familiar themes with the radically new. By her reckoning, the artistic impulse is a human birthright, a trait so ancient, universal and persistent that it is almost surely innate. But while some researchers have suggested that our artiness arose accidentally, as a byproduct of large brains that evolved to solve problems and were easily bored, Ms. Dissanayake argues that the creative drive has all the earmarks of being an adaptation on its own. The making of art consumes enormous amounts of time and resources, she observed, an extravagance you wouldn’t expect of an evolutionary afterthought. Art also gives us pleasure, she said, and activities that feel good tend to be those that evolution deems too important to leave to chance.
What might that deep-seated purpose of art-making be? Geoffrey Miller and other theorists have proposed that art serves as a sexual display, a means of flaunting one’s talented palette of genes. Again, Ms. Dissanayake has other ideas. To contemporary Westerners, she said, art may seem detached from the real world, an elite stage on which proud peacocks and designated visionaries may well compete for high stakes. But among traditional cultures and throughout most of human history, she said, art has also been a profoundly communal affair, of harvest dances, religious pageants, quilting bees, the passionate town rivalries that gave us the spires of Chartres, Reims and Amiens.
Art, she and others have proposed, did not arise to spotlight the few, but rather to summon the many to come join the parade — a proposal not surprisingly shared by our hora teacher, Steven Brown of Simon Fraser University. Through singing, dancing, painting, telling fables of neurotic mobsters who visit psychiatrists, and otherwise engaging in what Ms. Dissanayake calls “artifying,” people can be quickly and ebulliently drawn together, and even strangers persuaded to treat one another as kin. Through the harmonic magic of art, the relative weakness of the individual can be traded up for the strength of the hive, cohered into a social unit ready to take on the world. As David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary theorist at Binghamton University, said, the only social elixir of comparable strength is religion, another impulse that spans cultures and time.
A slender, soft-spoken woman with a bouncy gray pageboy, a grandchild and an eclectic background, Ms. Dissanayake was trained as a classical pianist but became immersed in biology and anthropology when she and her husband moved to Sri Lanka to study elephants. She does not have a doctorate, but she has published widely, and her books —the most recent one being “Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began” — are considered classics among Darwinian theorists and art historians alike.
Perhaps the most radical element of Ms. Dissanayake’s evolutionary framework is her idea about how art got its start. She suggests that many of the basic phonemes of art, the stylistic conventions and tonal patterns, the mental clay, staples and pauses with which even the loftiest creative works are constructed, can be traced back to the most primal of collusions — the intimate interplay between mother and child.
After studying hundreds of hours of interactions between infants and mothers from many different cultures, Ms. Dissanayake and her collaborators have identified universal operations that characterize the mother-infant bond. They are visual, gestural and vocal cues that arise spontaneously and unconsciously between mothers and infants, but that nevertheless abide by a formalized code: the calls and responses, the swooping bell tones of motherese, the widening of the eyes, the exaggerated smile, the repetitions and variations, the laughter of the baby met by the mother’s emphatic refrain. The rules of engagement have a pace and a set of expected responses, and should the rules be violated, the pitch prove too jarring, the delays between coos and head waggles too long or too short, mother or baby may grow fretful or bored.
To Ms. Dissanayake, the tightly choreographed rituals that bond mother and child look a lot like the techniques and constructs at the heart of much of our art. “These operations of ritualization, these affiliative signals between mother and infant, are aesthetic operations, too,” she said in an interview. “And aesthetic operations are what artists do. Knowingly or not, when you are choreographing a dance or composing a piece of music, you are formalizing, exaggerating, repeating, manipulating expectation and dynamically varying your theme.” You are using the tools that mothers everywhere have used for hundreds of thousands of generations.
In art, as in love, as in dancing the hora, if you don’t know the moves, you really can’t fake them.
And it all starts with the babies, the babies and their mothers . . .
from today's NY Times
The Dance of Evolution, or How Art Got Its Start
By NATALIE ANGIER
Published: November 27, 2007
If you have ever been to a Jewish wedding, you know that sooner or later the ominous notes of “Hava Nagila” will sound, and you will be expected to dance the hora. And if you don’t really know how to dance the hora, you will nevertheless be compelled to join hands with others, stumble around in a circle, give little kicks and pretend to enjoy yourself, all the while wondering if there’s a word in Yiddish that means “she who stares pathetically at the feet of others because she is still trying to figure out how to dance the hora.”
I am pleased and relieved to report that my flailing days are through. This month, in a freewheeling symposium at the University of Michigan on the evolutionary value of art and why we humans spend so much time at it, a number of the presenters supplemented their standard PowerPoint presentations with hands-on activities. Some members of the audience might have liked folding the origami boxes or scrawling messages on the floor, but for me the high point came when a neurobiologist taught us how to dance the hora. As we stepped together in klezmeric, well-schooled synchrony, I felt free and exhilarated. I felt competent and loved. I felt like calling my mother. I felt, it seems, just as a dancing body should.
In the main presentation at the conference, Ellen Dissanayake, an independent scholar affiliated with the University of Washington, Seattle, offered her sweeping thesis of the evolution of art, nimbly blending familiar themes with the radically new. By her reckoning, the artistic impulse is a human birthright, a trait so ancient, universal and persistent that it is almost surely innate. But while some researchers have suggested that our artiness arose accidentally, as a byproduct of large brains that evolved to solve problems and were easily bored, Ms. Dissanayake argues that the creative drive has all the earmarks of being an adaptation on its own. The making of art consumes enormous amounts of time and resources, she observed, an extravagance you wouldn’t expect of an evolutionary afterthought. Art also gives us pleasure, she said, and activities that feel good tend to be those that evolution deems too important to leave to chance.
What might that deep-seated purpose of art-making be? Geoffrey Miller and other theorists have proposed that art serves as a sexual display, a means of flaunting one’s talented palette of genes. Again, Ms. Dissanayake has other ideas. To contemporary Westerners, she said, art may seem detached from the real world, an elite stage on which proud peacocks and designated visionaries may well compete for high stakes. But among traditional cultures and throughout most of human history, she said, art has also been a profoundly communal affair, of harvest dances, religious pageants, quilting bees, the passionate town rivalries that gave us the spires of Chartres, Reims and Amiens.
Art, she and others have proposed, did not arise to spotlight the few, but rather to summon the many to come join the parade — a proposal not surprisingly shared by our hora teacher, Steven Brown of Simon Fraser University. Through singing, dancing, painting, telling fables of neurotic mobsters who visit psychiatrists, and otherwise engaging in what Ms. Dissanayake calls “artifying,” people can be quickly and ebulliently drawn together, and even strangers persuaded to treat one another as kin. Through the harmonic magic of art, the relative weakness of the individual can be traded up for the strength of the hive, cohered into a social unit ready to take on the world. As David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary theorist at Binghamton University, said, the only social elixir of comparable strength is religion, another impulse that spans cultures and time.
A slender, soft-spoken woman with a bouncy gray pageboy, a grandchild and an eclectic background, Ms. Dissanayake was trained as a classical pianist but became immersed in biology and anthropology when she and her husband moved to Sri Lanka to study elephants. She does not have a doctorate, but she has published widely, and her books —the most recent one being “Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began” — are considered classics among Darwinian theorists and art historians alike.
Perhaps the most radical element of Ms. Dissanayake’s evolutionary framework is her idea about how art got its start. She suggests that many of the basic phonemes of art, the stylistic conventions and tonal patterns, the mental clay, staples and pauses with which even the loftiest creative works are constructed, can be traced back to the most primal of collusions — the intimate interplay between mother and child.
After studying hundreds of hours of interactions between infants and mothers from many different cultures, Ms. Dissanayake and her collaborators have identified universal operations that characterize the mother-infant bond. They are visual, gestural and vocal cues that arise spontaneously and unconsciously between mothers and infants, but that nevertheless abide by a formalized code: the calls and responses, the swooping bell tones of motherese, the widening of the eyes, the exaggerated smile, the repetitions and variations, the laughter of the baby met by the mother’s emphatic refrain. The rules of engagement have a pace and a set of expected responses, and should the rules be violated, the pitch prove too jarring, the delays between coos and head waggles too long or too short, mother or baby may grow fretful or bored.
To Ms. Dissanayake, the tightly choreographed rituals that bond mother and child look a lot like the techniques and constructs at the heart of much of our art. “These operations of ritualization, these affiliative signals between mother and infant, are aesthetic operations, too,” she said in an interview. “And aesthetic operations are what artists do. Knowingly or not, when you are choreographing a dance or composing a piece of music, you are formalizing, exaggerating, repeating, manipulating expectation and dynamically varying your theme.” You are using the tools that mothers everywhere have used for hundreds of thousands of generations.
In art, as in love, as in dancing the hora, if you don’t know the moves, you really can’t fake them.
Falling Up, 2000
ran across this while researching performer - controlled video. another Flight theme, without the "flee" aspect
"Falling Up explores concepts of gravity, flying and many of its related metaphors: the physical self, imagination, and how old beliefs hold us in place, limit and color our experiences. Inspired by inventors and pioneers, the first pilots, astronauts, and digital explorers, we examine moments in the 20th Century where technology enabled us to do something previously impossible and changed how we think forever. We also speculate on future technologies, enabling the body to be transported, modified and projected..."
"Falling Up explores concepts of gravity, flying and many of its related metaphors: the physical self, imagination, and how old beliefs hold us in place, limit and color our experiences. Inspired by inventors and pioneers, the first pilots, astronauts, and digital explorers, we examine moments in the 20th Century where technology enabled us to do something previously impossible and changed how we think forever. We also speculate on future technologies, enabling the body to be transported, modified and projected..."
Jeff's wing piece
The link is to a group of transcripts from the cockpit voice recorders (black boxes) of various flights that crashed. oddly technical and tragic a the same time.
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Once in a Poem by John Berger
From: And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory and defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known.
Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it has never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.
Poems are nearer to prayers than to stories, but in poetry there is no one behind the language being prayed to. It is the language itself which has to hear and acknowledge. For the religious poet, the Word is the first attribute of God. In all poetry words are a presence before they are a means of communication.
Yet poetry uses the same words and more or less the same syntax as, say, the Annual General Report of a multi-national corporation. (Corporations that prepare for their profit some of the most terrible battlefields of the modern world.) How then can poetry so transform language that, instead of simply communicating information, it listens and promises and fulfills the role of god?
That a poem may use the same words as a Company Report means no more than the fact that a lighthouse and a prison cell may be built with stones form the same quarry, joined by the same mortar. Everything depends upon the relation of the words. And the sum total of all these possible relations depends upon how the writer relates to language, not as vocabulary, not as syntax, not even as structure, but as principle and a presence.
The poet places language beyond the reach of time: or, more accurately, the poet approaches language as if it were a place, an assemble point, where time has no finality, where time itself is encompassed and contained.
If poetry sometimes speaks of its own immortality, the claim is more far-reaching than that of a genius of a particular poet in a particular cultural history. Immortality here should be distinguished from posthumous fame. Poetry can speak of immortality because it abandons itself to language, in the belief that language embraces all experience, past, present and future.
To speak of the promise of poetry would be misleading, for a promise projects into the future, and it is precisely the coexistence of future, present and past that poetry proposes. A promise that applies to the present and past as well as to the future can better be called an assurance.
Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory and defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known.
Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it has never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.
Poems are nearer to prayers than to stories, but in poetry there is no one behind the language being prayed to. It is the language itself which has to hear and acknowledge. For the religious poet, the Word is the first attribute of God. In all poetry words are a presence before they are a means of communication.
Yet poetry uses the same words and more or less the same syntax as, say, the Annual General Report of a multi-national corporation. (Corporations that prepare for their profit some of the most terrible battlefields of the modern world.) How then can poetry so transform language that, instead of simply communicating information, it listens and promises and fulfills the role of god?
That a poem may use the same words as a Company Report means no more than the fact that a lighthouse and a prison cell may be built with stones form the same quarry, joined by the same mortar. Everything depends upon the relation of the words. And the sum total of all these possible relations depends upon how the writer relates to language, not as vocabulary, not as syntax, not even as structure, but as principle and a presence.
The poet places language beyond the reach of time: or, more accurately, the poet approaches language as if it were a place, an assemble point, where time has no finality, where time itself is encompassed and contained.
If poetry sometimes speaks of its own immortality, the claim is more far-reaching than that of a genius of a particular poet in a particular cultural history. Immortality here should be distinguished from posthumous fame. Poetry can speak of immortality because it abandons itself to language, in the belief that language embraces all experience, past, present and future.
To speak of the promise of poetry would be misleading, for a promise projects into the future, and it is precisely the coexistence of future, present and past that poetry proposes. A promise that applies to the present and past as well as to the future can better be called an assurance.
The Flocking Party from Courtney
The Flocking Party is an interactive, non-linear web-based online story by artist Chris Landau. if you have some time and a good connection and the latest Flash installed, take a look at it. What I find interesting is how through the idea of an "electronic journal," a futuristic story about ecology, the loss of birdsong, and the reorganization of the world's political boundaries into regions by watershed, unfolds. I like its reliance on drawing - it makes me continue to think about how Jeff's drawings can be used and animated.
Friday, November 23, 2007
from jeff
I am thinking a great deal about memory, how places and objects have memories What does Kitty Hawk remember about the Wright Bros. The memory of Cape Canavral. What does the Enola Gay remember. What was the last thoughts of the planes involved in 9/11? The black boxes recording data in planes, what poetry can we find in that data?
I am also thinking about the planes and pilots susposedly lost in the Bermuda Triangle, where are they? Where is Steve Fossit?
Jeff
I am also thinking about the planes and pilots susposedly lost in the Bermuda Triangle, where are they? Where is Steve Fossit?
Jeff
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Kansas, from Lisa D.
Inspired by Daedalus and Icarus.
Who knew? (thanks Wikipedia)
Rock On...
Carry On Wayward Son
by KANSAS
Carry on my wayward son
There'll be peace when you are done
Lay your weary head to rest
Don't you cry no more
Once I rose above the noise and confusion
Just to get a glimpse beyond this illusion
I was soaring ever higher
But I flew too high
Though my eyes could see I still was a blind man
Though my mind could think I still was a mad man
I can hear the voices when I'm dreaming
I can hear them say
Carry on my wayward son
There'll be peace when you are done
Lay your weary head to rest
Don't you cry no more
Masquerading as a man with a reason
My charade is the event of the season
And if I claim to be a wise man
It surely means that I don't know
On a stormy sea of moving emotion
Tossed about I'm like a ship on the ocean
I set a course for winds of fortune
But I hear the voices say
Carry on my wayward son
There'll be peace when you are done
Lay your weary head to rest
Don't you cry no more
No!
Carry on
You will always remember
Carry on
Nothing equals the splendor
Now your life's no longer empty
Surely heaven waits for you
Carry on my wayward son
There'll be peace when you are done
Lay your weary head to rest
Don't you cry no more
Who knew? (thanks Wikipedia)
Rock On...
Carry On Wayward Son
by KANSAS
Carry on my wayward son
There'll be peace when you are done
Lay your weary head to rest
Don't you cry no more
Once I rose above the noise and confusion
Just to get a glimpse beyond this illusion
I was soaring ever higher
But I flew too high
Though my eyes could see I still was a blind man
Though my mind could think I still was a mad man
I can hear the voices when I'm dreaming
I can hear them say
Carry on my wayward son
There'll be peace when you are done
Lay your weary head to rest
Don't you cry no more
Masquerading as a man with a reason
My charade is the event of the season
And if I claim to be a wise man
It surely means that I don't know
On a stormy sea of moving emotion
Tossed about I'm like a ship on the ocean
I set a course for winds of fortune
But I hear the voices say
Carry on my wayward son
There'll be peace when you are done
Lay your weary head to rest
Don't you cry no more
No!
Carry on
You will always remember
Carry on
Nothing equals the splendor
Now your life's no longer empty
Surely heaven waits for you
Carry on my wayward son
There'll be peace when you are done
Lay your weary head to rest
Don't you cry no more
from J
funny kathy's assignment re. daedalus - i was reading up on him this morning and wondered if the clown/air traffic controller wasn't also daedalus several things intrigue me in addition to the icarus story - one seems to be that his genius/artisanship was the very thing that kept getting him into (and out of) trouble [he was almost trapped by the labyrinth
that he created, he exposed himself to minos by solving a puzzle]
another, perhaps a little more overwrought involves daedalus almost killing his nephew b/c his skills were approaching daedalus's, maybe there was something similar w/ icarus, ie icarus flew too close to the sun b/c daedalus planted the idea (to remove the competition)
J's assignment for lisa: instructions from falconer to falcon (some sensical some nonsensical) and maybe it's the falconers instruction that cause the falcons to fly out of earshot thus:
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
that he created, he exposed himself to minos by solving a puzzle]
another, perhaps a little more overwrought involves daedalus almost killing his nephew b/c his skills were approaching daedalus's, maybe there was something similar w/ icarus, ie icarus flew too close to the sun b/c daedalus planted the idea (to remove the competition)
J's assignment for lisa: instructions from falconer to falcon (some sensical some nonsensical) and maybe it's the falconers instruction that cause the falcons to fly out of earshot thus:
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
Assignments
Hey everybody!
Just got a great update from Jeff regarding the rehearsal last night. I'm carving out some time over the next few days to write, and will send some material to play with on Sunday. I have received small assignments from Kathy and Ashley and would love to have a few more for my stew pot. They can be tiny or big, according to your whim. I am pasting in Kathy's assignment to me below, to give you an example, but anything goes, so send 'em on.
Be Well,
LISA D.
KATHY'S ASSIGNMENT TO LISA
I would like for you to write some conversation between Icarus and Dedalus at any point in there relationship.
Some examples:
Deadalus explains birds to a 3 year old Icarus
Deadalus finally lets Icarus know he has been developing wings for them to fly away from their prison
the two planning their escape
conversation while flying
Icarus' thoughts flying fast on his descent into the ocean
Dedalus speaking to his son sometime after his death
or anything else that strikes your fancy
other archetypes I'm interested in:
the Wright brothers and their sister Amelia Earhart
Just got a great update from Jeff regarding the rehearsal last night. I'm carving out some time over the next few days to write, and will send some material to play with on Sunday. I have received small assignments from Kathy and Ashley and would love to have a few more for my stew pot. They can be tiny or big, according to your whim. I am pasting in Kathy's assignment to me below, to give you an example, but anything goes, so send 'em on.
Be Well,
LISA D.
KATHY'S ASSIGNMENT TO LISA
I would like for you to write some conversation between Icarus and Dedalus at any point in there relationship.
Some examples:
Deadalus explains birds to a 3 year old Icarus
Deadalus finally lets Icarus know he has been developing wings for them to fly away from their prison
the two planning their escape
conversation while flying
Icarus' thoughts flying fast on his descent into the ocean
Dedalus speaking to his son sometime after his death
or anything else that strikes your fancy
other archetypes I'm interested in:
the Wright brothers and their sister Amelia Earhart
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)