Monthly Archives: June 2016

Free Play Meta Action

Free Play June 26-16-_DSC0036

Free Play June 26-16-_DSC0035

Free Play June 26-16-_DSC0034

Free Play June 26-16-_DSC0033

“The way I look at it for the sake of giving you options is that there are rare occasions when the ethos of our free play approach trumps the scientific aesthetics of softball. Yes, technically and by one of the rules found somewhere not very near, you earned the extra base. But, I’m in general agreement with the ‘feel,’ of our group and urge you accept your best option as a solution to the ineffectiveness in this instance of the law.”

Leave a Comment

Filed under play

Morphing Fractals

Eternal One, Mighty One, Holy El, God autocrat self-originate, incorruptible, immaculate, unbegotten, spotless, immortal,
self-perfected, self-devised,
without mother, without father, ungenerated,
exalted, fiery,
just, lover of men, benevolent, compassionate, bountiful,
jealous over me, patient one, most merciful.
Eli, eternal, mighty one, holy, Sabaoth,
most glorious El, El, El, El, Iaoel,
you are he my soul has loved, my protector.
Eternal, fiery, shining,
light-giving, thunder-voiced, lightning-visioned, many-eyed… (The Apocalypse of Abraham 17.8-15)

Dionysian art […] is based on the play with intoxication/ecstasy [Rausch], with rapture [Verzu?ckung]. There are two powers in particular that trigger the self-for-gotten ecstasy [Rausch] of the nai?ve man of nature — the drive of spring and the narcotic drink. Their impacts are symbolized by the figure of Dionysus. The principium individuationis in both states is broken; the subjective disappears entirely against the force of the general-human, even the general-natural that is breaking forth. The festivals of Dionysus do not only create a bond between humans, they also reconcile the human with nature. -Friedrich Nietzsche

Leave a Comment

Filed under creative captures, cultural contradictions, nature, philosophy, Religion, self-knowledge

This Too Will Not Pass Soon

gold

In December 1964, I was ten years old. We lived at 2705 East Overlook Road in Cleveland Heights. It was a big Georgian house with a library room with built-in oak shelves. In the corner sat our big black and white TV. Because of what happened next, we would soon get a short-lived first color TV–destroyed when our siamese cat Cleo pissed into it–that would be replaced immediately.

What happened next was that the underdog Cleveland Browns won the NFL championship, their first since 1955, against the Johnny Unitas-led Baltimore Colts 27-0. Frank Ryan hit Gary Collins with three second half TD passes, and Lou the Toe Groza added two field goals. Good times.

Early the next year, my parents decided that our family would watch heartbreak in color.

The cataloging of close, but no dice, big games had come to plague Cleveland. Such moments are in the context of much more broadly deleterious losses due to Reaganomics, the inevitability of the economic process of catching up, and, the somewhat sclerotic “anti-visions” of civic leaders over decades.

But, there was always hope that a Cleveland major league sports team might someday succeed.

Hieronymus_Bosch_Ascent of the Blessed

Yesterday was just such a day. join the party: Cavstheblog.

Ulysses:
Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,
A great-sized monster of ingratitudes:
Those scraps are good deeds past; which are devour’d
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon
As done: perseverance, dear my lord,
Keeps honour bright: to have done is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail
In monumental mockery. Take the instant way;
For honour travels in a strait so narrow,
Where one but goes abreast: keep then the path;
For emulation hath a thousand sons
That one by one pursue: if you give way,
Or hedge aside from the direct forthright,
Like to an enter’d tide, they all rush by
And leave you hindmost;
Or like a gallant horse fall’n in first rank,
Lie there for pavement to the abject rear,
O’er-run and trampled on: then what they do in present,
Though less than yours in past, must o’ertop yours;
For time is like a fashionable host
That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand,
And with his arms outstretch’d, as he would fly,
Grasps in the comer: welcome ever smiles,
And farewell goes out sighing. O, let not
virtue seek
Remuneration for the thing it was;
For beauty, wit,
High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,
Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all
To envious and calumniating time.
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,
That all with one consent praise new-born gawds,
Though they are made and moulded of things past,
And give to dust that is a little gilt
More laud than gilt o’er-dusted.
The present eye praises the present object.
Then marvel not, thou great and complete man,
That all the NBA begin to worship Curry;
Since things in motion sooner catch the eye
Than what not stirs. The cry went once on thee,
And still it might, and yet it may again,
If thou wouldst not entomb thyself alive
And case thy reputation in thy tent;
Whose glorious deeds, but in these fields of late,
Made emulous missions ‘mongst the gods themselves
And drave great Mars to faction.

Troilus and Cressida Act 3, Scene 3
William Shakespeare

Leave a Comment

Filed under Cleveland, play

Body Acting Virtually I.

Interaction-Design.org Youtube channel

Leave a Comment

Filed under experiential learning, philosophy, psychological anthropology, psychology, web 2.0+

Forced Choice

Forced-Choice

In sixty seconds,

(1) Pick your favorite.

(2) Pick your least favorite.

LearningCycle

Experiential Learning:
Fourth Annual Experiential Learning Conference June 16-17, 2016

Hunting and Gathering In the Cleveland Art Museum
(Thursday June 16, 1:45pm) facilitated by Stephen Calhoun, squareONE:experiential toolmakers

Hunting and Gathering sets eager learners to the playful of task of exploring and
discovering consequential relationships between their personal learning goal and novel data able to be hunted down and gathered in the galleries or environs of the Cleveland Art Museum. This experiential tool blends a model of collaborative experiential learning with a framework for deliberately animating a learning space.


Here listed are several aspects of experience and learning I am fascinated by, and, drawn to theorize about, in a most informal way. Other times, I rope in subjects and do experiments!

One–entanglements of contexts and their contextualizations; abductive contextualizing
Two–personal culture and the geneaology of individualized knowledge
Three–hidden contingencies, webs of uncertainty, biosemiotic fragility
Four–novelties, serendipities, oracles, synchrons

Leave a Comment

Filed under experiential learning, folk psychology, Gregory Bateson, proto-post-disciplinarity, psychological anthropology, psychology, self-knowledge, serendipity, social psychology, organizational development

Free Play Motley Crew

the bop

the bop

the catch

the catch

the crew

the crew


 

Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment. Jean Baudrillard

Blue-Cap-540sm

Leave a Comment

Filed under play

All Aboard

alchemical_narrative-768x994

The Topological Media Lab (TML) was established in 2001 as a trans-disciplinary atelier-laboratory for collaborative research creation. In 2005, TML moved to Concordia University and the Hexagram research network in Montréal, Canada.Its projects serve as case studies in the construction of fresh modes of cultural knowledge and the critical studies of media arts and techno-science, bringing together practices of speculative inquiry, scientific investigation and artistic research-creation practices. The TML’s technical research areas include: realtime video, sound synthesis, embedded sensors, gesture tracking, physical computing, media choreography, and active textiles. Its application areas lie in movement arts, speculative architecture, and experimental philosophy.

monkeys_cards_boel_teniers

Ice Cracking, Einstein's dreams, 2013 from Topological Media Lab on Vimeo.

Leave a Comment

Filed under art, artists, creative captures, music, proto-post-disciplinarity

One Sided Dream

Sea dream by Stephen Calhoun

Sea Dream (Stephen Calhoun)

There is so much of theoretical and practical interest in supposing that art, artistry, and the artistic experience, transcend most, if not all, the closely defended normative socio-cultural-philosophical perspectives about WHAT IS ART? that what I would term “platform issues” become hidden away almost from the get-go.

Google’s Deep Dream platform embeds bizarre animalistic features in uploaded images. Because Google rolls out Deep Dream with a lot of cultural force, the new creative platform receives a huge amount of attention.

Meanwhile, Leonardo Solaas’s Dreamlines (2005-2014) and Doodl (2010-2016), neither of which are one-tricksters like Deep Dream, received almost no attention. Except, there is a creative sub-culture concerned with computer-generated and computer-assisted art. It has been around for fifty years. The first computer-generated art dates back to the sixties. This came to be a movement but, such so-called machine art remains a sub-culture as against what is termed New Media. And, oddly, Digital Art has come to be the catch-all term for anything that is unacceptably ‘facile;’ and so it is that an absurd dividing line has been etched.

gate dream

Gate Dream (Stephen Calhoun) 2016

Can Google’s Deep Dream become an art machine?

“Deep Dream was never about the aesthetics for me,” says Akten, a fine artist and PhD candidate at Goldsmiths University in London. Instead he was impressed by the way the machine learning manages to mimic and interact with human visual perception.

“It might look like Deep Dream is generating say, sparrow’s faces in clouds, but what it is actually doing is generating patterned noise, which our brains try to find meaning in.” Akten. “It creates just enough of a sparrow’s head in a cloud, so that our brains find the rest. Visually, our minds and Deep Dream are doing exactly the same thing. It’s such a perfect mirror. I love that conceptual aspect.”

“which our brains try to find meaning in.”
Palm slap! But, our brains aren’t finding, our brains are composing.

law dream

The Law Dream (Stephen Calhoun) 2016

Because Google Deep Dream traffics in its single trick, and the results are almost always grotesque, it isn’t an appealing tool. Where there is zero control, the end product is not one I really want to see! Still, the above piece intrigues me and likely will be my last creative word, or image, using the GDD facility.

Setting aside the usual prejudices of artists who think any manipulation of pixels is, (for lack of a better all-encompassing term,) decadent, the fundamental expansion of facility provided by processing power, whether it is a Photoshop plug-in or a one-trick neural network, or, advanced repainting as is the case with Processing apps, and Python/Java driven search and manipulation, plus all the other “facile” application platforms, at a minimum reveals possibilities which are not otherwise available.

Add to this elements of trial-and-error, serendipity, and under-determination, and new media techniques put a ton of pressure on, for example, the social and hermeneutic theories, theories which are concerned with masterful individual artistic projections of intentionality within social-historical contexts. I have a lot to assert about all of this from the perspective of a creative person leveraging other person’s programming innovation for the sake of producing visual experiences, and, producing art.

Ironically, Google’s Deep Dream is a play-toy when it is compared with software, the brilliant browser interfaces of Leonardo Solaas, Dreamlines, and the Doodl dashboard (2010-2016,) and, a handful of unique iPad apps. I used the Doodl dashboard to help me create most of my generative art work between 2014-2015.  See: Sun Ra In Heaven (2015).

 

Leave a Comment

Filed under art, artists, creative captures, cultural contradictions, dada, visual experiments, my art

Silence, Healing

Heraclitus Throws Down

Failure does not matter in life. To a progressive person even a thousand failures do not matter. He keeps success before his view, and success is his even after a thousand failures. The greatest pity is when life comes to a standstill and does not move any further; a sensible person prefers death to such a life. (Pir Inayat Khan)

Leave a Comment

Filed under adult learning, experiential learning, philosophy, zen