Mekka

David Cronenberg's Body Language - New York Times

"...loss is inevitable, especially when you're speaking about the loss of people. You've got to find a way to come to terms with it. Part of my project, consciously or not, has always been to alter my own sense of aesthetics so that the things that some people find horrible, I don't find horrible. I think they're beautiful."

Can such loss be made beautiful?

"Absolutely. It is the inevitable human experience, isn't it? If you live long enough, you'll lose everybody else, and if you don't, they'll lose you. There is sadness; there is separation; there is loss; there is physical decay. And if you want to say that you've embraced life fully, you have to embrace all of those things. A lot of natural processes are considered horrific or disgusting or repulsive, and I always found that really hard to understand, even though I might have experienced it myself. You do not turn away from these things."

(Found at New York Times)

Here Be Dragons

Here Be Dragons

I stumbled upon this project a few months ago. Every few weeks or so I would go back to the project page and read it again. Each time I would think " i should blog it, that's so fascinating." Here you go:

Here Be Dragons, by Todd Furmanski uses emergent and genetic algorithms to generate virtual spaces. Through use of digital "genes", Lindenmeyer ("L") Systems, cellular automata and other procedural methods, users can navigate and interact with a world containing architecture and creatures that had no direct human designer.

A creature or structure within the virtual space has feedback mechanisms, as well as rules for creation, that combat potential haphazard forms. A city can react to a user much the same way a creature does, as both rely on very similar agent and genetic algorithms. In turn, the creatures and cities may interact with each other, as their protocols are virtually the same.

Very often in designed virtual spaces a user can hit the boundaries too quickly, finding an invisible wall or contrivance that foils further exploration. In Here Be Dragons, creating a new city takes a fraction of a second, as the computer simply has to generate a new space from existing formulas.

At first, the user/explorer will see a foggy terrain, with a city-like entity in the distance, and one or two virtual creatures wandering the landscape. While much of the space has been subject to random and algorithmic variance, one city and a few creatures are specifically placed within eyesight of the explorer, for orientation and direction. They may seek or flee the explorer, and will respond in different, often unexpected ways to the user’s actions.

Both cities and creatures remain fairly rare throughout the space. While the program has the ability to flood the environment with countless objects, a certain cultivation of rarity exists to make encounters more meaningful.

[Found via we make money not art]

Definition of Art?

Ramachandran on art:

"visual foreplay before the climax of recognition." 

I like it.

(via Mind Hacks)

Avalon

Avalon:

"Avalon (the 2001 film by Mamoru Oshii, not the 1990 Barry Levinson film) is perhaps the one game movie I've seen that has something important to say about immersive games.  (netflix)

It's the story of Ash, an VR  gamer in a post-apocalyptic Eastern Bloc country. It nods to lots of old, familiar forces -- the drive to be the best player, the desire to find the hidden level at any cost, the allure of a virtual world that is better than reality.  These are familiar to game theory, Oshii shows them nicely, but they aren't the point.

Very, very quietly,  Oshii shows a hint of a game world that can create deep emotional resonances beyond the excitement of flow, the musical groove of the pinball wizard.  It's not about social software -- Ash is a loner in a software environment that demands collaboration.  It's not about sex; Ash is sexy in the real world but covered in a body-armor chador in the game.

Avalon shows us how games could be about recognition and humanity,  about the sense of the uncanny -- of meeting something familiar and human that you've never quite seen before, of seeing something you see all the time transformed into a completely different kind of signifier.  Games could do this -- they haven't, but they could. It'd be worth trying.

(I think it was George Landow who put me onto this.  Avalon really should be the talk of the game theory world.)

Avalon is also interesting as a comic; the pictures move, yes, but it's conceived and written as a combination of text and image, not as a film. The filmmakers are Japanese, the actors speak Polish, and the film was made for Hong Kong: nobody is really supposed to hear the dialog and so almost everything needs to be carried in the sound effects or pure visuals.

Is the dark-haired woman with a streak of gray an allusion?  I notice it shows up in Nowhere Girl as well, a very different comic with a sometimes-similar approach to art direction.  Did I miss a cultural moment or something?"

Via Mark Bernstein

Mice with human brains?

Mice with human brains?:

Scientists have begun producing chimeras— hybrid creatures that are part human, part animal.

In 2003, Chinese scientists fused human cells with rabbit eggs. The embryos were allowed to develop for several days before the researchers destroyed them to harvest their stem cells.

At the Mayo Clinic last year pigs were created that had human blood flowing through their bodies.

Irving Weissman, from Stanford University in California, has already created mice with brains that are about one percent human.

Later this year he may try to inject human neurons into the brains of embryonic mice, giving the animals 100 percent human brains.

Before being born, the mice would be killed and dissected to see if the architecture of a human brain had formed. If it did, he'd look for traces of human cognitive behavior.

Weissman hopes the experiment leads to a better understanding of how the brain works, which would be useful in treating diseases like Alzheimer or Parkinson. For scientists indeed, more humanlike animals make better research model for testing drugs or growing "spare parts," such as livers, to transplant into humans.

Not all chimeras are considered troubling: faulty human heart valves can now be replaced with ones taken from cows and pigs; and for years scientists have added human genes to bacteria and farm animals.

What's problematic here is the mixing of human stem cells with embryonic animals to create new species.

While conceding that these studies would lead to some medical breakthroughs, many believe animals have the right to exist without being tampered with or crossed with another species.

Via Slashdot National Geographic.

7,000 Years of Religious Ritual Is Traced in Mexico

7,000 Years of Religious Ritual Is Traced in Mexico

Archaeologists have traced the development of religion in one location over a 7,000-year period, reporting that as an early society changed from foraging to settlement to the formation of an archaic state, religion also evolved to match the changing social structure.

This archaeological record, because of its length and completeness, sheds an unusually clear light on the origins of religion, a universal human behavior but one whose evolutionary and social roots are still not well understood.

balance

Balance (8 min) is an Oscar award winning short animation piece by the Lauenstein brothers. "Balance turns a black comedy into a meditation on human interdependence" [flash, click on last link at bottom of page]

Duchamp opened up modern art...

Cut the crap - Duchamp opened up modern art

Marcel Duchamp's "readymade" Fountain has been named the World's Most Influential work of modern art, according to 500 artists, curators, critics and dealers in a survey conducted by Turner Prize sponsor Gordon's. (more inside)
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Can you take a picture of a thought?

Can you take a picture of a thought?

Perhaps the largest non-profit you never heard of, the Chevy Chase, Maryland-based Howard Hughes Medical Institute recently decided on the long-term mission of their currently-under-construction $500 million research facility in Ashburn, Virginia. Janelia Farm will strive to understand human consciousness in a 100-year timeframe. They plan to accomplish this by attracting the best and brightest, and non-conventional scientific minds to live at or near the research facility, and to work in a collaborative, the sky's the limit type environment.

disclaimer: I work for HHMI in a non-scientific role.
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64=65?

64=65? there must be some kind of trick to this, right? [MetaFilter]