physical virtual

A conversation about the impact of the internet on contemporary visual culture with some of London’s leading young voices in digital media and post-internet art.

The panel comprised Paul Hobson (Contemporary Art Society Director), Sarah Page (Contemporary Art Society Membership Programmes Manager), Attilia Fattori Franchini, a bright and rising curator working with digital media and co-director of online gallery, bubblebyte.org, and acclaimed artist and member of the collective, LuckyPDF, Yuri Pattison.

It is not enough to imagine post-internet art as being only computer or internet based, but rather it can be identified as any art that is influenced by the internet and digital media. Informed by questions around the collapse of the traditional physical exhibition space, the reproducibility of the digital image, decentralised authorship, and further into ideas around the development of attention as currency. Post-internet art is a subject of our contemporary moment and we delighted to invite your views, questions and thoughts on it in an evening of discussion and debate.

Image: Yuri Pattison, Focal Plane (detail), image courtesy the artist, 2013.

Talk - Conversations on Contemporary Art: Post-Internet Art

Tom Giannattasio, Founder/CEO of Macaw, “the superhot web design tool of the future”, joins Zeldman to discuss a paradigm shift: can we really draw semantic HTML and succinct CSS? How it works. Pixels, percentages, ems, or rems? Designing a design tool. How to quit your job. From Kickstarter to startup. Team building. Responsive design, responsive community.  

117 The Real Macaw: Stop Writing Code, Start Drawing It

SynTalk thinks about the ontological (mind independent) aspects of Beauty and aesthetics in areas such as mathematics, arts, poetry, literature, music, sculpture, and photography, while constantly pondering whether Beauty is important. The historicity and present status of Beauty is discussed in contexts of intuition, justice, goodness, religion, and boredom. In a sense the conversation follows the opposite of phenomenological / epistemological conception of ‘beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder’. The concepts are derived off / from Advaita, Zen / Buddhism, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Ockham, Descartes, Kant, Gauss, Goethe, Schiller, Jane Austen, Weber, Coomaraswamy, Raja Rao, Tagore, Walter Benjamin, Einstein, Sri Aurobindo, Derrida, Cartier-Bresson, Nisargadatta, Warhol, and Eliot, among others. We also discuss if there are mathematical analogies to Beauty. How does the human spirit embody itself in art (say, ‘scraptures’)? What is the role of aesthetic training? When & why does boredom set in? What is an aesthetic emotion? What is the role of ‘surprise’? The SynTalkrs are: Yaron Barzilay (philosophy, New Acropolis, Mumbai), Arzan Khambatta (sculpture, Mumbai), Prof. Makarand Paranjape (literature, JNU, New Delhi), & Prof. Dipendra Prasad (mathematics, TIFR, Mumbai)

#TOOB (The Ontology Of Beauty) --- SynTalk

A piece I wrote for musicians at Guildhall, with me cueing the electronic voices.  Musical direction by James Weeks.

Gesualdo Interludes

An introduction to social ontology given by Margaret Archer at a Centre for Social Ontology event in June 2014

What is social ontology? An introduction in 13 minutes by Margaret Archer

This podcast by Dave Elder-Vass (Loughborough University) is from a Centre for Social Ontology event in January 2015. Unfortunately it cuts off a few minutes from the end - sorry!

Prosumption – the unpaid performance of productive work by ‘consumers’ who thus help commercial businesses to generate a profit – is perhaps the most studied of the many hybrid forms of economic practice that have proliferated in the digital economy. A number of critical accounts have analysed prosumption in terms of Marx’s labour theory of value, suggesting for example that as prosumers do useful work for free they are infinitely exploited by the firms that profit as a result. But such accounts analyse the digital economy in terms that were derived from the nineteenth century factory – and terms that were highly questionable even in that context.

The spectacular mismatch between this model of capitalism and the case of prosumption exposes the inadequacy of the standard monolithic conception of capitalism as a homogeneous and universal contemporary economic form – a conception that at a certain level is also shared by the marketised discourse of mainstream economics. We need a new ontology of economic form that goes beyond the totalising concepts of mode of production and market economy and instead provides us with tools for understanding the sheer diversity of forms of economic practice in the contemporary economy. This paper offers the concept of appropriative practices as a contribution to such an ontology and applies it to the case of prosumption.

Prosumption, appropriation and the ontology of economic form

Jochen Runde at the CSO Digital Social Ontology Symposium

Non-materiality and the Ontology of Digital Objects

What is a (hard) problem? Can we know which problems do not have solutions? Is scheduling flights a hard problem? Is assembling cars an easy problem? Theoretically, are there more problems (uncountable) than solutions (countably many)? Are algorithms well defined? Are they a finite description for infinitely many possible inputs & processes? What is not an algorithm? Can processes be algorithmic and not computational? Does it matter how algorithms are embodied? Is every algorithm a Turing Machine? Is there a difference between equations and algorithms? Can algorithms be approximate? Where do heuristics come from? Are comparisons the easiest measurement? Do physical symbols always underlie any computation? Are the best algorithms exponential? Is there infinite richness of algorithms, & are computers infinitely reconfigurable machines? How is the real world abstracted (& discretized)? Do problems need analog computing, since (real life) variables are usually (?) continuous and not discrete? Is a recipe, then, an algorithm? Is the brain a computer? Is the world analog or digital? Do algorithms have an ontology? Are algorithms abstractions? Are they here to stay? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from logic & theoretical computer science (Prof. Anuj Dawar, Cambridge University, Cambridge), & operations research & industrial engineering (Prof. Ashok K. Mittal, ex-IIT Kanpur, New Delhi). Listen in....

#TMOA (The Metaness Of Algorithms) --- SynTalk

M96MC Methodology, Ontology, Epistemology

Ontology (Form and Content)

Scientists are developing tools that allow you to digitally feel textures like wood and cotton.

Can You Feel Me Now? The Science of Digitizing Touch

The father of the Web speaks on social business, collaboration, and the semantic web.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee at Lotusphere

A conversation about the Challenge of Collaboration with Anthony Stravianakis in a bit noisy Kitchen at Berkeley University Campus. Anthony have seens 2006 been working closely together with Paul Rabinow. 

The conversation take about the challenge of collaboration in big projects like:
The STIR project (STIR: Socio Technical Integration Research - http://cns.asu.edu/research/stir
The Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC), http://www.synberc.org
and the bio hackerspace, Biocurius, http://biocurious.org/

The conversation also touch upon the Question, What is the right ontology for Applied Philosophy? 

Anthony Stavrianakis, about Collaboration

John Searle at the University of Cologne
American Philosopher accepts Albertus Magnus Professorship 2013

John Searle is one of the most important philosophers of language of our time. As Albertus Magnus Professor, he will be holding lectures and a seminar on the themes of "Language and Social Ontology", "Mind and Brain" as well as "Perception and Intentionality" from 6th till 8th May, 2013 at the University of Cologne.

More on:
https://www.youtube.com/user/UniversitaetzuKoeln

physical virtual

Jonnylives