theory - Ruben Van Havermaet on Diigo

29 Jan 09

Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?

a reference site to a collection of papers concerning the simulation argument

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philosophy simulation matrix computer science reality technology theory

28 Jan 09

Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?

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simulation computer technology philosophy articles theory

It
may be possible for simulated civilizations to become posthuman. They may then
run their own ancestor-simulations on powerful computers they build in their simulated
universe. Such computers would be “virtual machines”, a familiar concept in computer
science. (Java script web-applets, for instance, run on a virtual machine – a
simulated computer – inside your desktop.) Virtual machines can be stacked: it’s
possible to simulate a machine simulating another machine, and so on, in arbitrarily
many steps of iteration. If we do go on to create our own ancestor-simulations,
this would be strong evidence against (1) and (2), and we would therefore have to conclude that we live
in a simulation. Moreover, we would have to suspect that the posthumans running
our simulation are themselves simulated beings; and their creators, in turn, may
also be simulated beings.
Reality
may thus contain many levels.

10 Oct 08

"The End of Art" by Roger Kimball

Throughout modern history, the traditional link between beauty and art has gradually disappeared. This essay represents Kimball's ode to reinstall this link.

www.firstthings.com/article.php3 - Preview

art aesthetics religion critic theory culture

The subjugation of art—and of cultural life generally—to political ends has been one of the great spiritual tragedies of our age

04 Aug 08

Cyberwar, God and Television: Interview with Paul Virilio

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artscience body cinema culture newmedia philosophy postmodernism theory technology television virilio

Beyond Postmodernism? Paul Virilio's Hypermodern Cultural Theory, John Armitage

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10 May 08

Postmodern Thought

a large collection of links concerning postmodernism and its thinkers

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Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age

This article describes a new learning theory, connectivism, that's more adapted to the needs of our digital age.

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connectivism education learning theory technology

Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network,
and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that
occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements –
not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning (defined as
actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization
or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets,
and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than
our current state of knowing

09 May 08

Mary Klages about Postmodernism

YAIP - yet another introduction to postmodernism

www.colorado.edu/...pomo.html - Preview

postmodernism pomo theory literary_theory philosophy

General Introduction to Postmodernism

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philosophy theory postmodernism pomo culture

individual subject is seen as valued, a new emphasis
is placed on internal feelings and inspiration
move epic form away from external battles and
inwards towards the formation of an individual subject
48 more annotations...
- rise of urbanization
  leads to a counter-reaction: artists begin to extol the value of nature,
  including sublime landscapes like mountains and oceans that would have
  been considered forbidding by early-eighteenth-century aestheticians
- formation of the Romantic hero
- firmly entrenched
  in guilt culture
- the rise of autobiography
  as a genre
- emergent
  mass market
- new emphasis on individualism
- Caspar David Friedrich's
  "Wanderer"
- invited to take on his point-of-view
- experience his
  emotions before the grandeur of the scene before him.
- final establishment of
  the middle class as the dominant ruling class
- establish the novel as the middle class' primary
  artistic form
- formation
  of a mass market
- turns away
  from the exotic experimentation of Romantic poetry and instead offers
  a critique of Romantic ideals
- Victorian architecture
  (particularly the centrality of the hearth and the separation of rooms
  by hallways) helps to establish spaces where private identity and domesticity
  can be established
- There is still a belief
  among many thinkers in concepts such as truth and progress; however, the
  means taken to achieve utopic goals are often extreme
- fascism, nazism, communism,
  anarchism
- surrealism,
  dadaism, cubism, futurism, expressionism, existentialism, primitivism,
  minimalism, etc.
- this radicalism is driven by a sense that
  Enlightenment values may be suspect. Modernists therefore participate
  in a general questioning of all the values held dear by the Victorian
  period (narrative, referentiality, religion, progress, bourgeois domesticity,
  capitalism, utilitarianism, decorum, empire, industry, etc.)
- In general, there is a fear that things
  have gone off track
- self-reflexivity
- an exploration of psychological
  and subjective states
- alternative ways of thinking about representation
- radical experimentation in form
- fragmentation in form and representation
- extreme ambiguity and simultaneity in structure
- some experimentation in the breakdown between high
  and low forms
- the use of parody and irony
- postmodern artists and theorists continue
  the sorts of experimentation that we can also find in modernist works,
  including the use of self-consciousness, parody, irony, fragmentation,
  generic mixing, ambiguity, simultaneity, and the breakdown between high
  and low forms of expression
- others
  prefer to represent the move into postmodernism as a more radical break
- Many date postmodernity from the sixties when we witnessed the rise of
  postmodern architecture; however, some critics prefer to see WWII as the
  radical break from modernity, since the horrors of nazism (and of other
  modernist revolutions like communism and Maoism) were made evident at
  this time
- extreme self-reflexivity
- In modernism, self-reflexivity tended to be used by "high"
  artists in difficult works (eg. Picasso's painting above); in postmodernism,
  self-reflexive strategies can be found in both high art and everything
  from Seinfeld to MTV
- postmodern architecture, this effect is achieved
  by keeping visible internal structures and engineering elements
- irony and parody
- a breakdown between high and low cultural forms
- Postmodernists
  by contrast often employ pop and mass-produced objects in more immediately
  understandable ways, even if their goals are still often complex (eg.
  Andy Warhol's commentary on mass production and on the commercial aspects
  of "high" art through the exact reproduction of a set of Cambell's
  Soup boxes—on the left)
- retro
- fascinated with styles and fashions from the past,
  which they will often use completely out of their original context
- Jameson and Baudrillard tend to read this tendency as a
  symptom of our loss of connection with historical temporality
- a questioning of grand narratives
- visuality and the simulacrum
  vs. temporality
- As a result, Baudrillard and others have argued (for example, through
  the notion of the simulacrum)
  that we have lost all connection to reality or history
- keeps coming back to the idea that the line separating
  reality and representation has broken down
- (Wag the Dog, Dark
  City, the Matrix, the Truman Show, etc.)
- late capitalism
- disorientation
- attempts to
  disorient the subject entering its space
- secondary orality

08 May 08

Introduction to Jean Baudrillard, Module on Postmodernity

An introduction to Baudrillard's writings. Furthermore, the root of this site provides an introduction to postmodern theory in general.

www.cla.purdue.edu/...baudrillardpostmodernity.html - Preview

baudrillard philosophy postmodernism theory

12 Mar 08

Reactie op "De dialectiek van de Verlichting" door Leo Apostel

www.marxists.org/...1989verlichting.htm - Preview

enlightenment philosophy postmodernism theory

18 Jan 08

Lev Manovich forthcoming book 'Info Aesthetics'

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aesthetics art books culture design newmedia theory

detect
emerging aesthetics and computer-based cultural forms specific to information
society
systematic comparison of our own period with the beginning
of the 20th century when modernist artists created new aesthetics, new forms,
new representational techniques, and new symbols of industrial society
4 more annotations...
- if the shift from modernism to informationalism
- has been accompanied by a shift from form to information,
  can we reduce information to forms, meaningful to a human?
- Avant-garde as Software.” I first show that the 1920s
  avant-garde techniques became transformed into the conventions of modern human-computer
  interface and software, thus functioning as a foundation of post-industrial
  labor
- challenge before us is to figure out how to employ these tools to create
  new art; in short, how to interface them not to quantified data but to human
  experience, subjectivity and memory

Video Game Aesthetics: the future

a report on current game industry's fetisch with visual realism

modetwo.net/...index.html - Preview

art culture design newmedia technology theory videogames

30 Dec 07

The Work Of Art in the Age Of Digital Reproduction

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aesthetics art culture newmedia postmodernism theory

Peter Lyman
the cybernetic premise upon which computer
programs were based led inevitably to the centralization of control
1 more annotations...
- Here is where the aura
  resides. In the originality of the moment when we see, hear, read, repeat,
  revise. Not in the thing itself

29 Dec 07

'The Postmodern Condition A Report on Knowledge' by Lyotard

www.marxists.org/...lyotard.htm - Preview

culture newmedia philosophy postmodernism theory

prescriptions
Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorised in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange
48 more annotations...
- knowledge has become the principle force of production over the last few decades
- major bottleneck for the developing countries
- gap between developed and developing countries will grow ever wider
- nation-states will one day fight for control of information
- ideology of communicational “transparency,” which goes hand in hand with the commercialisation of knowledge, will begin to perceive the State as a factor of opacity and “noise.”
- multi-national corporations
- visualise learning circulating along the same lines as money
- “payment knowledge” and “investment knowledge”
- flows of knowledge travelling along identical channels of identical nature, some of which would be reserved for the “decision makers,” while the others would be used to repay each person’s perpetual debt with respect to the social bond
- fails to challenge the general paradigm of progress in science and technology, to which economic growth and the expansion of sociopolitical power seem to be natural complements
- In the first place,
- scientific knowledge does not represent the totality of knowledge
- narrative knowledge
- second point – the scientists’ demoralisation has an impact on the central problem of legitimation
- Legitimation is the process by which a legislator is authorised to promulgate such a law as a norm
- The point is that there is a strict interlinkage between the kind of language called science and the kind called ethics and politics: they both stem from the same perspective, the same “choice” if you will – the choice called the Occident
- who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to be decided? In the computer age, the question of knowledge is now more than ever a question of government
- emphasising facts of language and in particular their pragmatic aspect
- prescriptions
- Wittgenstein,
- each of the various categories of utterance can be defined in terms of rules specifying their properties and the uses to which they can be put
- language games
- three observations about language games
- their rules do not carry within themselves their own legitimation, but are the object of a contract, explicit or not, between players
- that if there are no rules, there is no game, that even an infinitesimal modification of one rule alters the nature of the game, that a “move” or utterance that does not satisfy the rules does not belong to the game
- every utterance should be thought of as a “move” in a game
- first principle underlying our method as a whole: to speak is to fight, in the sense of playing, and speech acts fall within the domain of a general agonistics
- the second principle
- the observable social bond is composed of language “moves.”
- If we wish to discuss knowledge in the most highly developed contemporary society, we must answer the preliminary question of what methodological representation to apply to that society
- two basic representational models for society
- Talcott Parsons
- Marxist current
- mpossible to know what the state of knowledge is
- without knowing something of the society within which it is situated
- One can decide that the principal role of knowledge is as an indispensable element in the functioning of society, and act in accordance with that decision, only if one has already decided that society is a giant machine
- Conversely, one can count on its critical function, and orient its development and distribution in that direction, only after it has been decided that society does not form an integrated whole, but remains haunted by a principle of oppositions
- It is tempting to avoid the decision altogether by distinguishing two kinds of knowledge
- positivist kind
- critical, reflexive, or hermeneutic kind
- I find this partition solution unacceptable
- no longer relevant for the societies with which we are concerned
- Increasingly, the central question is becoming who will have access to the information these machines must have in storage to guarantee that the right decisions are made
- A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before
- one is always located at a post through which various kinds of messages pass
- the system can and must encourage such movement to the extent that it combats its own entropy, the novelty of an unexpected “move,” with its correlative displacement of a partner or group of partners, can supply the system with that increased performativity it forever demands and consumes
- language games are the minimum relation required for society to exist
- The atoms are placed at the crossroads of pragmatic relationships, but they are also displaced by the messages that traverse them, in perpetual motion

'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' by Walter Benjamin

www.marxists.org/...benjamin.htm - Preview

aesthetics art culture newmedia philosophy theory

factors of movement which are in reality those of the camera, not to mention special camera angles, close-ups
the audience takes the position of the camera; its approach is that of testing
48 more annotations...
- First, process reproduction is more independent of the original than manual reproduction
- Secondly, technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself
- yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated
- The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced
- “aura”
- the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition
- By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence
- permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced
- intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements
- During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well
- Riegl and Wickhoff
- if changes in the medium of contemporary perception can be comprehended as decay of the aura, it is possible to show its social causes
- the social bases of the contemporary decay of the aura
- related to the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life
- the desire of contemporary masses to bring things “closer” spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction
- Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former
- Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing importance of statistics
- The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition
- the unique value of the “authentic” work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value
- for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual
- But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics
- Works of art are received and valued on different planes. Two polar types stand out; with one, the accent is on the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the work
- for the first time – and this is the effect of the film – man has to operate with his whole living person, yet forgoing its aura. For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it
- Consequently, the aura that envelops the actor vanishes, and with it the aura of the figure he portrays
- The stage actor identifies himself with the character of his role. The film actor very often is denied this opportunity
- Nothing more strikingly shows that art has left the realm of the “beautiful semblance” which, so far, had been taken to be the only sphere where art could thrive.
- feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor before the camera
- basically of the same kind as the estrangement felt before one’s own image in the mirror. But now the reflected image has become separable, transportable
- Before the public
- consumers who constitute the market
- The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity
- directives
- instructive to note how their desire to class the film among the “arts” forces these theoreticians to read ritual elements into it
- camera
- an increasing number of readers became writers
- the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character
- in the studio the mechanical equipment has penetrated so deeply into reality that its pure aspect freed from the foreign substance of equipment is the result of a special procedure, namely, the shooting by the specially adjusted camera and the mounting of the shot together with other similar ones.
- the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology
- for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment
- Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art
- The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert
- great social significance
- greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public
- characteristics of the film
- manner in which
- man presents himself to mechanical equipment
- manner in which, by means of this apparatus, man can represent his
  environment
- Evidently a different
  nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye – if only because
  an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously
  explored by man

Ruben Van Havermaet's Library tagged theory → View Popular

Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?

Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?

"The End of Art" by Roger Kimball

Cyberwar, God and Television: Interview with Paul Virilio

Beyond Postmodernism? Paul Virilio's Hypermodern Cultural Theory, John Armitage

Postmodern Thought

Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age

Mary Klages about Postmodernism

General Introduction to Postmodernism

Introduction to Jean Baudrillard, Module on Postmodernity

Reactie op "De dialectiek van de Verlichting" door Leo Apostel

Lev Manovich forthcoming book 'Info Aesthetics'

Video Game Aesthetics: the future

The Work Of Art in the Age Of Digital Reproduction

'The Postmodern Condition A Report on Knowledge' by Lyotard

'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' by Walter Benjamin

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