Haenyo
June 18th, 2013

Via Wikipedia: "The haenyo, literally meaning sea women, are female divers in the Korean province of Jeju. They are representative of the matriarchal family structure of Jeju.

Until the 19th century, diving was mostly done by men. The job became unprofitable for men since they had to pay heavy taxes, unlike women who did not. Women took over the diving (which was considered the lowest of jobs) and, because of the great dependence on sea products in most places on Jeju, became the main breadwinners. It could also be said that women simply were more adapted for the job, with their bodies keeping them warmer and being more suited to swimming than a male, with more body fat. With that, they often became the head of their family. On Mara Island, where sea products accounted for almost all sources of revenue before it became increasingly attractive as a tourist site, gender roles were entirely reversed. Often men would look after the children and go shopping while the women would bring in money for the family.
This evolution clashed with Korea's Confucian culture, in which women have traditionally been treated as inferior. As a result, administrators from Seoul (unsuccessfully) tried to bar the women from diving, ostensibly because they exposed bare skin while at sea.

Haenyo are skilled divers who are known to be able to hold their breath for almost two minutes and dive to depths of 20 meters. The divers must also contend with other dangers such as jellyfish, and sharks."

Also, check out the German Haenyo documentary.
Thanks to Lena Willikens!

Filed under: Wunderkammer

A movement?
June 15th, 2013

Via Wikipedia: "Speculative realism is a movement in contemporary philosophy which defines itself loosely in its stance of metaphysical realism against the dominant forms of post-Kantian philosophy or what it terms correlationism. Speculative realism takes its name from a conference held at Goldsmiths College, University of London in April, 2007. The conference was moderated by Alberto Toscano of Goldsmiths College, and featured presentations by Ray Brassier of American University of Beirut (then at Middlesex University), Iain Hamilton Grant of the University of the West of England, Graham Harman of the American University in Cairo, and Quentin Meillassoux of the École normale supérieure in Paris. Credit for the name speculative realism is generally ascribed to Brassier, though Meillassoux had already used the term speculative materialism to describe his own position. [...]

What unites the four core members of the movement is an attempt to overcome both correlationism as well as philosophies of access. In After Finitude, Meillassoux defines correlationism as 'the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.' Philosophies of access are any of those philosophies which privilege the human being over other entities. Both ideas represent forms of anthropocentrism."

Also, check out the Speculative Realism Aggregator.

Filed under: Wunderkammer

Projection mapping onto moving objects
May 18th, 2013

Projection mapping, i.e. video projection perfectly fitted onto 3-dimensional objects, has developed in recent years into a popular technology in art, architecture and design. The next stage of this technology was researched by Dipl.-Ing. Gerrit Kress in his final year project Projection Mapping onto moving objects. To this end, he developed a prototype with the Cologne design agency GROSSE 8, that made it possible to map onto a rotating object. He used the software vvvv and the Arduino development platform. Gerrit Kress was invited to hold a workshop about this prototype at the Node Forum 2013, the most important congress relating to the software vvvv.

The final exam was supervised as part of the Audio and Video Engineering program by University of Applied Sciences Düsseldorf professor Dr. Karin Welkert-Schmitt and me at the Institute For Music And Media.

Filed under: Students

5 corrupting influences are keeping the public from the facts
May 15th, 2013

Via Market Watch: "It’s become a cliché these days to say you don’t trust the media. But you know what? You’re right not to do so.
The problems aren’t as bad as they appear. They are much, much worse.
And, as usual, almost everyone is focused on exactly the wrong things.
The problem isn’t that the occasional journalist makes a mistake on deadline. We’re human, folks. The problem isn’t big business, or corporate control. It isn’t even the Koch brothers. If you’re a liberal, you should probably want them to blow $600 million on a loss-making newspaper company.
Here are the real problems. And I don’t see any solutions."

Filed under: Wunderkammer

All thanks to basic research
May 14th, 2013

Via Big Think: "The Center for Perceptual Systems at The University of Texas at Austin has just released a free web-app that will denoise and enlarge photos in a heartbeat to an extent that according to the authors, may have never been seen before. [...]

According to the researchers this tool is unlike other algorithms as it is based on average statistical regularities across all images rather than just within the image being processed. Also the algorithm removes noise that is spatially correlated rather than just removing uncorrelated noise as other algorithms currently do. The end result is a program that attempts to understand how to detect and eliminate noise and improve the resolution of photographs."

Filed under: Wunderkammer

Talk by Frans de Waal
May 9th, 2013

Via TED: "Empathy, cooperation, fairness and reciprocity – caring about the well-being of others seems a very human trait. But Frans de Waal shows several surprising videos of behavioral tests with primates and other mammals, that show how many of these moral traits all of us share."

Related: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

Filed under: Wunderkammer

A sphere turning inside out
May 4th, 2013

Via Wikipedia: "In differential topology, Smale's paradox states that it is possible to turn a sphere inside out in a three-dimensional space with possible self-intersections but without creating any crease, a process often called sphere eversion (eversion means "to turn inside out"). This is surprising, and is hence deemed a veridical paradox."

Watch the explanation.

Thanks to Lilong Li!

Filed under: Wunderkammer

With, Over, Through, Out – To Me
May 2nd, 2013

The premiere of With, Over, Through, Out – To Me took place on 14 February 2013. This cooperation project by Kathrin Bingel, a student on the Audio and Video bachelor program, and Kokomini Nemesi, a dance student at the University of Music and Dance in Cologne, approaches the relationship between humans and their shadows, and deals with the question of which is dominant, and whether the two are inseparable. What happens when a shadow breaks away from its world? Does this produce a conjunction or a disjunction? What happens in the dialogue between the two worlds? The result is a duet of contrasts, between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional, between white and black, between gravity and weightlessness.

Supervised With, Over, Through, Out – To Me in my Visual Music class together with IMM assistant professor Andreas Kolinski at the Institute For Music And Media.

Filed under: Students

New York Stories: The Lives of Other Citizens by Andrew Irving
April 30th, 2013

Via Scientific American: "The human brain loves soliloquy. Even when speaking with others—and especially when alone—we continually talk to ourselves in our heads. Such speech does not require the bellows in the chest, quivering flaps of tissue in the throat or a nimble tongue; it does not need to disturb even one hair cell in our ears, nor a single particle of air. We can speak to ourselves without making a sound. Stick your head out that same window above the crowded street and you will hear nothing of what people are saying to themselves privately. All that inner dialogue remains submerged beneath the ocean of human speech, like a novel written in invisible ink behind the text of another book. [...]

Some people have tried to eavesdrop on the silent conversations in other people’s minds. Psychologists have attempted to capture what they call self-talk or inner speech in the moment, asking people to stop what they are doing and write down their thoughts at random points in time. Others have relied on surveys or diaries. Andrew Irving, an anthropologist at the University of Manchester, decided to try something a little different: a peripatetic transcription of consciousness."

Filed under: Wunderkammer

Paul Klee: The sound of images
April 22nd, 2013

In his audiovisual live performance with associated workshop being offered to children and teenagers, Felix Herzog, student of the Audio and Video Engineering program, has expanded the works of the highly musically characterised artist Paul Klee by a temporal and tonal dimension. The images have been broken down to their component parts to make them interactive and able to be performed once interpreted musically. In this way the observers can immerse themselves in the painting and start their own voyage of discovery.
The videos that are shown are live recordings of such improvised explorations. The project came about in cooperation with the department of education of the North Rhine-Westphalian art collection on its Paul Klee day, which took place as part of the exhibition 100 x Paul Klee – Geschichte der Bilder [100 x Paul Klee – Paintings and their stories] (29 September 2012 – 21 April 2013, K21 Ständehaus) on 18 November 2012 in K21 Ständehaus.

Supervised Paul Klee: The sound of images in my Visual Music class together with IMM assistant professor Andreas Kolinski at the Institute For Music And Media.

Filed under: Students

by Thaddeus Golas
April 21st, 2013

Via The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment: "I am a lazy man. Laziness keeps me from believing that enlightenment demands effort, discipline, strict diet, non-smoking, and other evidences of virtue. That's about the worst heresy I could propose, but I have to be honest before I can be reverent. I am doing the work of writing this book to save myself the trouble of talking about it.
There is an odd chance that this is what someone needs to read in order to feel better about himself. If you are a kind person and want to know what to expect when enlightenment strikes and why it comes to you, with or without psychedelic help, this is for you.
These are the rules of the game as I see them. I realize that many of us are opening up very fast these days, and one of the most common delusions we face is the belief that our sense of revelation is unique. The feeling of knowing the truth is not enough. My intention is not to pretend final truth, but to suggest certain simple attitudes that will work for anybody and stay with you in the most extreme freak-out or space-out, even when your mind is completely blown. These attitudes are so simple that I'm surrounding them with a picture of the universe to show why they work even when you don't believe they will.
The universe is so vast and complex that if we needed books like this to become enlightened, we'd never make it. But on the other hand the universe is so simple in design that there's no reason for anyone to be puzzled or unhappy. It's easy to control your existence, no matter how complicated it looks. I've abandoned the idea of writing this a number of times, on the ground that people didn't know it because they didn't want to. But in the end there is no more reason for not writing it than there is for writing it.
I am writing what I will want to read someday when I am stuck in a weird place. Several times on bummers I've thought: What could I say to someone in this state of mind that would mean anything? That's the kind of testing this information has had. There isn't a line in this book that is there just because it sounds beautiful. The information is practical and reliable. It has taken me and others safely through some extreme states of mind, and can be reduced to a few phrases that are simple enough to recall in any crisis. [...]

Every person who allows others to treat him as a spiritual leader has the responsibility to ask himself: Out of all the perceptions available to me in the universe, why am I emphasizing the ignorance of my brothers? What am I doing in a role where this is real? What kind of standards am I conceiving, in which so many people are seen to be in suffering, while I am the enlightened one?
These questions came to me with a great shock, and this is one way I might answer for myself: Everything that is happening in your body is happening on an infinite range of vibration levels. If you love your lack of information better than I love this knowledge, then you are on a higher level than I. There is absolutely no external evidence that will tell me how much you love yourself, because I am seeing you with the limited vision of my own vibrations. In that sense, what I see is myself."

Filed under: Reading

by Henri-Georges Clouzot
April 19th, 2013

Via International Film Festival Rotterdam: "L’enfer was intended to be a film about a newlywed couple in which the husband becomes pathologically jealous. Clouzot wanted to look deep into the mind of the mentally ill man. In order to achieve this, he spent months on tests with kinetic lighting effects and other experiments. It promised to become a fascinating and innovative film. However that's not how it went. Reggiani quarrelled with Clouzot and left the set; Clouzot himself had a heart attack, after which the production was cancelled. A great loss for film history."

Thanks to Ulla Barthold !

Filed under: Wunderkammer

Bill Cunningham New York by Richard Press
April 17th, 2013

Via Zeitgeist Films: "The Bill in question is 80+ New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham. For decades, this Schwinn-riding cultural anthropologist has been obsessively and inventively chronicling fashion trends and high society charity soirées for the Times Style section in his columns On the Street and Evening Hours. Documenting uptown fixtures (Wintour, Tom Wolfe, Brooke Astor, David Rockefeller—who all appear in the film out of their love for Bill), downtown eccentrics and everyone in between, Cunningham’s enormous body of work is more reliable than any catwalk as an expression of time, place and individual flair. In turn, Bill Cunningham New York is a delicate, funny and often poignant portrait of a dedicated artist whose only wealth is his own humanity and unassuming grace."

Filed under: People

Stills from films and their corresponding color palettes
April 14th, 2013

Via Movies In Color: "So far, the blog has not only been an aesthetic pursuit but also an educational pursuit that showcases the relationship between color, cinematography, set design, and production design. Overall, it is a study of color in films, but has other uses and applications. One of the goals is to give artists color palettes they can use in paintings, films, videos, graphic design, and other pursuits."

Thanks to Tim Fehske!

Filed under: Wunderkammer

by Mark Jacobson
March 30th, 2013

Via Vulture: "There were levels to this game, as I would learn from Kevin McLeod, writer and video-game designer, whose lengthy Shining essay is one of the reigning texts on the topic. McLeod, who declined to appear in Room 237 because he 'didn’t want to be included with a bunch of cranks' (but wound up liking the film anyway), and I had much in common. A pair of Queens boys, we both saw The Shining the night it opened, the then-12-year-old McLeod in the company of his mother at the now vanished Sutton Theatre on East 57th Street. We hit a snag, however, when I referred to Kubrick as 'one of the three or four' greatest filmmakers ever. After a long period of silence, McLeod said, 'Stanley Kubrick is not one of the three or four greatest filmmakers! Stanley Kubrick is a philosopher the equal of Heraclitus, a visual artist on the level of a Da Vinci.' Kubrick combined 'all the great talents of a Velázquez and a Caravaggio,' McLeod contended."

Filed under: People

Absolute irritation
March 19th, 2013

Via Urban Dictionary: "A way of admitting a mistake, and apologizing for that mistake, without actually apologizing. The best definition I ever read of this, now paraphrased: 'I did something bad, and I recognize that I did something bad, but there is nothing that can be done for it now, and there is technically no reason to apologize for that error, so let's just assume that I won't do it again, get over it, and move on with our lives.' [...]
A grammatically incorrect way of acknowledging (facetiously) a wrongdoing. Used very commonly by gangsta-wannabes and other sorts of conforming posers, the terrible grammar tends to drive literate people up the wall in absolute irritation. [...]
A term currently used when a mistake is made on your part. Allegedly originating from an unamed African Basketball Player in the 1980's (who spoke very poor english) who said it after missing a free throw. Several Sportscasters heard the phrase and used it as a joke until it became a part of popular culture."

Filed under: Wunderkammer

by Heiko Haller
March 14th, 2013

Via Semantic Web: "iMapping is a technique for visually structuring information objects. It supports the full range from informal note taking over semi-structured personal information management to formal knowledge models. With iMaps, users can easily go from overview to fine-grained structures while browsing editing or refining the knowledge base in one comprehensive view.

An iMap is comparable to a large whiteboard where information items can be positioned like post-its but also nested into each other. Spatial browsing and zooming aswell as graphical editing facilities make it easy to structure content in an intuitive way. iMapping builds on a zooming user interface approach to facilitate navigation and to help users maintain an overview in the knowledge space.
First iMapping prototypes have been developed in the Nepomuk project and as the main part of Heiko Haller's PhD thesis."

Thanks to Florian Zeeh!

Filed under: Wunderkammer

An old sufi story
March 10th, 2013

Via Wikipedia: "(Persian: این نیز بگذرد‎, Arabic: كله ماشي‎, Hebrew: גם זה יעבור‎, Turkish: Bu da geçer (yahu)) is a proverb indicating that all material conditions, positive or negative, are temporary. The phrase seems to have originated in the writings of the medieval Persian Sufi poets, and is often attached to a fable of a great king who is humbled by the simple words. Some versions of the fable, beginning with that of Attar of Nishapur, add the detail that the phrase is inscribed on a ring, which therefore has the ability to make the happy man sad and the sad man happy. Jewish folklore often describes Solomon as giving or receiving the phrase.
The proverb and associated fable were popular in the first half of the 19th century, appearing in a collection of tales by the English poet Edward Fitzgerald and being employed in a speech by Abraham Lincoln before he became president."

Via Eckhart Tolle: "According to an old sufi story, there was once a king in the middle east, who was constantly torn between happiness and despair. The slightest thing would provoke a strong reaction in him, and when he felt happiness, it would swiftly turn into disappointment or hopelessness.
The king eventually became so tired of himself, and his life, that he decided to face his problems and call for help. He was notified of a wise man in his kingdom, that was said to be enlightened. The king pleaded for his help, and when the wise man came to see the king, the king told him: 'I want to be as you are. I want balance and clarity in my life – And i will pay you any price you demand for that insight'.
The wise man responded: 'I might be able to help you, but this insight is so valuable, that the entirety of your kingdom will not be enough to pay for it. That’s why i will give it to you as a gift, if you will honor it'. The king promised he would, and the wise man went on his way.
Weeks later the wise man came to the king again. This time bringing a jade shrine. The shrine contained a golden ring with arab letters inscribed on it. The letters said: This too shall pass.
'What is the meaning of this?' the king asked as he stood baffled. The wise man told him to always carry this ring on him, and to always look at it before he judged anything again. Good or bad. 'Do this and peace will be with you always' the wise man said."

Filed under: Wunderkammer

LC-0
March 6th, 2013

Inspired by the laws of gestalt psychology and the phenomenon of optical illusion, Stefan Wolf developed the visual music clip LC-0. The design is based on the principles of minimalism and reduction. Based on a quadratic base grid, shapes and figures are produced by the spatial displacement of the quadrilaterals. In the process, exciting and peaceful phases produce an interplay of illusion and resolution. Stefan Wolf was responsible for the sound and visual composition.

Supervised LC-0 in my Visual Music class together with IMM assistant professor Andreas Kolinski at the Institute For Music And Media.

Filed under: Students

A triangular theory
March 4th, 2013

Via The Psychologist: "I next proposed a triangular theory of love (Sternberg, 1986, 1997a, 1998a), which holds that love can be understood in terms of three components that together can be viewed as forming the vertices of a triangle. The triangle is used as a metaphor, rather than as a strict geometric model. These three components are intimacy (top vertex of the triangle), passion (left-hand vertex of the triangle), and decision/commitment (right-hand vertex of the triangle).

Intimacy refers to feelings of closeness, connectedness, and bondedness in loving relationships (Sternberg & Grajek, 1984). Passion refers to the drives that lead to physical attraction and excitement. Decision/commitment refers, in the short-term, to the decision that one loves a certain other, and in the long-term, to one’s commitment to maintain that love. More of each component leads to different sizes of love triangles, and different balances of the three components give rise to different shapes of triangles.

The three components of love are interactive. For example, greater intimacy may lead to greater passion or commitment, just as greater commitment may lead to greater intimacy or, with lesser likelihood, greater passion. Although all three components are important parts of loving relationships, their importance may differ from one relationship to another, or over time within a given relationship. […]

The triangular theory characterises the structure of love, but not how that structure emerged in the first place. According to the theory of love as a story (Sternberg, 1998b), love triangles emanate from stories. Almost all of us are exposed to large numbers of diverse stories that convey different conceptions of how love can be understood. Some of these stories may be explicitly intended as love stories; others may have love stories embedded in the context of larger stories. Either way, we are provided with varied opportunities – through experience, literature, media, and so forth – to observe multiple conceptions of what love can be. As a result of our exposure to such stories, we form over time our own stories of what love is or should be.

The interaction of our personal attributes with the environment – the latter of which we in part create – leads to the development of stories about love that we then seek to fulfill, to the extent possible, in our lives (Sternberg, 1995, 1996, 1998b; Sternberg et al., 2001). Various potential partners fit these stories to greater or lesser degrees. We are more likely to succeed in close relationships with people whose stories more rather than less closely match our own."

Filed under: Wunderkammer

by John Gray
February 17th, 2013

Via Dangerous Minds: "For the so-called New Atheists, on the other hands, nothing exists you can’t just slap a word on, so their disbelief is a matter of having the word God, but not having an entity to affix it to (they’ve looked everywhere). Gray suggests an altogether more elevated position: 'Atheism does not mean rejecting belief in God. It means giving up belief in language as anything other than a practical convenience. The world is not a creation of language, but something that – like the God of the negative theologians – escapes language. Atheism is only a stage on the way to a more far-reaching scepticism.' (...)

John Gray: 'I do think of The Silence of Animals as a successor to Straw Dogs, though that only became clear to me as I wrote the book. I began it as an exploration of secular myth, especially the variety in which meaning is embodied in cumulative advance in time, but it soon became an attempt to dig deeper into the themes of the earlier book—in particular the idea of contemplation. The chief difference between the two books, from my point of view, is that by presenting contemplation as correlative to a life of action. The Silence of Animals is more positive in tone.' "

Filed under: Reading

New cult for the info age
February 10th, 2013

Via Mind Hacks: "If your daily schedule and email inbox are anything like mine, you’re often left a state of paralysis by the sheer bulk of outstanding tasks weighing on your mind. In this respect, David Allen’s book Getting Things Done is a phenomenon. An international best-seller and a personal productivity system known merely as GTD, it’s been hailed as being a “new cult for the info age”. The heart of the system is a way of organising the things you have to do, based on Allen’s experience of working with busy people and helping them to make time for the stuff they really want to do."

Filed under: Wunderkammer

Empty space isn't empty.
February 2nd, 2013

Via Fermilab: "On the face of it, empty space should be … well … empty. If you take a container, pump all the air out of it, shield it from electric fields and plop it in the deepest of intergalactic space to get it away from gravitational fields, that container should contain absolutely nothing. Nada. Zip.

However, that's not what happens. At the quantum scale, space is a writhing, frantic, ever-changing foam, with particles popping into existence and disappearing in the wink of an eye. This is not just a theoretical idea—it's confirmed. How can this bizarre idea be true?

Even though in classical physics we are taught that energy is conserved, which means it cannot change, one of the tenets of quantum mechanics says that energy doesn't have to be conserved if the change happens for a short enough time. So even if space had zero energy, it would be perfectly OK for a little energy to pop into existence for a tiny split second and then disappear—and that's what happens in empty space. And since energy and matter are the same (thank Einstein for teaching us that E=mc² thing), matter can also appear and disappear.

And this appears everywhere. At the quantum level, matter and antimatter particles are constantly popping into existence and popping back out, with an electron-positron pair here and a top quark-antiquark pair there. This behavior is the reason that scientists call these ephemeral particles "quantum foam": It's similar to how bubbles in foam form and then pop.

Filed under: Wunderkammer