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Satire

Ursine Sylvian Defecation Study – Shock Result

From Vision Research vol 44 p1493 via NewScientist 26.6.04.

Adding visual noise to a picture of the Mona Lisa affected how people saw it. No, really. The scientists responsible for this study believe that the visual system’s own noise causes this effect. But anyone looking at the picture can see that if visual noise affects the picture, it -er- affects the picture. If the researchers don’t believe this, I have a project that involves adding random noise to their research grant budget figure…

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Satire

Asperger’s Syndrome Syndrome

Michaelangelo is the latest victim of Asperger’s Syndrome Syndrome. This is where a publicity hungry psychiatric hack assigns a pathology to someone famous using the famous bullet-point-comparison test.

Hopefully some day a cure will be found for the poor individuals who suffer from this syndrome syndrome. Or perhaps we’ll find that their inexplicable drive to pathologise notable historical figures is a result of their work, not a mental disorder, however much it might look that way when you reduce it to a soundbite.

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Satire

Fire At Saatchi Warehouse

Art-like objects destroyed including Hirst and Chapman products:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3747963.stm

Hope none of the good stuff was damaged. Do they make flame-retardant canvas?

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Satire

Quote From Harold Cohen’s Talk

“If programming in C is like marching, programming in Lisp is like dancing”.

Too true. To which it might be added that C++ is like walking on hot coals…

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Satire

The World As Code

Religion: The world is declarative.
Atheism: The world is functional.
Management: The world is imperative.
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Satire

The Difference Between hackers And Painters

A collection of Paul Graham’s essays is going to be published by O’Reilley under the title “Hackers and Painters”.
Book announcement.
The title comes from a lecture/essay of Graham’s.
Original Hackers and Painters article.
The art/science commonality (both order signifiers) was made in an article in Leonardo many years ago, and it wasn’t new then (Constable said that “Art is a science…of which paintings are but the experiments”). Graham makes the correct point that hacker culture is vanguard at the moment. So for social history of art, hacker culture is currently very important, although not for the reasons new media dilettantes and their sponsors claim.
The difference between hackers and painters is what they drink. Hackers drink caffeine, painters drink alcohol. Both suppress seratonin (IIRC), but alcohol is a relaxant whilst caffeine increases stress levels. Go figure. Go ground.

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Satire

Mouse Droppings

As the shareholder value maximisation continues at Disney the management’s reaction to a report showing that flooding your market with shoddy exploitation sequels destroys your core value proposition (something the staff have been telling them all along, apparently) is to shut down their most successful studio.
The excellent Jim Hill Media is tracking this story.

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Satire

But It’s Art…

Earlier in the year, some researchers wired rat neurons to a couple of coloured felt-tip pens over the internet to get scribbly “drawings”. Voila! Art, not bad vivisectionist “science”. The transformational power of art is truly amazing.
Article.
Inspired by this, I propose a project to make science in the same way. Some rat anus cells will be wired to a computer running a scientific typesetting program. Dip the cells in lemon juice. Voila! Scientific equations, not a bad nominative art stunt.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m quite happy for Damien Hirst to get out his chainsaw, but if a researcher has bad conscience, they shouldn’t try to hide it under a sugar coating of “art”.

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Satire

May Day

Smash global capitalism: spend less money.

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Satire

What Is Art?

I asked ThoughtTreasure (a natural language/commonsense system):

> what is art?
>
ENG art; fine art;
ANT: ENG art; fine art;

An art is a sort of media object. Sorts of arts: architecture, the American
art, the comic strip, the drawing, the graffiti, the museum piece, the Oriental
art, the painting, the performance art, the photograph, the picture, the
sculpture, and the watercolor. Other types of media objects: hypermedias, the
advertisement, the broadcast, the computer program, the dance, the datafeed,
the film, the genetic code, the mail, the message, the opera, the part of film,
the part of text, the part of theory, the play, the protocol, the script, the
station, the text, the theory, and the video.

An art is a R2 of a leisure activity. Artist creates an art. A museum visit is
a company relation of an art.

art creation
_______________ ______________________
American art American
architecture architect
performance art performance artist
photograph fine art photographer
sculpture sculptor

art paint
________ ________________
graffiti graffiti painter
painting painter

Artist creates an art.

An art. A leisure activity. A museum visit. Leave. Go. A snow. It. A rain
shower. Rain. Some meteors. The weather. An indefinite ce. A beautiful day. A
good weather. A sunny sky. A clear sky. A sky coverage.

>