All Articles

Feeling Fit for Function: Haptic Touch and Aesthetic Experience

Traditionally, the sense of touch—alongside the senses of taste and smell—has been excluded from the aesthetic domain. These proximal modalities are thought to deliver only sensory pleasures, not the complex, world-directed perceptual states that characterize aesthetic experience. In this paper,...
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Traditionally, the sense of touch—alongside the senses of taste and smell—has been excluded from the aesthetic domain. These proximal modalities are thought to deliver only sensory pleasures, not the complex, world-directed perceptual states that characterize aesthetic experience. In this paper, I argue that this tradition fails to recognize the perceptual possibilities of haptic touch, which allows us to experience properties of the objects with which we make bodily contact, including their weight, shape, solidity, elasticity, and smoothness. These features, moreover, may be indicative of how well-suited an object is for its function, and in feeling them we can thus feel the positive aesthetic quality of functional beauty.
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Dreaming A Public Poem

The Public Poem is a form I invented in 1967 and have performed in many European cities over the decades. For the last six years in Spain, I had been making “concrete” poems, seeing the sheet of paper as a two-dimensional surface which the typewriter could occupy spatially, then placing Letraset...
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The Public Poem is a form I invented in 1967 and have performed in many European cities over the decades. For the last six years in Spain, I had been making “concrete” poems, seeing the sheet of paper as a two-dimensional surface which the typewriter could occupy spatially, then placing Letraset letters on superimposed plexiglass sheets that provide a third dimension of depth. One day, looking about in the street, I thought, “If I can place letters on these surfaces, then I can ‘write’ on the street, as well.” I quickly discovered the cheap, light, industrial material of polystyrene which could be easily cut into letter shapes—the size of the human beings who occupy the streets—and thus enter into a dialogue with them and the urban space. At first, I placed the letters and words at strategic sites of the city, but soon I found that carrying them with a team was more eloquent, like a hand holding a pen moving across the page. I often used a classic concrete poetry device, the permutation and recombination of letters, in choosing a mother-word or matrix that could be broken up into other words and then form phrases—even entire sentences—as we moved along, like text passing across a giant electronic screen where one or two words may appear at a time, and a sentence is eventually formed.
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John Møller’s ‘Photographic Memory’ – Professional Photography of Greenlandic Inuit and Danish Administrators at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

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Unconditional hospitality: art and commons under planetary migration

In both European and non-European cities, public spaces are formed by racist and segregative politics that influence everyday life. Planetary migration flows and recently implemented border politics tend to leave the most vulnerable in precarious conditions, not only in the case of migrants/refugee...
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In both European and non-European cities, public spaces are formed by racist and segregative politics that influence everyday life. Planetary migration flows and recently implemented border politics tend to leave the most vulnerable in precarious conditions, not only in the case of migrants/refugees but also in the case of citizens. This article focuses on how artistic methodologies in the context of migration/refugeehood can experiment with “alternative modes of existence”. How can newly imagined modes of co-existence contribute to the creation of minor public spaces as well as the transformation of institutions? How can public art construct different and diverse guest-host relationships? How can artistic research and actions reveal precarious labour conditions, stage radical discursive debates, and transform existing institutional practices? This article is based on theoretical discussions of commoning and decolonization practices. It will focus on the art and activist practices, and analyse such, of Al-Madafeh/Living Room (Sandi Hilal, Stockholm) and The Silent University (Ahmet Ogut), and others.
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Breakthrough into Performance

The first public radio station in the United States, KPFA in Berkeley, California, began broadcasting in April 1949. A legendary counter-cultural enterprise, its initial program months aired a daily fifteen-minute performance of one of the most consequential literary works of late Modernist world l...
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The first public radio station in the United States, KPFA in Berkeley, California, began broadcasting in April 1949. A legendary counter-cultural enterprise, its initial program months aired a daily fifteen-minute performance of one of the most consequential literary works of late Modernist world literature, Jaime de Angulo’s ethnopoetic masterpiece Old Time Stories (announced as “Indian Tales”). The musicologist, composer, and writer Peter Garland has justly called it a “story-epic . . . unique in American literature.”1 It is unique not because of its epic extent and ambition. It is unique because of its oral performance, which in its currently authorized but incomplete state runs for some twenty-two hours
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Angels with Guns: A Memoir on Guy Brett (and David Medalla)

In the mind of anyone who knew them and their work, the British art critic and curator Guy Brett and the Filipino mixed-media and performance artist David Medalla formed a pair. Which is why, though it might sound awful, I was not overly surprised by the news that Guy had died (February 2, 2021) jus...
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In the mind of anyone who knew them and their work, the British art critic and curator Guy Brett and the Filipino mixed-media and performance artist David Medalla formed a pair. Which is why, though it might sound awful, I was not overly surprised by the news that Guy had died (February 2, 2021) just over a month after David (December 28, 2020). It was as if the former had waited for permission to die from the latter. Guy had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s at the end of 2013, and the deterioration of his health had accelerated in the last months of his life. As for David, it was Guy who had informed me of his stroke in his letter of April 25, 2018. He added: “I was profoundly shaken up by the whole event. I felt the vulnerability of David who I had all always thought was invincible.”
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From Quark to Infinite Dimensionality

This article gives a overall picture of how the universe works from the likelihood that our universe is infinite dimensional at the nanometer scale of an indestructible quark. The article explains that we only can perceive for sure up to 4 dimensions of physical reality. However, the speculation in ...
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This article gives a overall picture of how the universe works from the likelihood that our universe is infinite dimensional at the nanometer scale of an indestructible quark. The article explains that we only can perceive for sure up to 4 dimensions of physical reality. However, the speculation in this article seems very clear that likely we are seeing activity in the 5th dimension in particle physics experimentation explaining the EPR paradox and other mysteries seen in particle physics. Finally, the article shows why the Mendeleev Chart has historically listed possible stable atoms without giving the exact number possible. The way protons and other hadrons are composed of six quarks and six antiquarks held together by gluons leads to the inevitable conclusion that only 108 stable atoms can exist. Being stable means the protons in an atom are composed of 3 quarks/antiquarks having charge 1. Recent discoveries in particle physics research demonstrates that there exists a particle named the pentaquark composed of five quarks. The article explains that pentaquarks have been identified in recent particle research. It is not known yet whether the pentaquark leads to a different proton that leads in turn to a pentaquark atom. New particle research will likely answer this question.
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Uniform Scaling: Relativistic Energy-Momentum Relationships

A number of the most often cited results of relativity theory deal with the relationships between energy, momentum and inertial mass. The history of how Einstein and Planck came to these conclusions is reviewed. It is pointed out that considerations of how the speed of light is affected by the motio...
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A number of the most often cited results of relativity theory deal with the relationships between energy, momentum and inertial mass. The history of how Einstein and Planck came to these conclusions is reviewed. It is pointed out that considerations of how the speed of light is affected by the motion of the Earth played a determining role in these developments. After the Michelson-Morley null-interference result became available, Voigt introduced a new space-time transformation by amending the classical Galilean transformation so that the speed of light in free space has the same value of c regardless of the state of motion of both the light source and the observer. This led to the Lorentz transformation which has been the cornerstone of relativity theory for the past century. A thought experiment is presented which proves, however, that there are many situations for which the measured speed of light is NOT equal to c. Furthermore, it is pointed out that the rate of an inertial clock cannot change spontaneously, which result is perfectly compatible with Newton’s First Law of Kinetics (Law of Inertia). This result contradicts the space-time mixing characteristic of the Lorentz transformation and leads to the conclusion that events which are spontaneous for one inertial frame will also be so for every other one. The uniform scaling procedure is a generalization of this result for all other physical properties than elapsed times. Its application shows that the commonly accepted relationships between energy and momentum are only special cases in which it is assumed that the observer is stationary in the rest frame in which force has been applied to cause the object’s acceleration
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The Now and the Universe

The present, at any particular moment, is the realization of one of the many intentions of the All-creating Intellect. Here "realization" specifically means the materialization or the appearance of an object in the material world, which had not existed until now. This newly born material object exis...
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The present, at any particular moment, is the realization of one of the many intentions of the All-creating Intellect. Here "realization" specifically means the materialization or the appearance of an object in the material world, which had not existed until now. This newly born material object exists only for the duration of the moment of "now". This moment is infinitely short, or, if we use a concept from calculus, it is infinitesimal in duration. In my hypothesis, this new object is a product of a specific energy field of the All-creating Intellect. We call this particular energy field Time.
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The Effect of Rényi Entropy on Hawking Radiation

It is widely believed that Hawking radiation originates from excitations near the horizons of black holes [1,2,3]. However, Giddings [2] proposed that the Hawking radiation spectrum that characterizes evaporating semi-classical black holes originates from a quantum “atmosphere”, which extends be...
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It is widely believed that Hawking radiation originates from excitations near the horizons of black holes [1,2,3]. However, Giddings [2] proposed that the Hawking radiation spectrum that characterizes evaporating semi-classical black holes originates from a quantum “atmosphere”, which extends beyond the horizon of a black hole. Although several research projects have been conducted in this field, they have not yet taken into account the effect of Rényi entropy. In the present article, we will therefore consider the effect of Rényi entropy on Hawking radiation power. We assume that if the effect of Rényi entropy is very small, we suggest that the Hawking radiation should originate from the quantum “atmosphere” which extends beyond the black hole’s horizon for finite dimensions. That is, that Giddings’ suggestion is the more likely of the above possibilities. However, for infinite dimensions, both suggestions are equally credible. We briefly consider the very large effect of Rényi entropy on Hawking radiation power as well. We find that if the effect of Rényi entropy is very large and ω/TBH is very small, then the power spectral density SR is proportional to the power spectral density SBH.
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