If may respond to Simon,
I wholeheartedly agree. Place definition and extreme, need not be in any
other place than in our own skin. Our own home, our own community,
especially when our communities have lost sense of the self, the
collaborative, co creation and jest at artists or others who speak of
ushering ourselves and others towards ways we can transcend and provoke new
thoughts around old habits and our existing habitats.
We can dream up new ways to think about country and of its care, city spaces
and new vitality, pockets of eruption into something not yet conceived or
realized. Making this also extreme in light of the current conventional
thinking that insists on continued governance and highly agended controls
through bureaucracy's and councils. or at the other end of the scale through
community driven projects that just pick up what artists have conceived and
dilute it in such a way it becomes main stream and possibly mundane to
appease funding bodies , or enhance organizations profile that require some
form of creative community outcome to increase their own profiled
profitability margins.
Extreme may be just in an action.
Three years of walking a city tagged Dull, asking for planners and
architects and community members to walk along side artists to wonder,
experience and co create was seen to be crazy... extreme...
extreme in Germany and Madrid may not have the same definition of extreme as
that of in a conservative city like, I will say it Perth WA!
100 artists 100 others walking together.. just having a conversation would
be seen to be seen extreme, crazy, provocative and unauthorized. perhaps a
riot!
This action elsewhere may be seen to be enlightening new ways to explore
existing shared spaces and places, sending multiple rendering of ideas
reverberating through spaces , new messages made and place shaken by
thoughts about emergent possibilities.. towards future spaces including our
own psychological sense of place.
artists unlike historians tend towards celebrating ideas that are seen to
provoke new action in both cities and rural areas, ( even outer space) that
are seeking something some other way anyway.However this is most often held
under the breathe of Politicians and Governance structures, even creative
organizations themselves that see these actions(even as a spoken suggestion)
as unruly therefor setting boundaries of control towards such action. Crazy!
By bringing arts science and other into a mix in our more conservative
existing spaces with an intent of exploration, without the shackles of
expectation we may collectively inspire ideas and set of imagination that
celebrates art production in all its guises, and cut a clearer path for
those that think sideways about issues generating support for projects that
are titled crazy, extreme or possibly even seen as dangerous.
My guess is that it perhaps depends on the interpretation and from whom
intentions and agendas of both the conceptualize and the governing or
funding bodies that have the authority to allow or not allow projects to
emerge.
Perth is an extremely beautiful city with stunning sunsets and daybreak's,
yet we choose to sleep through not recognizing daylight as a saving
attribute.Perth is asleep by 5:00pm. This is an extreme waste, an extreme
challenge and an opportunity.
I like your thinking Simon,
thank you.
Janelle Cugley
----- Original Message -----
From: "Simon Biggs" <s.biggs@eca.ac.uk>
To: "YASMIN DISCUSSIONS" <yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr>
Sent: Saturday, October 03, 2009 11:59 PM
Subject: Re: [Yasmin_discussions] artists workng with scientists in
extremeenvironments
It could be asserted that exploring extreme states of mind (as opposed to
the brain) is standard operating artists procedure (SOAP). The mind is
arguably an imagined thing and artists routinely seek to imagine it in its
strangest or most extreme state, whether as something isolated (mind as
location of the individual) or networked (the mind as instantiation of the
social being). As an artist I consciously seek to do this, imagining myself
into a mental state. When it starts to feel dangerous that¹s when I think I
might be getting somewhere.
There is also a long history of artists who have been regarded as rather
mad. Whether they were so because they were ill (in conventional medical
terms John Martin, for example - which is deeply problematic for anyone of
a Foucauldian or Langian persuasion) or pushing their ideas to extremes
(such that people thought them mad) or simply taking too many drugs (that
seems to render other people mad).
Turning back to extreme environments, artists have similarly explored these,
even when the places they visited were either not that extreme or were
actually imaginary. Here I am thinking of the Romantics, with Caspar David
Friedrich or Beethoven seeking to evoke what they felt to be the sublime
(extreme) in nature and the (extreme) states this transported them to. There
was no need for them to go to the Moon to achieve this although perhaps in
our over-stimulated society this is the reason artists are seeking to do
this. They are simply exhibiting our shared symptoms of environmental
disassociation.
Best
Simon
Simon Biggs
Research Professor
edinburgh college of art
s.biggs@eca.ac.uk
www.eca.ac.uk
Creative Interdisciplinary Research into CoLlaborative Environments
www.eca.ac.uk/circle/
simon@littlepig.org.uk
www.littlepig.org.uk
AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk
From: roger malina <rmalina@alum.mit.edu>
Reply-To: YASMIN DISCUSSIONS <yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr>
Date: Sat, 3 Oct 2009 17:15:19 +0200
To: YASMIN DISCUSSIONS <Yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr>
Subject: [Yasmin_discussions] artists workng with scientists in extreme
environments
yasminers
here is another thought- are extreme environments only
physical/geographical
exploration- or can one also explore extreme mental states ?
yesterday i was with christian xerri who is a neuroscientist in marseille
and
jim gimzewksi
were were discussing the work that xerri does with alzheimers
patients
christian's work includes looking at ways the brain re organises
itself after trauma
*Curre*
*Research topics *
1. Experience-dependent malleability of somatosensory cortical maps
during development and maturation.
2. Postlesion remodeling of somatosensory maps after brain damage.
3. Spatio-temporal coding of tactile inputs within cortical networks.
4. Biochemical and morphological mechanisms involved in somatosensory map
reorganization.
5. Elaboration and recognition of haptic and visual forms: a fMRI study.
christian's son your is an artist and art therapist and they are working on
art science collaborations
xerri's lab has developed interactive software tools that are used to help
patients with impaired
memory etc
a related connection is how humans in extreme environments have modified
percetion
, i heard a talk by michel marcelin who mentioned that at high altidue
vision is affected ( see for instance
http://ajplegacy.physiology.org/cgi/pdf_extract/140/3/354 )
so for the discussion i thought i would introduce the topic of modification
of mental states
in extrement enviroments, but also extreme zones of mental states themselves
as part
of this discussion
roger
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