Saturday 25 June 2011

around intersubjectivity

Enacting Intersubjectivity: A Cognitive and Social Perspective on the Study of Interactions. Edited by: F. Morganti, University of Lugano, Lugano, Switzerland; A. Carassa, University of Lugano, Lugano, Switzerland; and G. Riva, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy.
Preface:
"Intersubjectivity is a central theoretical construct intersecting various disciplines. As a research field it is therefore characterised by its being the meeting point of areas and methodologies even very different from each other. In the history of science, when this sort of overlapping takes place, we witness the gradual emergence of ever more complex theoretical constructs, which can become the conceptual ground for building more general theories.'




International Workshop
ENACTING INTERSUBJECTIVITY
Paving the way for a dialogue between Cognitive Science,
Social Cognition and Neuroscience

Contemporary research on cognitive and social cognition is focussed on humans’ abilities to understand others and to establish interpersonal relationships with them. Within this field intersubjectivity is investigated as a basic aspect of social cognition that allows to share experiences and to be attuned to others’ mental states in an immediate way. A large amount of work has been done on this topic in cognitive and developmental psychology, neuroscience, philosophy of mind. The workshop aims at bringing together theoretical and research contributions derived from cognitive science, neuroscience and social sciences with the aim to enhance integration and cross-fertilization between these areas.



Intersubjectivity in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism
B. Alan Wallace

This essay focuses on the theme of intersubjectivity, which is central to the entire
Indo-Tibetan Buddhist tradition. It addresses the following five themes pertaining to
Buddhist concepts of intersubjectivity: (1) the Buddhist practice of the cultivation of meditative quiescence challenges the hypothesis that individual human consciousness emerges solely from the dynamic interrelation of self and other; (2) the central Buddhist insight practice of the four applications of mindfulness is a means for gaining insight into the nature of oneself, others and the relation between oneself and the rest of the world, which provides a basis for cultivating a deep sense of empathy; (3) the Buddhist cultivation of the four immeasurables is expressly designed to arouse a rich sense of empathy with others; (4) the meditative practice of dream yoga, which illuminates the dream-like nature of waking reality is shown to have deep implications regarding the nature of intersubjectivity; (5) the theory and practice of Dzogchen, the ‘great perfection’ system of meditation, challenges the assertion of the existence of an inherently real, localized, ego-centred mind, as well as the dichotomy of objective space as opposed to perceptual space.
Introduction The theme of intersubjectivity lies at the very core of the Indo-Tibetan Buddhi

around narratives

metanarratives (Baudrillard)
"In making this argument Baudrillard found some affinity with the postmodern philosophy of Jean-François Lyotard, who famously argued that in the late Twentieth Century there was no longer any room for "metanarratives." (The triumph of a coming communism being one such metanarrative.) But, in addition to simply lamenting this collapse of history, Baudrillard also went beyond Lyotard and attempted to analyse how the idea of forward progress was being employed in spite of the notion's declining validity. Baudrillard argued that although genuine belief in a universal endpoint of history, wherein all conflicts would find their resolution, had been deemed redundant, universality was still a notion utilised in world politics as an excuse for actions. Universal values which, according to him, no one any longer believed universal were and are still rhetorically employed to justify otherwise unjustifiable choices. The means, he wrote, are there even though the ends are no longer believed in, and are employed in order to hide the present's harsh realities (or, as he would have put it, unrealities). "In the Enlightenment, universalization was viewed as unlimited growth and forward progress. Today, by contrast, universalization is expressed as a forward escape."


Narrative Discontinuities in Contemporary Arts: Film, Literature and New Media.
Discipline; 10 credits / at LACE - University Network
"Recent films have shown that a story can be told in non-linear fashion, even backwards (e.g. Memento by Christopher Nolan) or without immediately evident causality (works by David Lynch come to mind). The same tendencies appeared in literature. Writers have offered us various narrative experiences where time, in the plot or in the telling, is fragmented, disorganised, non-linear (see Sterne or Proust) or consistently reversed (Martin Amis' Time's arrow); where a causal chain is not explicitly constructed (e.g. the French Nouveau Roman and postmodern novels such as Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by J.S. Foer). Even though narratology has argued that narrative texts can be characterized by two main logics - "chrono-logic" (temporal logic: a happened, then b happened followed by c etc.) and causality ( a caused b and b caused c etc.) -, telling in contemporary arts is not always (perhaps even rarely) a matter of continuity regarding these logics. As a spectator or a reader, one faces the challenge of reorganising the elements of the artefact. For example, when viewing Memento, it becomes fairly clear that, together with the character, we must rebuild, rearrange some sort of linearity (causal and temporal) in order to understand the plot. Doing so, we are reframing the film in a new narrative that we create, using cues and clues taken from the picture."


Metanarrative (Wiki)
"In critical theory, and particularly postmodernism, a metanarrative (from metagrand narrative) is an abstract idea that is thought to be a comprehensive explanation of historical experience or knowledge. According to John Stephens it "is a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience".[1] The prefix meta- means "beyond" and is here used to mean "about", and narrative is a story constructed in a sequential fashion. Therefore, a metanarrative is a story about a story, encompassing and explaining other "little stories" within totalizing schemes."

LPDT2
"LPDT2 is the Second Life incarnation of Roy Ascott’s groundbreaking new media art work La Plissure du Texte (“The Pleating of the Text”), created in 1983 and shown in Paris at the Musée de l’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris during that same year. The title of the project, “La Plissure du Texte: A Planetary Fairy Tale,” alludes to Roland Barthes’s book “Le Plaisir du Texte”, a famous discourse on authorship, semantic layering, and the creative role of the reader as the writer of the text. As was also the case in its first incarnation “distributed authorship”, a term coined by Ascott has been the primary subject of investigation of LPDT2."



Beyond Myth and Metaphor*
-The Case of Narrative in Digital Media
by Marie-Laure Ryan

"If we compare the field of digital textuality to other areas of study in the humanities, its most striking feature is the precedence of theory over the object of study. Most of us read novels and see movies before we consult literary criticism and cinema studies, but it seems safe to assume that a vast majority of people read George Landow before they read any work of hypertext fiction. In this paper I would like to investigate one of the most important forms that this advance theorizing of digital textuality has taken, namely the use of narrative concepts to advertise present and future product."

Multivariant Narratives
Marie-Laure Ryan

Media theorists divide the history of writing into four periods delimited by technological innovations: the oral age; the chirographic age (manuscript writing); the print age; and the digital age. The material support of language passed from unique to freely copiable; from restricted to a live audience to widely distributed; and from evanescent to durable, only to return to a strange combination of evanescence and durability: though digital texts can be stored in a wide variety of memory devices, computer systems become rapidly obsolete and their archives unreadable.

Friday 24 June 2011

Victory Garden



This figure shows the organizational map of Stuart Moulthrop's novel Victory Garden (1991). This map represents only the upper layer of the textual architecture: "each named site on the map stands for a region of the text with its own finely grained system of links, and it would be necessary to zoom in to a larger-scale image to get a full view of the textual architecture. The configuration of the map of Victory Garden is what theorists would call a network, or unrestricted graph." (in: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405103213/9781405103213.xml&doc.view=content&chunk.id=ss1-4-9&toc.depth=1&brand=9781405103213_brand&anchor.id=0#ss1-4-9_b18)

One of the software available online to create hypertextual architectures is Storyspace, a hypertext writing environment that is especially well suited to large, complex, and challenging hypertexts. Storyspace focuses on the process of writing, making.
Eastgate Systems Inc.,
134 Main Street
Watertown MA 02472 USA
(617) 924-9044

Sunday 19 June 2011

camera mouse software



to download the software:
http://www.cameramouse.org/

Controlling Video: JMyron camera as mouse




Today I was working in a code to stop and play a movie file using camera as mouse for a friend who wants to build an installation in a store window. The library I'm using is JMyron for Processing. Here is the first code I finished, but I'm still having problems using the function myMovie.pause and my.Movie.speed:


import fullscreen.*;
import JMyron.*;
import processing.video.*;

Movie myMovie;
FullScreen fs;
JMyron m;

void setup() {
size(800, 600);
background(0);
myMovie = new Movie(this, "vitrine.3gp");
myMovie.loop();
fs = new FullScreen(this);
fs.enter();
m = new JMyron();
m.start(width,height);
m.trackColor(255,255,255,256*3-100); //adjust 3-5
m.update();
m.adaptivity(100); // how fast the white is capted! it was 100
m.adapt();// immediately take a snapshot of the background for differencing
println("Myron " + m.version());
rectMode(CENTER);
noStroke();
}
void movieEvent(Movie myMovie) {
myMovie.read();
}
void draw() {
m.update();
drawCamera();

int[][] centers = m.globCenters();
float avX=0;
float avY=0;
for(int i=0;i fill(0);

avX += centers[i][0];
avY += centers[i][1];
}
if(centers.length-1>0){
avX/=centers.length-1;
avY/=centers.length-1;
}

image(myMovie, 0, 0);


if(!(avX==0&&avY==0)&¢ers.length>1){
myMovie.stop();
}

if(!(avX==1&&avY==1)&¢ers.length>1){
myMovie.play();
}
fill(0,0,0);
ellipseMode(CENTER);

}

void drawCamera(){
loadPixels();

updatePixels();
}