Yuri Knorozov: The Image of Russian Joy

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 From Wikipedia: Yuri Knorozov:

In 1952 Knorozov published a paper which was later to prove to be a seminal work in the field (Drevnyaya pis’mennost’ Tsentral’noy Ameriki, or "Ancient Writing of Central America".) The general thesis of this paper put forward the observation that early scripts such as ancient Egyptian and Cuneiform which were generally or formerly thought to be predominantly logographic or even purely ideographic in nature, in fact contained a significant phonetic component. That is to say, rather than the symbols representing only or mainly whole words or concepts, many symbols in fact represented the sound elements of the language in which they were written, and had alphabetic or syllabic elements as well, which if understood could further their decipherment. By this time, this was largely known and accepted for several of these, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs (the decipherment of which was famously commenced by Jean-François Champollion in 1822 using the tri-lingual Rosetta Stone artefact); however the prevailing view was that Mayan did not have such features. Knorozov's studies in comparative linguistics drew him to the conclusion that the Mayan script should be no different from the others, and that purely logographic or ideographic scripts did not exist.

Graphic Arts: Melville's Moby Dick

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From one of the best sites out there, Graphic Arts: Exhibitions, acquisitions, and other highlights from the Graphic Arts Collection, Princeton University Library:

Melville's Moby Dick

Connections between Herman Melville (1819-1891) and Princeton University began in the eighteenth century, with his grandfather Major Thomas Melvill (1751-1832) graduating with Princeton class of 1769. His uncle Peter Gansevoort (1788-1876) followed in the class of 1808. To celebrate the centenary of Moby Dick in 1951, Firestone Library mounted a Melville extravaganza featuring dozens of the significant holdings, detailed in a catalogue compiled by Howard C. Rice, Jr., Alexander D. Wainwright, Julie Hudson, and Alexander P. Clark. http://libweb5.princeton.edu/visual_materials/pulc/pulc_v_13_n_2.pdf

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Between the Folds: Origami and Paper Art | Notes and Selected Quotes

The Artisan

From the Website:

Origami may seem an unlikely medium for understanding and explaining the world. But around the globe, several fine artists and theoretical scientists are abandoning more conventional career paths to forge lives as modern-day paper folders. Through origami, these offbeat and provocative minds are reshaping ideas of creativity and revealing the relationship between art and science.

BETWEEN THE FOLDS chronicles 10 of their stories. Featuring interviews with and insights into the practice of these intrepid paper folders, the film opens with three of the world's foremost origami artists: a former sculptor in France who folds caricatures in paper rivaling the figures of Daumier and Picasso; a hyper-realist who walked away from a successful physics career to challenge the physics of a folded square instead; and an artisanal papermaker who folds impressionistic creations from the very same medium he makes from scratch.

The film then moves to less conventional artists, exploring concepts of minimalism, deconstruction, process and empiricism. Abstract artists emerge with a greater emphasis on concept, chopping at the fundamental roots of realism, which have long dominated traditional origami. The film also features advanced mathematicians and a remarkable scientist who received a MacArthur Genius Award for his computational origami research.

While debates ebb and flow on issues of folding technique, symbolism and purpose, this unique film shows how closely art and science are intertwined. The medium of paper folding—a simple blank, uncut square—emerges as a resounding metaphor for the creative potential for transformation in all of us.

Between the Folds is one of the more profound and enlightening documentaries I have seen in some time. (And I watch a lot of documentaries.) For at least a short while, you can find the entire film at PBS: Independent Lens.


What follows are a few clips from the film, some of my notes and a selection of quotations from the featured artists.

Much of the Beauty that arises in art comes from the struggle an artist wages with his limited medium.

- Henri Matisse

The three themes that I find most interesting are:

• The challenge to create beauty with a limited medium
• The tension between between technical  proficiency and emotional meaning
• The relationship between the art and music

Yoshizawa

From the History:

Akira Yoshizawa, who died in 2005 at age 94, is considered one of the progenitors of modern origami. In the 1930s, he developed a system of folding patterns employing a set of symbols, arrows and diagrams. By the 1950s, these patterns were published and widely available, contributing to origami’s global reach and standardization. Yoshizawa and other origami masters formed local and international organizations publicizing the art.

Yoshizawa never sold a single one of his pieces. Sold soup for a living.

As I get older and older, I find that the big task is to put more white canvas in my work, to not play too many notes in music, to start to say what do I not want to put in this figure. To try to reduce it down to just a few lines and essences of what it is. That's a much tougher challenge to me now, trying to make something much more representational.  - Bernie Payton

Technique vs. Emotion

Yes, I think as I will get more and more old, I will take out technique and just keep emotional things with the paper. - Eric Joisel

The Postmodernist

Lots of people think about the reality of an elephant in origami. Does it look real? Does it look like an elephant? But it's a piece of paper. Of course, it can't look like an elephant. But people measure the detail. They measure the proportions to the real elephant to see if it is good or bad. And if it's got really long spindly legs, it can't be a good elephant. If it's got huge, huge, huge ears or just three legs or something, it can't be a good elephant. The elephants with four legs are better than the elephants with three legs. This is not just a problem in origami. This is a problem in painting. For example, you see a painting by Mondrian or something. Just colored squares and black lines. Is that better than, say, a painting of flowers? For many people it's not. I mean, it's the same in origami: that they would prefer to see an origami elephant than an origami blumpf. - Paul Jackson

 One Crease - Paul Jackson

The process of making is the point of it. The object looks good if the process felt good. This needs to be a kind of ballet. And this is what I try to with my work, to take it to an edge of something - because that's always where the interesting things happen. - Paul Jackson

Chris Palmer

A simple compostion is like Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. It has a simple melody, a little bit of structure, not a lot going on, but it can be very elegant and nice - but simple. So, in the world of patterns, the hexagon grid or triangular grid is kind of like those real simple melodies. - Chris Palmer

 Chris Palmer at Origami USA

When you are putting a crease in a piece of paper, you are essentially changing the memory. - Eric Demaine

The Theory of Everything

In the beginning we didn't know what would be possible, then we tried to push the limits and, eventually, found that everything could be made, that you could make any shape that you want with straight sides just by folding with one straight cut. - Eric Demaine

Eric Demaine

A Demonstration of Supremely Bad Thinking: Religion: Biological Accident, Adaptation — or Both

Neural activation produced by God’s perceived love (left) and anger (right) [source]

An article whose subject matter is of great interest to me. I started the piece only to find myself running through the three stages of a bad reading experience: distraction, frustration, and, Jesus, who wrote this? Sentence construction, loose logic, and the almost surreal conclusions drawn by the author make this into a supreme example of bad writing.  Perhaps, I am reading too rigorously. Perhaps, I am too passionate about the subject. Perhaps, God just hates me and deliberately doesn't want me to understand. Judge for yourself:


Religion: Biological Accident, Adaptation — or Both [commentary mine]

Whether or not God exists, thinking about Him or Her doesn’t require divinely dedicated neurological wiring. [I am still trying to figure out what this sentence actually means. The only solution I could figure was to make a trite equation: God = Pain. However, the logic still tortures me.]

Instead, religious thoughts run on brain systems used to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling. [Again, what does this sentence mean?]

The findings, based on brain scans of people contemplating God, don’t explain whether a propensity for religion is a neurobiological accident. But at least they give researchers a solid framework for exploring the question. [At this point, I am going back to the original article to see if it was incorrectly copied.]

“In a way, this is a very cold look at religious belief,” said National Institutes of Health cognitive scientist Jordan Grafman, co-author of a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “We’re only trying to understand where in the brain religious beliefs seem to be modulated.” [Willing to keep plowing through it.]

Though scientific debate about God’s existence has transfixed the public, Grafman’s findings fit into a lesser known argument over why religion exists. [Transfixed? Really? transfix: 1. To pierce with or as if with a pointed weapon. 2. To fix fast; impale. 3. To render motionless, as with terror, amazement, or awe. With writing like this, I certainly feel transfixed.]

Some scientists think it’s just an accidental byproduct of social cognition. They say humans evolved to imagine what other people are feeling, even people who aren’t present — and from there it was a short step to positing supernatural beings. [Imagine me looking up to the ceiling in disbelief, talking to the screen. Was this actually published in Wired? Is this a joke? Are they hiring copy-editors? Is there any reputable scientist who would allow that 'short step' to stumble by without pulling out a bazooka to stop it dead in its tracks? This is cartoon science: an apple fell on Isaac Newton's head - and from there it was as short step to the theory of gravity.]

Others argue that religion is too pervasive to be just a byproduct. Historically, at least, it must have provided believers and their communities some sort of advantage, or else it would have disappeared.

The argument breaks down into the so-called byproduct and adaptation camps. Of course, they might both be right. [If religion is a "byproduct" of social cognition, then one must imagine it to be substantially pervasive. Again, I am lost in the loose logic.]

“Religious beliefs might have arisen as a byproduct,” said Justin Barrett, an Oxford University specialist in the cognitive neuroscience of religion, “but once in place, they’re pretty handy.” ["Pretty handy?" I realize that it is not only the author that is giving me trouble, it is the approach of the scientists who are performing these studies. There are so far away from how I understand Being in the World, the nature of religion and the idea of God, that I can barely understand them. With this in mind, I will stop commenting now.]

Grafman started by interviewing 26 people of varying religious sentiments, breaking down their beliefs into three psychological categories: God’s perceived level of involvement in the world, God’s perceived emotions, and religious knowledge gained through doctrine or experience. Then they submitted statements based on these categories to 40 people hooked to fMRI machines.

Statements based on God’s involvement — such as “God protects one’s life” or “Life has no higher purpose” — provoked activity in brain regions associated with understanding intent. Statements of God’s emotions — such as “God is forgiving” or “the afterlife will be punishing” — stimulated regions responsible for classifying emotions and relating observed actions to oneself.

Knowledge-based statements, such as “a source of creation exists” or “religions provide moral guidance,” activated linguistic processing centers.

Taken together, the neurological states evoked by the questions are known to cognitive scientists as the Theory of Mind: They underlie our understanding that other people have minds, thoughts and feelings.

The advantages of a Theory of Mind are clear. People who lack one are considered developmentally challenged, even disabled. Anthropologist Scott Atran, a proponent of the byproduct hypothesis, has suggested that it let our ancestors quickly distinguish between friends and enemies. And once humans were able to imagine someone who wasn’t physically present, supernatural beliefs soon followed.

But just as a Theory of Mind provided benefits, so might its supernatural byproducts and the religions that grew from them.

Unlike other animals, humans can imagine the future, including their own death. The hope given by religious beliefs to people confronting their own mortality might provide motivation to care for their offspring.

Supernatural beliefs may also have produced group-level advantages that then conferred benefits to individuals.

“You get some selective advantages, such as inter-group cooperation and self-policing morality,” said Barrett. “And maybe the entire network of belief practices, and whatever is behind them, gets reinforced.”

According to Barrett, religion may even have created a feedback loop, refining the Theory of Mind that produced it.

“It could be that when you’re in a religious community, it improves what psychologists call perspective-taking,” he said. “Exercising your Theory of Mind could be good for developing it, making your reasoning more robust.”

David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist at Binghamton University, said the findings fit with the idea that religion started as a cognitive byproduct and became a cultural adaptation, but cautioned against over-interpreting them.

“It’s tremendous to see religious belief manifested at the neurological level,” he said. “But there’s a sense that when you bring things down to that level, that trumps other kinds of understanding. That’s not true in this case.”

Grafman declined to speculate, instead concentrating on what he hopes to achieve with future research: studying other kinds of religions than were represented in his small sample size, and comparing religious cognition to legal and political certainties.

“The differences and nuances between these types of belief systems will be important to understanding the deliberation that goes on,” he said.

Grafman also stressed that the study examined only the nature of religion, not the existence of God.
“He, or She, didn’t come in for the evaluation,” he said.

I cannot let that horribly nightly newscast conclusion rest. Here is Steiner, oil on the waters:

"There is an actual sense in which every human use of the future tense of the verb "to be" is a negation, however limited, of mortality. Even as every use of an "if"-sentence tells of a refusal of the brute inevitability, of the despotism of the fact. "Shall," "will," and "if," circling in intricate fields of semantic force around a hidden center or nucleus of potentiality, are the pass-words to hope."

Thanks to S.F-T, for getting me up on the soapbox.

Antonin Artuad's "Spurt of Blood": Stars collide, the hand of God reaches down, and things turn transparent

This review is for an event long gone. Her words remain around like an echo...

Spurt of Blood: An experience in theater itself by Michelle Fordice (emphasis mine):

When most people read Antonin Artuad's surrealist play "Spurt of Blood" they consider it an academic exercise. For all the influence Artuad has had on modern theater, this play is considered to be unstageable and unproduceable. But not all people work that way. Two years ago now-senior Jackie Dineen discovered "Spurt of Blood" during Dr. Mark Pilkinton's Theater, History and Society class. She remarked in an e-mailinterview that, "he had us read the play out loud in class as an academic exercise and briefly mentioned how it has always been considered unstageable due to many of the surrealist and absurd characteristics of the show. I immediately became interested in what it would take to faithfully translate Artaud's vision onto the stage." This week, under her guidance as dramaturge, her interest has come to full realization as the Film, Television, and Theater department take on one of theater's most difficult works. The show is part of her honors thesis for the department, which will focus first on the practical aspects of translating Theater of Cruelty, an overarching theme of Artuad's work, to a modern stage and audience and second on Peter Brooks, the first person to bring the play to the stage. Taking "Spurt of Blood," which is a very short play filled with surrealist imagery, and turning it into a physical performance is not an easy task, both conceptually and physically. The audience is not given much text and no plot to react to and there are events that are difficult to express within the limits of a stage: stars collide, the hand of God reaches down, and things turn transparent. Dineen remarked, "once you read the play you immediately realize how incredibly challenging it is to translate to a modern audience. It has so many surrealist and absurd characteristics like objects falling with a 'despairing slowness' or characters catching on fire. The brevity of the play also tends to leave the reader a little shocked and feeling like nothing was explained."

In his introduction to the play, director Dr. Mark Pilkinton wrote, "'Spurt of Blood' challenges the traditional Aristotelian concept of theatre." The cast and crew worked hard to make "Spurt of Blood" a reality, especially under a short three week production schedule. In an e-mail interview, Kathleen Hession, the assistant director and one of the actresses remarked, "being completed entirely by Theatre Majors, this production highlights the immense talent that exists on this campus. I just wish people could have seen the insane amount of work that was put into the three weeks that preceded this performance." Dineen remarked, "the first few days of rehearsal took a lot of patience just in deciding what ideas we could use and what we couldn't. Everyone helped in all areas of the show like acting, designing, and staging which really added to the mentality that this is a Company production." Of course, while the company did their best to remain true to the spirit of the play, not every one of Artuad's directions was able to be followed. Dineen explained, "it was important that we tried to stay as true to Artaud's concept as possible, but some things will always have to be changed based on the resources you have."

The question on most people's lips is, of course, what is this play about? Before audience members walk in, they need to recognize that there isn't a plot or a theme in the way we have come to expect them. Dineen said the play, "…is about the concept and the method of production not necessarily the story," and expanded, "the play doesn't have a traditional plot line or your typical characters that audience members relate to, but it does show exactly what Artaud thought theater should be." She said, "it's important that everyone try to see what Artaud believes is broken in our typical theatre performances. The surrealism that runs throughout the show is there to tell the audience that there are more important things in theatre than just the spoken word. Theatre of Cruelty isn't about violence; it's about focusing on what makes us human, which is more than just talking." With "Spurt of Blood" Artuad is challenging the audience to drop their preconceptions and approach theater anew. Hession remarked, "when you enter the theatre and the show begins focus more on the style of the production and less on the text. Allow yourself to be taken over by the production and just have fun with it. Not everything has to be explained … surrender to the madness!" She explained that the show is in a way attempting to turn a passive audience into an active one, startling their senses so that they cannot just sit back and absorb. This was not only a challenge for the audience, but the actors as well. Hession explained that the actors had to remember that, "the text is not what should be placed at the center of this production. Rather it is the style of the play that we try to highlight." She continued, "once you convince yourself that you can let go of that stress the entire process becomes much easier and you focus more on simply being constantly present." Attendees of FTT's production of "Spurt of Blood" are certain to be exposed to a new theater experience.