Attention, according to William James, is "the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what may seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought." Any model of attention must account for its selectivity, for the fact that, after an animal learns a skill, it becomes automatic (or unconscious), for the ability to interrupt automatic acts by attention to novelty, and for the ability to direct attention specifically by conscious means. (Edelman)
Read MoreAttractors
in abstraction
Attractors are geometric forms that characterize long-term behaviour in the phase space. Roughly speaking, an attractor is what the behaviour of a systems settles down to, or is attracted to. They are globally stable in the sense that the system will return if perturbed off the attractor, as long as it remains within the basin of attraction.
Read MoreAutocatalysis
in self-organization, theory, biology, a-life
Catalysts are chemical substances that modify reaction rates without themselves being changed in the process. Their kinetics are characterized by threshold and amplification phenomena. Enzymes are the major class of biological catalysts.
Read Moreautomaton
In Aristotle's sense of the term, automaton means sheer random happening, and tyche refers to some cause and effect sequence outside the usual pattern of development. In more current usage, an automaton would be a bit of machinery exhibiting somewhat complex behavior but completely lacking in awareness. An automaton is a "self-moving" machine, and the development of control mechanisms led to the possibility of programming automata.
automobile
"With the advent of the motor-car the poet, painter, intellectual, was no longer a passive recipient of technological experience, but could create it for himself." (Banham, Theory and Design, p 102)
Read MoreAutopoesis
Autopoesis is both a concept about self-maintaining systems, especially biological ones, and an epistemological theory about cognition and self-reference.
Read Moreavant-garde
For Poggioli, futurism defines one central aspect of the avant-garde, which in Ortega Y Gasset's words, is that the historical task of the contemporary artist is to "work in the present for the future". In this "historical mythology of contemporary art" the work of the avant-garde presents the shape of things to come. Poggioli differentiates between the actual artistic movement of Futurism and that movement's claim to the concept of the avant-garde. For Poggioli,Futurism "possessed in its name the most successful and suggestive formula thought up by the avant-garde" but the movement "was one of the lowliest and vulgar manifestations of avant-garde culture" (p.143) If real futurism is dead forever, ideal futurism is still living, precisely because it renews itself in the consciousness of each successive avant-garde. (p.223). Reyner Banham also enthusiastically described the Futurist example and its exaltation of speed while distancing himself from its politics.
Read MoreAuthoritarianism
In an essay entitled “three kinds of ‘Conservatism’”, Karen Stenner refers to “status quo” conservatism, Laissez-Faire conservatism, and authoritarianism as psychological tendencies in the form of enduring predispositions within individuals with regards to change, redistribution, and diversity — as distinct from their political “packaging”. In her analysis, these three forms of conservatism are significantly different in definition and consequence.
Considered separately, these predispositions relate to an inclination to favor stability and preservation of the status quo over social change ("status quo conservatism"); a persistent preference for a free market and limited government intervention in the economy ("laissez-faire conservatism"); and an enduring predisposition, in all matters political and social, to favor obedience and conformity (oneness and sameness) over freedom and difference.
Read MoreB/Z Reaction
Chemical reactions do not generally display dynamic patterns or spatial order. The Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction, discovered in 1951, may be the first completely understandable laboratory example of pattern formation in a chemical system that involves nothing more than chemical reaction and molecular diffusion. That same year, in 1951, Alan Turing investigated the theoretical possibilities of pattern formation by reaction/diffusion as "The chemical basis of Morphogenesis." The B/Z reaction is an example of a chemical system that shows spatial, periodic and wave properties that suggests that morphogenetic self-organization might follow similar pathways in both inorganic and organic systems. (cf. Slime Mold)
from Arthur T. Winfree, When Time Breaks Down, p. 168
bachelor machine
The term "bachelor machine" was first used by Marcel Duchamp around 1913 in connection with pieces of work that would later be assembled in the Large Glass of 1915-1923. (Also known as the bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even) For Duchamp, the term refers specifically to the lower portion of the glass, the realm of the bachelors, which contains, among other things, the chocolate grinder, the cemetary for uniforms and liveries -- Priest, Delivery Man, Gendarme, Cuirassier, Policeman, Pallbearer, Footman, Stationmaster and Page Boy -- and the témoins oculistes. The Large glass consists of two distinct realms, the realm of the bride above, and the realm of the bachelors below, both desiring and imagining one another without any possibility of mutual comprehension. (one is here reminded of the real / imaginary distinction and the discussion of cyberspace)
Read Morebasin of attraction
in fractal, physics, theory, abstraction
The phase space of a particular dynamical system is partitioned into one or many basins of attraction , perhaps intimately intertwined, each with its own attractor .
basins of attraction for a pendulum swinging over three magnets. (from Peitgen, Jürgens, and Saupe, Chaos and Fractals)
being / becoming
For Cassirer, " Form thinking" belongs to being, while "causal thinking" belongs to becoming. But strict knowledge is only possible of the always-being. That which is becoming can only be described, if at all, in the language of myth. Or rather, myth is already familiar with both the question of the "what" and the question of the "whence." "It sees everything that it grasps (the world as well as the gods) under this double aspect." (The Problem of Form and the Problem of Cause, in The Logic of the Cultural Sciences, p. 87)
Read Morebifurcation
in abstraction, theory
A bifurcation occurs when an attractor changes qualitatively with the smooth variation of a control parameter. Physically, bifurcations denote phase transitions from a state of equilibrium to new possible states of equilibria. (see also singularities)
Read MoreBig Science
Big Science attacks complex problems through large corporate enterprises and megamachines like CERN or Fermilab. Often the smaller the phenomenon, the larger and more complex the instrument set.
Read Morebiological time
Some biological patterns are cyclical and function as clocks, subject to resetting and breakdown. The Circadian rhythms ( the term means approximately daily and was coined by Franz Halberg in 1951) are an examply of biological cycles which are non-linear oscillators, which mesh with day/night cycles. They are subject to entrainment or synchronization because of their time-dependent sensitivity. Exposed to some standard disturbance beginning at different times in the cycle, there will be different phase shifts inflicted. (see Winfree, 1987. p. 12) There is a particular point of vulnerability, where circadian rhythms can break down or become unpredictable when subject to a particular stimulus known as the "critical annihilating stimulus". This arrhythmic center in the pattern of timing is called its "phase singularity"
Read Morebiopower
In The History of Sexuality, (p. 139) Michel Foucault describes the power over life evolving since the seventeenth century in two basic forms, in two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations.
Read More
Hanna Wilke from IntraVenus
body image
Two English neurologists, Lord Russell Brain and Henry Head (!) coined the phrase "body image" for the internal image and memory of one's body in space and time. The body-image mediates the mind / body polarization. It requires input from both sides to be effective.
Read Morebody thinking
In Antiquity, Body and Mind were not yet explicitly viewed as separate entities. This is reflected by the fact that the Greek word soma in Homeric verses referred to a corpse, not a living body. Neither the living body as an entity nor the Mind as an entity had a name. (see Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature.) But For Aristotle, thinking is the one specific activity of the human soul which is capable of separate and independent existence from any connection to the body.
In Love's Body, Norman O. Brown proposes an alternative to the dualism, established by the reality principle, between inside and outside, between the Lockean and Cartesian notions of mental events as distinct from external, material reality. He rejects the " simple location" of the body as a thing which is here in space and here in time. (see p. 154. see also ego and play)For Brown, the alternative to dualism is dialectics, that is to say, love.
body
Aristotle distinguished between the body and the soul. The latter referred not only to the principle of life, but to the form of a particular living body. Thus the soul is the organization of the body. (cf. organism) Aristotle rejected the doctrine of the Pythogoreans, according to which the soul can clothe itself in different bodies. (see clothing/garment ) Instead, a particular soul is the entelechy, or formative force of a particular body, and the individuality of a particular man. Thus every particular soul requires a connection to a particular organic whole. At the same time, he upheld a division between matter and form which describes, for example, the relation between the eye and sight. When the power of sight is absent, the eye is no longer an eye in the proper sense. After taking the position that "..there seems to be no case in which the soul can act or be acted on without involving the body," Aristotle goes on to suggest that thinking is the one specific activity of the human soul which is capable of separate and independent existence from any connection to the body. (see also subject )
Kristi Hargrove, Egg Series, 20004
BwO
in theory, embodiment, psyche
The "body without organs" and the "organs-partial objects" are concepts that Deleuze and Guattari mobilize in opposition to the organism and its organization, in opposition to the functional specificity of organs, so as to release the decoded and deterritorialized flows of desire. The BwO is the "anorganism of the body" a bundle of virtual affects in a non-organic and non-organized multiplicity, "molecular" rather than "molar."
Read More