Jean Baudrillard died.. one of the great theorists I actually enjoy reading. If you have some time today, read a bit from “Simulacra and Simulation”. Its (most of it at least) on Google Book Search, well, a simulation of the book anyway. Well, read it then you tell me.
There is a fantastic article in the New York Times on the evolution of religion, detailing the work of Scott Atran and others who have been trying to figure out just why humans hold counter-intuitive ideas such as believing our consciousness continues after death – or that a mind or spirit disembodied from physical form exists and created everything. Its a long read, but a great argument and lead-in to the research. Here is a chunk from the middle:
“Whether or not it is adaptive, belief in the afterlife gains power in two ways: from the intensity with which people wish it to be true and from the confirmation it seems to get from the real world. This brings us back to folkpsychology. We try to make sense of other people partly by imagining what it is like to be them, an adaptive trait that allowed our ancestors to outwit potential enemies. But when we think about being dead, we run into a cognitive wall. How can we possibly think about not thinking? “Try to fill your consciousness with the representation of no-consciousness, and you will see the impossibility of it,” the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno wrote in “Tragic Sense of Life.” “The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness. We cannot conceive of ourselves as not existing.”
Much easier, then, to imagine that the thinking somehow continues.”
We got invited up to the Getty Center to see Tim Hawkinson’s show open up.. here is a write up about it in the New York Times. I am excited to see it, and bet the Getty has awfully nice wine and cheese.
So I haven’t been posting much in the last several months. I’ve been busy… This school year I picked up an extra class at UCR. It is great to be teaching sculpture again, in addition to video and digital photo. I am enjoying the time away from the computer and my students are making interesting work. I’ll have to post images at some point. We’re almost finished with the CARD documentary, Recovered – Journeys Through the Autism Spectrum and Back. It’s just waiting for Jeremy’s music score and a DVD package design. I’ve also been finishing up a new body of work, including my most recent digital photos and video shorts, which I am excited to present in a few weeks at South La Brea Gallery. Check our calendar page for more details.
I started up an account over at Coroflot, and posted some work there.. I will be sticking up some of my recent architectural work there this week. Check it out if you like.
Also, some new pics up at flickr from this weekend, and from the past month.
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