Mikaela Du Pomzamparc Graduate Academy of Finland.
Area of specialty: Thawing the frozen poetry of architecture. Light, space and the materials of utopia.
Member of Imaginary Foundation since 1978
Pierre Mâché Baccalauréat Lausanne University
Area of specialty: Exploring the horizon of the human imagination, Assistant to the Director since 1993
Isadore Muggli Bauhaus Drop out
Area of specialty: Stimulating the neural mechanisms of visual perception. IF Co-ordinator of optical consistency since 1976
Kamilla Rousseau Groupe de Recherche Musicale
Area of specialty: Chaotic harmony, cultivated disorder and the atonal structure of infinite beauty. Imaginary since 1978
Neville Bennette Professor Emeritus Saint Petersburg State University
Area of specialty: Experimentally demonstrating the elaborate logic underpinning nature's awesome machinery. At the IF since 1991.
Everett Ruskin MA of Octameter Odes Stanford
Area of specialty: Surfing the undulating waves of novelty reflected downstream from the impending Singularity.
Welcomed into the Imaginary Foundation 1981
"Bonkers" Bainbridge Elongated sabbatical
Area of specialty: Profound absurdity and the ever multiplying wisdom of the cosmic joke.
Estranged from the Imaginary Foundation 1974 reunited 1998
Rufus Daintree Oxbridge expulsion committee
Area of specialty: Examining the interplay of cultural and biological evolution through the lens of the metabolic metaphor.
Enchanted by the imagination since the dawn of the Foundation.
Prof. Harold Rass Graduate Kingston Institute of Higher Education,
Area of specialty: Applied vapor research and it's coextending cosmic implications.
Associate Imaginary Foundation 1982
Andre Garnier L’Université Paris Descartes
Area of specialty: Anticipatory rearrangements of tomorrow via the wealth of yesterday's experience.
With Imaginary since 1979
The Director Graduate University of Zürich
Area of specialty: Deep Pattern Structures, Conciousness and the Articulation of the Possible.
Founder of Imaginary Foundation, 1973.
At TEDIndia, Pranav Mistry demo'ed several tools that help leverage our knowledge of everyday objects to interact with the world of data, including a deep look at his SixthSense device and a new paradigm-shifting paper "laptop."
The Centre for Life in Newcastle is taking an unusual look at people who stare deep into space to try to understand the mysteries of the Universe. Photographer Max Alexander conceptualises the astronomers' work in a series of striking images. See the audio slideshow here.
Cornel West is a philosopher, author and the University Professor at Princeton University. Here he talks about how great musicians—like Curtis Mayfield, Aretha Franklin and Bob Dylan—understand life in all its bristling glory. He urges us to find our passion, never leave it, and become a prisoner to the hope that it matters.
The positive words of British artist Martin Creed are a fresh contrast to the cynicism and spiritual malaise that is prevalent in much contemporary art.
"No Limits" is one of our favorite IF designs. It was inspired by a quote from Bruce Lee: "There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. "
Bruce Lee's eclectic belief system was influenced by Taoism, Jiddu Krishnamurti, and Buddhism. In this great clip, Lee ruminates on thephilosophy underlying his artform.
A flashmob is a group of people who assemble suddenly in a given locale, do something unusual or notable, and then disperse. Made increasingly popular through the use of cellular technology, social media and viral email, the flashmob is one of our favorite "bottom-up" art movements. This "Human Domino" flashmob is brought to you by the Boston society of spontaneity.
Programmable matter refers to matter that has the ability to change its physical properties (shape, density, etc.) in a programmable way. According to Intel, they are already in partnership with Carnegie Melon University and are studying how millions of tiny particles might be reshaped into diverse, useful objects. Beyond the mind-bending implications of such a technology for tomorrow, this video is a fine example of corporate marketers adopting the techniques of viral media today. Watch closely…
Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, explains that the next 50 years of media will be chaos, as old models break faster than new ones are being created.
Posted By: Pierre Mâché 11.23.09 Via: bigthink.com
Starting today, MOMA New York is presenting a retrospective of Hollywood director Tim Burton's work. Going beyond his well-known films, "this exhibition explores the full range of his creative work, tracing the current of his visual imagination from early childhood drawings through his mature work in film. It brings together over seven hundred examples of rarely or never-before-seen drawings, paintings, photographs, moving image works, concept art, storyboards, puppets, maquettes, costumes, and cinematic ephemera from such films as Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Batman, Mars Attacks!, Ed Wood, and Beetlejuice, and from unrealized and little-known personal projects that reveal his talent as an artist, illustrator, photographer, and writer working in the spirit of Pop Surrealism."
Henry Krokatsis' public work Ambo was featured in The Artists' Playground (2008) exhibit at Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire, England. Krokatsis' Gothic tree-house was inspired by a spiraling pulpit found in a chapel on the castle grounds, and plays upon the constrast between the organic architecture found in nature and the intricate hand-crafted work of Gothic architecture.
In this uplifting Ted talk, journalist and author Robert Wright posits that, contrary to what natural selection would seem to dictate, biological and cultural evolution actually rewards cooperation. In a globally networked society, the welfare of others is positively correlated with our own self-interest. As we become more interconnected, we become more interdependent and the well-being of the whole gives rise to the well-being of the individual. This he calls "non zero sum."
Milton Glaser is one of the world's most important living designers. Creator of the hugely popular "I Love New York" icon, Glaser's work has helped shape pop culture for more than 40 years. Here, he speaks on the relationship between art, design, beauty and status.
Colombian-born sculptor Doris Salcedo's work addresses the question of memory and forgetting. For the 8th International Istanbul Biennial, her installation featured 1,600 wooden chairs stacked precariously in the space between two buildings.
Scientists and artists alike have been fascinated with bringing Benoit Mandelbrot's 2D fractal formula into the third dimension since its introduction in the '80s. These exquisite 3D Mandelbrot sets with the addition of depth, shadows and light sourcing, allow us to see the famous self-similar object in a new way.
This hard-to-find PBS documentary, Albert Einstein: How I See the World, is quite possibly the best one that's been made on the greater thinker. Beautifully crafted, it features narration by William Hurt, great archival footage and a beautifully haunting soundtrack. Perhaps the most profound moments are of his sister reading from diary entries that Einstein made in the last weeks of his life.
Musician/fimmaker Jarbas Agnelli collaborated with photographer Paulo Pinto when Agnelli was moved by Pinto's still photo of birds perched randomly on electrical wires. Agnelli gives motion and melody to the photo, using it as sheet music to assign notes to the birds based upon their placement on the wires, or, through his eyes, the five-line staff. As individuals, the birds sit motionless, but, as a flock, they create a serene and magical score for an imminent Brazilian sunset.
The radical and subversive Swiss artist Jean Tinguely questioned the relationship between artist and machine in his mid-twentieth century Dadaist sculptures. His works will be on display at the Liverpool Tate through January 2010.
Looking into my archives, I found an old guide from my 1992 visit to the floriade park in Zoetermeer, The Netherlands. At that time, the park was offered as a public space for the project Allocations, an art exhibit whose aim was to present an insight into how artists expierience what the organizers call a "natural" and "artificial" enviroment. Vito Acconci, a poet, performer, and sound and video artist, who has also proposed a number of public space projects in recent years, contributed to Allocations with an installation entitled Personal Island, a small tree-island that can be rowed, with an identical fishing rowboat placed on land with a young tree inside, and the oars firmly planted on the grass...
It was a wonderful time in the lake, albeit the cold.
To love beauty is to See Light. Tel Aviv-based light sculptor Yochai Matos understands this concept and invites his viewers to participate in illuminated seeing.
I write this at twilight from my mountain cabin in Vals. I've left the dull chatter of the Parisian gossip to dedicate myself fully to the special project the Directeur has assigned to me. After spending long nights researching the moral rights of all living beings under the new amendments to the Swiss and Equadorian constitutions I stumbled upon a truly moving, long time-scale artwork I thought worthy of reporting.
First, allow me to profess my admiration for the simple elegance of trees. They exist efficiently, so purely connected to the sun and are known to even communicate with each other in a language yet to be understood by human beings. Legend has it that the venerable Baobab trees are the widest in the world becuase they contain the collective souls of our ancestors. I dream everyday of what tomorrow might bring my grandchildren yet am no longer able to ingore my own mortality. I've come to accept it, as all humans must, and welcome the phase transition that awaits when my time is up. Perhaps I will live much longer than I think, but when making plans for my final days here on Spaceship Earth I want to be remembered as a tree.
Thanks to Biopresence, it is now possible to create Human DNA trees by transcoding the essence of a human being within the DNA of a tree. They refer to these as "living memorials" or "Transgenic Tombstones." I would love to be found here on the hills of the Alps, gently swaying to and fro in the perfect Swiss air rather than on a slab of stone in a Parisian cemetary.
PLAYBOY: Despite your personal distaste for the upheavals induced by the new electric technology, you seem to feel that if we understand and influence its effects on us, a less alienated and fragmented society may emerge from it. Is it thus accurate to say that you are essentially optimistic about the future?
MCLUHAN: I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form. There is a long road ahead, and the stars are only way stations, but we have begun the journey. To be born in this age is a precious gift, and I regret the prospect of my own death only because I will leave so many pages of man's destiny–if you will excuse the Gutenbergian image–tantalizingly unread. But perhaps, as I've tried to demonstrate in my examination of the postliterate culture, the story begins only when the book closes.
Neo-conceptualist Jason Eppink has be kind enough to throw a series of Print After Parties for the dead publishing industry, utilizing their abandoned distribution infrastructure as venues.
MultitouchBarcelona is an interactive design group that explores natural communication between people and technology. This adorable video literally turns the relationship between man and machine inside out.
There are some who might point out that it is our preoccupation with fairness and justice that are among our most human of traits. These folks would be quite wrong, for the sense of justice extends deeper into the tree of life than many have expected, from many species of primates, to canines, to even birds:
Inequity aversion will no doubt prove a rich research area, all the more so since there is no reason to think it is limited to the primates. I expect it to be found in all social animals. One entertaining account concerns psychologist Irene Pepperberg's typical dinner conversation with two squabbling African grey parrots, the late Alex, and his junior colleague, Griffin. "I ...had dinner, with Alex and Griffin as company. Dining company, really, because they insisted on sharing my food. They loved green beans and broccoli. My job was to make sure it was equal shares, otherwise there would be loud complaints. 'Green bean,' Alex would yell if he thought Griffin had one too many. Same with Griffin."
From this we can surmise that the principle of cooperation between members of a particular species is in part based on a notion of equity, that social life among species is primarily the distribution of equity along the different levels within a particular hierarchy, and that this is enough to hold a social group together despite the nearly always present pressures of competition for food, territory, resources, and mating rights.
In a nutshell, "the singularity" is the postulated point in our future when evolutionary development accelerates enormously (powered by nanotechnology, neuroscience and AI) so that nothing beyond that time can reliably be conceived. ...a future time when societal, scientific and economic change is so fast that we cannot even imagine what will happen from our present perspective, and when humanity will become posthumanity. This is a trailer for the upcoming feature documentary The Singularity Film by Doug Wolens.
This clip from "The Roots of the Matrix," an hour-long documentary that was originally released as a DVD extra for the 1999 science-fiction action movie, The Matrix, explains how Joseph Campbell's ideas influenced the film's narative arc.
Alan Watts was a British philosopher, writer, speaker who put forward a worldview that draws upon Zen, Hinduism, Chinese philosophy, pantheism, and modern science. This charming short film illustrates one of Watt's great insights–that life is about the journey and not the destination.
French photographer Frédéric Lebain imposes urban landscape upon itself in a contemporary nod to the surrealist concepts of altered perspective and irrational collage.
Marshall McLuhan, once referred to as “the high priest of popthink who conducts a Black Mass for dilettantes before the altar of historical determinism," was arguably the most important media theorist the 20th century. This footage from 1968 shows McLuhan at the top of his game, debating Norman Mailer on media, art and the electronic envelope.
Since 2006, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been orbiting Mars, and is currently circling approximately 300 km (187 mi) above the Martian surface. On board the MRO is HiRISE, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, which has been photographing the planet for several years at resolutions as fine as mere inches per pixel. More Here
Artist Jason de Caires Taylor has created the world’s first underwater sculpture park in Grenada, West Indies. His underwater sculptures, designed to create artificial reefs for marine life to colonise and inhabit, embrace the transformations wrought by ecological processes.
O is for Omniverse is a new book by the creator of Imagining the Tenth Dimension, Rob Bryanton. Written in the deceptively simple form of an A-to-Z children's story, this charming book is a beautifully illustrated tour of some of the biggest concepts in our multidimensional cosmos.
555 KUBIK facade projection is a project by Urbanscreen, a group of free media artists and architects who deal with research and development of experimental media installations with the aim to stage urban areas.
The discovery of linear perspective in fifteenth-century Italy, and the use of symmetry and harmony of proportion in the arts of ancient Greece 2,000 years before then, exposes the human quest to reveal the highest truths of their society through the arts. In both cases, mathematical principles were used to disclose divine order and divine perfection. The highest truths in society today are not theological, however, but theoretical, in the form of the laws and principles of physics and the other sciences. In the light of this notion, Dale Frank's canvases become vessels of mystic truths.
Zdzisław Beksiński was one of the masters of Polish surealism. With no formal training, he developed his work in solitude, listerning to thousands of hours of classical music. His "Fantastic" period (from the late 1960s up to the mid-1980s) established Beksiński as the leading figure in contemporary Polish art. A Beksiński museum (Muzeum Zdzisława Beksińskiego), housing 50 paintings and 120 drawings from the Dmochowski collection, opened in 2006 in the City Art Gallery of Częstochowa, Poland.
"If the world pays attention to Howard Bloom, the future of capitalism and the future of the world will change."– Bob Krone, Provost, Kepler Space University
"Bloom is a brilliant synthesizer who connects the dots so the rest of us can see." – Paul Herr, author of Primal Management and Inventor of The Horsepower SurveyTM
"Pure poetry, divinely begotten. It's a struggle of visions wine and wafer to become the real world's flesh and blood. I am convinced that Howard Bloom is the reincarnation of Plato. This beast is absolutely captivating; a godsend." – Mark Lamonica
Human form and movement abstracted to express mysterious beauty by Memo Akten. This is an off-shoot from a visual performance accompanying the Rambert Dance Company at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, South Bank, London UK.
The spectacular new camera installed on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope during Servicing Mission 4 in May has delivered the most detailed view of star birth in the graceful, curving arms of the nearby Spiral Galaxy M83.
The idea of the soul is older than human culture. As self-awareness evolved in response to communicative needs within social groups, we were being made by our language and our motor neurons. One of the things motor neurons know how to do is contain, so in order to explain what "we" were, the brain came up with the containment metaphor. From there was launched the idea of a soul that travels the astral spheres, landing in this or that life to carry on an eternity of learning. An awful lot to bear for the simple notion of "to hold."
But now there is a crack in the container, for Thomas Metzinger has more or less killed the notion of any real self to be contained, and to it we say: au revoir!
The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self, is certainly an important book, but it will be the books which follow that determine its greatness. They have a high hurdle to vault, for Herr Metzinger has basically solved the mind/body problem. By looking at cases of out-of-body experiences, lucid dreaming, phantom limbs and virtual reality, Metzinger shows how our deepest sense of self, our containment in a body, is easily manipulated to startling effect. His conclusion as we read it is thus: our sense of self is the effect of the transparency of the brain's model of self. In other words, there's actually no one really here, just an idea of being here. We are a model of self that can't see behind its own facade... usually.
Although Metzinger never ventures to oriental shores, his findings quite mirror the general lay of the land in the nondual traditions. Most of them start with the same general idea, that our identity as individuals is empty. The object is to find that as experiential truth. What Metzinger is telling us is that indeed, there is no real self. But he leaves the question of where exactly consciousness comes from for another book. We all look forward to his presumptions on that most important question.
Buckminster Fuller is considered by many to be the grandfather of the sustainability movement. This portrait of him by HunterGatherer's Todd St. John is marvelous.
This is a photo of the "Dream-In" launch ceremony of The Imaginary Foundation on April 17, 1973. As a group, we lay down and all visualised the same thought: "Our minds are omnidirectional. Understanding our interconnectedness releases us from our limitations and makes us part of the greater totality." It was quite an event! I remember, at the after-party, we played the newly released "Dark Side of the Moon," and Roger Waters, still ecstatic from a show he had just played in Earl's Court, London, had brought a 16mm copy of The Wizard of Oz as visual accompaniment. Alas, the film melted in the projector! Rather a let-down, I must say. But, to my delight, the night was salvaged by Bucky Fuller's wife, Anne, making scrumptious "Omni-Triangulated Omelets" for all the attendees.
Here Richard Dawkins sees the scientist's career as a colorful and incredibly creative enterprise—akin, in many ways, to the highest poetry and most imaginative art.
"Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of the imagination. ." -John Dewey
Posted By: Pierre Mâché 11.05.09 Via: bigthink.com
Today, prompted by an impulse on the wire, awareness came to bear on the concept of social and emotional learning, which seeks to apply the findings of neuroscience in educational programs, along with a good helping of that most important of mental talents, mindfulness.
Leading the effort is none other than the famous American actress, Goldie Hawn. Her Hawn Foundation seeks to implement their brain science-enabled MindUp™ program, developed in collaboration with "neuroscientists, behavioral psychologists, educators, and leading researchers in the field of social and emotional learning."
The fifteen lesson MindUP™ curriculum uniquely incorporates the brain science associated with each lesson concept so that children also learn how their thoughts and actions affect their brain and how their brain affects their thoughts and actions.
The four-stage curriculum offers a developmental model for the students and the teachers, as well as the parents, one might hope. It's simple, positive, completely secular and a venue for the application of our latest understanding in neuroscience.
The inclusion of mindfulness is also a great boon for the students, teachers and parents, as well as everyone else who lives on our world. We find it as clear as a bell on a calm night in a deep valley that meditation, which is what basic mindfulness is, can only improve our lives and the lives of those around us.
You may color us quite impressed with the famous blonde, who clearly understands—as we do at the Foundation—that neuroscience and the self-awareness it brings are among the greatest hopes our world enjoys at this moment.
This is an excerpt from Sweeper Clock, a movie by Dutch designer Maarten Baas featuring two men with brooms pushing lines of debris to form moving clock hands in real-time. This is one of three movies that Baas created in The Netherlands on the theme of new clock designs. The real-time nature is reminicent of some of Andy Warhol's early underground movies such as Sleep or Empire, both consisting of hours and hours of unedited continuous footage.
This year marks the 40th Anniversary of the first broadcast of Monty Python's Flying Circus on BBC TV in 1969. A new documentary, Almost The Truth: The Lawyers Cut, tells the story of Monty Python through brand-new interviews with The Pythons (John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin) and archive material from the late Graham Chapman. A host of others also contribute to putting the Python legacy in context.
The influential French intellectual, Claude Levi-Strauss (dubbed "the father of modern anthropology"), died yesterday at 100. His thinking was largely influenced by the philosophies of both Hegel, "who explains that in every situation there can be found two opposing things and their resolution" as well as Saussure, "who saw in the structure of language as a series of oppositions or opposites." With these two philosophical giants as grounding, he spent (more than what most consider) a life-time developing and researching ideas around structural anthropology (this means how people think about the world, largely in terms of binary opposites). His tenacious search for archetypes and patterns in human thought and activity will continue to inspire curiosity and meaning.
"Not a year goes by without my recieving an order for jeans."
The idea of the soul is older than human culture. As self-awareness evolved in response to communicative needs within social groups, we were being made by our language and our motor neurons. One of the things motor neurons know how to do is contain, so in order to explain what "we" were, the brain came up with the containment metaphor. From there was launched the idea of a soul that travels the astral spheres, landing in this or that life to carry on an eternity of learning. An awful lot to bear for the simple notion of "to hold."
Today, prompted by an impulse on the wire, awareness came to bear on the concept of social and emotional learning, which seeks to apply the findings of neuroscience in educational programs, along with a good helping of that most important of mental talents, mindfulness.
