the old world falls apart

Don't be freaked by the term 'sacred' here. This short film doesn't draw meaning from a mythical god in the sky, but neither does it draw meaning from the dumb conservatism of secular mysticism and its chief contesting ideological manifestations: free markets and scientific socialism. It is a contribution to a discussion taking us beyond such outdated oppositions.

urban colour scheme

I posted this back in June. Now the artist Slinkachu has an exhibition at the Andipa Gallery in London SW3 from 27 Sept to 27 Oct. His book Global Model Village is out today. Again, I like the found objects aspect and the creation of miniature worlds under our feet, beneath our gaze. The artist leaves the tiny models in place after he had photographed them and claims often on returning months later some remain untouched.


pic from here

urban colour scheme

'I'd like to teach the world to sing' by Laura Keeble (2012), currently hanging in the Walker Gallery in Liverpool, just across the street from Lime St station. Exhibited as part of the John Moores Painting Prize, the UK's biggest painting competition, open to anonymous entries from UK based artists working with paint. A found coke can with enamel paint depicting marching cops, it appears very slight on the wall between two framed pieces by other painters, and has an affinity with the series of flattened tin cans posted here under the 'city' thread (see tag below).

self and other disappear

a gradient of grays

" “(C)onsciousness” is not a term that applies only to higher mammals, and exists well beyond the realm of humans... it is a continuum, a sliding scale, a gradient of grays between the white of an unfeeling amoeba and the black of we highly evolved Homo sapiens. It is not a quality that something simply “has” or “doesn’t have”. Rather, the animal world falls at points across the scale." 

From here

Regarding the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness which can be read in full here

millions of petabytes

"This system — let’s call it Grace — has access to the world’s major datasets, which contain millions of petabytes of social data in this hypothetical future. Grace would work surreptitiously and guardedly, applying social math to each of our private social contexts, convincing us to brush more often, to read to our kids, to help others in need. Grace would reward us at the physiological level, by convincing one person to touch another, unleashing oxytocin and building trust where none existed before. Teams would work more efficiently. Friends would make that extra effort, families would settle old differences. Politicians would reach out to their opponents to find common cause and to put aside partisan division. Warring factions in dusty far-away lands would lay down their AK-47s and make peace where there had been decades or millennia of war."

There's an extraordinarily nutty post here from Stowe Boyd, an influential thinker in the field of new technology and its impact on society and culture. He is quite serious, I think, in his belief that machines can save the world.

I can't believe he hasn't watched this:

now where was i?... continued

my mate amy marries her french hunk

night party at the pool in murcia

louis my grandson in normal mode

my mate katie visits from japan

now where was I?

Ah yes...banging on about the failure of modern discourse to include the obvious facts of consciousness as they have been known for all cultures throughout history, and continue to be known by the community of seriously intelligent contemplatives, but denied by the narrow prejudices of materialistic atheism, a provincial western-centric strain of thought that stems from the current dominance of capitalistic science and technology in our culture. But before we proceed with that, here's some pictures from my summer:

jo fro and 65daysofstatic at tramlines

walking home through sheffield at dusk

godson's first footie match: brazil v belarus at old trafford during olympics

only olympics event i got to go to

the daz in london posing with a foreign language newspaper 

stone's 50 years exhibition at somerset house

assorted daughters and grandkids (one missing) watching the olympics