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Visual artefact – ‘Dualisms’

My visual artefact Dualisms takes the form of an exhibition (using artsteps).

Follow the link to enter the exhibition – you have the choice to explore without guidance or text (by using the keyboard and mouse to move around), or by clicking the “play” button to take a guided tour.

There is a little audio at points, but it can be viewed without audio so feel free to switch it off if you wish.

Dualisms artsteps Exhibition
Dualisms artsteps Exhibition

If you have any problems accessing the exhibition directly at artsteps, here is a video preview showing the guided tour:

Credits can be viewed by clicking on the individual images within the exhibition.

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Michael saved in Pocket: ‘Digital Bodies (2017-current) — Megan Archer’

Swipe Down (Megan Archer)
Swipe Down (Megan Archer) from Digital Bodies series

Excerpt

In my current series I am combining my previously quite separate practices of collage and painting. I heavily edit my analog collages in Photoshop until the digital modifications are very obvious. Although the finished product is created solely through traditional oil painting techniques, the end result shows evidence of every step of the process, the original collage, the digital manipulation, and the final unifying physicality of the painted surface.

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Michael commented on Susan’s lifestream – Week 2 Summary – enhancement & (dis)embodiment

Week 2 Summary – enhancement & (dis)embodiment

Michael Wolfindale:

Great summary and fascinating points!

Reflecting specifically on the idea of ‘distributed cognition’, and what this might mean for education, brought me across an article where Hayles (2008) discusses the idea in context of ‘slippingglimpse’, a verbal-visual collaboration involving a videographer, poet and programmer and consisting of videos of moving water associated with scrolling poetic text.

Amongst other things, Hayles (2008: 23) discusses the ‘collision/conjunction of human and non-human cognition’, as well as ‘non-conscious parts of cognition’. One example of the latter might be a musician who has learnt a piece ‘by heart’ and ‘knows the moves in her body better than in her mind’ (I remember the phrase ‘muscle memory’ from piano lessons!).

She also discusses the ‘non-conscious performance of the intelligent machine’ (for example, learning from ‘computed information’), as well as ‘the capacity of artificial evolution for creative invention’ (such as using image-editing software).

Another example is reading, which some describe as ‘a whole-body activity that involves breathing rhythms, kinaesthesia, proprioception, and other unconscious or non-conscious cognitive activities’ (Hayles 2008: 16). The work ‘slippingglimpse’ itself ‘requires and mediates upon multimodal reading as a whole body activity’ (ibid.: 18).

While I am still processing the implications of these ideas for education (particularly the way they complicate individual agency), these examples have certainly been food for thought and helped me to think beyond the Cartesian mind/body dualism!