UPDATED FINAL
watch here
THIS MOVIE HAS SOUND!
Posted on June 6, 2008
Lawrence Weiner Exhibition
Posted on June 5, 2008
View here.
Posted on May 25, 2008
Low Touch Spectrum:
Posted on May 22, 2008
My book will, in hope, communicate the sensation of positive and negative touch through visual color references.
The breakdown:
By interviewing numerous individuals about the emotions felt when one is touched vs. not touched, I have come up with a list of 19 "high-touch" emotions and 19 "low-touch" emotions that correlate with this sensation.
Next, I assigned specific "colors" that best communicate the emotion perceived. For instance, warm is assigned a warm orange-brown to communicate the sense of warmth etc. To somehow connect the emotions via the limitations of a book, I've decided to blend the colors/emotions in 19 equal steps. Each color then becomes a combination of emotions, much like the combination of emotions an individual experiences when touched.
My chart (1-1, 1-2, 1-3 etc.) is basically saying (I feel intensely warm, I feel very warm and minutely comforted, I feel very warm and a little comforted etc.) My spectrum is categorical and ordinal.
To view here
Posted on May 20, 2008
Posted on May 6, 2008
INVERTED FLAGS
Inverting the colors of the spanish, french, & italian flag.
muted:
Posted on May 6, 2008
HUMAN TOUCH = HAPPINESS
Positive human interaction via touch leads to a happy human being
Posted on May 6, 2008
Posted on May 6, 2008
muted:
Posted on May 6, 2008
Posted on May 2, 2008
For some reason my research brought my thoughts back to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. In Highschool, we focused on how the creature yearns for Frankenstein's affection, for he is the creature's "father". Frankenstein denies his paternal duties because he cannot find those affectionate feelings in such a horrid beast. Creature gets no TLC, so it kills etc.
The power of human connection.
Posted on April 28, 2008
Here is an excerpt from a cultural athropology book defining high and low touch culture. Read here
Posted on April 28, 2008
Our Parenting Choices
by Pam Leo
"Everyday, every parent makes major and minor, conscious and unconscious decisions about how to interact with their children. We may be pushed by the traditions of culture, or the approval or disapproval of family members, but in the end, all parents decide for themselves how to treat their children."
- Dr. Meredith F. Small, Author of "Our Babies, Ourselves"
From the moment we decide to have a child or find out that we are having a child we begin making important choices about how we will care for our children. Parenting our children will likely be the most important and challenging job any of us will ever have. The parenting choices we make daily are determined by the information and support we have at the time, our life circumstances, how we ourselves were raised and the parenting practices of our culture. Unlike all other important jobs, parenting is the one job for which we get no formal preparation, education or training.
Parents seeking information and guidance often find the advice of child experts and parenting books to be confusing and contradictory. One book or expert says to do one thing and another says to do the exact opposite. Parents often ask me, "How do I tell 'good' parenting advice from 'bad' parenting advice? How am I to choose what is best for my child?"
Securing and maintaining a strong bond with our children is our primary work as parents. A secure bond or connection with at least one other human being is the greatest emotional need of every child. It is also the biological key to optimal human development. Parenting advice is relevant only to the extent that it honors our human biology and promotes parenting practices that support secure bonding. When considering any parenting advice we must ask ourselves, "If I follow this advice, will I be providing nurturing, guidance, and limits in a way that maintains a secure bond with my child? Our effectiveness as parents will be in direct proportion to the strength of the connection we have with our child. In any interaction will our words and actions strengthen or weaken our connection with a child? Any advice that promotes parent behaviors that compromise trust is counterproductive and undermines the strength of the parent-child bond.
One of the most interesting and important things I have discovered in studying human development is that parenting practices are cultural. What is considered the "normal" way to care for infants and children in one culture can be very different from what is considered normal in another culture.
In many cultures normal includes:
natural birthing practices that protect the vital mother-infant bond
honoring genital integrity (no circumcision)
breast-feeding ideally for two years or beyond
babies spending the majority of time in human contact, being carried in arms or worn in slings
babies and young children sleeping with parents
babies and young children being cared for by parents and relatives the majority of the time
Cultures where these parenting practices are observed are considered high-touch cultures.
In our technologically advanced Western culture normal includes:
technological birthing practices that interfere with the vital mother-child bond
circumcision
formula-feeding from a bottle until the child can drink from a cup
babies spending the majority of time in plastic baby containers, out of human contact
babies and young children sleeping alone in a crib in a separate room
babies and young children being cared for by unrelated others the majority of the time
Cultures where these parenting practices are observed are considered low-touch cultures. The United States is the lowest touch culture in the world. While the high-touch nurturing practices of other cultures may sound strange to parents in our culture, the low-touch parenting practices of our culture sound just as strange to parents in other cultures. Dr. Meredith F. Small, author of "Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent," reports that in a survey of 186 societies, researchers found that "infants are carried most of the time in nonindustrial societies, 56 percent of the time in less traditional societies, and 25 percent of the time in the United States."
Many of the infant and child behaviors that are challenging parents in our culture are unheard of in cultures that practice high-touch nurturing. While our culture has changed dramatically to keep up with our technology, our biology has not. Babies are biologically programmed to expect the same high-touch nurturing that evolved millions of years ago. Just because we no longer need to keep our babies in close physical contact so tigers won't eat them, doesn't mean we no longer need to carry them. Research shows that carrying and keeping babies in close physical contact does far more than keep them safe from predators; it is critical to their optimal development.
This information about the biological need for high-touch early nurturing and the importance of the parent-child bond is not news even in our culture. Leaders in the field of human development, Joseph Chilton Pearce, Jean Liedloff, Suzanne Arms and James Prescott have been writing and speaking out about the need to return to biologically sound birthing and nurturing practices for nearly 30 years. About 20 years ago, Dr.William Sears began using the term "attachment parenting" to describe these biologically sound birthing and nurturing practices. Attachment parenting promotes natural birth, genital integrity, extended breast-feeding, baby-wearing, family sleeping, and parents as the primary caregivers the majority of the time in the early years.
Many parents who have never heard of attachment parenting choose to breast-feed, or to respond to their children's needs by holding and carrying them often, or to bring their babies and young children into their bed so everyone can get some sleep, or to be their children's primary caregivers the majority of the time in the early years. In spite of the dictates of our culture, and the unsolicited advice from family, friends and neighbors, most parents choose to practice some parts of attachment parenting to some degree, at least some of the time. Dr. Sears says that this is the "style of baby care that parents would naturally practice if they followed their own intuition rather than listening to the advice of others."
In my Connection Parenting workshops the feedback I most often get from parents who did not have the information or support to intentionally practice attachment parenting is, "I wish I'd had this information from the beginning." We can't make life better for our children or ourselves by making ourselves wrong for not doing what we didn't know. However, we can make it better for our children and ourselves by choosing parenting practices now that will strengthen our bond with our children. When we consciously choose behaviors that create a connection with a child, trust is reaffirmed and the bond is strengthened. When we unconsciously behave in ways that create a disconnection with a child, trust is violated and the bond is weakened.
Connection Parenting encompasses attachment parenting as it promotes parenting practices that support maintaining a strong bond with children of all ages. I describe the parenting style promoted in my "Meeting the Needs of Children" workshop series as Connection Parenting because it supports parents in continuing the connection created by attachment parenting. Even if, especially if, we didn't know about or practice many of the early strong bonding elements of attachment parenting, we can learn parenting practices that will strengthen our bond with our children. We don't have to observe low-touch parenting practices just because that is what our culture dictates as "normal." We can choose to take back the high-touch nurturing practices our children are biologically adapted to expect and need for optimal development. Every day is a new opportunity to strengthen the bond. As Dr. Small points out, "we can change the dictates of culture because we are culture."
Posted on April 28, 2008
Posted on April 26, 2008
The universal power of touch
Eva Scherer is frustrated that people in her adoptive country are afraid of touch. She says New Zealand is a "low touch" culture and she believes that many of the health and social problems experienced by children may stem from an aversion to touching.
Ms Scherer moved to New Zealand from Poland five years ago. She was amazed to find that her new homeland had high rates of youth suicide and child abuse. New Zealand was among several Western countries found to be a "low-touch" culture by the Touch Research Institute.
The institute was set up by the University of Miami's School of Medicine in 1992. Through worldwide research, it established that there are two types of cultures - "high touch", such as France, Italy and Greece, and "low touch", such as New Zealand, Australia, Britain and the United States. Some of the research involved observing couples in cafes for 30 minutes and recording their touching.
In Paris, the "touch rate" was 110 times over half an hour. In Miami, couples made physical contact just twice in the same time. Researchers also compared physical contact in preschool playgrounds. In Paris, children touched one another affectionately 23 per cent of the time; in Miami, they did so only 3 per cent of the time. Aggressive touching occurred 37 per cent of the time in the Miami playground, but only 1 per cent in the Paris preschool.
The institute's researchers went on to establish a worldwide correlation between high-touch cultures and low rates of suicide, abuse and depression. Italy had the lowest rates of suicide and ranked in the highest of high-touch cultures. "Lack of touch - touch starvation if you like - is one of the major causes of depression and suicide in this country," says Ms Scherer. She has set up the Touch Love Health Trust to introduce people to educational and practical programmes about touch.
She believes the family unit worldwide is in crisis. With the institute's backing, she wants to deliver "touch for children" programmes through the education and health-care systems.
Ms Scherer's "children massaging children" workshop has already been tried at one primary school, and is included in the YMCA holiday programme. She says the best way to bring about change in child abuse and suicide is to change behaviour from the beginning, because children under the age of 3 cannot develop properly without touch. "They have to be stimulated or they are not the child they could be - healthwise or mentally."
Ms Scherer says touch has had some bad publicity and is associated with negative feelings. "As a society we are afraid of touch," she said. "We suffer from a fear of inappropriate or 'bad' touching. "But touch belongs to the universal law of life and we are a touch-deprived society. We must not be afraid."
The trust runs workshops to introduce concepts of touch and massage to everyday lives. "They appear simple but they contain profound messages for our touch-starved society." Ms Scherer says only trained therapists conduct the workshops, and says Sweden has 9000 teachers trained in therapeutic massage.
"Every day I hear of the great difference massage can make in children's lives," she says. The groups become calmer, children show less aggression, they concentrate more easily and they develop empathy for one another.
Ms Scherer says we have been taught that children do not touch children - adults touch children, for example by holding their hands. But she believes teaching children to massage one another's hands and heads can have great benefits in the classroom. "You can't hit someone you touch. It's a strange thing, you know, but you can't."
Posted on April 23, 2008
Yoko Ono
Posted on April 23, 2008
Thoughts as soft as velvet gently drift into my mind,
Reminiscent lover's touch, another place and time;
My body aches to hold you close,
my heart beats pure & fast,
I embrace the feel of your sweet taste,
to have you here at last.
Fingertips carressing as the passion starts to rise,
the love you're making to me shines softly through your eyes,
as I feel you deep within me & I'm lost in all your charms,
the only place my heart desires is the comfort of your arms...
Posted on April 23, 2008
For months my hand was sealed off
in a tin box. Nothing was there but the subway railings.
Perhaps it is bruised, I thought,
and that is why they have locked it up.
You could tell time by this, I thought,
like a clock, by its five knuckles
and the thin underground veins.
It lay there like an unconscious woman
fed by tubes she knew not of.
The hand had collapse,
a small wood pigeon
that had gone into seclusion.
I turned it over and the palm was old,
its lines traced like fine needlepoint
and stitched up into fingers.
It was fat and soft and blind in places.
Nothing but vulnerable.
And all this is metaphor.
An ordinary hand -- just lonely
for something to touch
that touches back.
The dog won't do it.
Her tail wags in the swamp for a frog.
I'm no better than a case of dog food.
She owns her own hunger.
My sisters won't do it.
They live in school except for buttons
and tears running down like lemonade.
My father won't do it.
He comes in the house and even at night
he lives in a machine made by my mother
and well oiled by his job, his job.
The trouble is
that I'd let my gestures freeze.
The trouble was not
in the kitchen or the tulips
but only in my head, my head.
Then all this became history.
Your hand found mine.
Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot.
Oh, my carpenter,
the fingers are rebuilt.
They dance with yours.
They dance in the attic and in Vienna.
My hand is alive all over America.
Not even death will stop it,
death shedding her blood.
Nothing will stop it, for this is the kingdom
and the kingdom come. - Anne Sexton
Posted on April 23, 2008
If you were here,
I would take the measure of your skin
with my fingers -
just a little brush across your arm
to blend my self with you
in a small, unobtrusive way:
not to wake you,
not to demand your attention,
not to disturb your dreaming -
but simply to stake
my claim on your next breath
and the words you would speak to me:
Hush. Come closer.
If you were here,
I would wrap my thoughts around you
and take you with me
into a world that would allow
no apologies for need
or the wants that surface
when the dark presses too close
to leave any room for sleep
and imagination becomes more a torment
than a virtue:
this constant whirling
of words and images from a
past and future that engulfs now
and chokes the air
with disturbances that leach the tears
from my eyes and leave me trembling.
I hold the memory of you
in my blood,
in my bones,
in my skin,
in my eyes reflected in the mirror:
did you dream me into being
or did my reality separate into
the half that is alone
and the half that is missing
without you?
When we are lost in our days,
we can choose the means of touch -
but here, in the geography of alone,
all maps birth confusion
descending to blind corridors
narrow with a wanting
that accepts no solace
without the touch
that is denied. - Karen Thompson
Posted on April 23, 2008
Posted on April 23, 2008
Posted on April 23, 2008
Posted on April 23, 2008
Posted on April 23, 2008
Posted on April 23, 2008
Humans, at the core, are perceptive and emotional. Offering affection, or any other type of intimate behavior with one's hand showcases the transcendence between one's emotional intentions and use of hands. However, holding hands only suggests intimacy in its every form, and nothing but. Thus, to perceive the notion of an intimate feeling, one shares this emotion by holding hands, a gesture unique to the human race. To hold someone's hand is to offer them affection, protection or comfort.
Posted on April 19, 2008
Posted on April 16, 2008
What is unique to humans:
we can express our feelings (or affect) through our hands.
Two or more people voluntarily hold hands for one of the following reasons and purposes:
in various rituals:
handshake
in certain religious services, to pray
in various occult rituals
to express friendship or love
to enjoy physical intimacy (not necessarily of erotic character)
for emotional support
to guide (a child, a blind person, in darkness, etc.)
to urge to follow
to keep together (in a crowd or in darkness)
to help the other walk, stand or climb up
to dance
Whether friends hold hands depends on culture and gender: in the Western culture this is mainly done by women and small children. In Arab countries, Africa and some parts of Asia it is done also by men. On Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's 2007 visit of Iran he was publicly holding hands with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Affect, like the adjective affective, refers to the experience of feeling or emotion. Affect is a key part of the process of an organisms interaction with stimuli. The word also refers sometimes to affect display, which is "a facial, vocal, or gestural behavior that serves as an indicator of affect."
The term "affect" can be taken to indicate an instinctual reaction to stimulation occurring before the typical cognitive processes considered necessary for the formation of a more complex emotion. Robert B. Zajonc asserts this reaction to stimuli is primary for human beings
"I remember being somewhat stunned one day when asked by one of my professors a question about the common coffee cup, what it implied about being human. After much pondering, I came up with a few feeble observations, such as, a cup approximates the proportions that a human being can comfortably wrap the hand around. Directing my attention in this way to function and form started my thinking about the relevance and significance of the human hand to the lived world."
"The two most expressive features of the human body are probably the eyes and the hands. We are told that the soul is revealed through the expression of the eyes. Think of Beatrice leading Dante upward, traversing the rings of Paradise with her ever brightening eyes. Next is surely the hand."
We use our hands to declare ourselves.
The hand is an avenue of communication, independent of the verbal medium. The baby points and puts its hands over the eyes or the ears in pre-verbal expression or it claps its hands to convey joy. Have you ever played the hand game Here’s the church and here’s the steeple? Or the one where you stretch a string and make a cradle’s bow? What we do with our hands can define a complete attitude or our whole relationship to others. Hands are expressive. Think of the thumbs-up or thumbs-down gesture. Having someone rudely flash us the finger is a gesture that is a frequent occurrence on the road. In the Eastern tradition, hands are folded together to acknowledge the other in meeting. In the West, we greet each other or make a deal by shaking hands. We use the hands to say ‘Bye, bye.’ We raise our hands to say we want to speak. We put our hand on the Bible to make an oath. We say: "It’s out of my hands; it’s in the hands of God." We pray by clasping our hands together. We make the sign of the cross by passing our hands over our heart.
A recent study reported in Nature indicates that gesturing with the hand helps people lay out abstract thoughts or recall words. Gesturing isn’t learned. Children blind from birth use hand gestures, even when speaking to other blind children.
Hand gestures are innate
When we hurt, we instinctively put our hands on the spot. The healer too uses the hand to massage or stroke the body. It is through the hands that we are most aware of touching and being touched.
One of the aspects of Bachelard that I most appreciate is his acceptance of human anger not as a liability but often as a spur to action. Tantalizingly, he says "To imagine a fist clenched for no reason would be a dishonor to the high drama of ANGER, a blemish on the image of invincibility." For Bachelard, "Always anger is a revelation of essential being. In anger one feels reborn, renewed, called to new life." Anger is energy potential.
Posted on April 16, 2008
How he catches the emotion of human beings
Chris Marker composed and edited Sans Soleil in 1982. The film begins with a quotation from Racine: "The distance of countries makes up in some way for the excessive nearness of time." As it opens, the film shows a shot of three children walking together through a meadow in Iceland and a shot of an American military plane aboard an aircraft carrier. Both shots serve as visual interstices for a black screen. The voice of Florence Delay reads the following text (sec. 10): "The first image he spoke to me about was the one of the three children on a road in Iceland in 1965. He told me that for him it was the image of happiness, and that he had also tried on numerous occasions to associate it with other images, but it had never worked. He wrote to me: "One day I must put it alone at the beginning of a film, with a long stretch of black. If they have not seen the happiness in the image, at least they will see the darkness."
That beautiful opening introduces one of the keys to the singularity of the rest of the film: the opening of an image in which any interpretative imposition by the author is discounted and a close relation is established between the visible and the invisible, the said and the unsaid (the image and the black screen; the voice over and the silence). Marker turns to a third person singular to introduce the text: "the first image he spoke to me about, he told me that for him it was the image of happiness"
Posted on April 16, 2008
From THE EXPERIENCE OF BEAUTY:
"For the aesthetically creative mind art is the transformation of the common world of perceptual experience into the unique realm of imaginative thought plus its adequate recording in some material form."
Perceptual Experience:
The representation of what is perceived; basic component in the formation of a concept. Thus, beauty is only a representation of what is perceived. Beauty is a concept, and the perception of beauty is the basic component. Beauty only exists through human perceptual experience.
PERCEPTUAL EXPERIENCE & BEAUTY
"The feeling of beauty is a feeling of clarity as if one had found a solution to a problem. It is a feeling that is compatible with the possibility of experiencing perception as a solution to a problem; a deeply satisfying and pleasurable feeling."
"Now Mothersillsuggests a remedy to this conundrum. She argues that the apparent contradiction emerges from the false assumption that the only way to ground genuine judgments of beauty is through principles of beauty of the kind that can be articulated as properties in the object which are necessary or sufficient for beauty. Mothersill suggests instead that if the basis of genuine judgments of beauty were neurophysiological laws, then judgments of beauty could be grounded without issuing in principles of beauty (of a logical kind). Neurophysiological laws might point to how certain characteristics of certain objects employ perceptual processes in such a way as to cause pleasure. This would shift the emphasis when defining beauty from objective properties in the beautifulobject to neurophysiological principles activated in a certain way in the viewer of the beautiful object."
From SC:
"The wholeness of the aesthetic experience cannot be subdivided and criticized in/by its parts. It is the wholeness in: the wholeness of the aesthetic experience that creates and in fact allows the experience to be whole.
If it is not whole, it might not be an experience.
If it is not aesthetic, it might not be whole.
If it is not a whole experience, what makes it aesthetic?
Consciousness of the wholeness of the aesthetic experience, may be described as the basis of self reflection. Simple or complex, life changing or banal, the wholeness of the aesthetic experience, brings consciousness forth. "
Posted on April 12, 2008
Perception:
In the case of visual perception, some people can actually see the percept shift in their mind's eye. Others who are not picture thinkers, may not necessarily perceive the 'shape-shifting' as their world changes. The 'esemplastic' nature has been shown by experiment: an ambiguous image has multiple interpretations on the perceptual level.
Just as one object can give rise to multiple percepts, so an object may fail to give rise to any percept at all: if the percept has no grounding in a person's experience, the person may literally not perceive it.
This confusing ambiguity of perception is exploited in human technologies such as camouflage, and also in biological mimicry, for example by Peacock butterflies, whose wings bear eye markings that birds respond to as though they were the eyes of a dangerous predator. Perceptual ambiguity is not restricted to vision. For example, recent touch perception research (Robles-De-La-Torre & Hayward 2001) found that kinesthesia-based haptic perception strongly relies on the forces experienced during touch. This makes it possible to produce illusory touch percepts (see also the MIT Technology Review article The Cutting Edge of Haptics).
Posted on April 9, 2008
I'm finding topics of "symmetry" interesting, as I travel through SC. I'm not quite sure how to run with it, yet; there seems to be a link between my research, but rather intuitive.
Tiling
Nature
Fractal Reality
What is awareness?
perception of life according to one's cognitive reaction to a condition or event. Awareness does not necessarily imply understanding, just an ability to be conscious of, feel or perceive.
Self-awareness?
Popular ideas about consciousness suggest the phenomenon describes a condition of being aware of one's awareness or, self-awareness. Efforts to describe consciousness in neurological terms have focused on describing networks in the brain that develop awareness of the qualia developed by other networks.
May reflect back to THIS
Beauty
Beauty is a characteristic of a person, place, object or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure, meaning or satisfaction.
To see beauty, one must be perceptive, aware. And beauty is only in that particular perception.
"The word "taste" is unpopular in a culture that feels obliged to accommodate everything that seems out of joint or freakish, even when it is silly, such as John Cage's "music of silence". The exercise of taste is elitist and therefore narrow, undemocratic, and "biased", objective attributes that form the basis of the critique of taste that is so popular these days. While the critics are correct in their observations of the facts that surround taste, they forget that each exercise of taste struggles to acquire the beautiful as only the beautiful can be acquired: in personal experience. This experience satisfies if the art is good enough. It may also teach, but teaching can be the effect of bad as well as good art. Many up-to-date PoMos claim to have learned from Cage. How could anyone doubt them?" - John Link
Symmetry
Symmetrical in common usage is an imprecise sense of harmonious or aesthetically-pleasing proportionality and balance; such that it reflects beauty or perfection.
The relationship of symmetry to aesthetics is complex. Certain simple symmetries, and in particular bilateral symmetry, seem to be deeply ingrained in the inherent perception by humans of the likely health or fitness of other living creatures, as can be seen by the simple experiment of distorting one side of the image of an attractive face and asking viewers to rate the attractiveness of the resulting image. Consequently, such symmetries that mimic biology tend to have an innate appeal that in turn drives a powerful tendency to create artifacts with similar symmetry. One only needs to imagine the difficulty in trying to market a highly asymmetrical car or truck to general automotive buyers to understand the power of biologically inspired symmetries such as bilateral symmetry.
Posted on April 5, 2008
