skandalon

kepler tycho art astronomy comic earth geocentrism heliocentrism history humor illustration illustrator model paradigm representation revolution science scientific_revolution sun hark_a_vagrant reblog

✖ Via Hark, a vagrant no 145: “Tycho That Was Uncalled For”

Hark! A Vagrant! is an comic series by Kate Beaton:

Kate Beaton was born in Nova Scotia, took a history degree in New Brunswick, paid it off in Alberta, worked in a museum in British Columbia, then came to Ontario to draw pictures. (About)

Kate owns a degree in History and Anthropology from Mount Allison University.

• Sep 28, 2010 link notes reblogged from chasingthales [via] tagged: Kepler Tycho art astronomy comic earth geocentrism heliocentrism history humor illustration illustrator model paradigm representation revolution science scientific revolution sun Hark A Vagrant

art technology communication poster design data visualization imagination science reality knowledge model representation film cinema movie filmmaker truffaut love love_triangle couple pain biography experience understanding

✖ Via Density Deisgn: “Jules et Jim” visualization by student Lorenzo Fernadez, January 2009

About this project:

Often love affairs are instable, fleeting and unpredictable. It seems emotions change in a chaotic way. On this assumptions some mathematicians recently modeled a love relationship in terms of dynamic system. One of the case study of this kind of works is Jules et Jim, the autobiographical novel of Henri Pierre Roché and his cinematographic version by François Truffaut. The main psycho-physical features of the three characters and their long and turbulent triadic relationship have been synthesized in a mathematical model enlightening the relationship as a real chaotic system.

Since we strongly agree with Kurt Richardson that «there exists an infinitude of equally valid, non-overlapping, potentially contradictory descriptions» for any complex system. And there is «the need for synthesizing a wide variety of perspectives in an effort to better understand the problem at hand, and how we might collectively act to solve it» and we strongly agree with Paul Cilliers that when: «dealing with complexity there are simultaneous roles for the natural and the human sciences, for both mathematics and imagination», we asked our student to model the Jules, Jim and Catherine System form their point of view, using the designer visual attitude, to better understand it. (Density Design: “Jules et Jim” by Donato Ricci, January 23rd, 2009)

About Density Design:

Density Design is a research and teaching program. Born as a laboratory course in the final year of the Master Degree in Communication Design at the Politecnico di Milano, it develops into a research group. Using complexity as a keyword to understand reality, combining it with a continuous research for information aesthetics and representation, DensityDesign explores the emergent relationships among communication design, information visualization and complex systems. (more)

At first, I found those visualizations much more confusing than the film. Thus, the problem of modeling or representing : a guy (Henri Pierre Roché) lived his life, tried to understand it, to make some sense out of what he experienced. He than tried to create a model so that he could explain what he thought he knew about his life to other : a novel was born our of this effort. Truffaut read the novel, he experienced it and tried to make sense of the story he read, maybe using his own experiences. Than, he proposed himself to show what he thought and felt by the means of movie making, BW film, Cinemascope ratio, fixed frame, voice over reading, music, etc. Finally, design students watch the film (I don’t know if they read the book) and tried to visually represent in a static form, using science and imagination, the way they felt about the film, the way they understand it. It’s a big challenge, to say the least.

• Aug 08, 2010 link notes tagged: art technology communication poster design data visualization imagination science reality knowledge model representation film cinema movie filmmaker Truffaut love love triangle couple pain biography experience understanding

For the epistemologist, the notion of ‘application’ in an expression such as ‘applied psychoanalysis’ is simply flabby. It would seem to imply that a body of theory, more or less rigorously formulated, can be applied without modification to a set of data or to a field of study (in this case, works of art) different from that for which it was constructed (the set of psycho-neurotic symptoms and abnormal psychic phenomena). If this were so, the two domains would be indistinguishable; if they are not, then the attempt at application requires modifications that, however trivial, make that body of theory different from what it was in its first ‘state’.

✖ Via “Beyond Representation” by Jean-François Lyotard, tr. by Jonathan Culler, reproduced in The Lyotard Reader, edited by Andrew E. Benjamin, Wiley-Blackwell, 1989, p. 155

About The Lyotard Reader:

“Jean-Francois Lyotard was one of the founding members of the College Internationale de philosophie. Ha has taught at Vincennes, Saint Denis and is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Irvine. Several of his books have appeared in English, notable The Postmodern Condition, Just Gaming and The Dirrerend.The Lyotard Reader is a collection of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s most important and significant papers to date. While they are all written from within philosophy, they seek to address subjects as wide-ranging as film, painting (Adami, Francken, Newman), psychoanalysis, Judaism and politics. The originality of Lyotard’s work means that it can not be readily situated within any one philosophical tradition. Instead he returns philosophy itself to debates across a range of areas and, in so doing, redefines the philosophical enterprise.A number of chapters in The Lyotard Reader appear for the first time in English. This is the most comprehensive collection available of Lyotard’s work, work has profoundly influenced debates on the Enlightenment, on modernity, on postmodernity, on the transmission f information, on literary theory and on philosophy.” (more)

• May 27, 2010 link notes tagged: art representation application epistemology domain knowledge world data theory model word thing Lyotard

art photo photographer hero critic alcool loneliness model desintegration fall

✖ Via Matt Robinson: Superheroes in the Recession

Artist’s statement:

“This photography project looked at childrens’ dream jobs, projecting the current employment problems onto one of the few timeless themes throughout childrens’ fantasies; Superheroes.”

Previously on Skandalon

• Mar 07, 2010 link notes [via] tagged: art photo photographer hero critic alcool loneliness model desintegration fall

museum nature history animal anatomy model skeleton photo bw

✖ Via American Museum of Natural History Library / Picturing the Museum: “Plaster of paris applied to Timber Wolf skeleton in modeling process”, photo by Robert E. Logan, October 1947, New York, NY.

Original caption: “Mounting Timber Wolf-Burlap, saturated in liquid plaster of paris is used to cover skeleton to form a base or armature on which to model in clay.”

• Jan 30, 2010 link notes [via] tagged: museum nature history animal anatomy model skeleton photo BW

technology science_museum nature history human body dna model photo bw

✖ Via

American Museum of Natural History Library / Picturing the Museum: “DNA model, Hall of Invertebrates”, photo by Alex J. Rota, 1965, New York, NY.

• Sep 10, 2009 link notes [via] tagged: technology science museum nature history human body DNA model photo BW

D’un côté, la représentation met la force en signes (comme on met un bateau à l’eau) et, d’un autre, elle signifie la force dans le discours de la loi. Elle opère la substitution à l’acte extérieur où une force se manifeste pour annihiler une autre force dans une lutte à mort, des signes de la force qui n’ont besoin que d’être vus pour que la force soit crue. La représentation dans et par ses signes représente la force: délégation de force, les signes ne sont pas les représentants de concepts mais des représentants de force saisissables seulement par leur effets-représentants: l’effet-pouvoir de la représentation, c’est la représentation elle-même.

✖ Via Louis Marin, Le portrait du roi, éd. de Minuit, coll. Le sens commun, Paris, 1981 p. 11.

Compare with Charconnet’s observations. That’s one way to approach relations shared between knowledge (reflexive representation), art (transitive representation) and power. Or between science, art and politic.

• Sep 09, 2009 link notes tagged: author book philosophy art politic science power representation concept model analogy

D’autre part, si l’on considère les grandes révolutions scientifiques comme celle de Galilée et d’Einstein, on peut dire que le discours scientifique vise à proposer des représentations nouvelles du monde et à faire accepter ces représentations par les interlocuteurs. En effet, chercher à construire des représentations qui rendent mieux compte des faits, comme le modèle copernicien par rapport au modèle géocentrique de Ptolémée, ou la relativité générale d’Einstein, puis les faire accepter relève de l’argumentation, et même d’une argumentation très puissante, puisque cela ne va pas sans résistance. Séparer dans ce cas argumentation et démonstration paraît parfaitement illusoire. Vouloir caractériser les discours par une fonction unique paraît donc forcément manichéen. Il y a dans tous les discours scientifiques de l’esthétique, de l’argumentatif, et de l’heuristique.

✖ Via Jean Charconnet, Analogie et logique naturelle. Une étude des traces linguistiques du raisonnement analogique à travers différent discours [Amazon], éd. Peter Lang, Berne, 2003, p. 33-34.

Read also Max Black and Jacques Bouveresse on a similar topic.

• Aug 04, 2009 link notes tagged: science philosophy book author analogy metaphor representation model