skandalon

The better I got to know him, the more his productivity awed me. I have always been a plodder, a person who anguishes and struggles over each sentence, and even on my best days I do no more than inch along, crawling on my belly like a man lost in the desert. The smallest word is surrounded by acres of silence for me, and even after I manage to get that word down on the page, it seems to sit there like a mirage, a speck of doubt glimmering in the sand. Language has never been accessible to me in the way that it was for Sachs. I’m shut off from my own thoughts, trapped in a no-man’s-land between feeling and articulation, and no matter how hard I try to express myself, I can rarely come up with more than a confused stammer. Sachs never had any of these difficulties. Words and things matched up for him, whereas for me they are constantly breaking apart, flying off in a hundred different directions. I spent most of my time picking up the pieces and gluing them back together, but Sachs never had to stumble around like that, hunting through garbage dumps and trash bins, wondering if he hadn’t fit the wrong pieces next to each other.

✖ Via Leviathan by Paul Auster, New York: Penguin, 1992, p. 55

• Jul 27, 2010 link notes tagged: art author novel writing word thing creation creativity composition relation fragment destruction Paul Auster Leviathan

✖ Via Fiona Banner: Almost Fluorescent Nude, 2007 + detail

Artist statement:

“I got involved in looking at and describing the human form through watching war films. It occurred to me, after a while, that their images were pornographic in nature – both alluring, seductive and repulsive. That got me into looking at porn films. I began to think that they were like life drawings, only with all the rules broken. They have very limited narrative: often no script, virtually no dialogue, just the hovering gaze. I described these films moment by moment, in my own words, and made very big pictures from them. They take something very private and domestic, and make it heroic. After that, I worked with a striptease artist. She came to my studio and undressed, and I began describing her act verbally. It became a kind of striptease in words.” (more)

About Fiona Banner:

“Fiona Banner was born in Merseyside and now lives in London. She studied at Kingston University and completed her MA at Goldsmiths College in 1993. The next year she held her first solo show at City Racing. Following her shows at the Neuer Aachener Kunstverein,and Dundee Contemporary Arts, she was nominated for the Turner Prize. More recent shows include at The Power Plant, Toronto, and Live/Work, at MOMA, New York.” (wikipedia)

• Jul 10, 2010 link notes tagged: art artist body sex nude word representation

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

But there were obstacles. Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context. As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball games” — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what “hot dog” — and millions of other terms — meant. “Today, if you type ‘Gandhi bio,’ we know that bio means biography,” Singhal says. “And if you type ‘bio warfare,’ it means biological.

✖ Via Wired: “How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web” by Steven Levy, Feb. 22, 2010

Or how Ludwig Wittgenstein helped to improve Google.

First spotted via Kottke.

• Mar 16, 2010 link notes tagged: technology language context philosophy word computer definition Google

communication technology word meaning evolution social friend friendship network generation semantic reblog

✖ Via

The New York Times: “Hey, ‘Friend,’ Do You ‘Like’ My Sad Story?” by Nick Bilton, March 8, 2010

“I called up an expert on language for some insight into this issue: Jesse Sheidlower, lexicographer and editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Mr. Sheidlower said the evolution of meaning and interpretation is natural for language. He considers it entirely possible that a younger generation growing up online might understand “like” to mean something different than older folks do.

“People are posting very heartfelt feelings on these social sites, and the option is to either like it or comment,” he said. “I don’t think it changes the meaning of the word, but there is a disjunct that is happening here, and it forces you to think of the word that is pointing to a story and not necessarily the content within it.”

“Like” clearly isn’t the only word that is seeing a change to its context or understanding. We are starting to perceive the word “friend” differently, too, thanks to social networking services.

“There’s a point when these friends are really just people I have in common with others, or people I’ve only met once, but ‘friend’ is the only word available to say you know this person, even though they are simply connections,” Mr. Sheidlower said.” (more)

• Mar 09, 2010 link notes reblogged from infoneer-pulse [via] tagged: communication technology word meaning evolution social friend friendship network generation semantic

✖ Via

VisualCulture: “Inlingua” by Optix Kreation. Watch it in better quality HERE.

• May 31, 2009 link notes tagged: typo design animation world word war

✖ Via The Visual Dictionary: “Car”

Words as things : “The Visual Dictionary is a collection of words in the real world. Photographs of signage, graffiti, advertising, tattoos, you name it, we’re trying to catalogue it.” In the real world? Really?

• Apr 29, 2009 link notes [via] tagged: ressource photo word archive