letters

darling m, that's the precious thing about being a student i guess, you get real holidays! well, you can dive into it when your holidays next come around.. i'm sure it'll be difficult to do so whilst you're in the midst of term.... i don't think i'll be any good for getting my head around these things starting in a week's time. the merging business as you call it is FASCINATING! there is no mind i admire more than leonardo da vinci's - not that i know it at all, only from the drawings he left behind, and what is said of him. my favourite drawing of all i caught only a brief glimpse of once, of a horse in motion. one single drawing of a horse actually moving. his mastery and genius lay in his ability to observe so carefully the things around him, then use the principles he observed, to imitate, to adapt and then to create. he was just being inquisitive, but produced what we recognize as art, and science. being inquisitive - asking questions. that's very very lacking in our time isn't it? not just philosophically, but in terms of everything! where does this come from? where is it going? why am i being told this? why? what? sorely lacking. and i too forget to ask questions. i had a hell of a semester just past, i think i told you, and i'd shown my project to a colleague and she too was dismayed at what i produced. my designs lacked concepts or a theory. they were dead things. they worked, but had no life. i told her that i am not one to bother with theory. but she grilled me and i realized i didn't know what theory actually means. talking to her made me realize that theorizing wasn't the process of trying to understand the conceptual somersaults of previous "great" thinkers (derrida and the lot), but simply a process of wanting to ask questions. i had missed this very big point, and last semester, i asked no questions, so i got no answers. to this end, i penned the following after reading john brockman's piece on the third culture. it made sense to me. reading edward o wilson's consilience. and found this. the ossified intellectualism of the great theorists should now be padded with the flesh and blood of a new humanism. the knowledge we possess, and that we will continue to create and discover for ourselves in the sciences, in the arts, in all the different parts of humanity must collide to form one body, and it will be a coherent body as marvellous as the bodies we now possess. perception will change, in methods, in scale, and we will see in different light and at different degrees of magnification so that an understanding of who we are may emerge from the various levels of being, and through different forms of being. we will know that we are systems that are part of a system that is a part of a system that does not end because it has no beginning. it's a tad simplistic, i think, but it sums up for now how i feel about what we are. organisms made up of organisms making up organisms. it convinces me that there is no point in questioning the beginning or the end. we are the middle, exist in the middle, and the middle is as important as the beginning or the end. what we should be asking questions about is what we can do to make sure this middle works as optimally as it can within the system, since we have the capability to ask. but really, i think that humans are perhaps the least evolved of all creatures - dolphins live, my cat lives, other plants and creatures live, completely acclimatized and adapted to their environment. we are the only ones who are uncomfortable in our skins. it pains me to no end to think of how it's always us who throw the balance. it's as though we are precisely that element of chance mutation in darwinian evolution. we are the glitch. then again genetic glitches create as much an opportunity as it does a weakness. o and the philosophical cycle goes on, i feel it coming. so i think i'll stop here. i think what you said makes alot of sense, and in fact, i read something along pretty much the same lines by one of those thinkers at the edge. read this. find the time to. you'll appreciate it i promise - especially the actual interview with eno - scroll down to nearly the end (the top is a series of commentaries by the contributors to this site on the interview) http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge11.html ok, with this homework assignment, i sign off! write me with more brilliant thoughts ok? xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx miss you. o. and a short while ago, i saw a doco on henri cartier bresson, the photographer. he's inspired in me a crystal clear eye for the beauty of aging. and i thought this. much of the beauty in a flower is that it will fade away... just let things age. there is beauty in the face of a pale old man, spotted, jowly, droopy but bright bright eyed, beauty in his telling of stories of times too long ago for his listeners to remember, beauty when his droopy eyes cloud over in a timeless pause of reminiscence, beauty in his understanding that the world will go on as he folds away his stories, beauty in the strength of his quavering voice as he riles against our modern slavery to dynamism... the old world is not boring. if it has lived its life and loved its thoughts and used them well in whispers to the new world of where to look in its own quest to come of age... i want to be eighty six years old and looking at the world with bright eyes. he was ninety five. xxxxxxxxxxxxxx On 18 Jul 2005, at 21:23, Martin wrote: excelent! thanks for this link. it really is tremendously valuable. I have to find some time to dive deeper into it. this merging business has been occupying my mind for the last year while I did the internship at the artificial intelligence lab of zuerich. I wondered why we artist are so strangely attracted to those research issues and their power on the imagination for people - I think we artists are a bit jealous that we arent able to create the same powerfull metaphors as science can. and maybe science is a bit jealous of the arts, because they now how to communicate and manipulate the senses. I think the arts are driven to the scientists and not the other way around. so there is a kind of inbalance, beeing an artistst and willing to work with a scientist its is not enough. it takes a scientist that is interested to work with an artist and willing to open the frame of mind towards the artist. and vice versa of course. and then of course it is necessary to find similar ground and interest. and before this can happen, an artists must have found a personal theme, his own aesthetic research area and discourse and a language with which to comunicate. but arts and science have always been close to each other and have influenced each other, and there are similarities: artist research the perceptive field of humans, their relationships with each other and the possible combinations of metaphors in order to find new meaningfull expressions of beeing human scientist research the percieved world around us, its interconnections and complexities in order to find new meaningfull expressions to describe it (from the point of beeing human). does that sound reasonable? I just came up with it. xxxx