open call: to be here and there: general relativity and quantum physics

Hello,

there's an open call for a publication at Plastik - art & science (La Sorbonne University, Paris), which sounds very interesting. Here some excerpts :
(...) Some innovative theories, such as the quantum theory of gravitation, string theory and their extensions, mark a new way of thinking of a complete description of the Universe. The utopian goal consists of unifying these two pillars of modern science which are the most evolved and the most apt to explain the Universe. In this view it would indeed be possible to bring about every physicist's dream of unifying in a single theory the ultimate equation that could explain the Universe.

(...)The relationship between art and science, which we aim to analyse through this publication, can take the form of: a collaboration between artists and scientists – appropriation and exploration of scientific procedures by artists – visual propositions echoing the scientific problems – scientific research based on a hypothesis formulated through a work of art.

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Deadline 15th of June, 2009 >> extended to September

MA show in Stockholm this week

Inside Out Aasa Ersmark

I will screen this video piece together with other videoworks and sculptures at my class' MA show at the Royal Art Academy in Stockholm 28th of may-15th of june. For more info, see my blog and visit www.kkh.se .

non conservation laws

My contribution to visionforum deals with my recent ongoing project "Non Conservation Laws". The project is both an artistic and curatorial attempt to question temporality and emergence within production-distribution-consumption processes, in the context of globalization and network.

Theoretical surroundings
- Linear logic (Jean-Yves Girard, LIGC)
- Storytelling (Christian Salmon)
- Scale Free Networks and Web 2.0 (Albert-Laszlo Barabasi)
- Aesthetics by numbers (Komar & Melamid, Franco Moretti, Christophe Bruno...)
- La topologie et le temps (Jacques Lacan, séminaire XXIV)

Christophe Bruno

Some Inspiration - Returning to the Roots

In his seminal 1968 publication, Rabelais and his World Mikhail Bakhtin returns to the Medieval world where he finds a kind of paradise of human freedom that has been lost. He published this in the Soviet Union at the height of the cold war and he talks about the carnival and other medieval events where social structures were temporarily turned on their heads.

In the quote below he writes about the birth of the word “grotesque” which comes from a time when Roman ornaments were found in Titus’s baths, that were uncovered in the 15th century. Bakhtin writes:

“What is the character of these ornaments? They impressed the connoisseurs by the extremely fanciful, free and playful treatment of plant, animal and human forms. These forms seemed interwoven as if given birth to each other. The borderlines that divide the kingdoms of nature in the normal world were boldly infringed. Neither was there the usual static presentation of reality. There was no longer the movement of finished forms, vegetable or animal, in a finished and stable world; instead the inner movement of being itself was expressed in the passing of one form into the other, in the ever incompleted character of being. This ornamental interplay revealed an extreme lightness and freedom of artistic fantasy, a gay, almost laughing, libertinage.”

What I find so inspiring in this quote (especially the phrase in italics) is that Bakhtin in the medieval finds a reformulation of time and temporality along with a total acceptance of change. Through this reformulation of time, he finds a new form of human freedom. It goes hand in hand with the ideas of Vision Forum this year. We have to reformulate time in order to become free, be it through dreams, science or a physical journey across cultural borders.