Archive for December, 2006
December 31, 2006 at 9:29 am · Filed under Uncategorized
FDA declares clones livestock safe for food chain.
Please respond with your public opinion on these issues:
For the next few months public response including international response to Cloned Food Risks is requested at this address:
Docket Number & Title:
2003N-0573 – Draft Animal Cloning Risk Assessment; Proposed Risk Management Plan; Draft Guidance for Industry; Availability
FR Type:Notice
Action:Request for Comments
Keywords:Industry
Comment Period End Date:04/02/07
Summary:
Availability of, and request for comment on, Animal Cloning: A Draft Risk Assessment (to evaluate the health risks to animals involved in the process of cloning and to evaluate the food consumption risks that may result from edible products derived from animal clones or their progeny); draft Animal Cloning: Risk Management Plan for Clones and their Progeny; and draft GFI #179: Use of Edible Products from Animal Clones or their Progeny for Human
Food or Animal Feed
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A Sample Letter:
Does Cloned Animal Safety take into account the effect of Aesthetics on the long-term Ecological effects of Food Chain Design?
We should not be overly worried about somatic cell nuclear transfer as a Food Science edible technique. The abnormalities that can be expected might be delicious. Our worries stem from the fact that a large percentage of breeders may not have had the Art Historical schooling that most Academic students of Aesthetics might have had. Right now, the only type of ‘taste’
we can see embedded in cloned livestock is based on ramping up meat production and maybe designing and cloning industrial beings born with zero percent transfat. If we are spending millions of taxpayer dollars on making copies of sires whose profitability is based on 4-H tropes of beauty alone, then we are missing much of what contemporary art can lend to contemporary breeding of gastronomic novelty.
How do we decide what is worth engineering for?
In particular, Livestock can be designed along a wide variety of Aesthetic gene expressions. Considering the range of gene expressions possible in a collage of multiple genomic palletes, economic efficiency is neither a simple concept nor our only deciding force. Beyond public acceptance of the technology, there is also public trend diversity, novelty markets and niche
power to be brokered in this global competition for more unusual food. We need to explore the entire range of clonables and widen the variety pool to include gourmet, abject and non-utilitarian breeding projects. Practitioners or Historians of Futurism, Surrealism, Abstraction, Minimalism and other Contemporary art movements may all have their own special cow, pig or chicken clone advisory role to play. Consider what a gifted cubist could
bring to the table.
What are the cultural aesthetics of our ecological future?
The decision to design livestock along a plurality of aesthetic lineages may have an impact on the future of ecology and diversity of our planet. As competitively designed meat factories take up more and more of the terrestrial grazing land, we have come to understand that we live on a
planet dominated by humans and their domestic familiars. Designed and cloned livestock are limited editions but they can reproduce independently. The industry animals may be foreign species brought forth from technological sites but are they beautiful enough for us to want to live with them for generations to come. Sometimes real-time back fat is not enough. There is
an economy of aesthetics, which will drive the ecological affect of our engineered future.
What can an understanding of the arts bring to livestock design?
The history of art may finally come to some use for humanity through agricultural and other replicant applications. The aesthetic hazards of breeding without a proper understanding of Western Culture and our shared artistic heritage must be taken into account.. The arts represent a great asset for livestock design and a great way to insure that the future isn’t
born looking dull, retrograde and a bit too sketchy. Without a firm grasp of Art History, our cloned food may not represent our national and international goals as U.S. food producers and consumers. The admixture of global variety through genetic engineering and the cloning of spectacular hereditary cascades should only be approved through an aesthetic advisory
commission made up of artists, art historians and aesthetics specialists. The future of style and the avoidance of our populous eating any aesthetic hazards depends on collaboration between new reproductive biotechnology and the Arts.
I hope these issues will be taken into account as we sculpt new life from the media of biotechnology.
n Adam Zaretsky
n Vivoarts: Art and Biology Studio
n Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
n Arts Department
n www.emutagen.com
n az@emutagen.com
December 31, 2006 at 9:28 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Weltschmerz – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
–depression or apathy caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state
December 19, 2006 at 10:41 am · Filed under Uncategorized
––excerpt retrieved from Henri Bergson. “The Cinematographical Mechanism of Thought and the Mechanistic Illusion — A Glance at the History of Systems — Real Becoming and False Evolutionism”, Chapter 4 in Creative Evolution, translated by Arthur Mitchell, Ph.D. New York: Henry Holt and Company (1911): 272 – 370.
Suppose we wish to portray on a screen a living picture,
(305) such as the marching past of a regiment. There is one way in which it might first occur to us to do it. That would be to cut out jointed figures representing the soldiers, to give to each of them the movement of marching, a movement varying from individual to individual although common to the human species, and to throw the whole on the screen. We should need to spend on this little game an enormous amount of work, and even then we should obtain but a very poor result: how could it, at its best, reproduce the suppleness and variety of life? Now, there is another way of proceeding, more easy and at the same time more effective. It is to take a series of snapshots of the passing regiment and to throw these instantaneous views on the screen, so that they replace each other very rapidly. This is what the cinematograph does. With photographs, each of which represents the regiment in a fixed attitude, it reconstitutes the mobility of the regiment marching. It is true that if we had to do with photographs alone, however much we might look at them, we should never see them animated: with immobility set beside immobility, even endlessly, we could never make movement. In order that the pictures may be animated, there must be movement somewhere. The movement does indeed exist here; it is in the apparatus. It is because the film of the cinematograph unrolls, bringing in turn the different photographs of the scene to continue each other, that each actor of the scene recovers his mobility; he strings all his successive attitudes on the invisible movement of the film. The process then consists in extracting from all the movements peculiar to all the figures an impersonal movement abstract and simple, movement in general, so to speak: we put this into the apparatus, and we reconstitute the individuality of each particular movement by combining this nameless movement with the per-
(306) -sonal attitudes. Such is the contrivance of the cinematograph. And such is also that of our knowledge. Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and, as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself. Perception, intellection, language so proceed in general. Whether we would think becoming, or express it, or even perceive it, we hardly do anything else than set going a kind of cinematograph inside us. We may therefore sum up what we have been saying in the conclusion that the mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical kind.
Of the altogether practical character of this operation there is no possible doubt. Each of our acts aims at a certain insertion of our will into the reality. There is, between our body and other bodies, an arrangement like that of the pieces of glass that compose a kaleidoscopic picture. Our activity goes from an arrangement to a re-arrangement, each time no doubt giving the kaleidoscope a new shake, but not interesting itself in the shake, and seeing only the new picture. Our knowledge of the operation of nature must be exactly symmetrical, therefore, with the interest we take in our own operation. In this sense we may say, if we are not abusing this kind of illustration, that the cinematographical character of our knowledge of things is due to the kaleidoscopic character of our adaptation to them.
The cinematographical method is therefore the only practical method, since it consists in making the general
(307) character of knowledge form itself on that of action, while expecting that the detail of each act should depend in its turn on that of knowledge. In order that action may always be enlightened, intelligence must always be present in it; but intelligence, in order thus to accompany the progress of activity and ensure its direction, must begin by adopting its rhythm. Action is discontinuous, like every pulsation of life; discontinuous, therefore, is knowledge. The. mechanism of the faculty of knowing has been constructed on this plan. Essentially practical, can it be of use, such as it is, for speculation?
December 15, 2006 at 5:08 am · Filed under Uncategorized
December 14, 2006 at 3:59 am · Filed under Uncategorized
ebayaday
ebayaday is a month-long serial exhibit, using eBay as venue, beginning 9 a.m. PST, Dec. 1, 2006.
Curated by Rebekah Modrak, Aaron Ahuvia and Zackery Denfeld, ebayaday consists of 25 auctions (one debuts each day) in which the entire eBay listing (item for sale, descriptive text and imagery and placement within chosen categories) is the artwork. Works presented in the show exploit, redefine or underscore eBay’s potential in the exchange of ideas, objects and money.
The artists chosen for the show received instructions for the day and time to post their listing in a 7-day online auction. The first of the 25 auctions begins December 1st 2006 and the last auction ends on January 1st, 2007.
This 31-day event of staggered auctions can be viewed here at www.ebayaday.com.
December 10, 2006 at 8:26 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
a color model for the tent fabric…
December 8, 2006 at 10:07 am · Filed under Uncategorized
The National Science Foundation is currently soliciting proposals for innovative ideas in the science of software-intensive system design. Notable in the call is the explicit interest in artistic perspectives to extend the foundations of mutable software systems.
The Science of Design (SoD) program solicits proposals that address fundamental research and education topics in the science of software-intensive system design. The program’s objective is to inspire the research community to make significant leaps in thinking about how to extend the intellectual and creative foundations for the design of software-intensive systems. Original ideas are sought on how to synthesize creative expression with scientific rigor in the design of relevant, useful software-intensive systems. The program recognizes that significant strides in creative thinking about design have a strong tradition in many scientific, engineering, and artistic disciplines, and the program seeks to import and adapt the best of these ideas while recognizing and addressing the unique nature of software (e.g., its mutability), which differs significantly from other designed artifacts. Project goals will typically include the development of new, innovative theories, constructs, models, methods, and/or tools to move software design into the next generation of complex, distributed computing environments.
The full solicitation is here
December 8, 2006 at 9:49 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Visit the project here
How are competing concepts of the gene represented? Researchers attempt to answer this and other questions using an integrated approach from fields like biology, philosophy, and cognitive science.
December 4, 2006 at 3:54 am · Filed under Uncategorized
A local student group organizes participatory workshops to solve social, resource, and environmental problems. The collaborative input of art, design, and other perspectives contributes to displays of the processes and outcomes.
BLUElab Exhibits
