Ecology of Perception Blog

2008-01-29T05:41:00.001-08:00

From the vision psychologist Richard Gregory's website.

Narcissus Narcosis

2007-12-18T15:01:00.001-08:00

Without realizing it, the consumer seeks to achieve a physical high similar to other intoxicating substances, without acknowledging the intoxication achieved. A separation of the senses, of the imagination, is achieved… Numbness is a coping mechanism, a self-induced dulling faculty to protect the person from the awareness of change, similar to going into shock or repressing bad memories. Am I living life through a rear-view mirror, or am I appropriating technology as a tool to understand what is coming and to better prepare myself as an artist for what is to come? – Daniel Buttrey

Narcissus Narcosis

2007-12-18T08:01:00.000-08:00

The tactile responses encountered while interacting with the printed page are almost addictive. It was very difficult to view the pile of newspapers in the corner of my studio waiting to be read. Now the print media is being overtaken by the internet. It is immediate and extremely powerful. Media propaganda has convinced us that we are living a free will existence. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are the “distant early warning system” Our purpose as artists should be to enlighten and educate our culture before it is too late.– David Barsalou

Narcissus Narcosis

2007-12-18T07:59:00.001-08:00

Perhaps I feel like I’m connecting to the world, or I don’t know. All I know is that I have to do it in the morning, and repeat the same ritual at night before I go to bed. Only after reading Marshall McLuhan’s essay did I start to think about them as my drugs. It’s true. Every morning I go online, I get a feeling of happiness, which lasts for a few minutes and then quickly disappears. When I don’t get my fix, the feeling of needing to go online is much stronger... I almost feel like all technologies are evil, and that the only way to solve the problem is to go back to tribal society, even before phonetic literacy. It's hard to comprehend that media technologies like the telegraph, or the printing press are actually harmful to us in ways. – Luis Angulo

Narcissus Narcosis

2007-12-18T06:34:00.000-08:00

What a beautiful, mystical way of being we can strive to experience through religion, art and drugs. Timelessness and presence, experienced during the act of creation, feel related to a whole way of perception. When we started to name and label things we began our separation from them, and I wonder what came first, the chicken or the egg... I impose my height as the scale of the work, representing the constraints of measurement and of time. The imposition of a measurement, my height, relates it to my person but is also symbolic of our need to quantify and thus control. It represents how identity can get shaped and pinched by quantifying time, size and age. – Susan Bradley

Sheldrake and McKenna on Morphogenetic Resonance

2007-12-11T13:15:00.001-08:00

A morphogenetic field (a subset of morphic field) is a hypothetical biological (and potentially social) field that contains the information necessary to shape the exact form of a living thing, as part of its epigenetics, and may also shape its behaviour and coordination with other beings (see also morphogenesis). This hypothesis is not accepted by the scientific community, who consider it pseudoscientific.

The Medium is still the Mess-Age

2007-12-07T12:24:00.000-08:00

How Space-Time becomes Friends with Itself

2007-12-06T09:36:00.000-08:00

"Ecological design is not a style. It is a mode of engagement and partnership with nature that is not bound to a particular design profession." - Sim van der Ryn.

"The ordinary Indian woman who worships the tulsi plant worships the cosmic as symbolized in the plant. The peasants who treat seeds as sacred, see in them the connection to the universe... In most sustainable traditional cultures, the great and the small have been linked so that limits, restraints, responsibilities are always transparent and cannot be externalized. The great exists in the small and hence every act has not only global but cosmic implications. Humble local acts, each expressing the whole web of life, adds up to a sustainable culture." - Vandana Shiva

THE COSMOLOGY OF BEAUTY

By Justin Good

Beauty is a concept especially ripe for transformation by this paradigm shift in knowledge. This is because our perception of beauty is related closely to our understanding of nature, of reality, of what it means to have a mind or be conscious, and to our ideas about what value is and where it comes from. As such, anyone feeling that clean energy technologies need to be presented to conventional culture within a new vision of nature and mind could benefit from rethinking their ideas about beauty.

There is a coherence to natural systems, a deep process of unfolding wholeness perceivable at every level of scale within the natural world, that it is good for us to support. The more we understand the processes within nature that maintain and extend the wholeness of the world, the more do we understand the larger ecological meaning of purpose, of meaning, of value and of consciousness.

Construed ecologically, from the standpoint of the holistic science of natural, evolving systems, the perception of beauty is the perception of wholeness. Wholeness is an objective property of nature and natural systems. This is a very deep quality of a place, a work of art, an organism, that affects us deeply. For a neighborhood, it is a sense of belonging, a sense that everything feels right, natural, stable, alive – most especially a feeling of life, and a feeling of being yourself. Industrial structures and processes rupture wholeness with impunity. According to the theory of wholeness, the ugliness we see and feel about that destruction is a keen perception into the order of a certain region of space.

Wholeness is a function of the coherence of a region of space, in the sense of the high degree of relatedness of the entities within that space to each other. We know that ecosystems naturally tend towards greater harmonization of beings, hence higher degrees of biodiversity and lower entropy. The experience of beauty makes us feel related to the world, makes us feel at home with something, that we can find our self within it, that we feel centered in the presence of it.

Wholeness is difficult for us moderns to perceive because our cosmological picture and understanding of material reality. We make the assumption that what is truly real – physical matter – lacks meaning, purpose, subjectivity, self. If you make this assumption, then the feeling of relatedness between your personal self and the universe is mere illusion and scientifically meaningless. The science of complex adaptive systems however is revealing that nature is not a machine (reactive, reducible and constructed) but rather an active self-organizing and evolving system. The concept of perception is coterminous with the concept of life, in the sense that to be alive is to have an inside and an outside and so a need to perceive what to let in and what to keep out. The study of wholeness expands considerably our idea of what life is, and therefore what can be said to perceive, to be sentient, have purposes. The wholeness of a structure is the degree of life it has.

The difference between living and non-living form has to do with the process through which the form came to be. One can see, just by looking, that something with living form came to be by way of a process of unfolding, where each step of the growing grew out of the prior steps, and where each development enhanced the structure (the wholeness) that already existed. What lacks living form has the look of something that was put together. Its structure did not unfold out of itself. Frankenstein is the symbol of monsterousness because of his put-together look. Suburban sprawl has this look, this feel, as do many architectural icons of modernity.

The feeling of being grounded and centered which people often experience when finally alone with nature is not ‘subjective’, but rather a keen cognitive awareness of the geometry of the wholeness of living processes. What explains this deep affinity between us and the deep geometry of living processes? How is it possible for us to relate so deeply to the world? There is a startling, and yet ancient, belief that the sense of relatedness we feel in nature, in all beautiful things, things exhibiting wholeness, is that we are rediscovering a deeper identity of Self. To find the world beautiful and to feel that you belong there is to experience the limitations of your identity as an ego and to sense your deeper identity as a moment of the Self as a ground of the world.

Some texts:

1. Christopher Alexander's paper "New Concepts in Complexity Theory arising from Studies in the Field of Architecture". This summarizes the theory of form as he explicates it through the four meditative volumes in his masterpiece "The Nature of Order." What is the cultural aesthetic of the future? This is it.

2. Community Solution's documentary "The power of community: How cuba survived Peak Oil. Lessons we ALL need to know to prepare for the realities comming to our future". This sutainability group went to Cuba to see how well that post-Soviet era nation-state dealt with an artifical Peak Oil scenario after it lost most of its petroleum imports from Russia in the early 1990s.

Christopher Alexander's Theory of Form as Unfolding Wholeness

2007-12-03T11:49:00.001-08:00

§1. Design should not be value-free, it should be value-oriented. If one assumes that aesthetic values are merely “subjective,” then it is impossible to say what makes an artifact or building beautiful because there is no objective fact of the matter.

§2. Good design – beauty – is explained by the presence of wholeness.

§3. Wholeness is a system of centers.

§4. There is a structure, visible in any given part of the world, which we may call the wholeness. The wholeness is an abstract mathematical structure, existing in space. It captures what we may loosely consider as the global structural character of a given configuration, in itself and in relation to the world around it.

§5. The primary entities of which the wholeness structure is built are centers, centers that become activated in the space as a result of the configuration as a whole. Centers typically have different levels of strength or coherence. The coherence of a configuration is caused by relationships among centers.

§6. In particular, there are 15 kinds of relationships among centers that increase or intensify the strength of any given center. These 15 properties are listed below, and define the way that configurations within a configuration help each other. Within this scheme, unfolding of new configurations is a natural process, and can be understood and followed.

§7. Unfolding occurs as a result of wholeness-extending (W-E) transformations. These W-E-transformations are combinations and sequences of 15 possible spatial transformations based on the 15 properties that determine how coherent centers may be built from one another.

§8. It is the prevailing assumption of Modernist science and architecture that what is going on in the world is too often a nearly random aggregation of simple mechanical processes, with no special coordination or behavior as a whole. Within that view, there is little to be learnt from studying wholeness. It is just number crunching, without new insight. From the standpoint of Cartesian science, wholeness is just a cognitive artifact, something that our own thinking about the world places into our perception.

§9. There is empirical and conceptual evidence, however, that profound coordination of the whole is occurring. This coordination is not “merely” the effect of multiple random events and effects. There are strong reasons to think that this aggregation of apparently random events is, instead, a very highly organized larger structure- preserving process, in which the process in the large, does progressively pay attention to the whole, reflect the whole, and extend and make more beautiful the whole.

§10. Consider a given configuration with certain features that are visible, and which, in the main, define whatever whole, or wholeness, we see in the configuration. But, in addition, in every configuration there are also traces, hints, of dim structures, not yet fully developed, but existing in a latent form, “between the lines” of the configuration. What happens in harmony-seeking computation is that some process “notices” these latent structures and makes them explicit.

§11. There are 15 ways in which centers intensify each other.

(1) LEVELS OF SCALE. When a configuration contains centers, these centers are associated with centers at a range of sizes that occur at well-marked levels of scale. The scale jumps between levels are small: in coherent systems the centers of different sizes are often in size-ratios of 2 to 1, 3 to 1 and 4 to 1. If the jumps are larger – for example 10 to 1 or 100 to 1 – without intermediate levels, the coherence tends to fall apart.

(2) STRONG CENTERS. Wholeness is composed of centers, and centers arise from wholeness. A given wholeness is coherent to the extent that the centers in it are coherent. Centers are recursive in structure. Each center that exists acts to strengthen other centers, larger and smaller.

(3) THICK BOUNDARIES. Strong centers typically, though not always, have thick boundaries around them. These boundaries typically form a transition zone of interaction, allowing physical, chemical, or biological processes to occur without contaminating the centers being surrounded. Boundaries help form the field of force that creates and intensifies a center; they surround, enclose, separate and connect.

(4) ALTERNATING REPETITION. Centers intensify other centers by repeating in a rhythm; when a second system of centers also repeats, in parallel, it intensifies the first system by providing a kind of counterpoint, or opposing beat.

(5) POSITIVE SPACE. In coherent systems, there is no “background”, or figure and ground. Instead, every bit of space is coherent, well shaped; and the space between coherent bits of space are also coherent and well- shaped. Thus every bit of space swells outward, is substantial in itself, and is never the leftover from an adjacent shape – like ripening corn, each kernel swelling until it meets the others, each one having its own positive shape caused by its growth as a cell from the inside.

(6) GOOD SHAPE. This describes a particular, coherent quality of the particular shapes that occur in or around a coherent center. This kind of “good” shape is somewhat unusual, and is marked by the fact that the shape itself is made up from multiple coherent centers which together form the shape, and of other coherent centers which together form the shape of the space around the shape.

(7) LOCAL SYMMETRIES. Strong centers often have strong symmetries, and local parts of space with strong symmetries are typically strong centers.
The exact relation between life and symmetry is muddy. Living things, though often symmetrical, rarely have perfect symmetry. Indeed, perfect symmetry is often the mark of death in things, rather than life. In order to clarify this, overall symmetry must be distinguished from local symmetries. In general, a large symmetry of the simplified neoclassical type rarely contributes to the life of a thing, because in any complex whole in the world, there are nearly always complex, asymmetrical forces at work – matters of location, and context, and function – which require that the symmetry be broken.

(8) DEEP INTERLOCK AND AMBIGUITY. This occurs where coherent centers are “hooked” into their surroundings, making it difficult to disentangle the center from its surroundings. Often there are ambiguous zones which belong both to the center and to its surroundings, again making it difficult to disentangle the two.
In a surprising number of cases, living structures contain some form of interlock: situations where centers are ‘hooked’ into their surroundings. This has the effect of making it difficult to disentangle the center from its surroundings. It becomes more deeply unified with the world and with other centers near it.

(9) CONTRAST. Every center relies to some degree on the contrast of discernible opposites, and on its differentiation from the ground where it occurs. Life cannot occur without differentiation. Unity can only be created from distinctness. The difference between opposites gives birth to something.

(10) GRADIENTS. Centers are generated and strengthened by gradients of size, shape, or quality. Thus any quality among a system of centers that varies systematically produces a gradient, and this gradient, by pointing to a particular center, helps to build that center and to intensify its coherence. You probably have noticed that almost anything which has real life has a certain softness. Qualities vary, slowly, subtly, gradually, across the extent of each thing. Gradients occur. One quality changes slowly across space, and becomes another.

(11) ROUGHNESS. In coherent structures we usually find a rough arrangement and repetition of centers rather than exact repetition in shape, spacing and/or size. Thus apparently similar centers are different according to context, allowing each part to be adapted to the geometric constraints around it, thus modifying details of the repeating structure as it needs to be. Texture and imperfections are generated, and in part create the possibility of true uniqueness and life. Things which embody real life always have a certain ease, a morphological roughness. The seemingly rough arrangement is more precise because it comes from a much more careful guarding of the essential centers in the design. Roughness can never be consciously or deliberately created. Then it is merely contrived. To make a thing live, its roughness must be the product of egolessness, the product of no will.

(12) ECHOS. In things with deep life, everything within them seems to be related, and yet one doesn’t quite know why, or what causes it. Echoes, as far as I can tell, depend on the angles, and families of angles, which are prevalent in the design.

(13) THE VOID. In the most profound centers that have perfect wholeness, there is often at the heart of the structure a void that is large, undifferentiated, like water, infinite in depth, surrounded by and contrasted with the clutter of the structure and fabric all around it.

(14) SIMPLICITY AND INNER CALM. Essential to the completion of a coherent whole is a quality of simplicity. Every structural feature that is unnecessary has been removed, so that the remaining structure has slowness, majesty, quietness. Everything superfluous has gone.

(15) NON-SEPARATENESS. Connectedness; we experience a living whole as being at one with the world around it, not separate from it. This means that when not-separateness exists, visible strands of continuity of line, angle, shape, and form, connect the inside of a living center with the parts of the world beyond that center, so that it is, ultimately, impossible to draw a line separating the two.

§12. Wholeness is difficult for us moderns to perceive because our cosmological picture and understanding of material reality. We make the assumption that what is truly real – physical matter – lacks meaning, purpose, subjectivity, self. If you make this assumption, then the feeling of relatedness between your personal self and the universe is mere illusion and scientifically meaningless.

§13. The feeling that something has personality is related to the perception of wholeness. “Personal” usually means idiosyncratic or non-objective, or having no larger significance. But “personal” can also have a geometrical and metaphysical meaning: something that has the quality of personality has subjectivity.

§14. What is the “life” of a center? A center has more life to the extent that it has more relatedness (to other centers, to the Whole, to the Self).

§15. Relatedness is the condition which creates the feeling of life. The more life something has, the more related it is to every other center. The feeling of life created in you by the living structure is intensified to the extent that you feel (rediscover) your relatedness to everything else in the universe.

§16. How is it metaphysically possible for you as an individual self to feel (to be) related to the Whole of the universe? The hypothesis: The I of your (personal) self and the I-ness or self-like feeling of living structure are two aspects of one single, universal, timeless I.

§17. The mirror-of-the-self test helps to retrain your metaphysical assumptions so as to be able to perceive the self-like character of matter, and therefore to experience the genuine relatedness of all things. This test asks you to consider, given two entities:

Which of these two things is more like your whole self?
Which is a better reflection of your complete self?
Which of these would you prefer to be reincarnated as?
Which of these expands of contacts your humanity?
In presence of these, which one raises your humanity and which makes it fall?

§18. The metaphysical significance of beauty is that it expands one’s humanity, thus revealing and facilitating relatedness. Ugliness cauterizes the individual self’s ability to achieve relatedness to the infinite self of the world.

§19. Human life only begins to approach its clear meaning when a person makes contact with the Void, with the eternal I, as something a) personal, b) universally shared by all material beings, and c) suffused with relatedness.

§20. The I is a vastness, as large as the universe, from which living structure draws its life.

§21. Each living center is a picture of the self.

§22. As the build-up of centers proceeds, space becomes filled gradually with I-like stuff.
Beings partake in living structure to the extent that this structure becomes a undivided whole.

§23.Careful construction of the world, according to the principle that every center is made as profoundly as possible as related to the true I of the maker will result in a world which is practical, harmonious, functional. The safest road to sustainability is one in which people do what is most nearly in their hearts.

Eco-Aesthetic-Mediated-Perception

2007-11-20T12:15:00.000-08:00

Hartford Art School • Fall 2007
Ecology of Perception
Final Project: Environmental Aesthetics
Due: When final exam is scheduled for.

Choose ONE of the following topics to address

1. What does it mean, to be ‘realistic’?

REALISM AND THE RIDDLE OF STYLE • Requirement: 2+ Images and 4 page min. analysis  We puzzled this semester about the problem of understanding stylistic differences in art and looked at ten ways realism could be measured. This project allows you to further pursue this question. Instructions:  (a) Find/create 2+ images which portray the same or similar subject-matter. One image should be ‘realistic’ in the conventional sense of the term, the other should not be realistic in the conventional sense, yet it should not be obviously imaginary.   (b) Using whatever sources you prefer, write an analysis explaining what it means to say that the first image is realistic – the reasons for saying so – and again, why the second image is not realistic.  (c) Now reverse your perspective and argue why the second image can, given different concepts of realism and reality, be considered a closer approximation to reality than the first, and vice versa.

2. What is the relationship between beauty and truth?

BEAUTY AND TRUTH • Requirement: 6 page paper or an artwork + 4 page analysis  In the Republic, Plato criticizes art by saying that it cannot reach truth, and hence should be banned from the perfectly just city-state. Analogously, beauty is often taken to be merely subjective, and hence to lack cognitive content. But if art has spiritual or ethical or political value, it must embody truth somehow. Can Plato’s criticism be answered? How can art (and/or the experience of beauty) be understood to capture truth and reality, as opposed to merely reflecting (false) appearances?

3. What does it mean, to see?

THEORY OF PERCEPTION • Requirement: 6 page paper or an artwork + 4 page analysis  What does it mean to see? Hopefully by now, you will have realized that this question is very difficult to answer. One main reason is that perception is tied to just about every other problem of knowledge and understanding in human life. The study of perception, for example, is at the center of such diverse fields of inquiry as: psychology, biology and evolutionary theory, religion and mysticism, empirical science, political philosophy and epistemology (the study of knowledge), art history and art theory, cultural studies, sociology, advertising and marketing, architecture, and of course, art. This option asks you to synthesis as much of the material we’ve covered during the semester to offer an answer to the question: what does it mean to see?

4. What is my relationship to my environment?

ENVIRONMENTAL AESTHETICS  • Requirement: 6 page paper or an artwork + 4 page analysis  Peak Oil, global warming, the mass extinction of life and biodiversity, and wide-spread ecological devastation caused by hyperconsumption: all of these point to the fact that our political-economic system is on a collision course with the natural world. Survival will require a massive shift in our cultural values and a deeper, less autistic understanding of how natural systems function. As individuals, we must become aware of how we effect our ecosystem, of the flows of energy, food, and waste between our body and the larger environment, and how to live in ways which do not destroy the abilities of the environment to support life. How do we do this? This project asks you to pick one aspect of your life support system at home or at UHART to explore by creating a work of art which visualizes it. You must research one of the following systems: where YOU or the CAMPUS AS A WHOLE gets its: FOOD, WATER, where its WASTE WATER IS TREATED, WHERE ITS ELECTRICITY COMES FROM, HOW MUCH CARBON EMISSIONS are created by the campus, etc.

5. What does it mean, to be alive?

THE AESTHETIC GEOMETRY OF SPACE AND CONNECTIVITY OF BEINGS Requirement: 6 page paper or an artwork + 4 page analysis. We’ve studied a new view of nature and how to design things that mimic the structure of natural living systems. Explore the aesthetics of a natural system or process.

6. I'm still stuck on the question concerning....

GROW YOUR OWN IDEA.

Is Taste Possible?

2007-11-20T12:07:00.000-08:00

Excerpts from David Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757)

“The great variety of Taste, as well as of opinion, which prevails in the world, is too obvious not to have fallen under every one's observation. Men of the most confined knowledge are able to remark a difference of taste in the narrow circle of their acquaintance, even where the persons have been educated under the same government, and have early imbibed the same prejudices. But those, who can enlarge their view to contemplate distant nations and remote ages, are still more surprised at the great inconsistence and contrariety. We are apt to call barbarous whatever departs widely from our own taste and apprehension: But soon find the epithet of reproach retorted on us. And the highest arrogance and self-conceit is at last startled, on observing an equal assurance on all sides, and scruples, amidst such a contest of sentiment, to pronounce positively in its own favour…

“Every voice is united in applauding elegance, propriety, simplicity, spirit in writing; and in blaming fustian, affectation, coldness and a false brilliancy: But when critics come to particulars, this seeming unanimity vanishes; and it is found, that they had affixed a very different meaning to their expressions…

“It is natural for us to seek a Standard of Taste; a rule, by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled; at least, a decision, afforded, confirming one sentiment, and condemning another…

“It appears then, that, amidst all the variety and caprice of taste, there are certain general principles of approbation or blame, whose influence a careful eye may trace in all operations of the mind. Some particular forms or qualities, from the original structure of the internal fabric, are calculated to please, and others to displease; and if they fail of their effect in any particular instance, it is from some apparent defect or imperfection in the organ. A man in a fever would not insist on his palate as able to decide concerning flavours; nor would one, affected with the jaundice, pretend to give a verdict with regard to colours. In each creature, there is a sound and a defective state; and the former alone can be supposed to afford us a true standard of a taste and sentiment…

“One obvious cause, why many feel not the proper sentiment of beauty, is the want of that delicacy of imagination, which is requisite to convey a sensibility of those finer emotions. This delicacy every one pretends to: Every one talks of it; and would reduce every kind of taste or sentiment to its standard. But as our intention in this essay is to mingle some light of the understanding with the feelings of sentiment, it will be proper to give a more accurate definition of delicacy… It is with good reason, says SANCHO to the squire with the great nose, that I pretend to have a judgment in wine: this is a quality hereditary in our family. Two of my kinsmen were once called to give their opinion of a hogshead, which was supposed to be excellent, being old and of a good vintage. One of them tastes it; considers it; and after mature reflection pronounces the wine to be good, were it not for a small taste of leather, which he perceived in it. The other, after using the same precautions, gives also his verdict in favour of the wine; but with the reserve of a taste of iron, which he could easily distinguish. You cannot imagine how much they were both ridiculed for their judgment. But who laughed in the end? On emptying the hogshead, there was found at the bottom, an old key with a leathern thong tied to it.   “The great resemblance between mental and bodily taste will easily teach us to apply this story. Though it be certain, that beauty and deformity, more than sweet and bitter, are not qualities in objects, but belong entirely to the sentiment, internal or external; it must be allowed, that there are certain qualities in objects, which are fitted by nature to produce those particular feelings. Now as these qualities may be found in a smaller degree, or may be mixed and confounded with each other, it often happens, that the taste is not affected with such minute qualities, or is not able to distinguish all the particular flavours, amidst the disorder, in which they are presented. Where the organs are so fine, as to allow nothing to escape them; and at the same time so exact as to perceive every ingredient in the composition: This we call delicacy of taste.

“Here then the general rules of beauty are of use; being drawn from established models, and from the observation of what pleases or displeases, when presented singly and in a high degree: And if the same qualities, in a continued composition and in a small degree, affect not the organs with a sensible delight or uneasiness, we exclude the person from all pretensions to this delicacy. To produce these general rules or avowed patterns of composition is like finding the key with the leathern thong; which justified the verdict of SANCHO's kinsmen, and confounded those pretended judges who had condemned them.”

Plato's Challenge to All Future Artists

2007-11-20T11:53:00.000-08:00

In Plato’s still radical book Republic, the first work of systematic political science and one of the greatest works of philosophy every conceived, Plato articulates a scientific-rationalist and political critique of the arts that still holds sway over popular cultural and institutional beliefs about the cognitive and ethical shortcomings of art and the artistic life. In fact, Plato offers a challenge to all future artists in that argument, to justify themselves as a form of human culture. A contemporary artist struggling to make sense of the value of her creativity could do worse than trying to articulate a response to the most incessant and powerful of all dead white males. The following excepted dialogue is a conversation between Socrates and Glaucon from Plato’s Republic, Book 10 where Plato states his case against artistic perception and creativity.

•

Of he many excellences which I perceive in the order of our State, there is none which upon reflection pleases me better than the rule about poetry.

To what do you refer?

To the rejection of imitative poetry, which certainly ought not to be received; as I see far more clearly now that the parts of the soul have been distinguished.

What do you mean?

Speaking in confidence, for I should not like to have my words repeated to the tragedians and the rest of the imitative tribe --but I do not mind saying to you, that all poetical imitations are ruinous to the understanding of the hearers, and that the knowledge of their true nature is the only antidote to them…

You may look at a bed from different points of view, obliquely or directly or from any other point of view, and the bed will appear different, but there is no difference in reality. And the same of all things.
Yes, the difference is only apparent.

Now let me ask you another question: Which is the art of painting designed to be --an imitation of things as they are, or as they appear --of appearance or of reality?

Of appearance.

Then the imitator, I said, is a long way off the truth, and can do all things because he lightly touches on a small part of them, and that part an image. For example: A painter will paint a cobbler, carpenter, or any other artist, though he knows nothing of their arts; and, if he is a good artist, he may deceive children or simple persons, when he shows them his picture of a carpenter from a distance, and they will fancy that they are looking at a real carpenter…

And the same object appears straight when looked at out of the water, and crooked when in the water; and the concave becomes convex, owing to the illusion about colours to which the sight is liable. Thus every sort of confusion is revealed within us; and this is that weakness of the human mind on which the art of conjuring and of deceiving by light and shadow and other ingenious devices imposes, having an effect upon us like magic.

True.

And the arts of measuring and numbering and weighing come to the rescue of the human understanding-there is the beauty of them --and the apparent greater or less, or more or heavier, no longer have the mastery over us, but give way before calculation and measure and weight?

Most true.

And this, surely, must be the work of the calculating and rational principle in the soul…

But we have not yet brought forward the heaviest count in our accusation: --the power which poetry has of harming even the good (and there are very few who are not harmed), is surely an awful thing?

Yes, certainly, if the effect is what you say.

Hear and judge: The best of us, as I conceive, when we listen to a passage of Homer, or one of the tragedians, in which he represents some pitiful hero who is drawling out his sorrows in a long oration, or weeping, and smiting his breast --the best of us, you know, delight in giving way to sympathy, and are in raptures at the excellence of the poet who stirs our feelings most.

Yes, of course I know.

But when any sorrow of our own happens to us, then you may observe that we pride ourselves on the opposite quality --we would fain be quiet and patient; this is the manly part, and the other which delighted us in the recitation is now deemed to be the part of a woman.

Very true, he said.

Now can we be right in praising and admiring another who is doing that which any one of us would abominate and be ashamed of in his own person?

No, he said, that is certainly not reasonable.

And the same may be said of lust and anger and all the other affections, of desire and pain and pleasure, which are held to be inseparable from every action ---in all of them poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up; she lets them rule, although they ought to be controlled, if mankind are ever to increase in happiness and virtue…

And now since we have reverted to the subject of poetry, let this our defense serve to show the reasonableness of our former judgment in sending away out of our State an art having the tendencies which we have described; for reason constrained us. But that she may impute to us any harshness or want of politeness, let us tell her that there is an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry; of which there are many proofs, such as the saying of 'the yelping hound howling at her lord,' or of one 'mighty in the vain talk of fools,' and 'the mob of sages circumventing Zeus,' and the 'subtle thinkers who are beggars after all'; and there are innumerable other signs of ancient enmity between them. Notwithstanding this, let us assure our sweet friend and the sister arts of imitation that if she will only prove her title to exist in a well-ordered State we shall be delighted to receive her --we are very conscious of her charms; but we may not on that account betray the truth. I dare say, Glaucon, that you are as much charmed by her as I am, especially when she appears in Homer?

Yes, indeed, I am greatly charmed.

Environmental Aesthetics

2007-11-13T10:25:00.000-08:00

(10) 11/13 NATURE: Processes of balance and domination
• The End of Suburbia (film)
• Handout on realism

11/20 No class during Thanksgiving Recess

(11) 11/27 AESTHETIC: From cosmetic to cosmology
• Zehou Li and Jane Cauvel, Four Essays on Aesthetics
• Handout on Kant and Modernist Aesthetics

MEDIATION PROJECT DUE

(12) 12/4 DESIGN: From modernism to Post-industrial design
• Zehou Li and Jane Cauvel, Four Essays on Aesthetics
• Handout on Christopher Alexander

(13) 12/11 WHOLENESS: Theory of form as unfolding wholeness

WHOLENESS PROJECT DUE

Reversal of the Overheated Medium

2007-11-07T09:09:00.000-08:00

"The world is now too dangerous for anything less than utopia." - Buckminister Fuller

Narcissus Narcosis Project

2007-10-31T16:31:00.001-07:00

DUE: November 20th.

This project is has three parts:

(1) Choose a technology/medium that you use, on a daily basis and that is important to you. DO WITHOUT the use of that medium for a period of 100 hours (approx. 4 days). Some examples of media: email, cellphone, instant messenger, video games, tv, cars, clothing, newspapers, electric light, etc.

(2) Write a 4 page essay • What is Marshall McLuhan’s theory of media and the artist? (What are the implications of his analysis of media for how we understand the role of the artist?) For more information re-read: 1968 Playboy Interview with Marshall McLuhan and check out Terrence McKenna on Marshall McLuhan

(3) Create, in any medium, a self-portrait (of the artist) – that is, of you – as a user of a McLuhan medium? (e.g. car, cellphone, internet, IM, MySpace, television, etc. ) Your self-portrait MUST SHOW THE SENSE IN WHICH THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE.

If you are confused about the second part, do the first part first before you think about it.

Some things that Marshall Mcluhan says about ART:

1. The ARTIST is the person who
invents the means to bridge the
gap between biological inheritance
and the environments created by
technological innovation.

2. The ARTIST is a person who is
especially aware of the challenge
and dangers of new environments.
Whereas the ordinary person seeks
security by numbing his
perceptions against the impact of
new experience, the artist delights
in this novelty and instinctively
creates situations that both
reveal it and compensate for it.

3. The ARTIST studies the distortion of
sensory life produced by new environmental
programming and tends to create artistic
situations that correct the sensory bias
and derangement brought about by the new form.

4. ART at its most significant is a Distant Early
Warning System that can always be relied
on to tell the old culture what is beginning
to happen to it.

5. As the unity of the modern world becomes
increasingly a technological rather than a
social affair, the techniques of the ARTS
provide the most valuable means of insight
into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

6. The audience, as ground, shapes
and controls the work of ART, as figure.

7. Without the ARTIST’s intervention, man
merely adapts to his technologies and
becomes their servo-mechanism. He whorships
the Idols of the Tribe, of the Cave, and of the Market.

8. We become what we behold.
We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.

9. No society has ever known enough about its actions
to have developed immunity to its new extensions
or technologies. Today we have begun to sense that
ART may be able to provide such immunity.

10. In the electric age there is not longer any sense in
talking about the ARTIST's being ahead of his time. Our
technology is also ahead of its time.

11. The ARTIST can correct the sense ratios before
the blow of new technology has numbed conscious
procedures. He can correct them before numbness and
subliminal groping and reaction begin.

12. ART holds out the potential for communicating exact
information of how to rearrange one's psyche in order
to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties.

Blind Art

2007-10-31T16:06:00.000-07:00

While blind I found that I became far more aware of objects and their locations.

While seeing I can walk into a familiar room and not give the room a second thought.

While blind, I find myself saying things like "okay, this is a desk" or "this is the silverware desk."

The most mundane things take on a great importance.

I found myself relying on these mundane objects as a way to perceptually understand where I physically am in relation to everything else.

I became increasingly aware of surface texture and shape in order to identify objects and my surroundings.

I was touching everything.

I felt like I could almost see things for the first time.

It was like a whole new experience.

(Text by Paul Batch.)

The Dalai Lama on Technology

2007-10-31T16:04:00.001-07:00

"The Paradox of our Age"

We have bigger houses, but smaller families;
more conveniences, but less time.
We have more degrees, but less judgements;
more experts, but more problems;
more medicines, but less healthiness.
We've been all the way to the moon and back,
but have trouble crossing the street
to meet the new neighbor.
We build more computers
to hold more information,
to produce more copies than ever,
but have less communication.
We have become long on quantity,
but short on quality.
These are times of fast foods,
but slow digestion;
tall man, but short character;
steep profits, but shallow relationships.
It is a time when there is much in the window,
but nothing in the room.

- His Holiness the XIVth Dalai Lama

Introduction to Media Ecology

2007-10-05T13:13:00.000-07:00

Texts for Tuesday 10/9:

1. One of the most accessible statements McLuhan made of his ecological approach to media studies is given in this interview in Playboy magazine from 1968.

2. Marshall McLuhan and Norman Mailer debate, CBC TV, 1968

And recommended for your own interest but not important for our discussion:

3. Orwell Rolls in his Grave, a film about centralization in the modern mass media system.

Blindness Project

2007-09-20T06:52:00.000-07:00

Hartford Art School
The Blindness Project
DUE: October 2nd.

Aim: This project is an experiment which aims to defamiliarize the student to the experience of sight in order to understand better its question-ability. In this experiment, you must blindfold yourself and then ask yourself certain questions about the experience.

Questions: Consider the following questions before performing this experiment and then address them when you write your report.

What is it like, to see? What is the experience like?

What is the difference between your sense of place, location, and spatial layout when you can see as opposed to when you are blind?

What is the difference between visual space and acoustic space?

How do your non-visual senses change when you cannot see?

How do your relations to others change when you cannot see?

What perceptual sensitivities are seeing people blind to? What things can blind people see/perceive/experience that ‘seeing’ people cannot?

What does it mean, to see?

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Blindfold yourself for a min. 4 hours. The longer, the better response you’ll get. 6-8 hours is ideal. Locate your self in an environment that is very visually familiar to you, some place like your dorm room or living space that you know very well. If you work with a partner, then you can walk around and do some exploring.

2. Spend the first three hours of the experiment just trying to be receptive to your new condition. Think about the ways your other sense experiences change when you cannot see. Try to get into the strangeness of it.

3. After at least 3 hours, while still in a state of artificial blindness, you must perform a specific set of memory observations. You must record as many details about the visual look and contents of the space you are familiar with as you can remember. This is essentially a test of your visual memory. Try to think of everything you remember about what you can ordinary see and notice about the space, such as for example: photographs or images you have on the wall, the colors of surfaces, objects, odd visual details you customarily notice. Make a list of observations.

4. After the time is up, take off your blindfold. Now look over your list and check it with what you can now see. Record any differences, distortions or omissions.

5. Write a short 4 page analysis of your experience relating it to what we’ve discussed in class, in particular (a) the standard model of perception as hypothesis formation machine, and/or (b) how we explain optical illusions.

6. Create a visual or non-visual artwork which explores/expresses some aspect of the experience of blindness or sensory deprivation or reorganization.

Part One: Perception

2007-09-12T19:48:00.000-07:00

(2) 9/18 SEEING: Blindness, visuality and models of the mind

What does it mean to perceive?

Readings:
1. Oliver Sacks, “The Mind’s Eye: What the blind see”
2. Oliver Sacks, "To See and Not to See"
3. Richard Gregory, “Knowledge in perception and illusion”

(3) 9/25 EXPERIENCE: The body/consciousness problem

What is awareness?

Readings:
1. Rupert Sheldrake, “The Sense of Being Stared At”
2. Rupert Sheldrake, “The Extended Mind” video.
3. David Chalmers, "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness"

(4) 10/2 UNITY: Connectivity hypothesis, systems theory, Hindu cosmology

What is a self?

Readings:
1. Ervin Laszlo, The Connectivity Hypothesis
2. Famous 'Double Slit' experiment in quantum mechanics, video.

BLINDNESS PROJECT DUE

MFA 760/761 Ecology of Perception Syllabus

2007-09-12T19:26:00.000-07:00

Hartford Art School • Fall 2007
MFA 760/761 Graduate Seminar

ECOLOGY OF PERCEPTION

Tuesdays 7:30 to 10 PM
Room V119
Dr. Justin Good with Dean Power Boothe
Contact: vood@cummings-good.com

Course Description

The study of perception lies at the heart of both the natural sciences and the arts. Theories of perception inform, and are informed by, concepts in metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of mind and language, aesthetics, and epistemology (the study of knowledge). Broadly construed, ecology is the study of systems of interdependency in the natural world. Therefore, the ecology of perception is the study of how structures of interdependency shape, and are shaped by, the process of perception. Our interdisciplinary study will take us in a focused but exploratory way across exciting new topics in 21st. century thought such as consciousness theory, media ecology, Neo-Confucian aesthetics, philosophy of metaphor, quantum cosmology, anarcho-primitivist philosophy and ecological design.

Aims and Intentions

While this is a philosophy class, it is designed for graduate art students and is meant primarily to stimulate the artistic and design work of the student by introducing her, in a systematic and holistic way, to the theoretical study of perception. By learning the many ways that visual experience and visual images can be questioned, the student is given conceptual resources for discovering new expressive possibilities that her work can take.

Our Conceptual Map

This course is designed as a story of concepts, a continuous unfolding of questions and ideas which begins with the simplest (but still very complicated!) concept – perception – and goes on to address increasing levels of complexity and cultural meaning.

•
I. Perception
II. Mediated Perception
III. Aesthetic Mediated Perception
IV. Environmental Aesthetic Mediated Perception
•

Together we shall build a conceptual map with which to navigate some of the many ways that questions about perception ramify throughout every dimension of human life and specifically, the life of the Artist.

Course Requirements

• Three projects for the class on selected problems we will discuss and explore
during the seminar (60%).
• Student participation in class discussions (30%).
• Some short writing assignments (10%).
• Regular Attendance (necessary).
• Have fun and challenge yourself (the whole point).

Required Texts

1. Ervin Laszlo, The Connectivity Hypothesis: Foundations of an Integral Science of Quantum, Cosmos, Life, and Consciousness (State University of New York Press, 2003)
ISBN-10: 0791457869/ISBN-13: 978-0791457863

2. George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By (University Of Chicago Press, 1980) ISBN-10:
0226468011/ISBN-13: 978-0226468013

3. Li Zehou, Four Essays on Aesthetics: Toward a Global Perspective (Lexington Books
(August 28, 2006) ISBN-10: 0739113216/ISBN-13: 978-0739113219

4. John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization (Feral House, 2002) ISBN-10: 092291575X/ISBN-13: 978-0922915750

In addition there will be a number of online writings • Readings and additional information for each class are posted on the course website ecologyofperception.blogspot.com one class in advance and announced in class.

Course Schedule

(1) 9/11 QUESTIONING: Introduction to ecology of perception

What is education for?

(2) 9/18 SEEING: Blindness, visuality and models of the mind

What does it mean, to perceive?

(3) 9/25 EXPERIENCE: The body/consciousness problem

What is awareness?

(4) 10/2 UNITY: Connectivity hypothesis, systems theory, Hindu
cosmology

What is a self?
BLINDNESS PROJECT DUE

(5) 10/9 TECHNOLOGY: Introduction to media ecology

What is a medium?

(6) 10/16 MEANING: Metaphor and theory of meaning

What is a meta for?

(7) 10/23 MEDIUM: McLuhan and Orwellian dimensions of mediated society

What is freedom?

(8) 10/30 PROGRESS: Anarcho-primitivism and post-civilization society

What is a community?

(9) 11/6 LANGUAGE: Metaphors we live by

What is truth?

(10) 11/13 NATURE: Processes of balance and domination

What is purpose?
MEDIATION PROJECT DUE

11/20 No class during Thanksgiving Recess

(11) 11/27 AESTHETIC: From cosmetic to cosmology

What is beauty?

(12) 12/4 DESIGN: From modernism to Post-industrial design

What is coherence?

(13) 12/11 WHOLENESS: Theory of form as unfolding wholeness

What is life?
WHOLENESS PROJECT DUE

What is a conceptual ecosystem?

2006-12-18T20:50:00.000-08:00

What is a conceptual ecosystem and how do you walk through one?

The idea of a conceptual ecosystem is a picture for understanding – a tool for understanding – how our ideas about the world and about ourselves relate to and interact with how we live our lives.

It is a way to see how ideas are not just ideas, but parts of our reality, as real as stones and persons are helium, in the sense that they cause and shape and interact with, and even make up the very fabric of reality.

Generally speaking, ecology is the science of interdependency. It studies life as a system of living systems, all of which shape and are shaped by their relations with all other systems. As a hard, biological science, ecology studies biological ecosystems: dynamically organized, kinetic arrangements of organisms and flows of energy and nutrients. Originally beginning as the empirical study of how one organism’s life and behavior depends upon the life and behavior of another organism, ecology has become the name for a whole universe of disciplines and subdisciplines: all of which are pursuing their own cognitive niche to study one of the infinite implications of holistic interdependency.

Human ecology studies interdependency of all live insofar as it pertains to the existence of human beings and their mysterious, deeply troubled, but also hopeful and divine, condition on planet earth. Human ecology is itself a vast interdisciplinary project because of all the complicated problems and questions that our ways of living are currently throwing up at us to respond to.

Philosophical ecology is a kind of human ecology concerned with how our concepts about how we live are themselves parts of how we live. Philosophical ecology studies conceptual ecosystems, as structural aspects of our environment which serve to transmit, interpret, codify, relate, synthesize, reject and ignore, or illuminate, the flow of information through ecosystems.

All organisms, in order to maintain in the world as biological-thermodynamic survival machines, need to exchange energy and nutrients continuously, in order to resist the force of entropic heat death. Not only nutrients, to rebuild cellular structure, and energy, to metabolize continuity of form which marks the essence of all living beings, but also information is essential to the manifesting of life. To be alive is to be self-organizing, which means to have an inside and an outside – that is, to have a skin. To have a skin is to be semipermeable, which all life must necessarily be, insofar as all life needs to get energy from the larger environs and to release digested energy back into it. But to be semi-permeable is to let some things in and to shut other things out.

The ability to be selective about that process is the seed of perception, hence perception is synonymous with life. As life intensifies – and it is the essence of life to do so – perception also intensifies, by extending itself, internally and externally, and temporally, into the past and the future. At some point concepts appear as particular ways that perception and reality coalesce into deeper levels of unity. And like all living things, concepts develop as systems of concepts which relate and interact with each other and with the non-conceptual, material world, again, in order to intensify life.

Information implies knowledge, which coentails meaning and along with purpose. The ancient and eternal questions of philosophy – what is truth? what is goodness? What is beautiful? – are forever refracted through the dazzling infinite implications of the flow of information through your body, your community, your economy, your planet, your cosmos.

Theory of Form as Unfolding Wholeness

2006-11-27T07:03:00.000-08:00

Christopher Alexander's 'Harmony-Seeking Transformations'

What is a healthy ecosystem?

2006-11-02T09:12:00.000-08:00

When we speak of "healthy" eco-systems, we mean stable eco-systems: that is, both tending toward diversity and not subject to cataclysmic drops in diversity. Such conditions, also called balanced, create relationships--ever more intricate relationships--that increasingly locate the inorganic elements necessary to life in cycles that make those inorganic elements increasingly available to life. The more extensive these relationships, the more consistently available the nutrient-elements will be to the life forms within those relationships. Expanding diversity of life forms is, relatively speaking, a low entropy enterprise. The more diverse the forms of life, the more matter and energy are kept available for use, or "work," and the less they are lost to use or work through either irretrievable dissipation or unresolvable mixing. - Abby Rockefeller

Seattle's Reply

2006-10-30T14:15:00.000-08:00

In 1854, Chief Seattle is said to have given this speech as a response to the governor of Washington's wish to buy their land. The speech is commonly called "Seattle's Reply", but there is a great deal of controversy surrounding the actual words of Chief Seattle. This version of the speech is said to be a modified version by the screenwriter Ted Perry, writing it for the purpose of his ecological movie "Home". The speech is famous for its beautiful ecological statement and has been quoted in numerous ecological texts.

The speech is recited by the mythologist Joseph Campbell as a part of his PBS television series "The Power Of Myth".

Ecology of Money

2006-10-11T19:58:00.000-07:00

“From coin to paper currency, and from currency to credit card there is a steady progression toward commercial exchange as the movement of information itself. This trend toward an inclusive information is the kind of image represented by the credit card, and approaches once more the character of tribal money. For tribal society, not knowing the specialisms of job or of work, does not specialize money either. Its money can be eaten, drunk, or worn like the new space ships that are now designed to be edible. “Work,” however, does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.”
From Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 137-8.

Links on the ecology of money:

THE STRUCTURE OF OUR CENTRALIZED, PRIVATELY-OWNED AND MANAGED, DEBT-BASED MONEY SYSTEM

1. The Federal Reserve System is neither federal (it's privately owed), nor has any reserves (prints money out of thin air and sells it to the government at interest), nor is a system (it's a cartel)! Read Eustice Mullins' classic "Secrets of the Federal Reserve"

2. a Ludwig von Mises Institute film, "Money, Banking and the Federal Reserve"

3. Carolyn Baker, “The Valley of the Shadow of Debt”

4. Federal Debt Relief System

5. Stephen Zarlenga, “Abbreviated Monetary History of the US”

6. Jas Jain, “Peak Debt”

7. Ludwig von Mises, “On the Manipulation of Money and Credit”

8. Murray Rothbard’s lectures on monetary theory and economics

…and NOW DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE!

9. America: From Freedom to Fascism, trailer for film by Aaron Russo

10. Catherine Austin Fitts, “Narcodollars for Beginners”

11. and also Fitts’ comprehensive analysis of the ‘Tapeworm economy’

12. Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee

13. US Treasury Missing $ Trillions

14. Jane Stillwater, “The dollar’s evil twin: Exploring the Bush bureaucracy’s private monetary system”

15. William Clark, “Petrodollar Warfare: Dollars, Euros and the Upcoming Iranian Oil Bourse”

16. Krassimir Petrov, “The Proposed Iranian Oil Bourse”

17. John F. Kennedy knew a lot more than we realized

…and now SOME INSPIRING, REALISTIC SOLUTIONS!

18. Thomas Greco, Jr., "Money"

19. Bob Swann and Susan Witt, “Local Currencies: Catalysts for Sustainable Regional Economics”

20. Former central banker from Belgium explains the promise of local money

21. Sarah van Gelder, “Beyond Greed and Scarcity: An interview with Bernard Lietaer”

22. Bob Swann, “Building a Community Banking System”

23. Opemmoney LETS system

24. Open Capital and Co-ownership

25. Ryan Fugger, The Ripple P2P money project

26. Sepp Hasslberger, “Social Credit”

27. James Turk, “8 Things Everyone Should Know about Gold”

McLuhan's Media Ecology

2006-09-27T13:22:00.000-07:00

"the wheel
is an extension of the foot
the book
is an extension of the eye
clothing, an extension of the skin,
electric circuitry,
an extension of
the
central
nervous
system"

(from "The Medium is The Massage," Marshall McLuhan p 31-40)

The following links are helpful sources in trying to understand Marshall McLuhan's framework.

1. One of the most accessible statements McLuhan made of his ecological approach to media studies is given in this interview in Playboy magazine from 1968.

2. Marshall McLuhan and Norman Mailer debate, CBC TV, 1968

3. Orwell Rolls in his Grave, a film about centralization in the modern mass media system.

PH114 Syllabus

2006-09-11T10:44:00.000-07:00

Wesleyan University
Fall 2006
PHIL 112: Ecology of Perception
Mon-Wed 11-12:20
DWNY100; FISK115

Dr. Justin Good
vood@cummings-good.com

Course Description

The study of perception lies at the heart of philosophy and natural science. Theories of perception inform, and are informed by, concepts in metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of mind and language, aesthetics, and epistemology (the study of knowledge). Broadly construed, ecology is the study of systems of interdependency in the natural world. The ecology of perception is the study of how structures of interdependency shape, and are shaped by, the process of perception.

As an interdisciplinary introduction to the study of perception, this class explores some exciting and new ways that environmentalism, as a political-economic movement, and ecology, as a paradigm of human knowledge, are recasting traditional and modern ideas about the nature and meaning of experience.

Required Texts

1. Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy
2. Arne Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy
3. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
4. Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field
5. Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life

Some additional online readings and viewings will be assigned.

Course Requirements

1. Two short papers and two medium papers (70%)
2. Class participation (30%)
3. Mandatory attendance. After three unexcused absences, your grade will be impacted by one-half letter grade for each unexcused absence after that. After a total of six unexcused absences, the student will receive an incomplete for the course.

Schedule

9/6 Introduction to the Ecology of Perception

Part One: The Ego

9/11-9/25 Modernism, Visuality and the Mind-Body Problem

Mechanistic concepts of perception in metaphysics and epistemology

Texts

1. Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy

2. Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method

9/27 FIRST PAPER DUE

Part Two: The Medium

9/27-10/11 Media Ecology, Retribalization and Narcissus Narcosis

Hidden mental and social effects of new communications technologies

Texts

1. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media

2. Marshall McLuhan and Norman Mailer debate, CBC 1968

3. Orwell Rolls in his Grave, film

No class 10/16.

Part Three: The Land

10/18-10/30 The Spirit of Place and the Cosmology of Industrial Society

Case histories in the political ecology of the ‘American Dream’

Texts

1. Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land

2. Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh, film

11/1 SECOND PAPER DUE

Part Four: Earth Household

11/6-11/20 Deep Ecology, Buddhist Economics and Ecosophy T

Theory and practice of interrelatedness

Texts

1. Arne Naess, Ecology, community and lifestyle

2. E. F. Schumacher, ‘Buddhist Economics’

11/27 THIRD PAPER DUE

Part Five: The Whole

11/27-12/11 Evolutionary Cosmology and Form as Unfolding Wholeness

Post-industrial design theory, morphogenesis and post-humanism

Texts

1. Christopher Alexander, ‘New Concepts on Complexity Theory’

2. Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field

3. Rupert Sheldrake, ‘The Sense of Being Stared At’

12/20 FOURTH PAPER DUE