As we may think

[The Human Mind] operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.

Vannevar Bush 

Chris Marker, Memórias dos Tempos (parte 2)

Sans Soleil (1983)

Cineasta profundamente “empenhado” acompanhando as lutas políticas ao longo do tempo e dos espaços (e há breves imagens de Portugal no imediato pós-25 de Abril em Le Fond de l’air est rouge e Sans Soleil), Marker foi elaborando a memória destes tempos. E no entanto os seus filmes não são estritamente do real imediato, do cinema como “janela aberta para o mundo” mas um processo de montagem, retomando a tradição dos soviéticos dos anos 20. Na montagem não há um tempo único mas vários estratos, o passado e o presente como também o futuro: no famoso La Jetée, feito com planos fixos, a memória de infância da personagem principal é afinal a sua própria morte. O cinema torna-se tempos, no plural. Como assinalou Raymond Bellour, Marker dá a ver que a característica maior do cinema não é tanto o movimento como o tempo. E isto na ficção científica de La Jetée ou Level 5 como nas memórias dos acontecimentos.

Augusto M. Seabra

Say hello to Lynn Hershman, our star...

A Room of One's Own

In [these] interactive works, Hershman is less interested in the construction of female persona in a media society than in how the spectator's gaze is enmeshed in such constructions through mechanisms that the artist uses and puts in place to reveal these very regimes and forms of the gaze. All these systems include the gaze of whoever is looking and turn it back on itself, reverse it, so that the mechanism addresses itself to the looker, the eyes of one meeting the eyes of the other.

in Fondation Langlois

Projectos:

Lorna (1983-84)

A Room of One's Own (1990-93)

Apartment

Apartment

Martin Wattenberg

Liquid Architectures...

I'm in a familiar place. Have I been here before? I feel I know this place, yet even as I turn something appears to have changed. It is still the same place, but not quite identical to what it was just a moment ago. Like a new performance of an old symphony, its intonation is different, and in the difference between its present and past incarnations something new has been said in a language too subtle for words. Objects and situations that were once thought to have a fixed identity, a generic "self", now possess personality, flow and flavor. All permanent categories are defeated as the richness of the particular impresses upon me that in this landscape, if I am to benefit fully, attention is both required and rewarding. Those of us who have felt the difference nod to each other in silent aknowledgement, knowing that at the end of specificity lies silence, and what is made speaks for itself, not in words, but in presences, ever changing, liquid...

Liquid architectures in cyberspace 

Marcos Novak

Information Landscapes (Muriel Cooper)

"Electronic is malleable. Print is rigid," 

she told me, then backtracked in characteristic fashion. "I guess I'm never sure that print is truly linear: it's more a simultaneous medium. Designers know a lot about how to control perception, how to present information in some way that helps you find what you need, or what it is they think you nee. Information is only useful when it can be understood."

The primary mission of the VLW is to develop devices and design strategies for manipulating information under constantly changing conditions. Underlying many of these "computationally expressive tools" (to quote the somewhat cumbersome VLW-speak) are the concepts of transparency, adaptability, and blur. Translated into everyday language, these terms imply, respectively, that 1) you can see right through the data, as if it were printed on glass, to sequential layers behind; 2) that if there's a change in back ground color in a dynamic environment, the type "knows" to adjust its own hue so as to remain legible against it; and 3) that fuzzy fields of information come into focus, and therefore become readable, as you approach them.

in aiga.org

The Art of Memory (Frances Yates)

Few people know that the Greeks, who invented many arts, invented an art of memory which, like their other arts, was passed on to Rome whence it descended in the European tradition. This art seeks to memorise through a technique of impressing 'places' and 'images' on memory. It has usually been classed as 'mnemotechnics', which in modern times seems a rather unimportant branch of human activity. But in the ages before printing a trained memory was vitally important; and the manipulation of images in memory must always to some extent involve the psyche as a whole.