James G. R. Cronin

CALL FOR PAPERS AND PERFORMANCES DRHA 2010 Conference: Digital Resources for the Humanities and Arts Sunday 5th September - Wednesday 8th September 2010 Brunel University, West London. Click on post title for link to website. CONFERENCE THEME : Sensual Technologies: Collaborative Practices of Interdisciplinarity The conference’s overall theme will be the exploration of the collaborative relationship between the body and sensual/sensing technologies across various disciplines. In this respect it will offer an interrogation of practices that are indebted to the innovative exchange between the sensual, visceral and new technologies. At the same time, the aim is to look to new approaches offered by various emerging fields and practices that incorporate new and existing technologies. Specific examples of areas for discussion could include: • Delineation of new collaborative practices and the interchange of knowledge • Collaborative interdisciplinary practices of embodiment and t...

At 5:29:45 am Mountain War Time on July 16, 1945, the world’s first atomic bomb exploded one hundred feet over a portion of the southern New Mexico desert known as the Jornada del Muerto – the Journey of the Dead Man. The site of which Oppenheimer named "Trinity". Oppenheimer later said this name was from one of John Donne's (1572–1631) Holy Sonnets . Donne’s sonnet opening: “Batter my heart, three-person'd God” ruefully encapsulates the project’s quest to split atomic particles. On seeing the fireball and mushroom cloud, J. Robert Oppenheimer recalled a passage from Hindu sacred scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: "I am become death the destroyer of worlds." In Critical Assembly artist Jim Sanborn has recreated one of the labs used in the Trinity experiment for Terror and the Sublime: Art in an Age of Anxiety at the Crawford Gallery of Art, Cork, but is this art? Sanborn thinks it is. Sanborn spoke of the “seductive” quality of the Trinity project for the sci...

At the end of October Edward De Bono was invited to speak in Cork as part of a creative film forum. I was fortunate to attend this talk in which he presented an entertaining overview of his life's work in the field of creative thinking. In the talk De Bono explained his theory of Parallel Thinking. De Bono defines Parallel Thinking as a thinking process where focus is split in specific directions. When done in a group it effectively avoids the consequences of the adversarial approach. In adversarial debate the objective is to prove or disprove statements put forward by the parties (normally two). However, in Parallel Thinking, participants put forward as many statements as possible in several parallel tracks. This leads to exploration of a subject where all participants can contribute, in parallel, with knowledge, facts, feelings etc. Crucial to the method is that the process is done in a disciplined manner, and that all participants plays along and contributes in parallel. Thus ea...

A battle over Wikipedia's use of images from the a London gallery's website has intensified. Read story

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[Click on title to access link] The Avant is based on ongoing conversations, and conversation, to my mind, is the soul of culture. Fergal Gaynor

[Click on title for link] The Paradox of Technology: What’s Gained and Lost? is a paper written a decade ago C. A. Bowers, an American educator. It is still relevant and thought-provoking. Written during the late 90s, Bowers argued that Western society was becoming dependent on communication technologies that it understood in terms of application, but was unable to fully appreciate the connections between the culturally diverse forms of knowledge that it was losing through the introduction of such ubiquitous technologies. Bowers makes a number of thought-provoking observations: 1. Computers amplify explicit, context-free forms of knowledge, while their programmers usually overlook implicit and culturally specific analog experiences and ways of knowing. 2. Computers amplify a conduit view of language, while hiding the metaphorically layered nature of language, as well as masking how language on the screen reproduces a specific form of cultural intelligence. 3. Computers amplify a Wester...