“In this study, we reconstructed visual images by combining local image bases of multiple scales, whose contrasts were independently decoded from fMRI activity by automatically selecting relevant voxels and exploiting their correlated patterns.”
That grisly thing, a “poetry reading”, is what it is because there will always be some among the audience who are bored or all but frankly hostile and who can’t remove themselves by the simple act of turning a knob. And it is at bottom the same difficulty—the fact that a theatre audience is not a selected one—that makes it impossible to get a decent performance of Shakespeare in England. On the air these conditions do not exist. The poet FEELS that he is addressing people to whom poetry means something, and it is a fact that poets who are used to broadcasting can read into the microphone with a virtuosity they would not equal if they had a visible audience in front of them. The element of make-believe that enters here does not greatly matter. The point is that in the only way now possible the poet has been brought into a situation in which reading verse aloud seems a natural unembarrassing thing, a normal exchange between man and man: also he has been led to think of his work as SOUND rather than as a pattern on paper. By that much the reconciliation between poetry and the common man is nearer. It already exists at the poet’s end of the aether-waves, whatever may be happening at the other end.
//
adrift in an ideological domain
temperate scavengers
work on notions of imperfect disclosure
//
“This site represents the space where typography and topography overlap: explorations of type in virtual environments, experiments in mapping, and innovations in textual display. TYPOTOPO examines how the act of reading evolves when letters and words, viewed both as text and image, are placed in interactive and dynamic environments. TYPOTOPO explores typographic information spaces and the possibilities for playful, expressive letterforms.”
“I’ve gradually smoothed over this more radical [ontological panpsychic] stance by strategically adopting methodological views (Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff’s cultural biographies of things, Stanley Fish’s reader-response theory of literary meaning) that would enable me to tell my biographical stories, and would at the same time domesticate my living objects within acceptable Western intellectual approaches. “Biographies” thus becomes a strategic metaphor for narrating the historical processes that surround objects over time, rather than the dead serious, non-metaphorical telling of an actual life of an embodied iconic being. Yet I don’t think that means that I entirely abandon my images to Western conceptualizations. In centering the book around stories, lives of individual objects that have led and continue to lead interesting and varied lives, I hope that there is a cumulative persuasive effect that I’m not using “lives” metaphorically or ironically, but as the expression of a serious ontological premise. My aim is that an accomodation between two different ideas of how images might in fact be alive will emerge over the course of the book.”
WRITING AS IF ICONS ARE REALLY ALIVE
(C.A.S.I. Position Paper)
Richard H. Davis
24 June 96