Category Archives: Perception

Last of the Lost

Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin quotes extensively from Doctor Richerand’s New Elements of Physiology on the order in which the senses shut down upon the approach of death. Memory is extinguished next. The dying man, who in his delirium could still recognize those … Continue reading

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Wonder of Words

Diana Kuprel and Marek Kusiba in their translation of selections form the poetry of Ryszard Kapuściński (I Wrote Stone) render a stanza from “The Laws of Nature” with economy and attention to the sparseness of the gesture being described. We … Continue reading

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Music Animation Machine

http://www.musanim.com I first saw this demonstrated at the Textile Museum. It accompanied an exhibit exploring pattern. Very pleased to see the endeavour still alive. And the incorporation at the Textile Museum well documented. There’s a picture of the gallery set-up. … Continue reading

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Impressed Modalities Compressed

Published in 1995 in The Cyborg Handbook edited by Chris Hables Gray, “Split Subjects, Not Atoms; or How I Fell in Love with My Prosthesis” by Sandy Stone has intrigued me for its particular insight into the possibilities of transcoding, … Continue reading

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Space: oriental and auditory

I once sent an inquiry to the McLuhan discussion list. There was little uptake on my questions. It is perhaps well-known that the McLuhans (Eric & father) in Laws of Media refer to F.M. Cornford’s “The Invention of Space” in … Continue reading

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A Winter Letter

Out of the rebounding border of an ecstatic flight came/comes a letter. There is this gorgeous beginning about snow: The snow continues to fall, muffling the tones of shoveling and of cars struggling. Despite the overcast sky, the whiteness blanketing … Continue reading

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Acute Hearing

Apparently if you close your eyes… Water is never silent when it moves. Brooks babble, streams burble, and a larger, slower river has deeper, more complicated things to say. Great rivers speak at low frequencies, too low for human ears … Continue reading

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Active Mind

Nella Cotrupi in Northrop Frye and the Poetics of Process draws attention to Frye’s discussion of Blake. In Fearful Symmetry, Frye used Blake’s distinction between the visonary ‘Hallelujah-Chorus’ perception of the sun and its more prosaic, rationalistic reception as a … Continue reading

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Descriptions as Constructions

William Gass. “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction” collected in Fiction and the Figures of Life. — but strictly speaking style cannot be, itself, a kind of vision, the notion is very misleading, for we do not have before us … Continue reading

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Perception Capture

From “Hyperboarding: From Aristotle to Brenda Laurel and on…” by Heikki Salo comes this lovely and telling typographical instance: In real world we perseive [sic] and distinguish objects and their relations – this is also true of abstractions like thoughts … Continue reading

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