Outsider Art – art created outside insitutionalized, mainstream, or official art culture, with a focus in the past on art by insane asylum inmates.
Archive for External content
The Thought Project
What happens when you stop strangers on the street and ask them what they were thinking the moment before you stopped them? Simon Hoegsberg did just that over a 3 month period in Copenhagen, Denmark and New York City. The result: The Thought Project.
What does Neuroscience say about schizophrenia and the Self?
In Lecture 5 of the 2003 Reith Lectures series on the Emerging Mind Vilayanur S. Ramachandran discusses new discoveries in the field of neuroscience and what they might mean for ideas about the Self. He describes interesting work by Sarah Blakemore and others who propose a theory of schizophrenia based on the ability of an individual’s brain to distinguish between internally generated actions and externally generated sensory stimuli. He suggests a radically simple test for schizophrenia involving tapping one hand with the other and asking the patient to describe the sensation. Such a theory is able to explain why schizophrenics may think they are being controlled by aliens or the CIA and in fact makes such delusions seem logical given the explanation. As a corollary to this, a schizophrenic should be able to tickle themselves. Using this and ideas emerging from other neuroscience experiments and data, he speculates that what we experience as ourselves may actually be a by-product of the evolutionary necessity to be able to predict the behaviour of others.
Counter hegemonic action in multi-player online computer games
“Velvet-Strike” is an online campaign inflitrating the multiplayer computer game “Counter-Strike”. Velvet-strikers have been painting anti-war and anti-volience graffiti, such as pictures of soliders kissing each other, inside the Counter-Strike virtual world. Avid players bemoan what they see as an encroachment of political ideology in the gamespace.
Robbers slip back into town
Phnom Penh: Robbers who strike while wearing only underwear, their bodies slathered with oil to make them slippery and harder to catch, have resurfaced in southern Cambodia.
Police thought they had quashed the “underwear gang” last year, with residents starting a community watch program, said Takeo province police chief Sok Tum Sok Tum, but the thieves resurfaced when the villagers stopped. – AP
Join the Jihad!
“Startling new underground group spreads lack of panic! Citizens declare themselves “relatively unafraid” of threats of undeclared rationality. People can still go to France, terrorist leader says.”
“Greetings to the Imprisoned Citizens of the United States. We are Unitarian Jihad. There is only God, unless there is more than one God. The vote of our God subcommittee is 10-8 in favor of one God, with two abstentions. Brother Flaming Sword of Moderation noted the possibility of there being no God at all, and his objection was noted with love by the secretary.” Read the rest of this entry »
Shopdropping
From Shopdrop.org:
“The basic idea is simple: one takes crap from home that they do not need, and places it on display racks in stores. The meaning behind the idea is the creativity that can be put into such an operation. Say one has an old ratty tweed blazer and has no use for it. Use a pricing gun to put a reasonable price on the object, grab a cheap hanger, put it in a department store bag and head to Limited Too. Enter the store, and when nobody’s looking, throw on the blazer. Now is when you casually look at the price tag, look discouraged, take it off, put it back on the hanger and place it on the display rack, among the many pink and baby blue girly teeshirts.” Read the rest of this entry »
Reality is virtual, is it?
“Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and simulation.”
Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra” in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, Ed. Brian Wallis (New Museum 1984), pg 262
The Clogosphere
Cambodian + Blogger = Clogger (see the Clogger Google group)
The Wired article, Blogs Taking Off in Cambodia (July 20, 2005), is about Khmers in Cambodia (as opposed to foreigners in Cambodia or overseas Cambodians) getting into blogs. One such blog is Youth Vision, a blog infinitely more popular than the one you are reading now.
A comprehensive list of Cambodian blogs, expat and local, can be found at the Global Voices wiki in the Cambodia entry.
Dog gives birth to kitten
People have flocked to a small village on the outskirts of Cambodia’s capital after a man claimed that his ten-year-old pet dog has defied nature and the ancient tradition of her species reviling cats and given birth to a kitten. Read the rest of this entry »
The man with no clothes
A long-haired teenage boy in south-eastern Cambodia has insisted on living nude since he was a toddler, according to local media. Read the rest of this entry »
Bananas bend interrogation rules
April 3, 2004/Phnom Penh: Police in Cambodia have been accused of extracting confessions from two teenagers by force-feeding them bananas until they felt sick. Read the rest of this entry »
First web link added
I’ve added the first web link, a blog (online journal) from an Iraqi in Baghdad.
