froginmythroat (FIMT) » External content

Outsider Art

Croaky — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 22:32:14 +0000

Outsider Art – art created outside insitutionalized, mainstream, or official art culture, with a focus in the past on art by insane asylum inmates.

Outsider Art – Wikipedia

The Thought Project

Croaky — Sun, 14 Aug 2005 09:55:33 +0000

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?

Croaky — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 09:40:02 +0000

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

Croaky — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 10:38:57 +0000

“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.

More at salon.com

Robbers slip back into town

Croaky — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 10:06:12 +0000

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

Source: Sydney Morning Herald June 11, 2005

Join the Jihad!

Croaky — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 09:54:18 +0000

“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 our leader’s communique here!

Join the fight by getting your Unitarian Jihadi name here!

(or if this is a bit too much for you, read the realist explanation at wikipedia)

Penned with Peace,

Sibling Gatling Gun of Patience

Shopdropping

Croaky — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 02:55:41 +0000

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.”

From Shopdropping.net:

“Shopdropping is an ongoing project in which I alter the packaging of canned goods and then “shopdrop” the items back onto grocery store shelves. I replace the packaging with labels created using my photographs. The “shopdropped” works act as a series of art objects that people can purchase from the grocery store. Because the barcodes and price tags are left intact purchasing the cans before they are discovered and removed is possible. In one instance a store employee even restocked the cans to a new aisle based on the barcode information.

Shopdropping strives to take back a share of the visual space we encounter on daily basis. Similar to the way street art stakes a claim to public space for self expression, Shopdropping subverts commercial space for artistic use.”

Can culture jammers actually make a difference? See this critique of culture jamming on wikipedia.

Via WorldChanging

Reality is virtual, is it?

Croaky — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 07:21:11 +0000

“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

Croaky — Sat, 23 Jul 2005 03:53:53 +0000

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

Croaky — Sun, 14 Nov 2004 20:03:01 +0000

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. Owner Te Huot told Deutsche Presse-Agentur that his dog, called Knou, gave birth to a grey tabby kitten after he was visited by a forest monk who claimed that the dog had mated with a tiger.

He said it was only the second time in the dog’s life that she had given birth, and that the first time, five years earlier, she had produced normal canine puppies.

However, he claimed that last Tuesday, Knou went into labour at his Chhbar Ampou village home and produced a single kitten.

The phenomenon has brought crowds thronging to Te Huot’s home to burn incense and give donations towards the dog and its tiny kitten, which Te Huot says is a sign from the gods.

“This animal cries like a cat, and its face is like a cat, but its feet are bigger than a cat’s and look more like a dog’s feet,” local media quoted Te Huot as saying.
However, one visitor on Friday was less than impressed.

“It is a kitten,” the man told DPA. “I only went to see what it looked like, but when the owner told me I had to pray to the dog, I left. I don’t believe him that this kitten came from his dog.”

Animal husbandry experts also cast doubts on the ability of a dog to give birth to a cat, but sheer curiosity value still saw hundreds of Cambodians mobbing the bemused new canine mother in a rush to witness the alleged strange birth for themselves.

Source: Sydney Morning Herald August 30, 2004