piero scaruffi

Interesting videos (not the music, the videos)

Fri, 24 May 2013 12:54:28 -0700

From my friend Kelley Watts:

These two were shot with one take without any post-production special effects;

1) Lucas – “Lucas With the Lid Off” – Michel Gondrey

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY5zaDZq0sc

2) Kylie Minogue - Come Into My World – Michel Gondrey

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63vqob-MljQ

(Here’s how he shot it, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw9FAxywDJ8)

These two do some interesting stuff with reverse playback;

1) Cibo Matto – “Sugar Water” – Michel Gondrey

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN9auBn6Jys

2) The Pharcyde – “Drop” - Spike Jonze

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKiwYoNvXrk

(Here’s how he shot it, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CBsxCUhNu0)

(A Dialog between the Self and the Other)

Sun, 19 May 2013 23:42:41 -0700

“It is always night”
“I can see the Sun”
“Trust me: here it is night - always - we left the Sun behind”
“Forever?”
“Forever”
“I’d like to go back”
“Too late”
“Too late for what?”
“To make sense of the present”
“How senseless that is”
“No: it was”
“When?”
“Here”
“It is so easy to confuse when and where”
“When is here and where is now”
“I am here and now”
“No: I is here and now”
“I am not a person, i am a place - there are many people inside me”
“Life is a place”
“Death is a time”
“I wonder if, overall, there are more living people or more dead people”
“It is easy to confuse life and death”
“You cannot die if you are not alive”
“Can you be alive if you have never been dead?”
“Can it be day if it has never been night?”
“It is always night”

More: http://www.scaruffi.com/poetry/halfmoon.html

Best of San Francisco Artmrkt 2013 Full set of pictures:...

Fri, 17 May 2013 14:42:00 -0700

Best of San Francisco Artmrkt 2013

Full set of pictures: http://www.scaruffi.com/monument/museums/artmrkt/index.html

More art: http://www.scaruffi.com/monument/museums

Octavio Paz's "Epitaph for no Stone"

Sat, 04 May 2013 12:54:00 -0700

(Translation by Eliot Weinberger)

Time.
that devours faces and names,
devours itself.
Time is a mask with no face.

The Buddha did not teach me how to die.
He tells us that faces dissolve,
that names are empty sounds.
But at death we have a face,
and we die with a name.
In the borderland of ashes
who will open my eyes?

I go back to my scriptures,
to the book of the knight read badly
in a sunlit youth
that shared much of its violence:
the gashed plains,
the battles of wind and dust,
the wild pear tree, green fountain of shadow,
the nape of the sierra, stubborn
against clouds pregnant with chimeras,
the rigorous light that portioned out
the living body of space:
geometry and sacrifice.

I buried myself in my reading,
surrounded by wonders and disasters:
to the south, the two volcanoes
made of time, distance, and snow;
the barbarian characters of fire
on the pages of stone;
the terraces of vertigo;
the hills, almost blue and scarcely drawn
with invisible hands by the air;
noon, the icon-maker
making sculptures out of all that it touches,
in distanm; where the eye learns
the duties of birds and architect poets.

High plains, terrace of the zodiac,
circus of the sun and its planets,
mirror of the moon,
high tide turned to stone,
stepped immensity
that the dawn, barely light, climbs,
and solemn evening descends,
lava garden, house of echoes,
thunder drum, shell of the wind,
theater of rain,
hangar of clouds, pigeon coop of the stars.
Seasons turn and days turn,
the heavens turn, fast or slow,
the wandering fables of the clouds,
the fields of play and the fields of battle
for unfounded nations of reflections,
the kingdoms of wind dissolved by the wind:
on peaceful days space is throbbing,
sounds are transparent bodies,
echoes are visible, silence listens to itself.
Source of presences,
the day flows vanished in its fictions.
On the plains the dust is asleep.
Bones of centuries ground by the sun,
time turned to thirst and light, ghostly dust
that rises from its stony bed
in brown and reddish spirals,
dust, masked and dancing,
under the diaphanous domes of the sky.
Eternities in an instant,
eternities enough,
vast, timeless pauses;
each hour is tangible,
forms think, stillness is dance.

Pages more lived than read
in the ﬂuvial afternoons:
the horizon, fixed and changing
from Ajusco the purple storm
hurled down to the plains
with a crash of stones and hoofs
and broke up into peaceful waves;
the bare feet of the rain
on that red-brick patio;
the bougainvillaea in the decrepit garden,
crimson ardor …
My feelings at war with the world:
reading was a fragile truce.

Memory invents another present.
As it invents myself.
What has been lived
blurs with today.
With eyes closed I read the book:
returning from his madness
the knight returns to his name and studies himself
in the still water of a timeless moment.
It dawns, a dubious sun
in the mist of the mirror, a face.
It is the face of death.
In such trances,
he says, man must not mock the soul.
And he looks himself in the face:
thaw of reﬂections.

(Greatest poets of all times: http://www.scaruffi.com/fiction/bestpo.html )

An introduction to Language for the SMMMASH at Stanford University http://www.smmmash.com

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 14:10:00 -0700

Language - An Introduction from piero scaruffi

Olaf Hajek (1965,...

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 23:25:53 -0700

Olaf Hajek (1965, Germany)

http://www.scaruffi.com/monument/museums/hajek

Scott Weaver built this kinetic sculpture of San Francisco using...

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 23:31:00 -0700

Scott Weaver built this kinetic sculpture of San Francisco using 100,000 toothpicks. He completed it after 35 years in 2011.

(More artists at www.scaruffi.com/monument/museums/ )

Ernesto Sabato - From “On Heroes and Tombs”

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 09:10:55 -0700

By virtue of that notable attribute of independence and superimposition possessed by the universe, as a banker makes ready to bring off the most formidable operation involving strong currencies that has ever been carried out successfully in the Rio de la Plata (incidentally scuttling Consortium X or fearsome Corporation Y), a bird, a hundred paces away from the Powerful Office, hops across the grass of the Parque Colon, searching here for some little bit of straw for its nest, some stray grain of wheat or rye, some little worm of nutritional interest to it or to its young; while in another even more insignificant stratum, and one in a way even farther removed from everything (not from the Great Banker but from the slender cane of the pensioner), tinier, more anonymous, more secret beings live an independent, and on occasion an extremely active, existence:

worms, ants (not only the big black ones, but also the little red ones and others even smaller that are practically invisible) and enormous numbers of other more insignificant tiny creatures, of different colors and very different habits. All these beings live in different worlds that are foreign to each other except when Great Catastrophes occur, when Men, armed with Fumigators and Shovels, undertake the Fight against the Ants (an absolutely useless fight, let it be said in passing, since it always ends with the triumph of the ants), or when Bankers unleash their Petroleum Wars; so that the infinite number of tiny creatures that until that moment lived on the vast greenswards or in the peaceful subworlds if the parks are wiped out by bombs and gases; while others that are more fortunate, those belonging to those species of worms that are invariably victorious, make hay while the sun shines and prosper with astounding rapidity, as meanwhile, up above, the Purveyors and Manufacturers of Armaments thrive.

Liu Bolin’s photograph “Hide in the City” (can...

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 10:11:00 -0700

Liu Bolin’s photograph “Hide in the City” (can you see the person?)

More of his photographs and optical illusions: http://www.scaruffi.com/monument/museums/bolin/

A Very Brief History of Eternity - Part 43

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 09:15:00 -0700

We, not trained to the language of the dead,
speak the language of the dying, but the language
that we try in vain to reconstruct, aware
that we will be speaking it for eternity,
is really the language of the dead,
whose grammatical rules belong
to the realm not of linguistics
but of mathematics,

although, aware of how senseless wisdom is
(wisdom is the thoughts that we choose
for our own epigraph),
we plan for our afterlife a fast absolute
(“fast” as in “fast food”)
that is affordable if not healthy
and whose reality is inversely proportional
to the number of people
who want to attain it,

as if life were a reckless departure
from the constant state of non-existence
and death was meant to reconnect us
to the eternal now of unanswered questions
via the vocabulary of cosmology,

instead of facing the inescapable fate,
that as long as you are alive,
you are incomplete, unfinished, the task
of knowing being merely a prelude
to the must higher and harder task of unknowing,
that life is but a futile defiant
postponement of the inevitable nothingness,
of the utter ignorance
that life is to gain all knowledge
up to the knowledge that knowledge
is meaningless and pointless;

and so, if you believe that the dignity
of the end can redeem the shamefulness
of the beginning, that the most powerful
music is to listen to the noise of the dying
as it mutates into the silence of the dead,
let us practice together the sudden
emptiness after the surf crashed
reenacting all deaths of all time,
and nurture and grow
the seed of death
that was planted in us
the day we were
born.

(Continues at http://www.scaruffi.com/poetry/halfmoon.html )

Kazumasa...

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 00:17:00 -0700

Kazumasa Nagai

http://www.scaruffi.com/monument/museums/nagai/index.html

Harbin Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival, the greatest show on...

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 15:52:46 -0700

Harbin Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival, the greatest show on Earth?

http://www.scaruffi.com/monument/museums/harbin/index.html

Happy birthday Max Ernst (All his paintings:...

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 13:04:00 -0800

Happy birthday Max Ernst

(All his paintings: http://www.scaruffi.com/monument/museums/ernst/index.html )

The Age of the Brain

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 17:00:55 -0800

Roger Sperry and the Age of the Brain from piero scaruffi

See also the Timeline of Neuroscience: http://www.scaruffi.com/mind/ns.html

An Interdisciplinary Evening on Body

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 22:22:00 -0800

Jan 17 @ Stanford: SMMMASH 5 - Body

(Stanford Multidisciplinary Multimedia Meeting of Arts, Science and Humanities)

Panelists and exhibiting artists: http://www.slideshare.net/scaruffi/smmmash-5-body

My introduction to “Body”: http://www.slideshare.net/scaruffi/introduction-to-body-for-smmmash

Program, interviews, reading material, etc: http://www.scaruffi.com/stanford/tour2012.html

Catalog of the Art Exhibit: http://www.scaruffi.com/stanford/artex5.pdf

Photos and videos: http://www.scaruffi.com/stanford/tour5/index.html

Videos:

Piero Scaruffi introducing the speakers http://youtu.be/pF9n_NS-foA
Shelly Xie’s sand-animated video “The Moving Hands” http://youtu.be/q7i18UkHqe4
Ben Burke’s kinetic sculpture “Every Body Needs Some Body” http://youtu.be/SHR9xFTHrzw
Tamara Albaitis’ sculptural sound costume “Armor” http://youtu.be/Xgm7MTF4Cn0
Cory Clinton’s installation “Art On the Body” http://youtu.be/zF56xWE47Zg
Robert Edgar’s interactive installation “Eye Mask” http://youtu.be/-B5H2uLwwQA
North-Indian classical dancer Antara Bhardwaj (Chitresh Das Dance company) http://youtu.be/MownLs_dKAk
Robot scientist Oussama Khatib (head of Stanford’s Robotics Lab) http://youtu.be/G_xecc1LAAU
Contemporary music performer Sarah Cahill http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx6cEPUtTOU
Multimedia artist and inventor Ken Goldberg (UC Berkeley) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3fVhbEqVyk

Remember the Far Side?

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 21:54:00 -0800

Remember the Far Side?

Wilder Ranch: Ohlone Bluff Trail (Santa Cruz, California)

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 22:34:00 -0800

Wilder Ranch: Ohlone Bluff Trail (Santa Cruz, California)

LASER of January 2013 @ USF

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 22:15:00 -0800

Cultural historian Piero Scaruffi on “Roger Sperry and the Age of the Brain” https://vimeo.com/57492967 - Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/scaruffi/roger-sperry-and-the-age-of-the-brain

Meredith Tromble (San Francisco Art Institute) on her virtual installation “The Dream Vortex And Collaborative Process” https://vimeo.com/57492008

UC Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik on “The Philosophical Baby - What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love and the Meaning of Life” https://vimeo.com/57483225 - Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/scaruffi/alison-gopnik-uc-berkeley-on-the-philosophical-baby

Computer graphics pioneer Alvy Ray Smith (PARC, Pixar, Lucasfilm, etc) on “A Biography of the Pixel”

Program: http://www.scaruffi.com/leonardo/jan2013.html

and the whole series at http://www.scaruffi.com/leonardo

Pale Blue Dot

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 15:33:00 -0800

Voyager’s image of planet Earth, taken on February 1st, 1990,known as the “pale blue dot”

Readings on the Singularity

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 17:03:00 -0800

Most of what i read on the Singularity is either trivial (written by people who obviously know very little about the history of technology, Artificial Intelligence, etc) or highly unscientific (pure speculation that is as good as any science-fiction novel). Here are some readings that i would recommend:

Irving John Good: “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine” (1964). This is the classic that created the whole field.
Douglas Hofstadter: “A conversation with Einstein’s brain” (1981). Not directly related to the Singularity, but good inspirational read.
Hans Moravec: “Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence” (1988), another classic.
Vernon Vinge: “The Singularity” (1993). Vinge is the sci-fi writer who originally coined the term “singularity” in 1988.
Nick Bostrom: “Are we living in a simulation?” (2003)
David Chalmers: “The Singularity - A Philosophical Analysis” (2010). Chalmers is possibly my favorite living philosopher and specializes in Philosophy of Mind.
Luke Muehlhauser and Anna Salamon” “Intelligence Explosion” (2012). The Singularity Institute’s stump speech.
Jaron Lanier: “Singularity Is Just a Religion for Digital Geeks” (2010)
Eliezer Yudkowsky (Singularity Institute) discussing the three main schools of thought (video)
Jaron Lanier on the Singularity (video)
IntelligenceExplosion.com (website)
Friendly-AI.com (website)
Singularity Institute (website)
The Journal of Consciousness Studies’s double-issue Volume 19/7-8 that includes:

A timeline of A.I. http://www.scaruffi.com/mind/ai.html

A timeline of Cyberculture http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/hacker.html

This is from Jaron Lanier’s article:

“The answer is simply that computer scientists are human, and are as terrified by the human condition as anyone else. We, the technical elite, seek some way of thinking that gives us an answer to death, for instance. This helps explain the allure of a place like the Singularity University. The influential Silicon Valley institution preaches a story that goes like this: one day in the not-so-distant future, the Internet will suddenly coalesce into a super-intelligent A.I., infinitely smarter than any of us individually and all of us combined; it will become alive in the blink of an eye, and take over the world before humans even realize what’s happening… Some think the newly sentient Internet would then choose to kill us; others think it would be generous and digitize us the way Google is digitizing old books, so that we can live forever as algorithms inside the global brain. Yes, this sounds like many different science fiction movies. Yes, it sounds nutty when stated so bluntly. But these are ideas with tremendous currency in Silicon Valley; these are guiding principles, not just amusements, for many of the most influential technologists.”