Category: Blog

By Mourya Viswanadha Published on Telangana Today, 29 July 2024

Break free from the constraints of Procrustean bed and zombie ant’s fate to celebrate the unique potential of every child.

Mourya Viswanadha

When I was in sixth grade, my science teacher was explaining the concept of gravitation. My mind, however, was elsewhere, immersed in the world of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.’ I was daydreaming about the Total Perspective Vortex, a torture device from the book that shows a person their utter insignificance in the vastness of the universe, often leading to a complete mental breakdown. Suddenly, my teacher called on me and asked, “What is gravitation?” Shocked, I quickly dropped a pen from my pocket and said, “This is gravitation.” Humiliated and furious, my teacher hit my hand with a scale and asked the same question to the student next to me. The student recited the textbook definition, and the teacher, impressed, declared, “This is what gravitation is.” That moment marked the beginning of my own Total Perspective Vortex in school.

My experience left me questioning the very nature of education. It highlighted the rigid expectations and lack of room for creativity within the system. This brings me to two powerful metaphors that encapsulate these challenges: the zombie ant and the Procrustean bed.

The Zombie Ant

In nature, there exists a parasitic fungus known as Ophiocordyceps, which infects ants, compelling them to leave their colonies and climb vegetation. The fungus then takes control of the ant’s central nervous system, turning it into a zombie-like creature. The ant, no longer acting on its own will, clamps onto a leaf, allowing the fungus to consume it and eventually release spores to infect other ants. The infected ant loses its unique traits and free will, becoming a mere vehicle for the parasite’s reproduction and survival.

The Procrustean Bed

In Greek mythology, Procrustes was a rogue smith and bandit who would invite travelers to spend the night in his iron bed. Procrustes claimed that the bed would fit anyone perfectly. However, this perfection was achieved through brutal means: if the guest was too short, he would stretch them to fit; if too tall, he would amputate the excess length. This tale has come to symbolize the enforcement of uniformity at the cost of individuality, often through cruel and rigid methods.

Just as Procrustes mutilated his guests to fit the bed, our education system forces children into predefined molds. They become like the zombie ant, moving through the motions dictated by the system.

Mourya Viswanadha

The Indian education system, despite its rich historical legacy and the potential of its young minds, often mirrors the plight of the zombie ant and the rigidity of the Procrustean bed. From a young age, children in India are funneled into a standardized system that prioritizes conformity over creativity, and uniformity over uniqueness.

Read the rest of the article at Telangana Today.

By Roger F Malina, July 24, 2024

Illustration: Cosmos Kinetic Mural, Oxford, UK in Patrick McCray:

Preface To Catalogue Raisonne of the work of Frank J. Malina by Camille Fremontier-Murphy

To be published October 2024.

This blog is the draft of an article that will be published in a forthcoming book by Camille Fremontier-Murphy: a Catalogue Raisonne of the work of Frank F. Malina. Frank Malina was the father of the co-founder of the UTDallas ArtSciLab: Roger F Malina

This pre-publication version has been sent to all whose name, or work, is referred to in the article. There will be final corrections of ideas and facts, We welcome your thoughts and additions. Send an email to rxm116130@utdallas.edu

Introduction

This book by Camille Frémontier-Murphy has the difficult task of reinventing this kind of publication for the artist Frank J. Malina. He had multiple overlapping careers. Most Catalogues Raisonnés focus on the artistic production of one notable artist. In this case, Camille documents the work of my father in the sciences, engineering, and the arts but also international diplomacy and publishing and the work of his colleagues.

As the author emphasizes, these hybrid careers are deeply connected. We look forward to seeing how a “retrospective” of his work can also reinvent the concept of a “retrospective” when the materialization of creativity takes such different forms, with the display of artworks, science works, and engineering works.

Complicating Camille Frémontier-Murphy’s task is that my father was deeply inter, multi or trans–media. He used string, Christmas tree lights, tapestries, motors, electronics, and more to express his artistic ideas. He even used trimmings from his beard. However, he never used the digital computer, though his colleagues in music, like Iannis Xenakis, were doing.

 This was by choice, he was rarely ‘gadget driven’ and would have been suspicious of the current enthusiasm for AI, VR, AR, and the metaverse; after all holographic art came and went. As Harold Cohen mentioned to me, neither “Steam Engine Art” nor “Ping Pong Art” are of lasting interest.

1. From the Individual Creative to Collective Consciousness

We mostly live in cultures where we often privilege the memory of individual ‘geniuses’ over groups that ‘behave with genius’. As the author emphasizes, Frank J. Malina only succeeded not only because of his skills and passion for collaboration across professions, but also across the planet. Frank J. Malina was a scientist and an artist involved in creative projects with social and cultural implications, which he carried through different levels of their realization with a variety of interlocutors.

Camille Frémontier-Murphy describes how the work of several young professionals, some graduate students at Caltech, others working people in local industries, led to pioneering work in rocket science under the guidance and protection of Theodore von Kármán. This group of intellectual risk-takers was described by their peers as a ‘Suicide Squad’ at the time, the 1930s. It led to fundamental patents in rocket technology, the founding with Martin Summerfield and their lawyer Andrew Haley of Aerojet General; the company succeeded and was  bought by General Tire, now named Aerojet Rocketdyne. Together with Theodore von Kármán and Hsue-shen Tsien, and others they led to the founding of the Jet Propulsion Lab more than a decade before NASA was imagined.

Later, a group of artists worked with my father to create a studio in Boulogne-Billancourt, France; there the technologies for kinetic art would be developed. Thanks to Robert and Camille Frémontier, we can now also remember, and see, the work of Nino Calos, Valerios Caloutsis and the others who created kinetic art together in the 50s and 60s.

This studio would now be called a hacking and co-working space; it included engineers Dominique Bouffier and Didier Bouchet, but also painters Anniki Luukela, Claudia Nichols and David Smith who are remembered in this catalog. We have largely forgotten the friends and colleagues of Leonardo Da Vinci. This book raises the standards for collective memory of important groups who changed the history of ideas and human cultures to make our futures more desirable and beautiful.

2. Leonardo Journal: If you have to plug it in, it can’t be art

Ironically, as my father once mused aloud, his triggering of the founding of the Leonardo Journal in 1968, may prove to be one of his most interesting and impactful legacies. The journal is now hosted by The International Society of the Arts, Sciences and Technologies at Arizona State University. It is run by a ‘group’ headed by CEO Diana Ayton-Shenker with J.D. Talasek as Editor in Chief.

The obvious name “Leonardo” was suggested by Frank’s colleague Joseph Needham, with whom he collaborated when they were involved in setting up UNESCO. But the group that was on the founding board of Leonardo reflects the collaborative transdisciplinary and trans-national nature of my father’s work and the dream of UNESCO. There were arts, science and engineering professionals across the world from France, to Chile, to Japan to Poland. Soon, the Chinese government appointed an official representative to the Leonardo Editorial Board.

F.J.Malina’s colleagues also included György Kepes; he had set up in 1967 the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. Others included Experiments in Art and Technology in N.Y., and Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel in Paris. In Japan, Itsuo Sakane, originally a journalist, made readers aware of the similar art, science and technology movements there. The Japanese space agency, JAXA, pioneered a number of art projects in orbit.

There were several reasons why my father felt it necessary to start a new academic journal.

First, existing journals in general had no interest in kinetic art; “if you have to plug it in, it can’t be art”, was usually the response. Fortunately founding editorial board member, the late Frank Popper was a frequent visitor to Malina’s studio; Popper thought otherwise and became a historian and advocated of this new art movement, now called Kinetic Art.

Second, unlike science journals, art journals were largely “regional”: British Art, NY Art, Russian Art. My father felt a need, as in science, to contextualize transnationally; this did not mean that the same art was beautiful in Beijing as in Mexico City (as, for instance, by founding editorial board member Mathias Goeritz).

The group also reacted strongly to the prevailing ethos that artists can’t write; they often told: leave it to the art critics and historians to do the writing. Great scientists are often not great writers, but to spread their ideas, discoveries and inventions, they write. Leonardo advocated the same for artists.

Finally, Leonardo was originally published in English and French with the intent of becoming trans-lingual. It is often a good idea to express oneself in one’s ‘mother tongue’ and English is a minority mother tongue worldwide. Today, Leonardo has published in several languages including Russian, Spanish, French and soon Mandarin with Tsinghua University.

The Leonardo Creative Disturbance Podcast series led by Dr Yvan Tina has also published in regional, aka indigenous and autochthone, languages. This reinforced our understanding that the division of knowledge in a ‘tree structure’ is a largely Western construction and not a logical or scientifically provable structure. The aphorism “lets cut down the tree of knowledge and create a rhizome of knowledge” captures this paradox. Leonardo publishes about artworks made by scientists, and inventions made by artists and so on. It has published the work of art created by a professional dentist. The job title doesn’t define the creativity.

I note that the cartoonist Ronald Searle was also on the founding editorial board. Leonardo not only focused on institutional art but insisted that art could be local and available only in one’s ‘salon’ at home. Yes, art and new technologies can lead to very desirable throw rugs; in my son Xavier Malina’s case 3D printing can lead to the re-invention of the ‘bust’ as contemporary sculpture.

3. Beauty and Neuro-Aesthetics

A crucial influence on my father was the work of cognitive scientists and art theorists who sought to understand why art so is so crucial to human societies. This ranged from founding board member Rudolf Arnheim, the Gestalt movement, Ernst Gombrich with art as illusion, and Reg Gadney.

In the 1990s this led Semir Zeki, an expert on the visual cortex, to coin the word ‘neuro-aesthetics’. As explained by Camille Frémontier, Frank J. Malina visited in Brussels the psychologist Albert Michotte in 1956. Michotte was conducting experiments on human perception using rotating disks and other devices. This helped my father design kinetic art to emphasize changes which catch human attention; a definition of ‘beauty’ can be what captures human attention and is remembered. The word beauty has been largely absent from discussion of aesthetics for decades but is being rethought internationally.

What was considered ‘beautiful’ before the COVID-19 pandemic may not be considered beautiful in the decades to come.

My father argued that artists created experiences for humans that changed their perceptions, but more deeply their cognition; Semir Zeki called artists “experimental neuro-scientists”; they carried out experiments, sometimes using scientific understandings, of human perception and cognition to manipulate the sense and feelings of existence.

My father also insisted that artists needed to capture the ‘landscapes’ that were only perceivable through scientific instruments (telescopes, microscopes etc.). One time when he came back from painting lessons with Vic Gray, I remember him joking that he was tired of ‘painting dead fish’. This synchronized perfectly with Kepes’s notion of the ‘new’ landscape in art and science. My father’s kinetic work “Brain Waves”, which visualizes the graph of activity in the human brain, is an example of a new landscape that bridges art and science. It also captures the attention of the human viewer, who inevitable wonders what signals are going on in their own brain. He became a pioneer in “space art’ or art that could only made from perceptions above the earth’s atmosphere (looking up or looking down).

4. Enabling desirable transitions after the wars

As a graduate student at Caltech, my father found the ideas of communism promising. At the time, the Communist Party was legal in California. His thesis advisor Theodore von Kármán, and his sister Pipö, organized numerous parties with faculty, neighbors, friends and students. And some of them were communist parties.

After all, capitalism had failed in the Great Depression, so the argument went, so let’s try communism. After WWII, my father realized that communism was also failing, notably in the Soviet Union. Internationalism, such as the UN, UNESCO, WHO, was the next political frontier, within the concept of science being an international open culture.

We can only wonder what my father’s thoughts would be after the failure of the U.N. and W.H.O to contain a predictable pandemic; contingency plans had been developed and stored but took a long time to be used. The failure of international leadership in containing climate change is similarly striking, given the prior success of containing the ozone hole. The impact of carbonic acid on the temperature of the air and ground was demonstrated in 1896. It took the climate art and eco-art movements to each everyday understanding.

In the 1980s, my father attended local meetings of dissenters in Boulogne-Billancourt;  they were realizing that the United Nations was failing. They discussed the idea of a “one world” government. With the internet, which developed after my father’s death in 1981, a one-world government might be achievable. However, my father and others were very concerned about how cybernetics, now called A.I., could become a tool of government control despite the enthusiasm of their colleagues at the Macy Conferences. They anticipated our current anxiety on data privacy and A.I that should follow the Platinum Rule, not the Golden Rule.

So, what does this have to do with this book and catalog? Frank Malina’s artmaking was not only contextualized by the bridging of the arts, sciences and technologies, but deeply socially embedded in the political crises of the time. Today he would be trying to figure out what the necessary, or desirable, “kinetic art” would be today.

Perhaps the work of the late Helen and Newton Harrison would connect to him. Newton Harrison built a ‘sensorium’ where what can be detected by scientific instruments related to climate change can create a mind-altering experience. Kepes would agree that this is a needed new landscape for our time.

For the last 25 years, Leonardo Journal championed the work of ‘bio-artists’ who use biological materials and technology as the raw materials for art making. Eduardo Kac, Oron Catts and the Australians and other pioneers of bio-art.

At the end of WWII, Vannevar Bush wrote a famous report for President Roosevelt “science the endless frontier”. He argued that since science had helped win the war, let’s use it to win the peace. But the scientists and engineers who helped win WWII with rockets, radar, bombers, and atomic bombs are the wrong orientation for scientists to win our health crises; social innovation is as important as scientific or technological innovation. This requires different approaches, combining the biological, brain and health sciences with the social and political sciences to re-craft human nature and its survival.

Perhaps a better metaphor would be the Second 100 Years War (HYWII), which ended in a seven-year truce and was marked by pandemics and conflicts between ‘states’. It ended in 1453, coincidentally with the beginning of the Little Ice Age.

So, this book about the work of Frank J. Malina is but a steppingstone for the new generations of artists to appropriate science and technology, in their contemporary political context. But the new generations of scientists and engineers seek to use art making to construct desirable futures.

Instead of painting dead fish, perhaps my father would have been a student or teacher in the Paris SACRe (Sciences Arts Création Recherche) Ph D program led by Emmanuel Mahe; where ‘adaptive clothing’ is being developed using 3D printing, or where the brain waves of a sleeping person on the floor are being captured to activate water waves in an aquarium, or where new design methods are being developed to recycle plastics in Madagascar and do human signatures at a distance.

5. The End of the Stone Age of Art and Technology, Enter the Uranium Age

Were my father alive today, he would have no interest in connecting art, science and technology. He was a rocket scientist, not a repeater or capitalist. Bridging arts, science and technology has been done; it as usual as using different metals for tools or plastics for 3-D printing. Its time to move on from the stone age to the uranium age.

In 2001 I erroneously argued in the Leonardo Journal that we were leaving the stone age of the digital arts

In our post pandemic world, we now have over 8 billion humans on the planet, many of them connected by the internet. Roy Ascot, author in the first issue of Leonardo, called this a ‘global village’ enabled by “moist media” combining organic beings and AI beings; this narrative feeds into the current discussion of collective consciousness in neuropsychology.

Human longevity, in many places, is increasing with soon over a million people online over the age of 100. In the Middle Ages a “Republic of Letters’ emerged among people across Europe and elsewhere; it led to an increase in philosophical knowledge and the emergence of science as we know it.

Joel Slayton, founder of the Leonardo Book Series, and artist and troublemaker Nina Czegledy have formed a group called the Post Pandemic Provocateurs. You can find one of their emerging “Republic of Zoom” online with south African artist Marcus Neustetter and his students and a colleague in Brazil.

The emerging Center for the Study of Emergence at UTDallas has coined the term “senexism” for the phenomenon of people who have known each over for more than 30 years continuing to collaborate with total freedom of thought as they are no longer looking for paid work. Robert Stern, Fred Turner and I have a total age of 259 years. There are now growing numbers of groups who have collaborated with each other for 30 years or more; this emergence of “senexism’ is unprecedented in human history

The Golden rule was surpassed by the Platinum rule: The platinum rule is a moral principle that says you should treat others the way they want to be treated. Similarly, the stone age is being converted to the uranium age of digital art. We no longer needing to combine art, science and technology; it is normal.

Art is no longer an individual experience but a collective one; my father refused to work on the atom bomb, but he would work on the Uranium Age that combines all ways of knowing, all disciplines, all cultures in a global village with arguments but no wars.

5. We all must become Migrants and Hybrids

Frank J. Malina’s family originated in Bohemia. They migrated to Texas and then back to the Czech Republic. In 1917 they returned to Texas due to the great depression. My father left Texas for California, then to Paris in a forced migration. Today migration is often viewed negatively, but in fact, it is often a desirable intermingling of peoples and ideas.

My father was a hybrid. He began as a rocket scientist, became a UN diplomat, then an artist then a publisher and author. As Sarabeth Berk argues in her book “Not in My Title”: we need experts who know more and more about less and less, and politicians who know less and less about more and more. But we need billions of migrant hybrids like Frank J. Malina.

Conclusion

This preface, then, provides one way of extending this book with recent developments in art and science, as well as the experiences you will have when you engage with the art of Frank.J. Malina in forthcoming exhibitions and retrospectives across the planet from China to Tasmania. I need to thank Robert and Camille Murphy for their persistence and resilience, in surviving the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and Palestine, and the invasion by AI into the art, science, and technology and all worlds. A.I. has its own “tree of knowledge’ but humans haven’t discovered or explored the AI world colonially, yet.

Footnotes:

The Malina family has given full access to all the archives and to the important archival work done by my mother Marjorie and we have reviewed and agreed with the content. Many works have been traced, restored where necessary, and photographed with our permission.

Jul 5, 2024, Roger F. Malina, Fred Turner Robert Stern, Tina Qin, and Paul Fishwick

Summary

We are starting a UTD Center for Emergence Studies. There are several motivations, but one is that the COVID-19 pandemic enabled growth and reduction of certain phenomena. In general, these were detected late by large top-down organizations. In this white paper, we enumerate methods and observational techniques we plan to use and evolve as we make discoveries of note.

Background

The COVID-19 pandemic provoked some rapid changes in human societies. On our own campus, we noticed that changes enabled by students and staff often preceded the top-down decisions of the university. The pandemic also provoked a move to online life for many social purposes from education to health care etc. A group of UTD faculty, co authors of this white paper, started meeting regularly online. By coincidence, they were all over 70 years old. This led to the concept of ‘senexism’, or the growing impact of aging populations in many areas of societal activities.

 The weekly meetings continue, and the group continues to grow and evolve. In July 2024 the group felt that the novel work they were undertaking was of significance. They proposed the creation of a UTD campus Center for Emergence Studies; originally, they named it an ‘anti-center’ or ‘non-center’ with the observation that in most complex systems emergence does not get triggered in a “center’.

 Prof Malina’s Edith O’Donnell Chair was renewed for 6 years; it was decided to use some of these funds to hire a student researcher for the center. The 6-year horizon is part of a methodology learned from Hakim Bey and Robson Tsou’s Technology Ethics.

His work on Temporary Autonomous Zones. A relevant citation is TAZ-theory tries to concern itself with existing or emerging situations rather than with pure utopianism. All over the world people are leaving or “disappearing” themselves from the Grid of Alienation and seeking ways to restore human contact. An interesting example of this — on the level of “urban folk culture” — can be found in the proliferation of hobby networks and conferences.

The emergence group can be compared to hobby groups.

Prior Research

The blog white paper co-authors have some background in the topic of ‘emergence.

1. They published an article in the UTD Atheneum on Emergence.
2. Roger F Malina working with Max Schich and Isabelle Meirelles ran a series of symposia and published an eBook. This was the first anthology of articles to foster the emerging convergence of arts, humanities, and complex networks in Leonardo journal. The emergence of transdisciplinarity between arts, sciences and technologies was noticed by Frank Malina who founded the Leonardo Journal in 1968 which focused on this topic. Ironically in 2024 this area of research has become so common across the planet, that we could identify a submergence or involution.

Methodologies

Consistent with the thesis of the Center, our methodologies will evolve, and we hope that some novel approaches will emerge that have desirable impacts.

1. Fred Turner is an advocate of the method of ‘anecdotes’. The word anecdote (in Greek: ἀνέκδοτον “unpublished”, literally “not given out”) comes from Procopius of Caesarea, the biographer of Emperor Justinian I (r. 527–565). Procopius produced c. 550 CE a work entitled Ἀνέκδοτα (Anekdota, variously translated as Unpublished Memoirs or as Secret History), which consists primarily of a collection of short incidents from the private life of the Byzantine court. Gradually, the term “anecdote” came to be applied^[9] to any short tale used to emphasize or illustrate whatever point an author wished to make.

This method was one used in their second article, in press, on the Emergence of the Arts and Humanities at UTDallas.  

• Data Analytics and Data Visualization. Dr Tina Qin, a member of the Center, has pioneered the use of making new discoveries using different metaphors in data visualization. Malina notes that the human brain can be described as a ‘pattern finding machine’. Metaphors foreground different ‘patterns. She discovered that Chinese and American crooks think with different metaphors, and that fraud detection can be improved by using a metaphor dashboard.
• Emergent Terminologies. Last century co-author Malina started a company in Spain to detect innovations by analyzing the internet for coined words, cf memes. For instance, Roy Ascott coined the term ‘moist media’ in anger for the separation of physical and digital media used in art. The term came and went as can be seen in google ngrams which tracks usage of words over time.

The word ‘emergence’ continues to trend up. We will detect emerging terminologies systematically.

• Transgenerational Collaboration

Most ‘think tanks’ rely on the use of ‘experts’. We will systematically rely on experienced people but also less experienced ones with the hope of noticing phenomena missed  by experts.

• Transcultural collaboration

Most human societies/groups  are culturally very ‘homogeneous’. The Science of Team Science however reveals that heterogeneous groups have a higher likelihood of making novel discoveries. We will therefore seek to enable cross-inter-trans cultural analysis.

• Emergent Poetry:

Co-author Fred Turner is an eminent poet. Poetry often identifies items that are ‘emerging’ in peoples minds but have not yet been analytically identified or defined. Turner is working with Qin and Fishwick to publish AI generated poetry; they may discover emergent phenomena that AI notices before humans.

• Biogeodynamics:

Stern and ETH colleague Taras Gerya are developing an exciting emergent transdisciplinary field called Biogeodynamics.  Biogeodynamics focuses on understanding how the interior and surface evolution of Earth and Earth-like planets interact to modulate landscape, atmosphere, oceans, climate and life and quantifying these relationships. Their pioneering work was reflected in the recent blockbuster paper “The Importance of Plate Tectonics for the Evolution of Complex Life: Implications for Finding Extraterrestrial Civilizations” published in April 2024 Science Reports. Gerya is leading the newly approved EUROBIG initiative, which aims to jumpstart Biogeodynamic advances by identifying and connecting a diverse pool of Early Career to Senior researchers from Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Biology, Atmosphere, Ocean and Climate Sciences, Astrobiology, Exoplanetary Sciences and Social Sciences and motivates collaborations across science and society. Because of problems that Stern is having with NS&M, he would like to say “Screw you” to them and carry out his Biogeodynamic research under the new proposal center.  Hopefully productive refugees from other UTD departments and schools will be similarly attracted to the C4ES

Initial Novel Results?

Note: we do pay attention to ‘innovation’, but also it is important to study ingenuity, or the transfer of innovation from one place to another, or from one time to another. The methodology of Translation Studies, initiated at UTD by Rainer Schulter is an exemplar of emergence studies.

July 3, 2024, by Roger F. Malina. Revision 1 includes Robert Stern’s revision

Compassion

I am working with high school teacher Antonia Moran on compassion as medicine and Johnathan Tsou.

Antonia Moran is leading a funding proposal in our UT Dallas’ ArtSciLab, on Compassion Science. She is focusing on the role of literature and narratives. She will be applying her work to teaching her high school teaching colleagues, and her students, the methodologies of compassion based on contemporary neuroscience.

Tsou is the director of our Bass School Center for Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology. He happens to have written a deep study of technological ethics and The Social Construction of Human Categories. Review of Ásta, Categories We Live By: The Construction of Sex, Gender, Race, and Other Social Categories (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Metascience 2021 – Book Review 

Positive Eugenics

This connects with the work I am collaborating on, as a PhD committee member, with John Varghese, which is centered on contemporary understanding of Eugenics. He just taught me the concept of “positive eugenics”, which I was unfamiliar with.

Pre-announcement of the Center for Emergence Studies at UT Dallas

One of my current interests is CSS or Coincidence, Synchronicity, and Serendipity. This is a methodology that we are using in our new Center for Emergence Studies which will soon open at UT Dallas. Yes, ants, compassion, and emergence do cross-connect by accident but our mind is a pattern-finding machine and often creates fake patterns to feel OK. I just happened to read Ants perform amputations to save injured nestmates (phys.org):

“Saving lives through surgery is no longer exclusive to humans. In a study published July 2 in the journal Current Biology, scientists detail how Florida carpenter ants, a common, brown species native to its namesake, selectively treat the wounded limbs of fellow nestmates—either by wound cleaning or amputation.
An ant-assisted amputation takes at least 40 minutes to complete. Experimental testing demonstrated that with tibia injuries if the leg was not immediately removed post-infection, the ant would not survive.”

cell.com

Watch this YouTube video.

Center for Emergence Studies cofounder geologist Robert Stern and co-author Taras Gerya of ETH Zurich just published an article arguing that the emergence of advanced civilizations capable of communicating across our galaxy requires plate tectonics and the co-existence of large continents and oceans. This is so rare that none of the 8000 exoplanets discovered so far are likely to have any such civilizations, and certainly none of the other planets or moons in our solar system.  We have no idea how common life is in the universe but nearly all of this could be very simple, microbial, like it was on Earth before the emergence of plate tectonics in the past billion years.  Because the presence of all three conditions: life, continents and oceans, and plate tectonics is so unusual, there may be very few advanced civilizations in our galaxy. More read.

So perhaps this means that compassion exists in all life forms on our planet, but maybe not elsewhere in the universe, unless they have ants.

Anti-Non-Center for Emergence Studies

Just to complete this narrative. We are about to start the Center for Emergence Studies under the leadership of poet Fred Turner, Geologist Robert Stern, and me (if you would like to be involved, contact us). Paul Fishwick and Tina Qin have joined the emergent team and bring very different perspectives, methods, and objectives from predicting future catastrophes to applying metaphor theory to data visualization in banks.

We already published a theoretical article and podcast on what we mean by ‘emergence’, mostly autopoietic bottom up, but also up and down and oscillating.

Our second article is on the emergence of the arts and humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. Our university was founded as a technoscientific institute last century with no plan, strategy, or intent to include the arts and humanities. But by accident, our university became a refugee center for experts in A and H who could not stay in their current jobs or find other work. Our Bass School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology, is now emerging, and yes arts humanities, AND technology.

If you would like a pre-publication copy, contact us.

Paul Fishwick and the gang are reworking our Aesthetic Computing manifesto from last century. Fred Turner is now a maestro in writing AI-generated poetry, but he says.

So, coming back to the start of this blog post: does AI exhibit compassion?

I have not used AI in generating this text, or maybe it happened behind my back. And I got the ok of all mentioned humans to go ahead and publish this text online, but how do I know they weren’t bots that replied to me permitting me?

Enigmatic Poem by Fred Turner (Published with his permission)

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The poem refers to three Phi Beta Kappa honorees: the Supreme Court Judges Kagan and Sotomayor, and the nobelist biologist Barbara MecClintock.

It traces the intellectual history of Phi Beta Kappa back beyond its founding at the Raleigh Tavern in colonial Williamsburg, to the tavern where Walter Raliegh drank with Shakespeare and Marlowe and the New World explorer and mathematician Thomas Hariot. It goes further back to all those gatherings of people who liked to think and learn, the academies of Urbino, Greece, Babylon and others, the “Republic of Letters”. It re-translates the motto of the society, “Let Philosophy guide life” as “the cybernetic life-force of Sophia, or Wisdom”.

The Yellow Brick Road
In honor of the Phi Beta Kappa inductees of 2024

Though you, no doubt, were not required to crouch
In silent dark like Mozart’s Papageno,
Or be transported like poor Dorothy
By the dark providence of the tornado,

Or suffer shipwreck and a father’s loss
Like poor Miranda and her Ferdinand,
Yet some such ordeal maybe met your path
Before you came to join this sacred band.

That spiral yellow road begins right here.
Here stand your wizards, tricky Prospero,
And Doctor Marvel of the great balloon,
And wise Sarastro, with his bass so low;

And, too, your night-queens, ladies of the moon,
Your Hecates, good witches of the West,
And in their virtuality attend
Kagan, Sotomayor, and all the rest.

Before you lies the world now, where to choose.
You ate the apple, and the Lord forgave.
The Raleigh Tavern opens up its doors:
Civil discourse, that merry painted cave.

For Keats rhymed “cavern-tavern” in his poem
Upon the Mermaid, where with Shakespeare swilled
That Raleigh who contributed his name
To this first frat, this most distinguished guild.

But not the first. The duchess of Urbino
Summoned from Europe and the Middle East
The best, most playful, conversationists;
The wits of Cordova had touched that feast,

The Agora, the free symposium,
Those bamboo sages, African and Asian,
Astronomers and poets of Babylon,
All had been drinkers of the same persuasion;

The old res-publica of letters stands
Even today, when plague and war return;
Philosophia Biou Kybernetis
Still whispers, while the bombed-out cities burn.

The cybernetic life-force of Sophia,
That drove the first self-reproducing cells,
Feeds on the wastes of its own evolution
To form the lovely spirals of its shells.

Oh yes, we speak in riddles in this place.
Your colleague, Barbara McClintock, knew
The inner meaning of the motto here
So barbarously translated here for you:

In her Nobel oration she described
The active thinking of the Corn genome,
That, challenged, could call forth and re-enliven
The ancient wisdom of its chromosome,

And call from silence poetry of code
To heal the errors wrought by entropy,
And more, to make decay a kind of growing,
Time’s damage turned to new anatomy.

So here’s the doctorate of thinkology,
Here is the heart, the life that makes us feel;
Here is the medal of such bravery
As is the timid lion’s way to heal.

That thought, we might conclude, brought you today
To join the company of your new peers,
Reason, compassion, beauty, P. B. K.,
Making a present of those long-past years.

Tommy Ayala, Carlos Beltrán, Ricardo Dal Farra, Tomás Londoño, Roger Malina

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Este taller propone centrarse en las características relevantes de las ciudades y pueblos inteligentes, animando a los participantes a reflexionar sobre los complejos problemas de la sociedad planetaria así como los de nuestra comunidad local, y buscando de forma colectiva y empática, mejores soluciones a las diversas circunstancias y diferentes culturas.

El Taller es presencial y se llevará a cabo en la Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano de Bogotá el 10 de mayo de 2024, durante el Festival Internacional de la Imagen. Para inscribirse, enviar un mensaje con el nombre completo, número y tipo de documento a: smartvillagers99@gmail.com

Más información será publicada durante las próximas semanas.

Antonia Solari Moran

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What is compassion, and how could it possibly be medicine?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

Not to be confused with its cousins Empathy and Sympathy, compassion has been elevated to field status: Compassion Science.  Though relatively young, Compassion Science and its body of research highlights the benefits to the brain and body of the giver upon taking kind, compassionate action for others or the self.  From evidence that suggests lowered rates of depression and anxiety, to decreased blood pressure and higher general sense of well-being, compassion seems to be a powerful medicine to combat the ills of our day.

And do we need it: We are suffering high rates of depression, anxiety (+ here), loneliness (+ here), among the other slings and arrows that accompany life.  There are many causes to blame, from the pandemic’s aftermath to social media, to too much tech and dwindling human contact, to overly processed foods…and so on.  The issue now is: what is there to do about it?

Perhaps a somewhat unconventional – yet wholly human – medicine is in order: a healthy dose of compassion. 

Read complete blog here.

April 2024 Solar Eclipse Poems: Fred Turner and George Morgan

Pasted together by Roger Malina

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The ArtSciLab under Philip Martin’s curatorship is organizing an eclipse exhibition – the anxious joke is that the eclipse is crossing from Mexico to Texas without a passport or visa.

Meanwhile a call for eclipse poems has already et to these by Fred Turner and George Morgan.

If you would like to publish an eclipse poem, send it to roger.malina@utdallas.edu

Here goes:
A Reading for the eclipse
On March 26th, 2100, shortly after the Spring equinox that year, Pope Francis III will give a Good Friday sermon on the subject of the sun. Pope Francis is a Native American by birth and an astrophysicist by training.

“on the Sun” from Fred Turner
(from Apocalypse: an Epic Poem, book 8) pre-ambulation to the eclipse poem which follows:

“The English language has a lucky pun:
The sun of heaven and the true-born son.
In my tradition—I’m a Mescalero—
The Sun was the first word of the creation,
And still the truest likeness of its Source.
You can see clearly how our ancestors
In every tribe might worship that bright zero,
That pure all-color white too dense to see,
Which gives, and gives, and lets us see and know,
And feeds all things, and comes back every year.
Easter was built upon the ancient rites
Of gods who died in fall and rose in spring,
Who die at night and come back in the morning.

“Now I’m a scientist as well, and know
The sun to be a giant ball of plasma,
Burning its hydrogen to helium,
Tearing five million tons in every second
Out of itself as light and energy,
Breaking its own mass, giving it away.
Perhaps the likeness holds, though, stronger still:
A god is, in the human imagery,
The greatest of all givers, sacrificing
Its plasma, its own lifeblood, for our planet,
Breaking its bread and pouring out its wine.

Let’s go back to the start: the sun as god,
And God as giver and self-sacrificer.
What we know now is that Creation
Was necessary by the force of  logic.
‘Why is there something, and not nothing’ was
A loaded question, presupposing zero
To be the default state for being itself.
But think: of all the possibilities,
Nothing’s the most unlikely state of all.
Think of the natural numbers, plus and minus,
And pick at random one of them: the chanceIt’s zero is one in infinity.
Privation isn’t what should be assumed:
Abundance is the only true assumption,
And like the sun, which gives abundantly,
God is the name we give that wild abundance.
Zero is not the end but a beginning:
If zero ever was, the moment after
Would be a wild explosion of new forms,
The cosmic egg would hatch, the world expand,
Its stretching making mass to shape itself,
Its cooling crystallizing into form,
To complex kinds of time, to life, to thought.
The zero is a sundisk, not an absence,
A generosity that burns itself
To make our gentle hills and trees and birds,
Our bodies, thoughts, our actions and our words.

Eclipse by Fred Turner
April 8th, 2024

The unseen dragon eats the sun.
A shadow drowns the drowsing mind,
The self by Alzheimer’s undone,
The nightmare of all humankind,

Paper reminders by the sink,
The winter’s slow then sudden chill,
The inability to think,
The lost, lost footing of the will;

The last squeeze of the mother’s hand,
The swift horizon-darkening,
The coming of the shadowland,
Where all the birds have ceased to sing:

All this we soon or late must know
As tokens of the kindling.
We are not things, but some bright flow;
Promethean fire is not a thing.

If Kali swallows up the sun
She also gives him birth again.
By kindling is the world begun,
The green bud opening after rain,

Quick run of flame along the log;
The waked cat opening golden eyes,
The sudden clearing of the fog,
The mental spark of a surprise.

Our first awareness at the breast,
Our first smile when we knew we knew,
Were such a kindling, and the rest
Is doing what our fire can do.

A Reading for the eclipse Fred Turner
Poem by George Morgan

The path of totality for the upcoming solar eclipse will first be observable off the western coast of Mexico near the village of Villa Corona. From here the Moon’s circular shadow—also known as the umbral cone— will proceed in a northeasterly direction across several Mexican states including Durango and Sinaloa. It will then cross the Rio Grande River between Del Rio and Eagle Pass, entering the U.S. via the state of Texas. It will do this without permission or papers, thus making it an illegal umbral cone crossing. Texas Governor Abbott has put the National Guard and local law enforcement agencies along the border on full alert. “We will not be intimidated,” announced the governor at a recent press conference. “The umbral cone will not—I repeat not—be allowed to cross our border.” The Moon could not be reached for comment.