The Cut Up Collective and their Cut Up Machine
"The Moustache Foundation is proud to present for its inaugural exhibition, CutUp Machine, a series of new works by the collective CutUp.
CutUp are an autonomous group linked by a shared desire to reorder the urban landscape through intervention and play. Incorporating film, collage and installation, CutUp's practice focuses largely on the creative potential of the street as a site for interventionist art and disruption.
Interested in the spaces of misinformation and miscommunication inherent in the everyday, CutUp aim to introduce disorder into daily existence by interrupting and re-appropriating established visual forms. Occurring both inside and outside the gallery, CutUp's billboard and bus stop works are created by slicing up an advert and reassembling the pieces into a newly ordered image."
(Jaguar Shoes Collective, 4 November 2005)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
A simple abstract model of human communication
"One of the first designs of the information theory is the model of communication by Shannon and Weaver. Claude Shannon, an engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories, worked with Warren Weaver on the classic book ‘The mathematical theory of communication’. In this work Shannon and Weaver sought to identify the quickest and most efficient way to get a message from one point to another. Their goal was to discover how communication messages could be converted into electronic signals most efficiently, and how those signals could be transmitted with a minimum of error. In studying this, Shannon and Weaver developed a mechanical and mathematical model of communication, known as the 'Shannon and Weaver model of communication'. ...
Shannon and Weaver broadly defined communication as 'all of the procedures by which one mind may affect another'. Their communication model consisted of an information source: the source’s message, a transmitter, a signal, and a receiver: the receiver’s message, and a destination. Eventually, the standard communication model featured the source or encoder, who encodes a message by translating an idea into a code in terms of bits. A code is a language or other set of symbols or signs that can be used to transmit a thought through one or more channels to elicit a response in a receiver or decoder. Shannon and Weaver also included the factor noise into the model. The study conducted by Shannon and Weaver was motivated by the desire to increase the efficiency and accuracy or fidelity of transmission and reception. Efficiency refers to the bits of information per second that can be sent and received. Accuracy is the extent to which signals of information can be understood. In this sense, accuracy refers more to clear reception than to the meaning of message. This engineering model asks quite different questions than do other approaches to human communication research."
(Communication Studies, University of Twente)
Shannon, C.E., & Weaver, W. (1949). The mathematical theory of communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Hawes, L.C. (1975). Pragmatics of analoguing: Theory and model construction in communication. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Fig.1 Mathematical (information) model of communication.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
The dialogic perspective accentuates social multiplicity and dynamic processes
"The dialogic perspective originates from literary theorist Bakhtin (1981, 1965/1984, 1986). His works on literary texts have been appropriated into the social sciences (van Loon 1997; Gardiner and Bell 1998; Ooi 2002). The dialogic perspective accentuates social multiplicity and dynamic processes. It offers a set of concepts and vocabulary to present social phenomena in a dynamic and yet systematic manner, with the emphasis on social multiplicity and interplay. Just as importantly, the dialogic perspective accentuates the tensions of order and disor-der in the social environment. "
(Can-Seng Ooi, 2010, p.347-364)
1). Ooi, C.-S. (2010). 'Cacophony of Voices and Emotions Dialogic of Buying and Selling Art.' Culture Unbound 2, Article 20: 18.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Open City: The Closed System and The Brittle City
"The idea of an open city is not my own: credit for it belongs to the great urbanist Jane Jacobs in the course of arguing against the urban vision of Le Corbusier. She tried to understand what results when places become both dense and diverse, as in packed streets or squares, their functions both public and private; out of such conditions comes the unexpected encounter, the chance discovery, the innovation. Her view, reflected in the bon mot of William Empson, was that 'the arts result from over-crowding'. Jacobs sought to define particular strategies for urban development, once a city is freed of the constraints of either equilibrium or integration. These include encouraging quirky, jerry-built adaptations or additions to existing buildings; encouraging uses of public spaces which don't fit neatly together, such as putting an AIDS hospice square in the middle of a shopping street. In her view, big capitalism and powerful developers tend to favour homogeneity: determinate, predictable, and balanced in form. The role of the radical planner therefore is to champion dissonance. In her famous declaration: 'if density and diversity give life, the life they breed is disorderly'. The open city feels like Naples, the closed city feels like Frankfurt."
(Richard Sennett, 2006)
Fig.1 Busy street in Naples, marlenworld.com
Fig.2 Paris, Les Olympiades, 1969-1974, Thierry Bézecourt in 2005
[3] Sennett, R. (2006). The Open City: The Closed System and The Brittle City. Urban Age.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
The mystery of discourse is not order, but disorder, incoherence
"When children fail at school, drop out, repeat, they are likely to be positioned in a factual world tied to simple operations, where knowledge is impermeable. The successful have access to the general principle, and some of these - a small number who are going to produce the discourse - will become aware that the mystery of discourse is not order, but disorder, incoherence, the possibility of the unthinkable. But the long socialisation into pedagogic code can remove the danger of the unthinkable, and of alternative realities."
(Basil Bernstein 2000, p.11)
Bernstein, Basil. (2000). 'Pedagogy Symbolic Control and Identity, Theory Research Critique'. Oxford, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
CONTRIBUTOR
The Constellations ProjectSHARE
