Dichromatic colourblind artist Luke Jerram's work explores the limits of both science and art, challenging the boundaries of both. Jerram creates sculptures, installations, soundscapes, and live arts projects that investigate the mysterious process of how we construct inner worlds from objective reality. His work is inspired by such disparate areas of research as biology, acoustic science, sleep research, ecology, and neural pathways. An ongoing theme of Jerram’s work is the animation of otherwise hidden phenomenon. Exploring the Moon’s invisible pull in his installation “Tide,” Jerram rigged a gravity meter to three water-filled globes, turning data from the meter into a resonating chorus based on Kepler’s theories of “music of the spheres.” In “Retinal Memory Volume,” Jerram uses light to exploit viewers’ retinal afterimages to construct ephemeral ghost-like sculptures.

Oh, and HIV & SARS glasspieces.

via SEED

Homegirl planted a cell phone in a melting glacier. You can call it.
As part of Scottish artist Katie Paterson’s Encounters exhibition at Modern Art Oxford, a white neon sign displays a phone number that connects curious visitors to a live transmission of the gurgles and pops emanating from Vatnajökull, a massive glacier in the remote interior of Iceland.


Signal-to-noise ratio is the relationship between meaningful information (a signal) and external factors (background noise). In a broader theoretical sense, it can refer to seeking out meaning from complexity. Paterson toys with this balance and explores the curiosities within some of our universe’s infinite blips: remote ones, old ones, ones long gone.
Earth-Moon-Earth (EME), or “moonbounce,” is an experimental kind of radio transmission first proposed in 1940 by a British communications engineer. With EME, messages are sent in Morse code from Earth, reflected off the surface of the Moon, and then received back on Earth. Later realized by the US military after WWII, today the technique is used by amateur radio operators across the world. Currently, EME provides the longest communications path for any two radio stations on Earth. Paterson translated Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata into Morse code and sent it to the Moon via radio waves. Ostensibly “remixed” as it bounced off the contours of the Moon’s surface, the sonata was then retranslated into a new score and played by a grand piano at Modern Art Oxford.


She also worked with astronomers, astrophysicists, and “supernova hunters” throughout the world to collect, catalog, and plot every known dead star in the universe (there are roughly 27,000). She laser-etched the map of these cosmic corpses onto 2x3-meter sheet of black anodized aluminum. CHECK IT.

via SEED

The discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of macaques and their implications for human behaviour has been heralded as one of the most important findings in neuroscience in the last decade. With the maelstrom of attention in scientific culture, quickly came rampant speculation that mirror neurons may provide the key to understanding an array of human behaviours. Current theories suggest the ability to interpret the actions and gestures of others is subserved by a mirror neuron system, a network that possesses the unique property of responding to specific actions both when they are executed and observed. Evolution of the mirror neuron system has been viewed as an adaptation for action understanding, where meaning about a movement can be attributed to actions made by others, and enables an observer to understand the intent behind an observed motor act of someone else. From tool use, and language acquisition to empathy and altruism, mirror neurons became a significant area of interest, despite the fact that no direct empirical evidence exists for their presence in humans.

Initially discovered by Rizzolatti and colleagues using single-cell recordings in the macaque monkey, the mellifluous term mirror neuron was coined to reflect the fact that these neurons fire during task performance, and also during passive observance of the same action performed by another agent, thus mirroring the neurological activity occurring in the other agent’s brain. Difficulties arise with conflicting assumptions of the definition of this system, leading to different experimental approaches and interpretations. An unambiguous definition of mirror neurons is necessary to streamline the research and narrow a more careful focus on what mirror neurons are and what they mean. The prospect of a single population of neurons playing an active role in a wide range of executive functions is alluring, albeit slightly optimistic. It will be interesting however, to see what designs are applied to mirror neuron research in the future (even if its bullshit).

darwin was right (again)

Inspired by the Darwinian principle of natural selection, evolutionary robotics views robots as autonomous artificial organisms that have the ability to develop their own skills in close interaction with the environment and without human intervention. Alan Turing suggested in the 1950's that intelligent machines capable of adaptation and learning would be too difficult to conceive by a mere mortals, but could be obtained through an evolutionary process with mutations and selective reproduction.

The general idea behind evolutionary robotics is to create a population with different genomes, each defining parameters of the control system of a robot or of its morphology. An initial random population of artificial chromosomes, each encoding the control system of a robot, is put into the environment. Each robot is then free to act (navigate, look around, manipulate) according to its genetically specified controller while its performance on various tasks is automatically evaluated. The fittest robots then reproduce by swapping parts of their genetic material with small random mutations. The process is repeated until the birth of a robot that satisfies the performance criteria. At the laboratory for intelligent systems, it was demonstrated that a couple hundred generations of random mutations and selective reproduction were sufficient to promote the evolution of efficient behaviours in a wide range of environmental conditions. The ability of robots to orientate, escape predators, and even cooperate is particularly remarkable given that they had deliberately simple genotypes directly mapped into the connection weights of neural networks comprising only a few dozen neurons.

SO CLOSE I CAN HARDLY STAND IT

book review: The Mind's Past

Michael Gazzaniga’s book "The Mind's Past" attempts to elucidate how the brain functions as a unified whole. He proposes a left-brain interpreter, which transforms the plethora of systems and networks active in the brain, into a single narrative. Gazzaniga emphasizes the importance of automatic, unconscious processes distributed throughout the brain that require meaning to be attributed by another cognitive model. The interpreter seeks patterns and understanding from these discrete systems, and makes sense of subconscious mechanisms comprising what we would consider as the self. Located in the same region as language functions, the interpreter may be viewed as an evolutionary adaptation to construct our conscious reality based on reflexive, automatic processes that are constantly occurring in the brain. Gazzaniga is the product of Nobel laureate Roger Sperry’s laboratory, and the two worked extensively with split brain patients to examine the lateralization of the two hemispheres in the brain. The idea that an interpreter generates conscious feelings and awareness was spawned from a number of cases where patients did not seemingly experience sensations, yet were able to communicate an unconscious understanding of the stimuli. This illustrates the trickiness of the brain, where the ability for information to be perceived by the senses does not depend on the conscious awareness. So why are we conscious beings at all? The interpreter theory paints a nice explanation for stuff that we have yet to understand, but its kinda like saying that God is responsible for creating the earth and people and that neat ark.

(Editors note: I did not actually read this book)

what colour is my tongue?

When presented with unoccupied events in space/time that do not require ones immediate attention, it is easy to drift off into a world where the only thoughts are your own and moments of clarity and thoughtful introspection are offered. I have been wrestling with Steve's "A Brief History of Time", causing me to fall asleep most nights consumed with more questions than answers, but ultimately, a solid sleep ensues. Last night however, I awoke following a bad dream and was wide awake. I usually write meaningful or at least entertaining passages in my journal when sleep is the last thing on the menu, but last night was different. All I could manage to think about was how stupid going to the gym is. I can (almost) see why people engage in physical activity, but why not save a few bucks and RUN AROUND THE BLOCK? Or lift a fucking phone book? I was starting to get really annoyed when I remembered something even more tragic. They discontinued Sparks. And I can't even remember what drinking sparks at 4am looks like anymore. And so it continues. No sleep, the world is beyond depressing and I may never taste the sweet nectar of kool-aid, energy drink and cheap beer in a single can again. Cest la vie.
PS I do not feel guilty about the dumbness of this post bc sparks are the epitome of science.
PPS Why would they put his picture on the damn cover if they weren't intending to induce nightmares?

According to James T. Kirk, captain of the USS Enterprise in the 23rd century, Space is the final frontier. According to some scientists in the 21st century, the final frontier of science is the inner space of the human mind itself. While this may be the case, it is likely a reflection of the advent of technology that has been made available in recent years. Neuropsychology undoubtably is challenging this frontier of science, but I believe it is more indicative of a fundamental basis for the human mind. One cannot infer behaviour without an understanding of where it comes from. While a swirl of exciting and novel techniques have steadily been consuming the focus of neuroscientific research, one must not lose sight that this is science in its most basic form, we are just now being allowed to see it.