Explaining art

He said:

I don't really 'get' the sculpture. It's just a sign of my artistic illiteracy.

I said

I think that if you can explain art simply, if you can say 'the sculpture means this', then it's not really art. You'd be better off with the words. Well, not necessarily. But it would then be like the simple signs such as a crossed-out cigarette to mean 'no smoking'.

Art, on the other hand, seems to be a medium for conveying things that cannot be put into words. That's not to say you can't talk about what it means, just that you can't get the answer, because there will always be more to say.

Which is not to say that the 'no smoking' sign cannot be seen as art. But in its role of telling you not to smoke it's not.

Communication over 3,550 years

If I can trust the science here (I do wonder how many assumptions are built in to the analysis), this is wonderful, isn't it? The information communicated over 3,550 years.

Amplify’d from www.bbc.co.uk

Stonehenge boy 'came from south'

Chemical tests on teeth from an ancient burial near Stonehenge indicate that the person in the grave grew up around the Mediterranean Sea.

The bones belong to a teenager who died 3,550 years ago and was buried with a distinctive amber necklace.

The conclusions come from analysis of different forms of the elements oxygen and strontium in his tooth enamel.

Most oxygen in teeth and bone comes from drinking water - which is itself derived from rain or snow.

In warm climates, drinking water contains a higher ratio of heavy oxygen (O-18) to light oxygen (O-16) than in cold climates. So comparing the oxygen isotope ratio in teeth with that of drinking water from different regions can provide information about the climate in which a person was raised.

Most rocks carry a small amount of the element strontium (Sr), and the ratio of strontium 87 and strontium 86 isotopes varies according to local geology. Read more at www.bbc.co.uk

 

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A flock of words

Extract from a flock of words in Morecambe (recorded 24 Aug 2010):

Loss of information from the record slip on a library book

Since the OU library has gone over to 'self service' books don't have the return date stamped on them. This is a loss of information, because it used to be that when I took a book out I could look on slip in the front to get some idea of how much interest there has been at the university in that subject. (I used to get perverse satisfaction when I found that I was the only person to have borrowed the book in, for example, the last 20 years!)

To be honest, this was probably only 'of interest', I don't know that I ever made explicit use of it, but it is something that's gone. Well, I guess the information is there still, electronically, and if I had access I could even get more information from.

Confidentiality would mean I wouldn't be allowed to know who had borrowed it, I assume, although that info presumably exists on the system*, but even information like what departments the people who borrowed it were in would be useful.

My real point, though, is that while that info is probably there I can't readily access it, unlike a glance at the slip.

*Do I recall that some libraries deliberately don't keep that level of detail? I seem to remember that some destroy it so that the authorities cannot come demanding to see it? I think something along those lines was recounted in The Virtual Revolution about the library at Santa Cruz, but I also think I heard something about it more recently.

"information cannot be copyrighted"

Reading the instructions for authors from Routledge (for the forthcoming Ramage and Chapman "Perspectives on Information") it says:

Even tables require permissions—information cannot be copyrighted, but the layout, format, and selection of data is.

Interesting statement in the light of the subject matter of the book, but what does that 'selection of data' mean?

I'm sure I've seen claims for copyright protection on football fixture lists, for example - not that there are likely to be many football fixture lists in Ramage and Chapman.

Biosemiotics: yet another strand of 'information' to explore

What is particularly pleasing about this for me is the reference to Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen. In a former life, long, long ago as a schoolboy who liked birdwatching and wildlife in general, I read Konrad Lorenz's 'King Solomon's Ring' and then later 'On Aggression', and I also read Tinbergen's 'The Herring Gull's World'. I then studied physics at university and became an engineer, leaving anything to do with birds and animals behind.

Amplify’d from www.newscientist.com

Biosemiotics: Searching for meanings in a meadow

One of the nascent field's leading lights, Donald Favareau of the National University of Singapore, provides a definition on the group's website. "Biosemiotics is the study of the myriad forms of communications... observable both within and between living systems. It is thus the study of representation, meaning, sense, and the biological significance of sign processes- from intracellular signalling processes to animal display behaviour to human... artefacts such as language and abstract symbolic thought."

To get a better sense of what this means, it is best to go back to the field's roots. Biosemiotics traces its earliest influences to the independent efforts of an Estonian-born biologist in the early 20th century and an American philosopher of the 19th century, who wrote much of his work hidden in an attic to avoid his creditors.

Estonian-born Jakob von Uexküll was an animal physiologist whose 1934 book A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A picture book of invisible worlds - and later works - inspired Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, who then went on to win a Nobel prize in 1973 for their studies in animal behaviour, or ethology.

Favareau came to biosemiotics as a result of "growing discontent with the inability of cognitive neuroscience to explain the reality of experiential 'meaning' at the same level that it was so successful in, and manifestly committed to, explaining the mechanics of the electrochemical transmission events by which such meanings are asserted (without explanation) to be produced".

For Gerard Battail, an information theorist at Télécom ParisTech in France, it is the fact that mainstream biology, while loosely using a vocabulary borrowed from communication theory- "pathways", "codes" and the like- "remains basically concerned with the flow of matter and energy into and between living entities, failing to recognise [that] the information flow is at least as important". Read more at www.newscientist.com

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