Sam Van Aken is an installation and new media artist. His works have been presented at numerous venues including the Portland Art Museum (Maine); Dallas Museum of Art; Project Room in Philadelphia; and Hallwalls, Buffalo, New York. His most recent installation, composed of grafted fruit trees, exhibited at the 2011 Armory Show by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts has been recognized in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Vogue, and Art in America among other publications. Van Aken has received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, Maine Arts Commission Fellowship, and both the Association of Art Museum Curators award and the Award for Outstanding Artistic Achievement at the Portland Art Museum Biennial. Van Aken is an associate professor and the director of the Sculpture Program at Syracuse University. He is represented by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York, NY.
Hasan Elahi Bio
Hasan Elahi (2006 Emerging Fields Creative Capital grantee) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work examines issues of surveillance, simulated time, transport systems, borders and frontiers. His work has been presented in numerous exhibitions at venues such as SITE Santa Fe, Centre Georges Pompidou, Sundance Film Festival, Kassel Kulturbahnhof and the Venice Biennale. Elahi has been invited to speak about his work at the Tate Modern, Einstein Forum, the American Association of Artificial Intelligence and TED Global, among many other institutions. His awards include a grant from Art Matters and a Ford Foundation/Phillip Morris National Fellowship. His work is frequently in the media and has been covered by The New York Times, Forbes, Wired, The Guardian,BBC, CNN, NPR, Al Jazeera, Fox News and has The Colbert Report. He was a 2010 Alpert/MacDowell Fellow and a 2009 Resident Faculty at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Elahi is Associate Professor of Art at the University of Maryland, where he is Director of Digital Cultures and Creativity in the Honors College. He lives outside of Washington, DC, roughly equidistant from the CIA, FBI and NSA headquarters.
Liz Cohen Bio
Liz Cohen (2005 Visual Arts Creative Capital grantee) is a photographer and performance artist whose multi-media work is exhibited both nationally and internationally. She is best known for her subversive project, "Bodywork," in which she transformed an East German 1987 Trabant automobile into a 1973 Chevrolet El Camino. Her work has been shown at venues such as Fargfabriken (Sweden), The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco) and Fiori Uso (Pescara). She has won numerous awards and grants including a Studio Residency from The MacDowell Colony; a Studio Fellowship in 2002 from the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany; an Artist’s Project Grant from the Arizona Commission for the Arts; a 2008 Traveling Scholars’ Award from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and a Kresge Artist Fellowship in 2011. Cohen lives in Detroit and is the Artist-in-Residence/Head of Photography at Cranbrook Academy of Art.
Worn out by the Apocalypse
By now, we know that human intuition can easily be fooled. But it's a bit of a surprise to read, according to a blog post in Scientific American, "The Irrationality of Irrationality: The Paradox of Popular Psychology," that even when we know we're being fed limited information, the conclusion-jumping hardly slows.
The fact is, we're much too confident in our assessments. SciAm:
It’s natural for us to reduce the complexity of our rationality into convenient bite-sized ideas. As the trader turned epistemologist Nassim Taleb says: 'We humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas.' But readers of popular psychology books on rationality must recognize that there’s a lot they don’t know, and they must be beware of how seductive stories are. The popular literature on cognitive biases is enlightening, but let’s be irrational about irrationality; exposure to X is not knowledge and control of X. Reading about cognitive biases, after all, does not free anybody from their nasty epistemological pitfalls.
The past 200,000 years or so of human development has honed a biological heuristic for dealing with all of the world, all at once. We imagine. We create. We fill in the gaps. We tell stories, some of them better than others. But our sentient, mirrored selves are quick to swivel back to threats. Our grapefruit-sized brains still buzz about the unknown. Is that rustling in the bush friend or foe?
"Exposure to X is not knowledge and control of X."
Here's the question: Do we believe the best or worst? Do we use our imaginative faculties to ask great questions or to seek out threats? On a recent Sunday afternoon passing through an airport bookstore, I stopped to admire the placement of two books, side by side: Jonah Lehrer's "Imagine" and Michael Savage's "Trickle Down Tyranny." While they were stocked because of their appearance on the New York Times best seller lists, their positioning - one hopeful and future oriented and the other cynical and despairing - got my attention, and I wondered if the bookstore employee had placed them together in an act of protest.
I don't know about you but the apocalypse is wearing me out.
Jonah Lehrer, by the way, spoke at the 2008 IdeaFestival.
In our compressed and constantly pinging culture we often forget just how enormous it all is and how small, really, our understanding. Ulcerative opinions and strained theories don't make discoveries that can be used over and over again, nor do they lead to worthwhile futures. They just fill the gaps with our first and worst. So when I let those stories seduce me, I don't have a reality problem. I have a me problem. Being "irrational about irrationality" is also called faith. I just need to be reminded from time to time that I still believe.
Wayne
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Nikky Finney - "The will of the human heart to speak its own mind," it can never be controlled
Will you be as moved by Nikky Finney's speech accepting the 2011 National Book Awards honor for her poetry as I was? My heavens these words are gorgeous.
Following her on stage, host John Lithgow said this short speech was the finest acceptance speech he had ever heard - for any award. Start at about the 4:40 mark in the video embedded here and prepare to be transported.
And yes, you'll want to get to your seats early to see her at IdeaFestival 2012.
Wayne