Ragg It

Lev Manovich

Michelle Henning reminds us, however that interactivity has its darker side. She cites Lev Manovich’s concern that computer technology plays into a "modern desire to externalize the mind."

Computer interactivity maps our own thought processes onto those already written into the software. It models certain ways of thinking, or certain ways of understanding our own cognitive practices: to click is to make a choice, to follow a link, to associate one event of piece of information with another. This process of the “externalization” of the mind closes the gap between subjective mental processes and objective, machinic processes. In this sense, like Taylorism, it hooks people and bodies up to machines, making people “thinglike.” This argument would suggest that interactivity, which seemed initially to promise agency over “numbed passivity,” actually does the opposite, increasing alienation.[40]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Manovich

Agathe Snow

Pearl River:
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/artpages/agathe_snow_pear_river.htm
Remarks: This next chance creation is named Pearl River, found at Level 4. It somehow retained its innocence, like a souvenir. I like pale hues. It's very feminine. It says I am here for lack of a better idea;
too elusive to be a movement but a moment, definitely. A moment can give meaning to a life, to a lie. We see her take back the ownership of her body image, hard work, determination and a killer body. You can
only sabotage your feminist ethics for so long. Well, Hello officer, how can I help you today? You're looking for genuine love. Sorry no I haven't seen any lately. But do come back at some other time, you might get lucky. When the world as you know it is over and you happened to be one of the sole survivors isn't it so nice to talk shit about somebody else…

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/agathe_snow.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agathe_Snow

Paul McCarthy

Mechanical Pig:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPXGfnhZPnU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JNuz7R_INU

Painter:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozubKHdprMI

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2005/oct/25/1

http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2007/12/last-week-i-vis-2.php

Royale de Luxe

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/10/the_berlin_reunion.html

"... the work I am referring to was ‘only’ an ephemeral performance by a French company who is called Royale de Luxe. They produce the best piece of street theatre I have ever had the pleasure of witnessing: The Sultan’s Elephant. Its performance cost the Antwerp municipality 800,000 euros but the majority of it went to the actual performance (which lasted three days and were extravagant and deeply moving), not just a concept. I saw grown men and women weep with joy and awe. Watch it here if they did not come to your town last summer." -- jahsonic

Videos here, here, here, and here.

Helmo

http://www.todayandtomorrow.net/2009/10/06/colored-smoke/

http://helmo.fr/

Gurdjieff

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFfa8Ae1Qog

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._I._Gurdjieff

Deuter

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TTDaZVxVaI

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deuter

Bill Hicks

"The world is like a ride at an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it, you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it's very brightly coloured and it's very loud and it's fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they begin to question: Is this real, or is this just a ride? And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say, 'Hey – don't worry, don't be afraid ever, because this is just a ride ...' And we ... kill those people. Ha ha, 'Shut him up. We have a lot invested in this ride. Shut him up. Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account and my family. This just has to be real.' It's just a ride. But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok. But it doesn't matter, because – it's just a ride. And we can change it anytime we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings and money. A choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one. Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace."

"Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration — that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death; life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves... Here's Tom with the weather"

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Hicks

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Hicks

Eugénio de Andrade

Procura a maravilha.

Onde um beijo sabe
a barcos e bruma.

No brilho redondo
e jovem dos joelhos.

Na noite inclinada
de melancolia.

Procura.

Procura a maravilha

Eugénio de Andrade (courtesy of Emília)

Camel Racing in Qatar

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiV7ilZgxKk

Robert Happé

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMRlBAHS1XI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lEEsZg1m98
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgPSUb_pnIo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8SWTpLkLig

http://www.comunidade-espiritual.com/blog.php?sub_section=view&id=1384

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWHOZwcxm4o

Fall of Saigon

http://abluteau.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/van-es-may-15-zzz.jpg

"... references the horrifying events that occurred on April 30th 1975 (the day Saigon fell) as hundreds of thousands of people tried to flee Saigon from the encroaching North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong. The mass exodus was a “Pishkun” a term used to describe the way in which the Blackfoot American Indians would drive roaming buffalo off cliffs in what is known as a buffalo jump.

In a panicking frenzy hundreds of U.S. built helicopters escaped towards waiting U.S. aircraft carriers in the South China Sea. Many never found the aircraft carriers crashing into the sea as they ran out of fuel. Some helicopters reached the carriers but soon the number of helicopters far exceeded the capacity of the carriers leaving hundreds stranded hovering in the air. The decision was made to drive off hundreds of helicopters and they were pushed into the South China Sea to make room for others to land. Shocking news footages of this event show these powerful machines that had rained terror over Vietnam for so long in their struggling, dying, and sinking demise."
http://www.artnet.com/galleries/Exhibitions.asp?gid=424216102&cid=165786

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Saigon

Dinh Q. Lê

http://www.artnet.com/galleries/Exhibitions.asp?gid=424216102&cid=165786

http://www.boston.com/community/photos/raw/2009/03/weaving_together_his_vietnam.html

http://qag.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/34871/Din_Q_Le_chronology.pdf

http://www.ppowgallery.com/selected_work.php?artist=16

http://www.researchchannel.org/prog/displayevent.aspx?rID=2035

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinh_Q._L%C3%AA

Buffalo Jump

http://www.wisdomoftheelders.org/prog5/images/buffalo_jump1.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_jump

A Pyre of Pianos

http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=6519

Santo Daime

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santo_Daime

http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uni%C3%A3o_do_Vegetal

http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ficheiro:Mestregabriel.JPG

http://www.daime.org/site/pages/mestre/mes24set-PT.htm

http://virb.com/annapurna

http://www.daime.org/site/pages/oficiais.htm

Luís Campos

http://www.luiscampos.pt/2006.html

http://www.luiscampos.pt/2008.html

http://www.luiscampos.pt/1994.html

Cymatics

http://www.ted.com/talks/evan_grant_cymatics.html

http://www.cymatics.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymatics

Buddhism

A large collection of Buddhist writings including the Pali Canon:
http://www.budsas.org/ebud/ebidx.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gautama_Buddha

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_Gnosticism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajahn_Chah

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajahn_Sumedho

Tina Braun

http://vimeo.com/4607984

Jesus in India

http://www.salagram.net/JesusLivedInIndia.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmCS7P-vdRM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbgCTBW7BPA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW3-4JXSSQg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yt3RLsp-cOo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sevWSx3Dp4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-_PvmP07PU

Jesus in Kashmir:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DXCZFRsyl8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T340DUSq9SY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cy8M4VzU-Y

The Lost Years of Jesus:
http://krishnatube.com/video/293/Jesus-in-India--BBC-Documentary

An alternative view, Jesus taught by Buddhist teachers:
"Elmar R. Gruber, a psychologist, and Holger Kersten, a specialist in religious history argue that Buddhism had a substantial influence on the life and teachings of Jesus.[21] Gruber and Kersten claim that Jesus was brought up by the Therapeutae, teachers of the Buddhist Theravada school then living in the Bible lands. They assert that Jesus lived the life of a Buddhist and taught Buddhist ideals to his disciples; their work follows in the footsteps of the Oxford New Testament scholar Barnett Hillman Streeter, who established as early as the 1930s that the moral teaching of the Buddha has four remarkable resemblances to the Sermon on the Mount."[22]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_Gnosticism#Therapeutae_influence

Agostinho da Silva

"Estou a exigir muito de si? Quem lhe há-de exigir muito senão os seus amigos? Eles receberam o encargo de não o deixar amolecer e, pela minha parte, tenha você a certeza de que hei-de cumprir. Você há-de dar tudo o que poder, e mesmo, e sobretudo o que não poder; porque só há homem, quando se faz o impossível; o possível todos os bichos fazem. Quando você saltar e saltar bem, eu direi sempre: mais alto! Que me importa a mim que você caia. Os fracos vieram só para cair, mas os fortes vieram para esse tremendo exercício: cair e levantar-se; sorrindo!" -- Agostinho da Silva, Sete cartas a um jovem filósofo, 1945

http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agostinho_da_Silva

a) "... that each man is different from myself and unique in the universe; that I am not the one, consequently, that must reflect instead of him, [...] that knows what is best for him, [...] that must point his way. Towards him I have only one right: helping him to be himself; as my essential duty to myself is being who I am, as uncomfortable as that may be [...]"

b) "... loving others and wanting their good has been the reason of much oppression and much death [...]; essentially, you must not love in others anything but freedom, theirs and yours. They must, for love, cease being slaves, as must we, for love, cease being slave owners."

c) "And it is the child the one that must be considered the noble savage, spoiling her, mis-shaping her [...] the least we possibly can [...]"

d) "Believing, thus, that man is born good, which means on my regard that he is born a brother to the world, not its owner and destroyer, I think that education [...] has not been much else than the system through which this fraternity is transformed in domination."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agostinho_da_Silva

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=agostinho+da+silva&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=Z0yFSoK_LpO5jAfEr6SiCw&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=8#

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72K70_uYKdA

http://www.rascunho.iol.pt/img/agostinho_silva2.jpg

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjW4Aq-XgfMK3IUjhUB8XC-uino8QQ1-12k08umq86E8cVk34BXVq_ICktGz7mfcF6WUTJRTr-herIc4H75PhIrUVdDU_4j_glLl9P2047GhbOQssAE40gfmfS3-5e5wb9BnYLQkA/s1600-h/Agostinho_da_Silva.jpg

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbQnunweJJG5icWiCmd31Emnu-kVzgyfoxXr6gZDRRBXAPO-mB_K8tVhmd4UFcGjJXCetXfPUquEYPRNUVLF4yGAE3fYjyrtB5lW40bi9N6jOQTMvId9YlxoQ2L0BBMbK7DhNSHg/s1600-h/agostinho+da+silva.jpg

Love and do what you will

"Love and do what you will." - "Dilige et quod vis fac." -- St. Augustine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine_of_Hippo

John Eccles

"...World 1 is the world of physical objects and states. It comprises the whole cosmos of matter and energy, all of biology including human brains, and all artifacts that man has made for coding information, as for example, the paper and ink of books or the material base of works of art. World 1 is the total world of the materialists. They recognize nothing else. All else is fantasy.

"World 2 is the world of states of consciousness and subjective knowledge of all kinds. The totality of our perceptions comes in this world. But there are several levels. In agreement with Polten, I tend to recognize three kinds of levels of World 2, as indicated in Fig. 6-2, but it may be more correct to think of it as a spectrum.

"The first level (outer sense) would be the ordinary perceptions provided by all our sense organs, hearing and touch and sight and smell and pain. All of these perceptions are in World 2, of course: vision with light and colour; sound with music and harmony; touch with all its qualities and vibration; the range of odours and tastes, and so on. These qualities do not exist in World 1, where correspondingly there are but electromagnetic waves, pressure waves in the atmosphere, material objects, and chemical substances.

"In addition there is a level of inner sense, which is the world of more subtle perceptions. It is the world of your emotions, of your feelings of joy and sadness and fear and anger and so on. It includes all your memory, and all your imaginings and planning into the future. In fact there is a whole range of levels which could be described at length. All the subtle experiences of the human person are in this inner sensory world. It is all private to you but you can reveal it in linguistic expression, and by gestures of all levels of subtlety.

"Finally, at the core of World 2 there is the self or pure ego, which is the basis of our unity as an experiencing being throughout our whole lifetime.

"This World 2 is our primary reality. Our conscious experiences are the basis of our knowledge of World 1, which is thus a world of secondary reality, a derivative world. Whenever I am doing a scientific experiment, for example, I have to plan it cognitively, all in my thoughts, and then consciously carry out my plan of action in the experiment. Finally I have to look at the results and evaluate them in thought. For example, I have to see the traces of the oscilloscope and their photographic records or hear the signals on the loudspeaker. The various signals from the recording equipment have to be received by my sense organs, transmitted to my brain, and so to my consciousness, then appropriately measured and compared before I can begin to think about the significance of the experimental results. We are all the time, in every action we do, incessantly playing backwards and forwards between World 1 and World 2.

"And what is World 3? As shown in Fig. 6-1 it is the whole world of culture. It is the world that was created by man and that reciprocally made man. This is my message in which I follow Popper unreservedly. The whole of language is here. All our means of communication, all our intellectual efforts coded in books, coded in the artistic and technological treasures in the museums, coded in every artifact left by man from primitive times--this is World 3 right up to the present time. It is the world of civilization and culture. Education is the means whereby each human being is brought into relation with World 3. In this manner he becomes immersed in it throughout life, participating in the heritage of mankind and so becoming fully human. World 3 is the world that uniquely relates to man. It is the world which is completely unknown to animals. They are blind to all of World 3. I say that without any reservations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Eccles_%28neurophysiologist%29

With and Without Flash

http://imgfave.com/view/142423