Validating the Crisis, Or the “Technology contra Humanities” argument during COVID-19 through Formal Proofs of Language

The context of the so-called “crisis of the humanities” is further tested against the backdrop of the COVID-9 pandemic crisis. Compounding variations or nuances of this premise infer that the crisis is true, which means that there is a lessening emphasis on the humanities. There is, however, a need to justify how this argument can stand on itself through an inquiry of its validity. The descriptive nature of its claim further begs the presupposition that a crisis is such because of an apparent disparity of the humanities and the sciences stemming from various charges. This paper thus takes over from this problem and utilizes the logical formal proofs of language to assess the underlying assertions being made. It carries on its tasks through a steady establishment of valid proofs that ground the very nature of the crisis

Concrete Thinking for Sculpture

This article proposes to explore the variegated plays of concrete as a travelling concept through four specific examples, viewed from the locality of the Yorkshire Sculpture Triangle in 2015. It will be argued that ‘concrete’ makes possible a triangulated reading practice in, of and for sculpture. The first example looks to the use of concrete, as a material, in some of the ‘technical’ experiments of Henry Moore, from the 1920s-1930s. The second example is the only public concrete sculpture by Barbara Hepworth on record, entitled Turning Forms. This is a kinetic work which was commissioned for the Festival of Britain in 1951. The psychic registrations of form-in-concrete will be explored through the aesthetic reception and understanding of these works. The third example examines the interplay between abstraction and concretion in a work of structural engineering: the Arqiva transmission tower on Emley Moor. This structure is a working utilitarian model of the telecommunications industry which took hold in the 1960s and 1970s. It is also a sculptural monument in a landscape of other design ‘types’. The fourth example considers the recent display of Lygia Clark’s Bichos at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, in 2014-2015. Bicho Pássaro do Espaço (‘Creature Passing through Space’) (1960) reveals a particular translation between concrete thinking and concrete experience. These examples call upon the semantics of the concrete as a thought process and will track a journey into a region marked by three interconnected points: the concrete specificity in the material works selected, the broader field of concrete forms within which the sculptural may sit and the philosophical/aesthetic language of concrete for sculpture

DH is us or on the unbearable lightness of a shared methodology

"In practice the Digital Humanities are methodologically defined by the principle of digital conceptualization of the objects and procedures of research. Who embarks upon Digital Humanities considers the objects of study implicitly as a complex of discrete measurable states, to apply, based upon this, computer based procedures: analytical, symbolizing or modeling. This mode of digital conceptualization of humanistic topics of research can in principle be used within all disciplines, as a digital lingua franca. Before this background we formulate two theses: (1) This methodological theoretical claim of universality has to be relativized by the Digital Humanities community through critical reflection of methodology; digital access does not turn out to be appropriate everywhere, when we make the specifically humanistic drive for knowledge the yardstick of a cost-benefit analysis. (2) The trans-disciplinary nature of the Digital Humanities may be politically 'unbearable' by tendency from the perspective of traditional Humanities' disciplines, as it challenges their disciplinary identity. For the Digital Humanities community both of these theses lead to the obligation to engage in a critical self reflexion of their own methods - and open the dialogue with the established humanistic disciplines against its backdrop." (author's abstract

Casual Poetry Creators : A Design Pattern and Internal Evaluation Measures

We explore the concept of Casual Poetry Creators with the aim of making poetry writing fun and entertaining for the user. We present a simple co-creative interaction design pattern based on constructing poems line by line, suggesting the user a set of line candidates at each step. We also propose objective measures by which a Casual Poetry Creator can evaluate and choose which line candidates to show to the user and sketch out a plan to evaluate the measures and pattern with users.Peer reviewe

Ecce Homo Sexual: Ontology and Eros in the Age of Incompleteness and Entanglement

Nietzsche’s iconic Ecce Homo: (How one becomes what one is) maps out the answer by taking the reader on a kind of magical mystery tour ruminating between the paradox. With chapter headings such as ‘Why I am so Wise’ or ‘Why I Write such Good Books’ or ‘Why I am Destiny’, one begins to breathe in the method, the madness, the sheer intelligence of it all. Whatever else may be being said in that text and his others, one thing is certain: a sustained, crucial, well-directed attack on metaphysics – as idealism, dialectical logic, universalism, identity politics, morality and a whole host of other paradigmatic strictures – is necessarily, urgently, launched. Scroll forward more than 100 years since, and, coupled with the profound advances in socio-cultural norms from civil rights to feminism to gender equality, and beyond, as well as the profound advances in physics, from quantum to Higgs Boson; in mathematics from recursive algorithm to fractal imaginaries; in technology and new media (in fact, all media) from the photography to the digital, from the computer to robotics, from the gun to the stealth bomber – it almost beggars belief that at least in the aesthetic-politico-philosophic arena, one finds a steady crawl, and most recently, more of a electrified sprint, back to metaphysics ‘as a whole’, and more worrying still, to the speculative idealism of Hegel and co. For reasons not entirely clear, there has been a massive group hug toward metaphysics: whether at the level of retrieving it via a return to Hegel or retrieving metaphysics via Heidegger (onto-theo-logic metaphysics) or retrieving it via Hegel (speculative idealism) or retrieving metaphysics via the newest old version: speculative realism. This chapter sets out to examine critically those approaches and to see how they fare once the erotic, the sensual, and indeed, the networked algorithmic age, is brought to bear. May have to dust off copies of Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy along the way

Contribution of Professional Pedagogy to Decision-Making

The aim is to offer a contribution to the problem of decision-making in the world of the higher intellectual professions, considering the pedagogy as a paradigmatic profession in the social, caring, and helping field. Pedagogy is an ancient science and profession, like medicine and jurisprudence, as it is known. The professional practice, in the social field as in the health and in other fields, consists in reconnecting the complex phenomenology of each singular particular case to a more limited number of general cases, theories, or disciplinary casuistries. It is a question of making a diagnosis, in a broad sense of the term. For this procedure, both the positive inductivist approach, from many facts to the generalization, and the idealistic and deductive approach, from general a priori ideas to the particular, are obsolete. We then examine the pragmatistic concept of abduction and, more generally, the contributions of the most up-to-date methodology, just as it is applied in the practice of professionals

Lacan and the Algorithm

Exploring the development of algorithms in Lacanian theory, specifically the R schema in the 1950s, I argue that psychoanalysis, read through contemporary debates about the algorithmic cult of Netflix and other avatars of popular culture, can be said to reveal the inhuman, machinic essence of subjectivity. The etiology of algorithms, mathemes, and other formulae and diagrams in Lacan’s oeuvre has been under-studied, in part because for some readers they are not as attractive as his more bravura flourishes of word play as exegetical excess, and in part because they derive largely from the ‘hard’ structuralist moment of his work in the 1950s, largely eclipsed in Lacan studies by interests in the ‘Late Lacan’ period of the Sinthome, the knots, jouissance and the semblant. Here I extend (and refine) arguments I began in Does the Internet Have An Unconscious, determining that algorithms in Lacanian theory help us understand the split subjectivity of internet discourse