Chicana/o Artivism: Judy Baca's Digital Work with Youth of Color

Part of the Volume on Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media Astounding digital murals have emerged from the minds and souls of Chicana artist Judy Baca and the youth of color who have collaborated with her over the past ten years. Their workspace is SPARC, the Social and Public Art Resource Center, founded by Baca in 1996 and dedicated to the creation and support of community and public art in Southern California. But the digital art they produce is not only located in SPARC -- it can be found in virtual installations globally, as well as on the walls of Los Angeles barrio housing projects and in the hybrid spaces of the Internet. We call their activity "digital artivism," a word that is itself a convergence between "activism" and digital "artistic" production. The digital artivism we find expressed through SPARC, we argue, is symptomatic of a Chicana/o twenty-first century digital arts movement. This digital artivist movement also advances the expression of a mode of liberatory consciousness that Chicana feminist philosopher Gloria Anzaldua calls la conciencia de la mestiza, i.e. the radical consciousness of a mixed race peoples. Chela Sandoval and Guisela Latorre call attention to this mode of digital artivism enacted by Baca and young people who are vested in the convergences between creative expression, social activism, and self-empowerment

Exploring the Creation and Humanization of Digital Life: Consciousness Simulation and Human-Machine Interaction

Digital life, a form of life generated by computer programs or artificial intelligence systems, it possesses self-awareness, thinking abilities, emotions, and subjective consciousness. Achieving it involves complex neural networks, multi-modal sensory integration [1, 2], feedback mechanisms, and self-referential processing [3]. Injecting prior knowledge into digital life structures is a critical step. It guides digital entities' understanding of the world, decision-making, and interactions. We can customize and personalize digital life, it includes adjusting intelligence levels, character settings, personality traits, and behavioral characteristics. Virtual environments facilitate efficient and controlled development, allowing user interaction, observation, and active participation in digital life's growth. Researchers benefit from controlled experiments, driving technological advancements. The fusion of digital life into the real world offers exciting possibilities for human-digital entity collaboration and coexistence.Comment: 10 page

A.I., Cyborgs, Shamans and Transcendence Configuring the ISO and the Mythopoeic Sacred in Tron: Legacy

This essay explores the role of cyberspace in the 2010 film Tron: Legacy as an expression of the enduring relevance of religious symbolism and humanity\u27s innate search for transcendence in modern technologies. Cyberspace is investigated as a sacred space of infinite possibilities in which humanity is redefined at the intersection of the digital, fantasy and consciousness. In the examination of the film’s religious symbolism as a modern-day creation myth and its roots in shamanic cosmology, artificial intelligences in the movie depicted as highly complex humanoid information systems are proposed as a blueprint for an advanced mode of consciousness which integrates the worlds of science, spirituality and the fantastic. The “imaginative consciousness” will be proposed as the key means by which this may occur – the archetype of the ‘woman-child’ in the cybernetic figure of the ‘ISO’ in the movie is argued to represent a blueprint for the cellular and cognitive advancement of the human species, to a unique state of spiritual purity

FACULTIES APPROACH TOWARDS ASSORTMENT MEASURES ON DIGITAL ARCHIVES: A STUDY

The digital archive and preservation is advantageous in comparison to traditional archive. For successful creation and maintenance of digital archive and preservation various basic principles should be followed. There are several technological, legal policies and related challenges which have to be solved for successful implementation of digital archive and preservation. The developing countries have started taking interest in digital archive and preservation but facing several challenges on the way. The study attempted to distinguish the level of consciousness on various copyright or legal issues associated with the digital collection and to get opinion from various categories of respondents about criteria guide on selection of materials for digitization. The present study analysis is to know various problems while using digital archives and ways to broadcast to use the IR/ digital archives and discuss about the special skills required for library staff to implement various methods to access the digital collection and defensive measures relating to issues on digitizing the documents in the digital archive

FACULTIES APPROACH TOWARDS ASSORTMENT MEASURES ON DIGITAL ARCHIVES: A STUDY

The digital archive and preservation is advantageous in comparison to traditional archive. For successful creation and maintenance of digital archive and preservation various basic principles should be followed. There are several technological, legal policies and related challenges which have to be solved for successful implementation of digital archive and preservation. The developing countries have started taking interest in digital archive and preservation but facing several challenges on the way. The study attempted to distinguish the level of consciousness on various copyright or legal issues associated with the digital collection and to get opinion from various categories of respondents about criteria guide on selection of materials for digitization. The present study analysis is to know various problems while using digital archives and ways to broadcast to use the IR/ digital archives and discuss about the special skills required for library staff to implement various methods to access the digital collection and defensive measures relating to issues on digitizing the documents in the digital archive

Shifting realities: Tron cyberspace and the “New” consciousness in 21st Century technoscapes

The existing direction of the (mis)use of information technologies founded on the deceptively secular rationalised heritage of scientism, arguably spells the increasing proximity to a dystopian nightmare that is far from mere fiction and imbued with the eternal religious symbolic of the battle between good and evil, as depicted in the 2010 science fiction film Tron: Legacy . The historical contextualisation of events in the film reveals the promise of the unfolding of an advanced sensibility alongside these concerns, in which fantasy and science converge to liberate humanity from an increasingly limiting worldview, and information and images serve as conduits to the sacred. The critical role information stands to play in humanity’s conscious evolution is outlined in the proposed development of a “dream systems theory”, where dreams capes are defined as interconnected systems of imaginal data

Relativistic Implications for Physical Copies of Conscious States

The possibility of algorithmic consciousness depends on the assumption that conscious states can be copied or repeated by sufficiently duplicating their underlying physical states, leading to a variety of paradoxes, including the problems of duplication, teleportation, simulation, self-location, the Boltzmann brain, and Wigner's Friend. In an effort to further elucidate the physical nature of consciousness, I challenge these assumptions by analyzing the implications of special relativity on evolutions of identical copies of a mental state, particularly the divergence of these evolutions due to quantum fluctuations. By assuming the supervenience of a conscious state on some sufficient underlying physical state, I show that the existence of two or more instances, whether spacelike or timelike, of the same conscious state leads to a logical contradiction, ultimately refuting the assumption that a conscious state can be physically reset to an earlier state or duplicated by any physical means. Several explanatory hypotheses and implications are addressed, particularly the relationships between consciousness, locality, physical irreversibility, and quantum no-cloning.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures. Replacement to fix minor formatting issue

Dr. Richard De Smet and Sankara\u27s Advaita

I have had the privilege of meeting Dr. Richard De Smet in Shimla at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, when we both participated in a Seminar organized by the Institute in 1989. We had opportunities of discussing Sankara\u27s Brahman and the Christian concept of God at that time without being able to fully understand each other\u27s position. That has been at the back of my mind all these years, and I was happy when Bradley Malkovsky asked me to write on Dr. De Smet\u27s view of Sankara\u27s Brahman for the Bulletin. I thus got an opportunity to revisit that topic again and have done so in what follows. Needless to say that, because of the limitation of space, I have not been able to do full justice to the topic

Book Review: Body Parts: A Theological Anthropology

Book review of Body Parts: A Theological Anthropology. By Michelle Voss Roberts. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017, xlvii + 181 pages