Klipsun Magazine, 2018, Volume 48, Issue 03 - Spring

Who are you? What qualities of your past have shaped you? What is your essence? Can you recognize the choices you are making now and what they will lead to? By definition, essence is “the intrinsic nature or indispensable quality of something that determines its character.” I like to think we make decisions based on what we know will happen indefinitely. When in reality, we are all trying to choose the best choice when life presents itself to us. The accumulation of gut reactions, late-night turning and days of pensive thinking we’ve made along the timeline of our lives is what has put us where we are today. Embrace and grow from past experiences to become the best version of yourself; they’re attributed to who you have become.https://cedar.wwu.edu/klipsun_magazine/1266/thumbnail.jp

It's Not Too Difficult: A Plea to Resurrect the Impossibility Defense

Suppose you are at the gym trying to see some naked beauties by peeping through a hole in the wall. A policeman happens by, he asks you what you are doing, and you honestly tell him. He then arrests you for voyeurism. Are you guilty? We don’t know yet because there is one more fact to be considered: while you honestly thought that a locker room was on the other side of the wall, it was actually a squash court. Are you guilty now? -/- Probably. You might argue that your scopophiliac ambition was impossible to satisfy given that you were peeping into a squash court, not a locker room. But this “Impossibility Defense” would fail because most jurisdictions follow the very influential Model Penal Code (MPC), which says that what is important about attempt is not the likelihood of success but rather what was going on in your head. You tried to peer into a locker room with the intention of seeing some nudity; that is enough for culpability. The fact that you were mistaken about the location does not exonerate you. -/- But now suppose that the particular jurisdiction you are in does not criminalize voyeurism. While most people think that voyeurism is just plain wrong, if not disgusting, the legislature just never got around to drafting a statute against it. Are you guilty now? The answer is no. But you might just be out of luck and convicted anyway. -/- The reason for this strange conclusion is that most jurisdictions have followed the Model Penal Code in yet another respect: along with the MPC’s “subjectivist” emphasis on what is in your head, they have followed the MPC’s lead in abolishing the Impossibility Defense entirely. As a result, people who believe that they are breaking laws when they really are not may still be subject to arrest, prosecution, and conviction respectively by police, prosecutors, and judges/juries merely if all three parties regard your conduct — especially your trying to violate a law that you mistakenly believed in — as morally reprehensible. The best, if not only, defense against this charge is the Impossibility Defense, but — again — most jurisdictions have decided to make this defense unavailable to defendants. -/- Depriving eligible defendants of the Impossibility Defense is unjust. It violates one of the most basic principles of criminal justice: the legality principle. The legality principle says that there cannot be just punishment without a crime, and there should not be a crime without an explicit law designating it as such. So you cannot be charged with, and convicted of, attempted voyeurism if voyeurism, reprehensible as it may be, was not explicitly prohibited at the time that you made the attempt. -/- If we believe in the legality principle, then we must restore the Impossibility Defense. Without the latter, too many defendants are being — and will continue to be — punished for attempts to perform acts that were not themselves illegal but which various parties in the criminal justice system (except the legislature) thought should be illegal based on their extralegal, moral prejudices. -/- In addition to the MPC, the principal obstacle to resurrecting the Impossibility Defense is a good deal of conceptual confusion that permeates relevant cases and scholarship. Too many courts and academics have conflated “factual impossibility” with “legal impossibility” and have fallaciously inferred “hybrid impossibility” from “hybrid mistakes” (that is, legal mistakes that derive from factual mistakes). One of the principal goals of this Article, then, is to clear up all of this confusion. I will explicate in the simplest possible terms (a) the difference between factual impossibility and legal impossibility, (b) why only legal impossibility qualifies as exculpatory, and (c) why hybrid impossibility simply does not exist

Body (less) fitness

It’s too cold outside. You stubbed your toe. You had too much Chipotle. You didn’t have enough Chipotle. There’s no shortage of reasons to abstain from exercise on any given day. Designing a product or system to get someone to exercise is almost anti-design. So much of design is making things seamless and easy for whomever your user may be. You want to make it easy for people to accomplish things they want to do. But designing to get someone to exercise? You’re trying to get someone to do something unpleasant. You’re asking your user to sweat, strain, exert, and exhaust themselves. You might even be asking them to look inward and acknowledge a certain level of unhappiness. It’s no surprise that, despite wanting to have exercised, people don’t actually want to perform the task. This is why, when designing for any type of fitness experience, it is vital to get a firm understanding of all of the positives as well as the negatives. Why might someone want to go out and exercise? Let’s look at connected fitness experiences. If you’re an avid runner, a cyclist, or some robot that gets a kick out of how many steps you take in a day, there is little doubt that you could benefit from the existing connected fitness experiences. You could set yourself a goal, give yourself some milestones, quantify some of the seemingly intangible aspects of your brand of fitness – all without the technology really getting in your way. Now, what if you’re not an avid runner? What if you don’t like to exercise on a bike? What if you don’t like to exercise at all? What if your sweatpants are used for anything but sweating? There’s no use knowing your heart rate or your best quarter mile if you haven’t even made it out the door. I’m here to challenge the role of connected fitness. Can a connected fitness experience help users beyond the point of regurgitating data? Can it motivate someone to get out of their comfort zone and into an active space? Body[less] Fitness is an exploration of a new motivator for fitness, particularly for the apprehensive, yet aspirant user. A connected fitness experience can yield more than quantitative data – it can connect us with others, expand our comfort zones, and help us take control of our fitness

8 Weeks

I get to his office tired. My prefect dark ringlet curls dripping wet from the rain. I start to his office not paying attention to the fact that his secretary is trying to stop me. “Miss Brown,” his secretary is saying, “he is on a conference call right now. If you wait I can let him know you are here.” “I don’t have time to wait David.” “Miss Brown,” he shouts at me, but I am already at the door to Joe’s office. As I walk in, I swallow hard. “So we are going to build this building in stages,” he looks up and stops what he is saying maybe it is the fact that I am a mess or the expression on my face. “Liah, what’s wrong.” “I am, I am…” I can’t say the words. My beautiful blue eyed blonde architect boyfriend is standing, waiting for me to tell him why I had been crying and why I am scared and I can’t say anything

You Might be a Robot

As robots and artificial intelligence (Al) increase their influence over society, policymakers are increasingly regulating them. But to regulate these technologies, we first need to know what they are. And here we come to a problem. No one has been able to offer a decent definition of robots arid AI-not even experts. What\u27s more, technological advances make it harder and harder each day to tell people from robots and robots from dumb machines. We have already seen disastrous legal definitions written with one target in mind inadvertently affecting others. In fact, if you are reading this you are (probably) not a robot, but certain laws might already treat you as one. Definitional challenges like these aren\u27t exclusive to robots and Al. But today, all signs indicate we are approaching an inflection point. Whether it is citywide bans of robot sex brothels or nationwide efforts to crack down on ticket scalping bots, we are witnessing an explosion of interest in regulating robots, human enhancement technologies, and all things in between. And that, in turn, means that typological quandaries once confined to philosophy seminars can no longer be dismissed as academic. Want, for example, to crack down on foreign influence campaigns by regulating social media bots? Be careful not to define bot too broadly (like the Calfornia legislature recently did), or the supercomputer nestled in your pocket might just make you one. Want, instead, to promote traffic safety by regulating drivers? Be careful not to presume that only humans can drive (as our Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards do), or you may soon exclude the best drivers on the road. In this Article, we suggest that the problem isn\u27t simply that we haven\u27t hit upon the right definition. Instead, there may not be a right definition for the multifaceted, rapidly evolving technologies we call robots or AI. As we will demonstrate, even the most thoughtful of definitions risk being overbroad, underinclusive, or simply irrelevant in short order. Rather than trying in vain to find the perfect definition, we instead argue that policymakers should do as the great computer scientist, Alan Turing, did when confronted with the challenge of defining robots: embrace their ineffable nature. We offer several strategies to do so. First, whenever possible, laws should regulate behavior, not things (or as we put it, regulate verbs, not nouns). Second, where we must distinguish robots from other entities, the law should apply what we call Turing\u27s Razor, identifying robots on a case-by-case basis. Third, we offer six functional criteria for making these types of I know it when I see it determinations and argue that courts are generally better positioned than legislators to apply such standards. Finally, we argue that if we must have definitions rather than apply standards, they should be as short-term and contingent as possible. That, in turn, suggests that regulators-not legislators-should play the defining role

Peacock Cabinet. Mary Magdalene From Feathers To Fur To Flesh: Painting a woodparent cabinet red

Description: This magazine is a written and graphic account of attempting to level with the scope and scale of the kind intuition that is responsible for producing the desire to create something. The kind of desire that you are not able to contain in anything you already are aware of. The kind of idea you cannot quite define, which are kept alive by a particular gut feeling[1]. A feeling that are both joyous and frightening, outlining the contour of a body on the horizon of thought. A contour you are curious to experience with full sensorial perception. Bodies we normally meet in the category of artefacts – wordless but sensible. Naturally, this perception of a “body” cannot be represented, when there is such a desire, by any other fashion than how the faculty that perceives it demands. Obviously, the project then must begin with an abandonment of documenting the process of making, as an effort of parallelism and on reasons of opposing the believed value of “transparency”, as forms of heresy. Rather, it embraces the concept of documenting the parts of the pattern that is possible to capture in a document – publishing it on the note of querying its validity. The various aspects of the work must be allowed to be faithful to their own laws, which in turn, creates a liminal state for the artistic researcher, like a place of rest, just outside the field polarity [artistic and research]. Thus, this document does not represent the made cabinet, but it mirrors a perception of a pattern, as does the cabinet. The liminal state between making and writing is not stable, because of the current asymmetric relationship between the two – the ontogeny of the pattern was initiated with the conception of a piece of furniture; the precision of language dwarfs our collective conscious understanding of craft. It is published, not as a scholarly embellishment of what is made, but, alongside the actual cabinet, as a demonstration of the fecundity of the bivalent deployment of artistic and research. Between the two, the designer is given two roles. 1) The attempt of transposing the quite nerdy research from a presentation of whim and caprice to a demonstration of live connections that is possible to connect with and trying its’ best to arbiter the connections in a comprehensible and coherent line of thinking. Artistic research is the rig that allows this possibility of sustained concentration, but it demands quite allot from the reader, as it has from BJB. 2) The second role given to the designer is found between Ingmar Bergman’s spear of intuition[2] and Michael Schwab’s notion of artistic research as the assembly of the rear-guard as opposed to the avant-garde. I propose rather not to send anyone anywhere, but to go the distance yourself. The designer’s intuition is not a wild stab in the dark but, if it was a spear, thrown with a rope and pully already attached to the back end. The mark manifests itself simultaneously with the perception of the pattern, connecting here and there, already with a sense of a route. The route is obviously not as you believe, and the mark may very well be very different to what you thought you aimed at, and finally there, all kinds of things are different. I don’t obey my intuition but are curious to find out what it knows. Matching resistance to flow. As the editor marks in her notes, friction is thick in this magazine. --------------------------------------------------------------------- [1]An inadequate word now that the chemical signals to the brain from the gut is given credence over will. A better description could be something like a sudden recognition of a pattern, between pervious unrelated issues. [2]“I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find that spear. That is intellect”publishedVersio

Invisible

I have explored a number of ideas and media since starting my journey to become an art educator. One theme that I find myself returning to are issues related to mental illness. This interest derives from my own personal experience as well as those of people in my life who also deal with mental health problems. My exhibition, titled ‘Invisible’, seeks to illustrate the hidden aspects of mental illness. I have chosen to use furniture as the main structures within my show because of the implication of human form, even in the absence of people. Furniture can be individualized and even act as a reflection of the owner. Each piece is a representation of a different mental illness and though they are not traditional furniture forms, they are still functional. They utilize color to highlight the individuality of the pieces as well as the people who deal with mental illnesses. These works give the viewer insight into the daily struggles of someone who deals with mental illness. Creating a different experience with each piece that gives viewers insight into the impact mental illnesses can have. They are constructed in ways that make them interactive both visually and physically. The differences between the two chairs in ‘Mirrored Opposites’, pulls you into different mindsets. While ‘Restricted’ makes you feel anxious when approached and frustrated as you interact with it, trying to reach the top. The use of contrasting colors and materials to form ‘Trigger’ brings the viewer into a state of unease and when interacted with you get consumed by the form. Each piece reinforces different emotions as the viewer interacts with them forming a better understanding of what it is like to deal with mental illnesses. Throughout the process of researching for this exhibition, I have drawn inspiration from is Christian Sampson, a photographer who made a photo series depicting the invisible side-effects of mental illness. He also makes visible the normally unseen struggle of coping with mental health issues and how they consume their sufferers. I have also drawn inspiration from Cat Bates, a jewelry maker who hand-braids most of the rope she uses for her jewelry. I have utilized her hand-braiding techniques to create my own rope to use for the hanging installation, Lethal Balance.https://digitalcommons.murraystate.edu/art498/1059/thumbnail.jp

Klipsun Magazine, 2014, Volume 44, Issue 04 - Winter

In an era when time seems to pass at a break-neck pace, staying current is an important part of any publication’s day-to-day operation. How can we stay current as a publication when societal trends and global issues seem to pass in a matter of days and weeks but we only publish twice a quarter? Klipsun stays relevant by telling the stories that matter not only to the people who pick up the magazine the day it comes out, but also to those who will read it years from now. For Klipsun, staying current means more than just keeping up with the times. The means in which stories are brought to readers is constantly changing. Readers are no longer passive consumers of media. The single downstream approach to storytelling is changing, allowing for reader participation and influence in what they read. We are trying to reach out and involve our readership throughout our process and allow them to help shape our final product. Our readers should know what life was like and what issues were worthy of being published when our staff sat down to plan the magazine. We want Klipsun to be a portal into what was important to the staff and community when the magazines were neatly stacked around Bellingham. We want to convey to both present and future readers that finding clean energy alternatives and reducing waste is of paramount importance to our readership and staff. We want people to read about how technology is moving into an ever more digitally dominated realm while some people still hold on to analog methods. We want readers to connect with stories of people as they break world records, give death new life and live every day with a neuropsychiatric disorder. These are the stories we have decided to tell in this issue. We want them to interest, enlighten and fascinate you. Staying current for our readership is important, but being current is as much about looking to the future and learning from our past as it is about observing the present. Take the time to read through Klipsun and see what our Current issue is all about.https://cedar.wwu.edu/klipsun_magazine/1167/thumbnail.jp

Screwed? Interactive Interpretation of The Turn of the Screw

I began thinking about my thesis by wondering why we read, why we read the books we read, why we read a book the way we do, and how we read leads to different interpretations and opinions of a book. In my thesis, I have focused on figuring out how we can determine who we are based on the interpretations we make about a text. I have determined that one’s interpretation is based on their baggage which includes their memories, expectations, and imagination. A reader, either consciously or unconsciously, brings baggage to every text they read in order to come to their own interpretation. In my encouragement of exploring one’s own interpretation of a text, my thesis involves its own reader by referring to them as ‘you’ throughout to reinforce the idea that reader involvement is crucial to understanding a text. I urge my reader to, “before you get into this thesis, do some things for yourself. Get comfortable. Get uncomfortable. Choose or switch your chair depending on this preference. You know yourself. Get rid of possible distractions.” I implore my reader to think about their own interpretation of a text by using Henry James’s novella, The Turn of the Screw. The novella works perfectly for this study as it invites different interpretations because of its ambiguity. I have created and explored three possible readers to the novella: the Surface Reader, the Freudian Reader, and the Savior Reader. The Freudian Reader is a reader who looks for the deeper meaning which almost always refers to sexual desire. The Savior Reader is a hopeful reader who desires a happy ending and above all for the hero to succeed. The Surface Reader is a reader who would rather not become too invested by trying not to tie themselves to the text with their baggage. In my explanation of the readers, I not only explore their relationship with the novella, but I also give examples of who they might be as people. This includes where they would be reading the novella, what they would be listening to, who they would be with, and what they would be doing before, during, and after their reading experience. This grounds not only my thesis but also allows the reader to imagine themself as a reader of The Turn of the Screw. I explore how each reacts to different sections of the novella. Discussing the readers and how they interpret different sections of the novella shows the power of interpretation as well as why the novella has been debated over by many literary theorists and critics