Winter 2009
Compost-Modern: Discussion Forum
Weekly open discussion on Fridays from 4:00 - 6:00pm. "CompostModern," a salon-style discussion forum, revolutionizing the way we present the work of poets and writers to the public. We have opened the floor to the community, bringing you in to participate in the planning, discussion, and hopes for the future of art, poetics and science. As the name implies, the CompostModern forum aims to re-cycle our rich aesthetic history. If the project of postmodernism was to deconstruct traditions, it has left us with a fertile soil out of which new forms may emerge. It is with the belief that all new forms of art must evolve from a history that we approach the guiding question of the forum: What is creativity? At each weekly meeting, Dactyl members, noted artists, poets, and scientists will be able to talk freely and on equal terms. We want to know your opinions, beliefs, values and theories about everything from beauty and meaning to pop-culture and hype. Write to info@dactyl.org to register. Admission free.
Featured Guests, Tyler Volk and Dorion Sagan, authors of Death & Sex.
Friday, Feburary 12th, 2010
What is shared by spawning Pacific salmon, towering trees, and suicidal bacteria? In his lucid and concise exploration of how and why things die, Tyler Volk explains the intriguing ways creatures-including ourselves-use death to actually enhance life. Death is not simply the end of the living, though even in that aspect the Grim Reaper has long been essential to natural selection. Indeed, the exquisite schemes and styles of death that have emerged from evolution have been essential to the great story from life's beginnings in tiny bacteria nearly four thousand million years ago to ancient human rituals surrounding death and continuing to the existential concerns of human culture and consciousness today. Volk weaves together autobiography, biology, Earth history, and results of fascinating studies that show how thoughts of our own mortality affect our everyday lives, to prove how an understanding of what some have called the ultimate taboo can enrich the celebration of life.
In Sex, Dorion Sagan takes a delightful, irreverent, and informative romp through the science, philosophy, and literature of humanity's most obsessive subject. Have you ever wondered what the anatomy and promiscuous behaviors of chimpanzees and the sexual bullying of gorillas tell us about ourselves? Why we lost our hair? What amoebas have to do with desire? Linking evolutionary biology to salacious readings of the lives and thoughts of such notables as the Marquis de Sade and Simone de Beauvoir, and discussing works as varied as The Story of O and Silence of the Lambs, Sex touches on a potpourri of interrelated topics ranging from animal genitalia to sperm competition, the difference between nakedness and nudity, jealousy's status as an aphrodisiac and the origins of language, Casanova and music, ovulation and clothes, mother-in-law jokes and alpha females, love and loneliness. A brief, wonderfully entertaining, highly literate foray into the origins and evolution of sex.
Two books in one cover, Death & Sex unravel and answer some of life's most fundamental questions.
Special guest Michael Schippling, robotics artist
Friday, November 20th, 2009
Why Are They Fighting?
Michael Schippling is an artist who builds robots designed to act creativity. He notes that most independent artists working in robotics have succumbed to building fighting machines for TV audiences. Michael will be a featured guest at our Compost Modern discussion forum, giving us what he calls a "quirky history of Machine Art with a proposal for the future."
The Modern era was the age of the Machine, control was the word. In 1943 the field of Cybernetics was founded by a neurophysiologist, a mathematician, and an engineer. Cybernetic processes were incorporated into artistic production almost as they were being developed in the scientific community. From 1950 to 1970 collaborations between artists, engineers, and scientists produced some major artistic developments. The Post-Modern era was the age of Information and irony was the rule. Artificial Intelligence research shifted from cybernetic bottom-up to symbolic top-down approaches. Taking a cue from Tinguely's 1960 Homage to New York, Post Modern Punk Aesthetic machines that destroy each other became popular. There are many reasons for this stagnation of imagination: practical, psychological, and sociological. Flight-or-flight is the lowest level of evolution but it titillates the masses nonetheless. If you can't make a real contribution you can always just destroy more that anyone else has before. So why bother to make it more complex.
Will the Post-Post era be the age of Artificial Life and Complexity? Higher level function is difficult to create but simple social activities, like flocking and dancing, are within our grasp. If we can give up the Control Illusion, we can elicit interesting behaviors from otherwise simple systems.
 2009 Award Recipient: Wendy Wheeler,"Creative Evolution: A Theory of Cultural Sustainability," forthcoming in Communications, Politics and Culture. Excerpt: "Under the name of something called postmodernism, or of a condition called postmodernity, the idea of the artist as someone possibly doing something special has been derided as romantic, and the lyric 'I' as merely the romanticised voice of the bourgeois individual. In a not dissimilar key, the idea of the preservation of traditions has too often been seen as nostalgic and anti-progressive. The romantic, for all his or her initial enthusiasm for the modern revolutionary gesture, is seen eventually as a sort of conservative failure of the revolutionary spirit – one who comes to see the analytic radicalism of modernity as hostile to an organicist view. In this view, the preserver of traditions is the more frank conservative; but both are, in the end, anti-progressives...."
"If you take the view – as I do, and will go on to argue from a biosemiotic perspective – that culture is natural and evolutionary, and that ideas are cultural organisms much like natural organisms, you might expect that these late modern cultural confusions will exert evolutionary pressures manifested in the production of new organism-ideas. Biosemiotics, I want to suggest, is precisely such a new evolutionary development. It derives – as all new organic and evolutionary forms do – from new recombinations of older, or antecedent, forms. What evolution teaches us is that nothing comes from nothing. So if we take ecology, which is to say evolutionary theory, seriously, then we must take cultural ecology and evolution seriously too. The second grows from the first...."
Wendy is a reader in English at London Metropolitan University. Copies of the essay will be available upon request.
Thurs., Jan. 15, 6:30 PM
wine & conversation with Maggie Jackson: Discussion Forum
Cohost: Center for Inquiry
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CFI's next Truth Uncorked wine and conversation event will take place on Thursday, January 15 with Maggie Jackson. Jackson is an award-winning author and journalist known for her penetrating coverage of U.S. social issues. She writes the popular "Balancing Acts" column in the Sunday Boston Globe, and her work has also appeared in The New York Times, Gastronomica and on National Public Radio. Her latest book, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (Prometheus Books, 2008) details the steep costs of our current epidemic deficits of attention, while revealing the astonishing scientific discoveries that can help us rekindle our powers of focus in a world of speed and overload. A former foreign correspondent for The Associated Press in Tokyo and London, Jackson has won numerous awards for her coverage of work-life issues, including the Media Award from the Work-Life Council of the Conference Board.
Space is Limited; RSVP recommended. $20 includes admission and wine. To RSVP, call (212) 504-2935 or e-mail nyc [at] centerforinquiry [dot] net. |
Summer & Fall 2008
Compost-Modern: Discussion Forum
Weekly open discussion on Wednesdays from 2:30 - 5:00pm. Postmodernism took it upon itself to disingegrate Modernist traditions; hence, we might come to look back upon that now dying era as "compost-modernism." In this open forum, artists, poets & thinkers come together to discuss the emergence of new forms of order out of the rich soil of our past.. Write to info@dactyl.org to register. Admission free.
Thursday, November 6, 6:30PM
wine & conversation with John Allen Paulos
Cohosted by The Center for Inquiry
Paulos has written on the vagaries of the stock market in A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market, arguments for God in his most recent book, Irreligion, and the mathematical and philosophical basis of humor in Mathematics and Humor and I Think, Therefore I Laugh. "Who's Counting," his long-running monthly column on ABCNews.com, deals with mathematical aspects of stories in the news. Paulos is a professor of mathematics at Temple University in Philadelphia who has gained fame as a writer and speaker, most notably on the topic of the importance of mathematical literacy. His books Innumeracy and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper were influential bestsellers.
$30 includes admission and wine
Space is Limited; RSVP, (212) 504-2935 or twilliams [at] centerforinquiry [dot] net
Fri, Oct 12, 7-9, 2007
Dorion Sagan, Notes from the Holocene: A Brief History of the Future
In a thought-provoking, humorous, and engaging style, Dorion Sagan, the eldest son of Carl Sagan and evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, combines philosophy, science, an understanding of illusion, and the fantastical writings of Philip K. Dick to probe the deep questions of existence. Operating on the precept that the universe if far weirder than we might imagine, Sagan provides fresh insights into the nature of technology, the prognosis for humanity, and the living, the living nature of our planet, and a reasoned explanation to why our universe is probably just one of an infinite number. Notes from the Holocene is a prime example of the writing coming from a new generation of scientific writers. It will inspire readers to think for themselves while leaving them chuckling with tongue-in-cheek anecdotes -- a rare combination that Sagan delivers with ease. And yes, as geneticist J.B.S. Haldane says, "the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine." www.sciencewriters.org
November 9-12, 2006
New York Art Science Festival
20th Annual Conference for the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts
Plenary Speaker: Lynn Margulis
Keynote Panel: Dorion Sagan and Eric Schneider
Special Presentation: Neil deGrasse Tyson
Site Chair: Victoria N. Alexander, Dactyl Foundation for the Arts & Humanities
Program Chair: Bruce Clarke, Texas Tech University
The Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts fosters the multi-disciplinary study of the relations among literature and language, the arts, science, medicine, and technology. This year's conference will be held in conjuction with the first annual New York Science+Art Festival. The hub of the conference will be the Dactyl Foundation for the Arts & Humanities on Grand St. in SoHo, which will host registration, the opening reception and one panel stream. Other regular panels and lectures will take place in nearby university, and studio spaces, with forays to midtown for evening events.
287 Speakers
More info
September 16-18, 2005
Poetics-Cognitive Science Colloquy
John Ashbery, Angus Fletcher, Walter J. Freeman, Rebecca Goldstein & Steven Pinker
Among the disciplines informing cognitive poetics, neuroscience has been undersung and underutilized, a trend that seems to suggest imminent remedy. Indeed, the recent experimental and theoretical advances offered by neuroscience question the traditional judgment that literary knowledge is incompatible with scientific knowledge. What insights might detailed attention to the neuronal activity of the brain lend to the creative process? Might this directionality be reversed, that is, might the complex structures interrogated by poetics yield a formal understanding that could, in turn, shed light on neuroscientific problems?
This conference will be a small, select gathering of scholars interested in probing these questions, collaborating on research, and reporting relevant findings in their respective fields. Participants include: literary theorists, neuroscientists, writers, artists, cognitive scientists of various disciplines, e.g., linguistics, physical psychology, social psychology, and the philosophy of mind.
35 speakers
2005
Research Support Award
Sharon Lattig, neuronal processes and metaphor
Lisa Zunshine, cognitive science and narrative
David Herman, cognitive science and narrative
2005 Award Recipients: Walter J. Freeman and Jennifer Ruth Hosek, "Osmetic Ontogenesis, or Olfaction Becomes You: The Neurodynamic, Intentional Self and Its Affinities with the Foucaultian/Butlerian Subject," Configurations 9 (2001): 509-541. Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press and the Society for Literature and Science. The authors will present at Dactyl Foundation's Poetics-CogSci Colloquy in September 2005. Walter J. Freeman, UC Berkeley, is a Professor of the Graduate School in Biophysics, Graduate Group in Bioengineering. See The Freeman Laboratory for Nonlinear Neurodynamic. Jennifer Ruth Hosek is a Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University.
She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University of
California, Berkeley in December 2004, for a dissertation entitled: Cuba and
the Germans: A Cultural History of an Infatuation. In addition to work in
cultural, gender, postcolonial and film studies, Jennifer is interested in
representations of selfhood in scientific and literary texts.
Thursday April 15, 2004
Angus Fletcher A New Theory for American Poetry:
Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination (Harvard University Press), Lecture
wine and hors d'oeuvres 6 p.m.
presentation 7 p.m.
2004
Research Support Award
Sharon Lattig, neuronal processes and metaphor
Friday, October 24, 2003 Society for Literature and Science
17th Annual Conference Austin, TX October 23-26, 2003 The Status of Emergence Roundtables Victoria Alexander (organizer/chair), Katherine Hayles, John Johnston, and Eve Keller.
2003
Research Support Award
Sharon Lattig, neuronal processes and metaphor
Friday, November 8th, 2002 2-4 pm
Interrogating Dichotomies, panel discussion
Hosted at CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, Room 5409, by the 20th Century Group & Dactyl Foundation.
Panelists: Susan Oyama (Philosophy of Biology), Victoria N. Alexander (Narrative Theory), and Sharon Lattig (Poetics).
November 10, 2001
"Nabokov, Evolution, and Insect Mimicry"
a public lecture by Victoria Alexander
April 26, 2001 6:30
 Public Lecture: "The Poet, The Critic, & The Interpreter: A Crash Course"
Angus Fletcher (Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Graduate School, CUNY)
Respondents:
Nico Israel (Asst. Prof, English, Hunter College, CUNY; critic, Artforum
International Magazine)
and Victoria N. Alexander (Dactyl Foundation)
Hors d'oeuvres will be served at 6:30. Lecture begins at 7pm.
Angus Fletcher is the author of books on allegory, prophecy, court
masque and the philosophy of literature; he specializes in the theory of
literature and the symbolic connections between literature and the other
arts.
2001
Award Recipient: Dominick LaCapra, "Trauma, Absence, Loss," in Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr, 2000)
 In his essay, "Trauma, Absence, Loss," Dominick LaCapra shows a sensitive understanding of the subtleties of deconstructive technique, and then, without refuting any of its claims, he advances the next intellectual step that takes us beyond postmodernism and into a more productive future.
Trauma, explains LaCapra, is an extreme condition, and its victims are often unable to make any progress toward recovery. Traumatic events seem to deal with metaphysical concerns, such as the realization that some formerly recognized truth is an illusion or that there exists no essential ground for a perfect understanding of reality. The situation is hopeless if the victim wishes to return to a condition of na?e faith. Thus, when deconstruction is applied to idealistic narratives, it uncovers "aporia, paradox, or impasse." Some of the best postmodern art forms, argues LaCapra, have convincingly illustrated this situation by reenacting, without working through, the discovery that an ideal is an illusion. According to LaCapra, Waiting for Godot is an example of a deconstructive point of view because it does not pretend that the absent ideal is a real historical loss, somehow to be regained. Appropriately then, he adds, "nothing" happens in Beckett's play. The action takes place within a sustained meaningless traumatic present. The parodic repetition of the same day does not differ so much as defer; no historical progress can ever be made. Godot never existed, and nothing will ever change this circumstance. Waiting, without hope, is all one can do.
LaCapra deals mainly with representations of the Shoah and the way it has been misconceived as an anti-pastoral like Waiting for Godot. Although the Shoah is one of the most tragic events in human history, the issues it forced us to examine are not, as Adorno has implied, of a metaphysical nature. The losses sustained in the Shoah are situated on a historical level and are the consequences of particular events. LaCapra suggests that it is possible to work through these losses. The objective is not to reinstate idealism, but to deal practically with real historical loss. He also suggests that an absence can be worked through too, if "only in the sense that one may learn better to live with it and not convert it into a loss." LaCapra's analysis offers a constructive approach to what seemed like an insurmountable problem. As he writes, "It is important not to hypostatize particular historical losses or lacks and present them as mere instantiations of some inevitable absence or constitutive feature of existence. ... [P]rejudice (such as anti-Semitism, racism, or homophobia) can be engaged ethically and politically only when they are specified in terms of their precise, historically differentiated incidence." Read Press Release
April 4--6, 2000
 Chaos in literature, science and art. Sponsored by Pfizer Corporation &Herbert Lee Grayson Foundation Panel Discussion:
Tuesday, April 4th & Wednesday, April 5th, 6pm
Angus Fletcher, CUNY on Spenser's "Mutability Cantos"and the poetry of John Ashbery
Thursday, April 6th, 6pm John Ashbery, Bard College, poetry reading
Jim Crutchfield, Santa Fe Institute, on the physics of chaos
Joan Richardson, CUNY, on science & poetry
&Angus Fletcher, CUNY, respondent
In history, chaos is anarchy, mutability, disorder, chance, indeterminacy, flux, non-linearity, entropy, irrational thought, creativity, destructive emotion and the primal source of all that is.
2000
Award Recipient: Angus Fletcher, on John Ashbery's "Middle" Poetry, lecture delivered at Dactyl Foundation April 5, 2000. More info. Copies of an essay derived from the lecture, "Long Amazing Unprecedented Way," in murmur Vol ii (New York: Donc Alors, 2000) can be obtained for $10 by writing to essay@dactyl.org
October 29,1998:
Panel Discussion:"Science and Art." Moderated by Victoria N. Alexander. The new sciences have made us realize the degree to which chance is both a principle of continuity as well as discontinuity. Regularity and structure do not necessarily bespeak the tyranny of some a priori principle. Order can evolve over time by chance operations being played out against a ground of accumulated structures. Unfortunately, much of the art today eschews the kind of complexity we find everywhere else around us. Dactyl Foundation has organized this panel in order to provide a forum for discussing the advances in science that insist that we take another long hard look at our aesthetic principles. The panel includes art reviewers who are also artists themselves, as well as poets/artists who have a science background. Tom Breidenbach is a regular contributor to Artforum and a poet whose most recent work is entitled The Fit Debut. Mark Cohen is a New York City-based art critic and sculptor. He is a regular contributor to Review magazine and Art New England. He is currently co-authoring, with Friedrich Ulfers, a book on Friedrich Nietzsche and twentieth- century theoretical physics. Jonathan Goodman writes for Art in America, Art Asia Pacific, and World Art. He formerly worked at Scientific American. His first collection poetry, Metropolitan Rooms, was published in 1994. Sharon Lattig is pursuing her doctorate in English at Graduate School at City University New York. She is currently conducting research on the relationship of Science to Wallace Stevens' poetry. Her own poetry has appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, Murmur, Whatever. Sharon is curator of the Dactyl Foundation Poetry Series.
April 23, 1998
Lecture: Stephen Jay Gould and the Antioch Review, with an introduction by Robert S. Fogarty. Gould teaches biology, geology and the history of science at Harvard University, where he has been on the faculty since1967. Well known for his popular scientific writings, in particular his monthly column in Natural History magazine, he is the author of thirteen books, including: Ever Since Darwin; Evolution & Extinction : Eassys; Full House : The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin; Human Evolution; Mismeasure of Man; Ontogeny and Phylogeny; and Why People Believe Weird Things : Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time. "The history of life is not necessarily progressive; it is certainly not predictable. History includes too much chaos, or extremely sensitive dependence on minute and unmeasurable differences in initial conditions, leading to massively divergent outcomes based on tiny and unknowable disparities in starting points." -Stephen J. Gould.
April 30, 1998
Panel Discussion:"The Interpreters: Shaping American Art." Moderated by Steven Vincent, Wall Street Journal, Art & Auction. DACTYL asked five writers: Do your essays and reviews reveal or conceal your process of interpretation? As interpreter you shape the way art is perceived: as a self-evident sign or image; as a mysterious code that requires a professional interpretation; or as an "inkblot" in which one may find any meaning one likes. In your opinion, what is the best approach for engaging or creating a serious art audience? Over forty art professionals attended the discussion. Here are some quotes from the panelists: Carter Ratcliff, whose books include: The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Andy Warohl, John Singer Sargent, Pat Steir: Paintings, and Robert Longo, and is a regular contributor to Art International, Art in America, Artforum, Art & Auction, ARTnews, remarked, "The first responsibility of the art writer is simply to keep track of things. The larger purpose is speculation, a specialized kind of mind-reading." Said Rosie Schaap, French NY News, Unmuzzled Ox, "When I was young I faced Abstract Expressionist art with the excitement of not knowing how it worked. I was filled with wonder, but this doesn't move me any longer. Meaning doesn't matter to me the way it once did. These days I'm against interpretation." Sarah Schmerler, ARTnews, Time Out, argued that "Providing multiple readings is a way of inviting the viewer/reader to contribute her own reading." Grady T. Turner , Curator of Education New-York Historical Society, ARTnews, Flash Art, Art in America, ironically noted, "It is necessary to translate the art object into a language that Art History will understand." And Alexi Worth, ARTnews, Art New England, Slate pointed out that "Because the image is immediately available people get a false sense that they understand."
1998
Award Recipient: Wai Chee Dimock "A Theory of Resonance." The essay, which
appeared in the October 1997 issue of PMLA, offers the concept of "noise" as a provocative analogy for interpretive
contexts. Unlike many other writers on the same topic, Dimock makes the claim that noise is positive, "a necessary
feature of a reader's meaning-making process. And even as it impinges on texts, even as it reverberates through them, it
thickens their tonality, multiples their hearable echoes, makes them significant in unexpected ways" (1063).
Understanding a reception theory such as Professor Dimock's is prerequisite to understanding of a theory of "phenomenal
patterns," the topic suggested for the Dactyl competition. Dimock's theory of literary resonance is enhanced by her
example of experiments with the phenomenon of stochastic resonance, "in which a weak signal is boosted by background
noise and becomes newly and complexly audible" (1063).
It becomes clear in her essay that interpretation is actually an effort to deny the existence of noise. Certainly if the attitude
toward noise is one of wonder, as Dimock suggests it can be, then the listener is not perceiving simply noise, but, in
his/her mind, a signal. The noisier the pattern of that signal, the more wonderful the decoding will be.
1997
Award Recipient: Steven Vincent "Listening to Pop." In his essay, Vincent demonstrates how the lesson of Claes Oldenburg's work is distorted as it is
reinterpreted today. According to the argument, representational art has reinforced the illusion of
a knowable, static reality, while at the same time it has always explicitly deconstructed that
illusion by its very nature of being artificial. Pop Art attempted to apply this lesson at large,
showing how everyday objects should be seen as signs trying to establish an eternal logos. An
important lesson indeed. But one that has backfired. As Vincent argues, these everyday objects
have come to re-present themselves as signifiers of a signified, reversing Pop Art's intention.
They now "represent" the Mythology of the era in which they were produced. Vincent captures
the eeriness involved in such a reinterpretation and reminds us how deeply invested the human
race is in its will to believe. Copies of the essay can be obtained for $7 by writing to essay@dactyl.org. Note: Steven Vincent was murdered in Iraq in 2006 for questioning political practices in a NYTimes Letter to the Editor.
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