The wish to forget about things is very common in all of us. How memory and the loss of it works is not that well researched yet. In Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) two former lovers undergo a procedure that erases the memory of their relationship. French artist Sophie Calle regularly deals with the subject of pain and the memory of it, such as in her project Douleur Exquise (1984-2003). An article published in Wired (UK edition / April 2012) gives very interesting insights on how science has been trying to find solutions to deal with trauma and it reveals some astonishing facts about what’s going on in your brain when you remember something. For example, every time you access a memory it is rewritten in your brain. The result is a dynamic one: every time you relive or retell the memory it changes – but you don’t realise it. A pill that lets you forget bad memories is being developed right now – until it’s available you’ll have to stick to smoking weed to get the effect.

Firstly, it intends to promote a discussion on the possible political implications of a renewed idea of ‘humanity’ that goes beyond any simplistic antithesis between humanism and antihumanism.

Secondly, it aspires to foster a dialogue between philosophy and science, especially evolutionary biology and the neurosciences, which both refuses any form of experimental reductionism vowed to ground man on statistically objective criteria and theoretically acknowledges the fact that homo sapiens’s brain has become the privileged object of study of an increasing number of empirical sciences.

Thirdly, the present project proposes to scrutinise the central role of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and more specifically of the retroactive temporality with which it works, for a reconsideration of the problem of anthropogenesis that avoids falling back into naïve ‘anthropologisms’. It is our contention that, in formulating a truly materialist and desubstantialised anthropology based on the corporeal inscription of language, psychoanalysis overcomes the supposed dichotomy between the human and the natural sciences.

The Human Animal in Politics, Science, and Psychoanalysis
December 16–17, 2011
KW Institute for Contemporary Art
Auguststrasse 69
10117 Berlin
Free entrance
Please find the full program of the conference here.

Organized by Mladen Dolar (Professor of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Advising Researcher, Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht) and Lorenzo Chiesa (Reader in Modern European Thought, University of Kent).

Partner Institutions: University of Kent, KIASH, SECL; Jan van Eyck Academie; University of Ljubljana

Die Weltmaschine in Munich
November 23rd – 26th 2011

Max-Planck-Haus
Hofgartenstr. 8
80539 Munich

We all knew that slime was special watching Ghostbusters. Now, scientist dig deeper to understand such ancient, alien slime civilizations.

“If some countries started to build highways from scratch, I would recommend to them to follow the slime mold routes”

says Andrew Adamatzky, a researcher at the University of West England who also engaged slime mold to produce electronic music.

Photo: Carsten Koal/Visum

But Phil Edwards now demonstrates, fake science is better for delight:

Find more lessons for rainy summer days here.

I had a conversation last night with a man who is working to develop neuro-enhancers. Do you take them yourself? I asked, casually. I wondered secretly whether the field of neuro-enhancement research was progressing at a faster rate than all the other neurosciences.

He said that he did not. He is happy with the progress he is making in life, and is uncomfortable with risk of side effects: nervousness, depression, headaches, sleeplessness, cardiac problems, decreased appetite and, of course, addiction. But the research will deal with the side effects within the next 10 to 20 years, and we will be able to take drugs to boost our mental capacity. Our memories will be crisper, we will learn faster; maybe we will have better ideas. Some of us will feel that we have no choice, and will take them just to keep up.

I suppose that this will be a revolution.

Despite myriad reservations, I would like to be smarter. There is a Borges story about a man who has suffered a brain injury that endows him with prefect perception and infallible memory:

We, at one glance, can perceive three glasses on a table; Funes, all the leaves and tendrils and fruit that make up a grape vine. He knew by heart the forms of the southern clouds at dawn on the 30th of April, 1882, and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book of Spanish binding he had only seen once and with the outlines of the foam raised by an oar in the Rio Negro the night before the Quebracho uprising.

These memories were not simple ones; each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his half-dreams. Two or three times he had reconstructed a whole day; he never hesitated, but each reconstruction had required a whole day. He told me: “I alone have more memories than all mankind has probably had since the world has been the world”. And again: “My dreams are like you people’s waking hours”. And again, toward dawn: “My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap”. A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a lozenge – all these are forms we can fully and intuitively grasp; Ireno could do the same with the stormy mane of a pony; with a herd of cattle on a hill, with the changing fire and its innumerable ashes, with the many faces of a dead man throughout a long wake. I don’t know how many stars he saw in the sky.

Astro Black is a new work from Australian duo Soda_Jerk – showing at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien until 17 April. The four channel video installation is composed entirely of found materials, remixed to chronicle an alternative version of history according to the glittering vision of Sun Ra – a musician from outer space.

The work is built around the ideas of Afrofuturism, which uses science fiction tropes as an expression of ‘otherness’ and as a means of creating empowering cultural mythologies.

This could be the history of the future.

Astro Black by Soda_Jerk

Künstlerhaus Bethanien
Kottbusser Straße 10
10999 Berlin

And that was it!

Since then I got caught in their web of highly developed narrative techniques and styles, sound games, and most of all, highly interesting subjects.

They start every podcast with a main subject on which they previously developed some research on, to then discuss it with different interviewees, questioning them, debating hypotheses and exploring the subject in every possible direction. The themes range from science to music, society, nature, etc., (they call it “a program about science and curiosities”) and it’s not that they reach any conclusions at the end! but that probably they will make you question simple things that you’ve taken for granted, that you never stopped to think about before, or most important –  make you laugh non-stop!

Make yourself a treat and download some of them to your mp3 player to listen to while going to work in these grayish-dark mornings. They will definitely lift your mood up for the day!