coyu3's posterous

Pull the Units Down

via sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy by noreply@blogger.com (owen hatherley) on 11/2/11

Despite earlier gripes I'm going to be giving several talks about Uncommon over the next month or so; one at the Architectural Association in London (of all places) on 10th November; one in Oxford as part of their Zero Books Season on 15th November; and another in Zagreb at the Centre for Drama Art on 17th November (no link as yet). There's also a campaign to make 'Cunts are Still Running the World' Xmas number 1. As you can see above it is a cause richly worth supporting.

Talks on other matters, connected to another thing, more of which will be revealed presently: I'll be expounding on post-Soviet squares in Cambridge on 8th November; on the paradoxes of modernism and conservation at the ASCHB on 9th November; on the 'socialist skyscraper' at the Historical Materialism conference on the 11th; and at Pushkin House in London I'll be taking part in a season on Constructivism, laterally connected with the current RA exhibition: one solo talk on Communist Constructivism on 23rd November, and taking part in a debate on the built legacy of the Soviet avant-garde on the 30th.

Some writings: Urban Trawl in Aberdeen; below, in case missed, long ramble about industry; linked to that, long and equally rambling post on the Lloyds Building for The 80s Blog. I've also written a short text for photographer Robin Maddock's book lovingly depicting that most jolie-laide of British cities, Plymouth, God Forgotten Face.

Go and read these instead: the now-regularly blog-updating Agata Pyzik causing a scrap on matters Ostalgic with this superb Frieze piece; the excellent English-language Polish politics/economy blog Beyond the Transition; Jones the Planner on an English city which oddly hasn't completely screwed itself up; Douglas Murphy on Summerland; and the 70s, 80s and 90s blogs are still generating the best online writing around.

Cognition and Decision in Nonhuman Biological Organisms

via The Pinocchio Theory by Steven Shaviro on 10/28/11

My edited volume, Cognition and Decision in Nonhuman Biological Organisms, has just been published as part of the new Living Books About Life series from Open Humanities Press.

I’m excited about the entire Living Books About Life series. It represents a new form of collaboration between scientists and scholars in the humanities. And it is entirely open access as well. Each volume contains a number of crucial science articles, collected (or curated) and introduced by a humanities scholar.

My own volume covers topics such as “free will” in fruit flies, moods and emotional tones in bees, and more generally processes of affect, cognition, and decision found not just in animals, but in other sorts of organisms (trees, slime molds, bacteria) as well.

When the biologist and science fiction writer Joan Slonczewski, in her recent novel The Highest Frontier , envisions plants that display a sense of humor, and that can learn to resolve “Prisoners Dilemma” situations with mutual cooperation, she isn’t extrapolating all that much from what we actually already know about “mental” operations even in entities that have few or no neurons.

- Robin James, “In, But Not Of, Of But Not In: On Taste, Hipness, and White Embodiment”