Part/Whole : Clippings on Mereology

"(1)	The handle is part of the mug.
(2)	This cap is part of my pen.
(3)	The left half is your part of the cake.
(4)	The cutlery is part of the tableware.
(5)	The contents of this bag is only part of what I bought.
(6)	That area is part of the living room.
(7)	The outermost points are part of the perimeter.
(8)	The first act was the best part of the play."

"(12)	The conclusion is part of the argument.
(13)	The domain of quantification is part of the model.
(14)	The suffix is part of the official file name.
(15)	Rationality is part of personhood."

"regardless of how one feels about matters of ontology, if ‘part’ stands for the general relation exemplified by (1)-(8) and (12)-(15) above, then it stands for a partial ordering—a reflexive, transitive, antisymmetric relation:

(16)	Everything is part of itself.
(17)	Any part of any part of a thing is itself part of that thing.
(18)	Two distinct things cannot be part of each other."

"As it turns out, virtually every theory put forward in the literature accepts (16)–(18), though it is worth mentioning some misgivings that may, and occasionally have been, raised."

- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Vermeer

Vermeer has long been one of my favorite painters. I learned from copying his paintings, using oil paint, charcoal and cut colored paper.

I found this analysis of his technique and careful control of paint, ranging from thin glaze to dense impasto, at the National Gallery of Arts website: using imperceptible brush strokes and finely ground paint to effect, varying from thin to thick as highlights vary from soft to intense, dragging course paint over less less course paint to achieve irregular edges and texture, understanding the optical characteristics of color to infuse coolness or warmth.

Shifting Ravens

My thoughts are wondering.

Read Poe's The Raven and thought about different bird -- red winged blackbirds. Growing up, we had a particularly vicious territorial red-winged blackbird that took over our backyard. It swept down on anyone who tried to take the garbage down to the cans by the alley, not that I needed an excuse to avoid this chore, as this particular chore never fell on me.

I usually think of ravens as an omen of death. The raven, however, also symbolizes protection, initiation and healing, and the death of one thing to bring forth another (to the Celts). Attributes include eloquence. Native Americans associate ravens with a positive change in consciousness and with shape shifting. Change seems key. Complicated birds.

Apparently, ravens live in the Tower of London. Their wings are clipped, lest they were to fly away and disaster were to befall England. Poor birds. Wonder if they want to shape shift.

The association with shape shifting could let ravens operate metaphorically in an artwork to denote formal shift, except that in an image the shift can be seen as one of the set view, rather than a difference in form itself. A square rotated to be viewed at its edge becomes a line. A cube viewed dead on from one side is a square. Perhaps what occurs with the shift between life and death, conscious and unconscious, is simply a shift in the view.

Theory Verses Practice

Temple Grandin spoke at Ars Scientia at the Chicago Cultural Center a couple days ago. 

One observation, or at least my interpretation of the observation, sticks in my head.  She compared bottom up thinking and top down thinking, observing that abstract thinkers can lose sight of the ground.  This strikes me as very relevant to conceptual art, which can easily get lost in its own airy logic, loops and associations, while losing sight of materials and play with materials and forms that ground art.

I also particular enjoy her focus on the perceptual lens through which we see.  She talked about getting into cow chutes to see what the cows saw.  As artists, we have to have an awareness of what viewers may see (on a ground level) and may think (on a bigger picture level), and how words and pictures translate through different lens.  It's always a translation -- we are never another person -- but awareness can foster communications in which less is seemingly lost in the translation.

Paradigm Shift: Quantum Philosophy

From an article about Quantum Philosophy.:

"Other philosophers call for a sea change in our very modes of thought. After Einstein introduced his theory of relativity, ... 'we threw out the old Euclidean notion of space and time, and now we have a more generalised notion.' Quantum theory may demand a similar revamping of our concepts of rationality and logic, Bub says. Boolean logic, which is based on either- or propositions, suffices for a world in which an atom goes either through one slit or the other, but not both slits. "Quantum mechanical logic is non-Boolean," he comments. " Once you understand that, it may make sense." Bub concedes, however, that none of the so-called quantum logic systems devised so far has proved very convincing."

"A different kind of paradigm shift is envisioned by Wheeler.The most profound lesson of quantum mechanics, he remarks, is that physical phenomena are somehow defined by the questions we ask of them. " This is in some sense a participatory universe," he says. The basis of reality may not be the quantum, which despite its elusiveness is still a physical phenomenon, but the bit, the answer to a yes-or-no question,which is the fundamental currency of computing and communications. Wheeler calls his idea "the it from bit. Following Wheeler's lead, various theorists are trying to recast quantum physics in terms of information theory..."

Yawn: More than being tired or bored.

Discovery news suggests yawning is a response to brain temperature.