Fred Tomaselli, Big Eye, 2009. Photocollage, acrylic, resin on wood panel, 2.1 x 2.1m. ‘Soul is the ring around your bathtub’ sings George Clinton on Funkadelic’s eponymous 1970 debut album. Funkadelic’s concept of soul is perhaps more intuitive than, say, Aristotle’s, but the image of the ring around your bathtub – a dirty halo as an emission of the physical self – perfectly reflects the idea that an individual consists of a physical body, and something else that is intangible but integral: the soul, self or spirit, a life force that both animates the body and makes us who we are. Separating the self from our fleshy containers has always been a complex operation and, 5,000 years after the Egyptians began to think about it, we still don’t know where we are. As well as running on a desktop or laptop platform, Perception Web can also be viewed on any Smart Phone or Tablet. The data displays provided by Perception Web are designed to automatically adapt to suit the screen size of the device. Ge transformer connections manual. Perception Web can be configured to run as an Intranet or Internet service. While we tend to consider the brain to be the seat of the self, other cultures have pointed to the heart or the liver. It may turn out that all these guesses are correct and the components of the self are diffused throughout the body. Soul Searching SynonymBuy Life Of Agony - Soul Searching Sun (180g ORANGE / YELLOW Audiophile Vinyl LP Record from Music On Vinyl) at Northern Volume, an independent Canadian record store. A few years ago a dense nerve bundle, described as a ‘second brain’ containing more nerve cells than the spinal cord, was discovered in the stomach. Actually, it was first found in the 19th century, then forgotten about, but its re-discoverery has identified it as a possible seat of emotional and instinctual behaviours – those gut feelings we all get. Getting weirder, a handful of transplant patients claim to have taken on distinct new personality traits and dreamed of being someone else after receiving major organs from anonymous donors. It’s reported that, on seeking out their replacement parts’ original owners, they realized that their new character tics also once belonged to the organs’ donors. A possible physical explanation for this comes from Dr Candace Pert, a pharmacologist at Georgetown University, who suggests that some of the elements that make up our selves, including emotions and memories, are carried around the body by neuropeptides, chemical communicators between the major organs and the brain. How To Do Soul Searching![]() ![]() Austin Osman Spare recognized the unconscious as a rich vein of imagery and developed automatic drawing techniques to explore it years before the French Surrealists. These new discoveries bring modern scientific concepts of the self closer to the ancient models described by the Egyptians and Greeks, but the frontiers of the mind may never be as thrilling as they were in the late 19th century when, in search of the self, pioneers such as William James, Sigmund Freud and the early Society for Psychical Research (spr) climbed into their bathyspheres and sank deep into the darkness of the newly-emerging unconscious mind. While revolutionary in many ways, these explorations formed a continuum with the past. The universal notion that the soul had form segued strangely into the body horror of Freud’s libido, while the spirit realm, familiar from most religions and was then being scientized by the spr, shared its borders with the emerging landscapes of the unconscious. This uneasy, temporary alliance between science and spirit produced some curious experiments. In 1907, Dr Duncan MacDougall, a Massachusetts surgeon, weighed six people and 15 dogs as they crossed the threshold from life to death. The first patient lost three quarters of an ounce (21 grammes) which MacDougall hastily declared to be the weight of the soul, ignoring the ambiguous results presented by the other five subjects. Stamping the seal of science onto the already over-exposed art of spirit photography, MacDougall attempted next to capture the departing soul on camera, as did a Chicago-based photographer, Patrick O’Donnell, using plates developed by a technician at St Thomas’ Hospital, London. It’s in these strange interstitial spaces that some of the most fully-developed collisions of art, science and spirit took place, driven by the sense that, like heroic big game hunters, explorers of these invisible territories could bring something back.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |