Wednesday, May 24, 2017

Re: [Yasmin_discussions] art*science 2017 - The New and History

Ken,

here we go again: Italy, a synecdoche for entire Mediterranean as soon as
food is on the table!

Indeed Shanghai is home to plenty of Italian expats. I was told, by an
Italian, of course, that the best Kung fu teacher in entire Shanghai is, in
fact, Italian! This argument was heavily supported with references, though
not so thoroughly as you would expect from Academic Zoo, see Tiger (2017)
and Panda (to be published in 2018).

Not to mention, I was once invited to one of those Shanghainese-Expatriate
pop-up restaurants downtown with no fixed location. On the menu was "Cucina
Triestina" (Trieste, or Trst in Slovenian, is an Italian town just minutes
from my home and their traditional dishes are a mix of Italian, Slovenian
and you guessed it - the Austrians - a quite complicated situation, as one
would expect of the Mediterranean). I had to pass that offer in disbelief -
too many references, perhaps?

I do admit though, expat food saved my day on many occasions and I would
recommend a food market & brunch restaurant (name escapes me) in French
Concession (a touch of Mediterranean again) with amazing imported food
going just a bit beyond Italian, offering even a Spanish version of
prosciutto! You can buy all the ingredients from the dishes that are served
there separately and there is also a noteworthy collection of designer
products on sale.

Enjoy your trip!

Živa


On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 11:46 PM, Ken Friedman <
ken.friedman.sheji@icloud.com> wrote:

> Dear Živa,
>
> Thank you for your reply. You've brought good issues forward. I must think!
>
> Heading off to Shanghai tomorrow — and I can tell you that I don't speak
> very well.
>
> The good news is that we have a touch of Mediterranean culture at the
> Tongji University College of Design and Innovation. One of our graduates
> launched a very successful restaurant, then another, and a few more. When
> we built our new building, Dean Lou Yongqi had a great idea — he asked the
> grad to build a location on campus with a break in prices for students and
> staff. That's what happened.
>
> The pizza is excellent — based on the Mediterranean pizza, thin crust,
> crispy and delightful. Despite the fact that I live in Europe, I can't get
> pizza that good here in Sweden. Some days, I don't even get to my office. I
> stop for an espresso on the way, then I use the WiFi to do my work, then it
> is time for lunch, then another coffee. People see me and stop in to talk,
> and by then, I have found that the day is over. So I eat dinner and then go
> back to my hotel.
>
> The café also caters our conferences. So if you visit us at D&I … you have
> more to look forward to than good conversation. The conversation will be
> good, and there will be more than conversation.
>
> Yours,
>
> Ken
>
>
> > On May 24, 2017, at 11:03 PM, Ziva Ljubec <ziva.ljubec@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> —snip—
>
> > Choice of language on the side, there are some other lost or loose points
> > in translations of my mind and I'm very glad Ken examines and challenges
> > every proposition thoroughly. As you say Ken: "Artists may make
> imaginative
> > propositions, but I have yet to see an artist make rigorous use of
> digital
> > neural nets to test and compare the outcomes of different parameters. It
> is
> > true that some scientific disciplines don't overlap. We already know
> this."
> >
> > Perhaps it is nonetheless worth the emphasis: more than not overlapping,
> > scientific disciplines leave uncovered territories behind. There is an
> > "undisciplined zone" of unknown proportions, conceivably claimed only by
> > transdisciplinarians. We may know many interdisciplinarians borrowing
> > methods from one discipline or another, but who are the
> > transdisciplinarians, by broadest, far stretched definition, transcending
> > the methods of any scientific discipline?
> >
> > Take a researcher on the brink of her significant scientific discovery,
> she
> > enters the zone where no previous method holds, she needs to carve her
> own
> > path as she advances, and rather than blindly relying on the existent
> > methodology, she is relying on her intuition. She works her way as a
> > prodigious artist does - all along transmuting the "methods". Whether she
> > is a scientist or an artist on the brink of her discovery is not the
> right
> > question to ask. These categories become obsolete when one enters the
> > transdisciplinary zone.
> >
> > If you entertain that thought, imagination plays a primary role. But of
> > course you expect more, we all, in fact, simply hope that the researcher
> > returns from the transdisciplinary into a disciplined mode of reasoning
> and
> > readjusts our current methods. You go further and draw a line: "It is
> > useful to distinguish between imaginary propositions and well argued
> > proposals. Imaginary propositions help us to understand why something is
> > important in terms of emotion, feeling, and ethics. In this sense,
> > imaginary futures explain "Why." Well argued proposals offer responsible
> > ways forward toward the world as we want it to be. In this sense, solid
> > proposals explain "How."
> >
> > I wouldn't delineate it quite that way. The imaginary solutions are the
> > result of the ever changing approach, intuitive, but not necessarily, in
> > the common sense, ethical or emotional, they are rather breaking the
> > boundaries of the common sense, exposing the alien and uncommon in us.
> Most
> > importantly the imaginary is not a how-to generalized solution to a set
> of
> > problems but rather the know-how of action and reaction at every
> encounter
> > with the problem.
> >
> > In short to answer your challenge: I haven't seen "an artist make
> rigorous
> > use of digital neural nets" either but already some researchers in AI
> seem
> > to just go with the flow, experimenting outside disciplines, inventing
> new
> > methods, allowing even their creations to invent their own methods, which
> > creators themselves already have a difficulty understanding. We have to
> try
> > and understand what these creations understand about us for so many
> > unsettling reasons, but we also want to understand what they understand
> out
> > of pure innocent curiosity.
>
> —snip—
>
> --
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