Recommended Reading

Benjamin Berlin - Childhood around 1900 translators foreword

Recommended Reading

Extract - Marcel Proust

Dream Research

: The Exhibition Dream and Reality

With the exhibition Dream and Reality-Modern and Contemporary Women Artists from Turkey, İstanbul Modern aims to show Turkey’s social and cultural transformation as seen through the eyes of female artists. The exhibition, which is centered on the position of women in the art world, offers a new, alternative perspective on the sociocultural history of Turkey.

Curated by Fatmagül Berktay, Levent Çalıkoğlu, Zeynep İnankur, and Burcu Pelvanoğlu, the exhibition includes artworks from the mid-19th century through to the present day and incorporates many different disciplines ranging from painting to video.

The exhibition, which can also act as a summary of modern and contemporary Turkish art, links seventy-four artists: including pioneering women artists about whose lives and works we know very little and whose names are almost forgotten; the rediscovered moderns; and women artists who for the last four decades have been shaping the contemporary art scene with their intellectual attitudes and practical actions.

The exhibition takes its title from the 1891 novel Dream and Reality coauthored by Fatma Aliye and Ahmet Midhat. This romance novel features many of the period’s symbolic characteristics; the first part, called “Dream,” was written by Fatma Aliye and the second part, which emphasises reality, by Ahmet Midhat. Fatma Aliye is featured on the cover of the novel with the pen name “A Woman,” therefore only indicating her gender, whereas the author of the “Reality” section is male.

Taking the novel Dream and Reality as its reference point, the exhibition investigates how women artists turn their dreams into reality and conveys, through visual examples, the relationships women artists establish with the different stratum of reality through their productions. It also explores the place of these relationships in today’s contemporary art culture.

By drawing attention to the works of women artists produced over more than a century, the exhibition aims to remind us of their position in the history of art while making visible the ways in which, through their art, they convey their experiences in the social arena. It also, more particularly, shows their pioneering and critical position in the contemporary art world.

The exhibition opens up to discussion the issue of female identity, which in Turkey has taken shape via diverse sociocultural dynamics. Furthermore, in panels, symposia, and workshops held in conjunction with the exhibition, feminist theory, gender discussions, and women’s studies in Turkey will be analyzed by speakers from different disciplines.

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Identity and Femininity Research

A book I read

Hidden Femininity: 20th Century Lingerie - Farid Chenoune

Dream Research

A book I read

Jonathan Borofsky

Identity and Femininity Research

A film

Il Grido

Recommended Reading

MAP - THE ARTIST REMAKE

Dream Research

Today I found out what the things you see when you close your eyes and rub them hard are called, namely “phosphenes”.

A phosphene is characterized by perceiving some form of light when there is little or no light actually entering the eye, making it an entopic phenomenon (meaning the source of the phenomenon is within the eye itself). Phosphenes are most commonly introduced by simply closing your eyes and rubbing them or squeezing them shut, tightly; generally the harder you rub or squeeze, the more phosphenes you’ll see. This pressure stimulates the cells of the retina and, thus, makes your brain think you are seeing light. Specifically, Grüsser et al. demonstrated that pressure in the eye results in activation of retinal ganglion cells in a very similar way to how they activate as a response to light.

There are also several other ways phosphenes can be generated. These include through: electrical stimulation; intense magnetic fields; hallucinogenic drugs (phosphenes not to be confused with hallucinations, which are generated in the brain, not the eye); a blow to the head or a particularly severe sneeze where extra pressure is created in the eye on the retina and possible stimulation of the visual cortex; low blood pressure, which can be experienced if you stand up really fast after you’ve been relaxing; exposure to radiation; meditation or extended visual sensory deprivation; various side effects from medical drugs; and certain diseases of the retina and nerves.

The word “phosphene” was coined by surgeon JBH Savigny deriving from the Greek “phos”, meaning “light”, and “phainein”, meaning “to show”.

When phosphenes show up during meditation, they are more commonly known as “nimitta”. In Buddhist psychology and philosophy, this simply refers to forms, shapes, colors, sounds, etc. perceived during meditation. Prisoners who are being sensory deprived also occasionally will experience this phenomenon; in this case, it is often called “prisoner’s cinema”.
A phosphene is not to be confused with phosphine, which is a toxic and explosive gas.
The first documented electrically produced phosphenes were by neurologist Otfrid Foerster in 1929. The first documented reference to any type of phosphene goes back all the way to the ancient Greeks, though they didn’t call them phosphenes obviously.
Scientists Brindley and Rushton, in 1974, once successfully created a type of visual prosthesis that allowed certain blind people to see Braille spots using phosphenes. This device only works on blind people whose brains were capable of processing visual information, such as those who once could see, but lost their sight in an accident or the like. More recently, researchers have successfully developed brain-computer interfaces for certain blind people that create phosphenes such that it mimics what the person would see, if their eyes worked, so somewhat restoring their vision. Both these visual prosthesis work through electrically produced phosphenes.

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/09/what-the-things-you-see-when-you-close-your-eyes-and-rub-them-are-called/

Identity and Femininity Research

A book I read

Cindy Sherman - October Files

Dream Research

A book I read

The Construction of the Image 1925-1930 - Salvador Dali

Identity and Femininity Research

A book I read

Renoir

Identity and Femininity Research

A book I read

Rossetti

Identity and Femininity Research

A film

Jules and Jim

Recommended Reading

On longing - Susan Stewart

Dream Research

Alice In Wonderland Syndrome (AIWS)

Alice in Wonderland syndrome (AIWS, named after the novel written by Lewis Carroll), also known as Todd's syndrome or lilliputianhallucinations, is a disorienting neurological condition that affects human perception. Sufferers experience dysmetropsia (micropsia, macropsia, pelopsia, teleopsia) or size distortion of other sensory modalities. A temporary condition, it is often associated with migraines, brain tumors, and the use of psychoactive drugs. It can also present as the initial sign of the Epstein–Barr virus (see mononucleosis). Anecdotal reports suggest that the symptoms of AIWS are fairly common in childhood,^{[citation needed]} with many people growing out of them in their teens. It appears that AIWS is also a common experience at sleep onset. Alice in Wonderland Syndrome can be caused by abnormal amounts of electrical activity causing abnormal blood flow in the parts of the brain that process visual perception and texture.

Signs and Symptoms of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome

• The foremost symptom of the Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is an altered body image. The person observes sizes of parts of the body wrongly. More often than not, the head and hands seem disproportionate; and in general, the person perceives growth of various parts rather than a reduction in their size.

• Another most significant symptom of the Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is that the patient perceives the sizes of various other objects inaccurately.

• The trademark symptom of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is migraine.

• The individual loses a sense of time. For him, time seems passes either at a snail's pace, or passes too swiftly.

• Some people experience strong hallucinations; they may visualize things that aren’t there and may also get the wrong impression about certain situations and events.

• Also, like the visual perception gets warped, so does the auditory and tactile perception.

- Wikipedia
- http://www.aliceinwonderlandsyndrome.net