Videos by topic: CULTURE
THE BOOK OF REVELATION: PROPHECY AND POLITICS EDGE MASTER CLASS 2011
"Why is religion still alive? Why are people still engaged in old folk takes and mythological stories — even those without rational and ethical foundations."
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Edge@DLD | An Edge Conversation in Munich
Introduction by Andrian Kreye
[1.24.11]
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THE HARD PROBLEM
"The notion of robustness became my recent obsession. How to be a robust? It's not clear; it's the hard problem — and that's my problem."
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DON'T DISAPPEAR INTO A DREAM
"I was not writing for an audience. I was writing for myself. I was making something for myself. And then just hoping that maybe somebody else had similar interests. But of course, in the early days, 75 percent of my audience would walk out after 20 minutes. And being a young Turk, I thought that was great, because it proved I was making real stuff. But I still have a very ambivalent attitude towards the audience, which is one of the things I've always hated about the theatre, because I believe that people, en masse, always have a reaction that is lower and less interesting than any individual person that you can confront and have a relationship with."
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On Being Original in Science in Art
"I'm going to talk about some convergences, about arts and science, as far apart as science and religion, two magisteria, if you might say, and yet at some human level they converge."
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THE END OF UNIVERSAL RATIONALITY
"We have a lot of sophisticated analyses that try, with great precision, to predict and describe existing systems in terms of an assumption of universal rationality and a sub-assumption that what that rationality tries to do is maximize returns to the self. Yet we live in a world where that's not actually what we experience. The big question now is how we cover that distance between what we know very intuitively in our social relations, and what we can actually build with."
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ART AND HUMAN REALITY
"Darwinian aesthetics is not some kind of ironclad doctrine that is supposed to replace a heavy postructuralism with something just as oppressive. What surprises me about the resistance to the application of Darwin to psychology, is the vociferous way in which people want to dismiss it, not even to consider it. Is this a holdover from Marxism or religious doctrines? I don't know. Stephen Jay Gould was one of those people who had the idea that evolution was allowed to explain everything about me, my fingernails, my pancreas, the way my body is designed—except that it could have nothing to say about anything above the neck. About human psychology, nothing could be explained in evolutionary terms: we just somehow developed a big brain with its spandrels and all, and that's it."
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FROM INFORMATION TO MOTIVATION
"What motivates people? What is it that people want to figure out, and when do they decide, "Hey, I've got to go find some information," and how can we get them to do that more, to find the information, and then use it in their life?"
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A RULE OF THE GAME
"These are exhibitions which are not material, but which are more virtual, virtual in the sense of them always being able to be reactualized. They can be revisited and reactualized and updated, and they are also not related to a place. The exhibition can go to where the viewer is. Anybody in the world can download these formulas and pin them on the wall, or they can do their own and trigger their own formulas. We are in the very early days of understanding how the Internet can be used for exhibitions."
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THE TRADESCANT'S ARK EXPERIMENT
"There are 43 stones passing amongst you. It’s called the Tradescant's Ark Experiment and I’ve named it in honor of John Tradescant and John Tradescant, Sr. and Jr., father and son, who were collectors of things in the 17th century. They were the exhibitors of the world's first pay-to-view museum and they had a cabinet of curiosities set up in Lambeth, on the Thames, which much later was sold to Elias Ashmole and became the germ of the Ashmolean Museum. Not much of it survives, there are little parts of it in the Ashmolen Museum. What is more important is the intellectual move they made in the catalog, which John Tradescant the younger created and in which he distinguished between 2 types of things, naturalls and artificialls. He divided all the things he collected into those he thought were natural and those that were modified by human hand—what archaelogists today call artifacts."
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