New Address

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June Pressings

Living in Time

The motion of oscillation...introduces temporal pulse in living organisms, and is its basic pulse, or measure. Indeed, it can perhaps be said that internal temporal organisation is a fundamental requirement, as well as symptom, of life. Trying to answer the question posed by Erwin Schrodinger, which was simply 'What is life?', a mathematician, Jonathan D. H. Smith, posits that 'biological systems' are 'systems complex enough to isolate their component space-times' -- in other words, to structure the indeterminate flow of time and space through internal dynamics. Organisms are highly organised forms, and the internal structuring of time through regular motion seems to be among the earliest and most universal features of organic life. This, in fact, corresponds to what we actually know through simple observation: living organisms are entities which move of their own accord, while inanimate matter moves only under the application of external force. The measurement of organic time through oscillation also echoes philosophical intuitions dating back to Aristotle, who thought that time is the measure of motion ('the numeration of continuous movement').

-- from Time by Eva Hoffman

via The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Milwaukee

Two Sculptures

Always Hungry

I have been very busy in the studio. I have three new large paintings for my shows this spring. They're getting close to done.

Minds Without Brains

Is it correct to say that plants forage for light, or that they actively avoid shade? Should we say that plants decide where to send out their roots, that they know that they should send roots down into the ground and stems up toward the sky? Is the plasticity and growth of plants to be compared with the free movement and action of animals? These are interesting and important questions that deserve our attention. I won't comment on them any further here other than to notice that if plants have minds, then perhaps they show that you don't need a brain to have a mind, and that's a strange and exciting possibility.

--Alva Noë, writing here