Bogotissimo!

The MIT Press is having a winter white sale.

noindex, nofollow meta-tags: more necessary than ever.

A group of neuroscientists have come forward on Nature to call for the right of (responsible) use of nootropic medication. Their points are as follow:

1. Based on our considerations, we call for a presumption that mentally competent adults should be able to engage in cognitive enhancement using drugs.

2. We call for an evidence-based approach to the evaluation of the risks and benefits of cognitive enhancement.

3. We call for enforceable policies concerning the use of cognitive-enhancing drugs to support fairness, protect individuals from coercion and minimize enhancement-related socioeconomic disparities.

4. We call for a programme of research into the use and impacts of cognitive-enhancing drugs by healthy individuals.

5. We call for physicians, educators, regulators and others to collaborate in developing policies that address the use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by healthy individuals.

6. We call for information to be broadly disseminated concerning the risks, benefits and alternatives to pharmaceutical cognitive enhancement.

7. We call for careful and limited legislative action to channel cognitive-enhancement technologies into useful paths.

They list 4 drugs in the article (Ritalin, Adderall, Provigil, and something for Alzheimer I hadn’t heard of), but they should have gone into more - making a case for Adderall, which are amphetamine salts, is more troublesome than for Bupropion, which hits on the same receptors but is famous as smoking cessation medicine. Otherwise, it was about time this began to be heard. Hope the debate will be less stale than the one on recreational drugs. ^^

Des Imagistes online.

Tom Moody writes about a recent schism in Digital Art and proposes a new taxonomy: “new media artists” vs “artists with computers.” Here:

New media suggests a respect for hardware & software and belief in their newness, something artists with computers don’t care about. New media involves a finicky devotion to programming and process, whereas artists with computers are bulls in the Apple Shop. (…) Lastly, new media artists define themselves in relation to Lev Manovich’s principles (”new media objects exist as data,” etc.) and artists with computers find those confining, impractical, and overly utopian.

Boy, do we even need to state this? The kids that are making fancy wallpapers and squiggly trippy things in Processing do not belong with the conceptual artists with works about code they can’t write themselves.

By the end of the post:

New media artists scoff at the art world’s notions of art yet want very much to be approved according to those criteria.

Tom Moody is saying: what the coder guys do is not art, but there is no telling them that. His divide is clear: there are “new media artists”, as there are, for example, “circus artists.” Nothing wrong with that. And then there are Artists, capital A, and among those, there are some who happen to be interested in computers right now. High Art and Low Art, all over again - do we really want to start this discussion? I don’t even think the two groups are moving apart - they have always been separate, far apart in spirit, and only meet when they are lumped together by curators and critics who don’t know any better. This is not the case with photography, that, early experimentation aside, branched out in different movements from a fairly singular origin. Lush, superficial spectacle and arid, challenging works you need the catalog to understand do not mix, and there are more, rather than less, people who don’t understand this today.

=o

i made this. you play this. we are enemies., a, er, game-art work, is making the links rounds this week. Suffices to say that net-art pretty much started with dadaist collage, and it’s been a while since then, and I don’t get the what whole new excitement is all about. The oft-copied recipe now includes a ball you can move around, which I guess is why this is cool again.* And: screenshots, newspaper cuts, logos for large Internet corporations, self-reference, text about links: everything feels so dated!

Taking the opportunity to bitch some more: at least we are not seeing another offshoot of the weaker theories of Electronic Fiction. A misguided emphasis on interactivity - and, for some, even on immersion through interactivity - back in more innocent days eventually led theorists, Stuart Moulthrop all the way to Janet Murray, to shift interests from literature to videogames, where the stuff might find some practical use. Losing your scholars to Videogame Theory is quite a punch on the stomach. Poor e-lit.

* of course you could use just the same argument over the jodi link there.