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A Brief Guide to Embodied Cognition: Why You Are Not Your Brain

Coming from the world of outdoor and experiential learning and then the arts and the arts therapies, it seems clear that we think with our bodies as well as our brains. Dancers and climbers both do this. As do joiners and sculptors, painters and decorators and artists. Art as research or art a way of exploring and expressing personal experience connects directly to embodied cognition, but the output of exploration or research is art and experience. If we are seeking models for understanding art making experiences and or outdoor experiences, embodied cognition is a kind of conduit to shift ideas from one context to another.

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The Spiritual Side of Performance – Hyperallergic

This goes with Rhirhi talking about unity below. The spirit does not care what colour you are, or what gender you are, or what religion you are. Art and performance have had an ancient connection to spirituality, with ritual playing a big part in creating unity. The Celts put precious objects in water to connect with the gods and most ancient artform has a connection to the spirit or to gods. Pat B Allen, creator of Open Studio Process, a form of art therapy talks about art as 'spritual technology.' Irving Lavin the renouned art historian says art is art history and as such is a 'natural science of the spirit.' What is interesting about this article is that this performance series has now developed a history, after, as Justin Hoover the curator observes, the energy of the performance harks back to the 60's. There is also reference to performative element in which the inclusion for performers is based on interest and not competence. This seems to be in the spirit of art as a form of personal research.

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Richard Long in Mexico

Richard Long changed my life. I was doing an urban outdoor programme in Liverpool, England, and went to see the first ever show at Tate Liverpool, called Starlit Waters - British Sculpture. An International Art 1968 - 1988. Saw Richard Long, Anish Kapoor, Alison Wilding, Hamish Fulto, Barry Flanagan, Tony Cragg, Art and Language, Ian Hamilton Filay, on and on... The man who walked into that show was a different man to the one that walked out. I did hiking for my job and here was a guy who made hiking into art. I was renderd speechless. It was the sheer physicality of it and that it was objects I would have never thought of as 'sculpture'.

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The Internet As Place

This links to ideas by James Bridle, that we use the internet on our pc's and devices, and it inhabits 'The Cloud' and forget it is a physical thing. All our data is on a server somewhere, which means it is on a hard drive in a building owned by someone somewhere. The building will be remote from whatever location you are in, so it has to be transmitted through devices in the real physical world. This is a great bit of art as research, in terms of the photographer researching the internet as a physical, offline, entity.

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Pottery Meets Experimental Animation in this Spinning Ceramic Phonotrope

Given a pot is made on a spinning potters wheel, I can see how this idea took form. Follow the link to the original article and there is a short movie about the making of the pot. It shows how the conception and execution would require the application of maths, geometry, physics, chemistry, and imagination. I like the way the image of a bird taking flight shows how birds fly off into a headwind with their wings static and simply extended to increase lift from the tree. The tree moves like it is being buffeted by wind. It is so well observed. Also at the foot of the page are links to a lot more artworks which apply the principle of the Phonotrope and the Zeotrope.

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Jessica Drenk – Artist

The artist Jessica Drenk is an American artist raised in Montana, where she developed an appreciation for the natural world that remains an important inspiration to her artwork today. Tactile and textural, her sculptures highlight the chaos and beauty that can be found in simple materials. Drenk’s work is also influenced by systems of information and the impulse to develop an encyclopedic understanding of the world.