Pictorial Maps of the Human Mind | Eyegiene Backstory in History

source

Cool New Exhibit at the Tate Modern, London

Thanks to my wanderlusting culturevulture, friend,
and Textmex Galleryblog contributor,
Eduardo "Eddie" Santacruz for the tip!

Cool Exhibit at the Smithsonian

Cool, Eyegienic Typography/Ransom Note Page

Very Cool New Video...

Typophile Film Festival 5 Opening Titles from Brent Barson on Vimeo.

Illusion and Reality | from AdBusters

Another Chapter in the History of Racialized "Entertainment" in America

This movie makes a cameo in my chapter on Mandingo in Eyegiene: Permutations of Subjectivity in the Televisual Age of Sex and Race. Hit the image for the boingboing.net link.

The Secret Powers of Time | Word/Image Meditations on Time by Philip Zombardo

source: boingboing.net

Eyegiene Fever: Chicago Style

Regular Textmex Galleryblog miscreant Daphne Strassman zapped in a note with a link for a story on a new optics-inspired sculpture invading Chicago next year--hit the eye for the skinny via boingboing.net.

Mark Dery on Cancer, Solipsism, Adult Diapers, TMI and More...

Mark Dery has been channeling the cultural studies zeitgeist in evocative ways for decades and I have been in rapt admiration of his work (I taught it as a graduate student in 1986 at Cornell) since Culture Jamming appeared. Needless to say, his DNA are everywhere you look in Eyegiene.

His latest take? A piece on "sharing," cancer, 'loving the panoption,' and more; a taste--with a link that follows...

The most obvious evidence of that cultural dynamic lies in those moments where the real and the virtual collide. As I’ve argued elsewhere, the totemic technologies of our times—the cellphone, the iPod, the Blackberry—are turning our psyches inside out, reversing the polarities of public and private. They make solitude portable, encapsulating the solipsistic self in a media bubble. More and more, we’re alone in public, oblivious to the world around us. Thus the ubiquitous obscenity of couples sitting together in restaurants, each gazing vacantly into the middle distance as he or she brays into a phone, or of people unashamedly texting away in the midst of social gatherings or, even more scandalously, during movies, the screen’s glow distracting everyone nearby. (A friend recently witnessed a scuffle between a compulsive texter and another moviegoer, who in a paroxysm of irritation snatched the woman’s phone from her.) Yet more dramatic evidence of the growing tension between electronic solipsism in public spaces can be found in the ever more common phenomenon of the stranger with the headset, chattering blithely about her irritable bowel as she elbows past you at the supermarket meat counter, or—even more appallingly—the cellphone conversation floating out of a bathroom stall, punctuated by the unmistakable plop of a bowel movement in progress. (Is there a surer sign that Western civilization is in its terminal stages?)

We are redrawing the boundaries of publicly acceptable behavior along medieval lines, when privacy, in the modern sense, was virtually unknown.

Do we really need more radical transparency?

Something is in the Eye of the Beholder or Jesus Christ, Stud

Eyegienic musings must, as a matter of course, grapple with the dynamics of the trompe l'oeil--the fooling of the eye (the eye being that most faithful of organs, as if!). In any event, this story, just in over the transom from Michael Wyatt Harper, conjoins religion, erotica, and semiotics in new ways. Click Jesus for the story.

Cool New Animation: MARS

via drawn.ca--a cautionary tale...

Eyegiene | Contact Lens Edition

Thanks to eyegienic correspondent MWH for the link.

New Camera Design: A Marriage of the Rifle and Camera

Will Varner | Eyegienic Vision

Thanks to fellow cultural studies scoptophiliac Michael Wyatt Harper (profe @ Mt. San Antonio College) for the link.

Elene Usdin

Sometimes I just fall across the work of artists who naturally surf the Eyegiene vein--explored in my forthcoming book for UT Press. Elene Usdin is one of these gifted seers. Click the image opposite to enter her site.

The work opposite comes from a dossier entitled "La chambre"--some representations here may be NSFW depending on the aesthetic vision (or blindness) of your employer.