The cardiovascular system has the life‐providing task of delivering oxygen and any flaw in this system can be life‐threatening. This has encouraged extensive studies to elucidate the mechanisms behind cardiovascular development/homeostasis. The zebrafish has emerged as a formidable tool to speed up this quest, as illustrated in a recent issue of Nature Genetics.1 Baculovirus IAP repeat c2 (BIRC2), also termed cellular inhibitor of apoptosis (cIAP)‐1, was found to specifically prevent endothelial cells (ECs, lining the inside of vessels) from going into (...) suicide mode (‘apoptosis’) and so preserve vessel integrity. Here, we summarize the factors determining vascular integrity and elaborate on the suitability of the zebrafish to study this phenomenon. BioEssays 30:418–422, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In the 21st century, the screen - the Internet screen, the television screen, the video screen and all sorts of combinations thereof - will be booming in our visual and infotechno culture. Screen-based art, already a prominent and topical part of visual culture in the 1990s, will expand even more. In this volume, digital art - the new media - as well as its connectedness to cinema will be the subject of investigation. The starting point is a two-day symposium organized (...) by the Netherlands Media Art Institute Montevideo/TBA, in collaboration with the _L&B _ series and the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. Issues which emerged during the course of investigation deal with questions such as: How could screen-based art be distinguished from other art forms? Could screen-based art theoretically be understood in one definite model or should one search for various possibilities and/or models? Could screen-based art be canonized? What are the physical and theoretical forms of representation for screen-based art? What are the idiosyncratic concepts geared towards screen-based art? This volume includes various arguments, positions, and statements by artists, curators, philosophers, and theorists. The participants are Marie-Luise Angerer, Annette W. Balkema, René Beekman, Raymond Bellour, Peter Bogers, Joost Bolten, Noël Carroll, Sean Cubitt, Cãlin Dan, Chris Dercon, Honoré d'O, Anne-Marie Duquet, Ken Feingold, Ursula Frohne, hARTware curators, Heiner Holtappels, Aernout Mik, Patricia Pisters, Nicolaus Schafhausen, Jeffrey Shaw, Peter Sloterdijk, Ed S. Tan, Barbara Visser and Siegfried Zielinski. (shrink)

'Standstill' could be the name for the exact kind of experience that is the hiatus between social expectations and real possibilities of agency. Standstill may also be the name of an aesthetic strategy to instill a non-linear time of resistance and experience into the political protocol of progress. Finally, standstill can be the name for the temporal fissure in the midst of the subject, for the lapse between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of a statement, the limit (...) that is the border between the inside and the outside. It can be the name for the mode of potentiality, for the moment of gesture, or, with Walter Benjamin, the medium of the dialectical image. The essays of this book transverse these dimensions of standstill as an in-between of time. The book includes essays by Georges Didi-Huberman, David Lapoujade, Peter Osborne, Jacques Rancière, Christine Ross, and others as well as conversations with Via Lewandowsky, Aernout Mik and Marcel Odenbach." -- Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Ereignet sich anstelle von Klang oder Sprache, Musik oder Lärm lediglich Stille oder vielmehr das, was wir für Stille halten, kommt ein unerwartetes Aufmerken in Gang. Die Stille kann auffordern, genauer hinzuhören, aber auch genauer hinzusehen. Ein plötzliches Aufmerken geschieht jedoch nur, wenn die Stille den Wahrnehmenden unerwartet trifft. Einer im Alltäglichen zumeist durch die Priorität des Bewussten, Bekannten oder Vertrauten untergeordneten Stille, können Arbeiten, wie jene von Aernout Mik, eine konkrete Erfahrbarkeit geben. Was er erfahrbar werden lässt, ist (...) aber nicht die Stille, sondern das, was in der Regel überhört wird. In der Verkehrung des vermeintlich Unhörbaren in ein Hörbares zeigt sich mit der Stille ein Möglichkeitsraum, dessen Besonderheit die Autorin mit der Frage, was sich in der Erfahrung von Stille zeigt, nachgeht. Ist also von einer Stille als ästhetischem Phänomen die Rede, ist nicht eine Stille innerhalb der Rezeption genuin stiller Kunstwerke gemeint, sondern der bewusste Entzug des Auditiven. Damit widerspricht die Autorin zugleich einer Vorstellung von Stille als mess- oder bestimmbarer Grösse und stellt die Stille aus der ästhetischen Erfahrung heraus ins Zentrum ihrer Betrachtungen. (shrink)