Intra-individual variability (IIV) refers to within-person variability in behavioural task responses. Several factors can influence IIV, including aging and cognitive demands. The present study investigated effects of aging on IIV of response times during executive functioning tasks. Known age-related differences in cognitive control and emotion processing motivated evaluating how varying the design of emotional response inhibition tasks would influence IIV in older and younger adults. We also tested whether IIV predicted inhibitory control across task designs (...) and age groups. Older and younger adults (N = 237) completed one of three versions of a stop-signal task, which all displayed happy, fearful, or neutral faces in Stop trials. An independent group of older and younger adults (N = 80) completed a go/no-go task also employing happy, fearful and neutral faces. Results showed older adults had more consistent responses (lower IIV) than younger adults in the stop-signal task, but not the go/no-go task. Lower IIV predicted more efficient emotional response inhibition for fear faces in the stop-signal task, but only when attention to emotion was task-relevant. Collectively, this study clarifies effects of aging and task design on IIV and illustrates how task design impacts the relationship between IIV and emotional response inhibition in younger and older adults. (shrink)

The investigation of how humans perceive and respond to emotional signals conveyed by the human body has been for a long time secondary compared with the investigation of facial expressions and emotional scenes recognition. The aims of this behavioral study were to assess the ability to process emotional body postures and to test whether motor response is mainly driven by the emotional content of the picture or if it is influenced by motor resonance. Emotional body postures and scenes (...) (IAPS) divided into three clusters (fear, happiness, and neutral) were shown to 25 healthy subjects (13 males, mean age ± SD: 22.3 ± 1.8 years) in a three-alternative forced choice task. Subjects were asked to recognize the emotional content of the pictures by pressing one of three keys as fast as possible in order to estimate response times (RTs). The rating of valence and arousal was also performed. We found shorter RTs for fearful body postures as compared with happy and neutral postures. In contrast, no differences across emotional categories were found for the IAPS stimuli. Analysis on valence and arousal and the subsequent item analysis showed an excellent reliability of the two sets of images used in the experiment. Our results show that fearful body postures are rapidly recognized and processed, probably thanks to the automatic activation of a series of central nervous system structures orchestrating the defensive threat reactions, strengthening and supporting previous neurophysiological and behavioral findings in body language processing. (shrink)

With the help of the current experiment, we wanted to learn more about the impact of visually demanding vs. cognitively demanding secondary tasks on the attention allocation of older pedestrians during the phase of traffic perception within the process of road crossing. For this purpose, we used two different road crossing tasks as well as two different secondary tasks. The road crossing “stop task” was a signal detection task, where an approaching car had to be detected. The road crossing (...) “go task” was a dynamic visual search task, where the resolution of a busy road situation had to be identified. The visual secondary task was a static visual search task and the cognitive secondary task was a 1-back task. One younger group and one older group of participants completed the tasks as single vs. dual-tasks in all possible combinations. Performance was measured through errors and response time; in addition, the subjective workload was assessed via NASA-TLX. Analyses show that the visual secondary task reduces performance in the road crossing more strongly than the cognitive task, while the visual task itself is less impaired by the road crossing tasks than is the cognitive task. Overall, performance diminishes from single to dual-task completion. Results further indicate age effects in terms of increased errors and response time for older compared to younger participants. In addition to these age effects, age-specific dual-task effects emerge for response time in the go task along with the visual task as well as for response time in the cognitive task along with the go task. Subjective workload is higher in the dual-task conditions than in the single tasks. Findings are discussed with regard to theoretical and practical implications. (shrink)

In recent years, the research field of the evolution of art has witnessed contributions from a wide range of disciplines across the "three cultures". In this thesis, I make both a critical review of existing explanations, and try to do elucidate the evolution of art by employing insights, methods and concepts from different disciplines. First, I critically evaluate the evidentiary criteria from standard evolutionary psychology some accounts employ to demonstrate that art qualifies as a human biological adaptation. I argue that (...) these criteria do not suffice to make that claim. Furthermore, I make the case for a cultural evolutionary approach to the arts. One commonly used evidentiary criterion for art as adaptation is the “tight fit” between artnbsp;human cognition, which is interpreted as suggesting that cognition has undergone selection to produce and appreciate art. However, disentangling cultural and genetic evolution allows formulating thenbsp;hypothesis that art has evolved culturally to match human cognition. Second, I observe that in ancient and modern hunter gatherer societies, artistic activities are virtually alwaysnbsp;with ritual. I discuss what this implies for the adaptive significance of art. Specifically, if the arts have culturally evolved in function of ritualistic purposes, their adaptive value has depended on the adaptiveness of ritual. Third, because architecture is characterized by the combination of utilitarian and aesthetic aspects, it is particularly interesting from an evolutionary perspective and therefore I devote special attention to it. Employing the cross-species comparative approach, I investigate two main purposes human architecture has in common with nonhuman animal constructions: protection andnbsp;Based on the phylogenetic approach I establish that protection may have been the primary function of building aptitudes in humannbsp;and that building was later co-opted for signaling purposes. Subsequently, I comparatively evaluate thenbsp;of signaling models in the cultural evolution of architectural aesthetics. Furthermore I combine insights from environmental psychology, niche construction and cultural evolution theory to develop the hypothesis that a function of religious monumental architecture may have been to support nbsp;or even to galvanize nbsp;social learning. Finally, I connect the account I developed to the cognitive science of religion. I complement the frequently held view that religious monumental architecture is a costly signal with the mechanism of sensory exploitation. I attempt to demonstrate that by exploiting thenbsp;response of awe in religious followers, religious monumental architecture promotes and regulates prosocial behavior and creates in them an openness to adopt supernatural beliefs. Fourth, I dealnbsp;the evolution of visual art, paying again special attention to cultural evolution andnbsp;explanatory value of sensory exploitation. I assert that the relatively late appearance of figurative art in the course of human evolution may be attributed to an increase in the number of social learning opportunities within and between human populations at that time. I support this assertion with archaeological data that indicate overall population growth and increased population densities at that time. These demographic changes, I argue, have allowed the retention and accumulation of innovations required for figurative art making. Contrary to previous accounts, I furthermore aim to show that this process doesnbsp;require figurative art to have served adaptive purposes. Employing sensory exploitation, I establish that figurative art could have evolved by exploiting pre-existing biases of evolved psychology. The dominant themes of upper Paleolithic and late stone age figurative art, animals and humans, seem to support this contention. Fifth, I present a number of experimental studies I conducted to verify whether contemporary art experts would have socially learned to resist exploitation of evolved psychology. One aspect ofrsquo;s exploitative power may be that it elicits aesthetic pleasure by pushing “pleasure buttons” that evolved for other purposes. Consequently, spectators may trade-off rewards from indulging in art and biological activities, resulting in less effort being allocated to reproduction. I contend that, while the generalnbsp; may indeed be exploited, experts, who are typically being exposed to high doses of art, may have socially learned to resist exploitation by selectively preferring art from prestigious art contexts. The latter would be in line with the claim that prestige bias may trump content biases of evolved psychology. The results of three experimental studies supportnbsp;contention. I find that laypeople's art appreciation is positively affected by a content bias for attractive faces, mediated by aesthetic pleasure, whereas experts' appreciation is positively affected by prestige and mediated by admiration for the artist. Moreover, experts confer lower appreciation to attractive compared to moderately attractive content, which is consistentnbsp;the contention that expertise and the use of prestige are associatednbsp;resistance against beautiful content that exploits evolved preferences. This research thus suggests that expertise moderates content and context biases, which may be of relevance to an ongoing debate about their relative importance as drivers of cultural evolution. In addition, this study provides a tentative but novel explanation for the fact, famously established by philosopher Arthur Danto, that beauty lost its central position in Western art during the 20th century. However my findings cannot exclude alternative explanations for the fact that art expert appreciation deviates from evolved aesthetic preferences. Further research may experimentally assess the role of prestige bias and resistance as drivers of this deviation versus other, previously suggested, potential processes. For example, preferences of experts may deviate on account of the fact that art serves as a badge of elite group membership and thus expert art appreciation as a means to distinguish oneself from the masses. Alternatively, art experts may seek intellectual challenges instead of pushing pleasure buttons. Future research may experimentally verify the respective roles of these different hypothesized mechanisms. In addition, it may be investigated how insights from sexual selection research may help elucidating the different processes at play in cultural evolution and particularly in the cultural evolution of art appreciation, given the commonalities between sexual selection and cultural selection models. (shrink)

The simultaneous recording of brain activity in two or more people, termed hyperscanning, is an emerging field of research investigating the neural basis of social interaction. Hyperscanning studies of adult–infant dyads have great potential to provide insights into how social functions develop. In particular, taking advantage of functional near-infrared spectroscopy for its spatial resolution and invulnerability to motion artifacts, adult–infant fNIRS may play a major role in this field. However, there remains a problem in analyzing hyperscanning data between adult and (...) young populations. Namely, there are intrinsic differences in hemodynamic time latencies depending on age, and the peak latency of the hemodynamic response function is longer in younger populations. Despite this fact, the effects of such differences on quantified synchrony have not yet been examined. Consequently, the present study investigated the influence of intrinsic hemodynamic differences on wavelet coherence for assessing brain synchrony, and further examined the statistical removal of these effects through simulation experiments. First, we assumed a social signal model, where one counterpart of the dyad sends a social signal to the other, which eventually results in simultaneous brain activation. Based on this model, simulated fNIRS activation sequences were synthesized by convolving boxcar event sequences with HRFs. We set two conditions for the event: synchronized and asynchronized event conditions. We also modeled the HRFs of adults and infants by referring to previous studies. After preprocessing with additional statistical processing, we calculated the wavelet coherence for each synthesized fNIRS activation sequence pair. The simulation results showed that the wavelet coherence in the synchronized event condition was attenuated for the combination of different HRFs. We also confirmed that prewhitening via an autoregressive filter could recover the attenuation of wavelet coherence in the 0.03–0.1 Hz frequency band, which was regarded as being associated with synchronous neural activity. Our results showed that variability in hemodynamics affected the analysis of inter-brain synchrony, and that the application of prewhitening is critical for such evaluations between adult and young populations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“It’s All Personal”Frances Rieth MaynardI was (am?) the mother of a full-term infant born in 1998 with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. This was my 3rd pregnancy; I had two prior pregnancies resulting in healthy children. Until that final week before birth, my pregnancy had been uneventful; my blood pressure, weight gain, and lab work charted normally. At my prenatal check (with a new physician as mine was away), my (...) measurements were off. That OB-GYN referred me to a perinatologist who was able to perform an ultrasound (checking for infant size) and advised that I should deliver soon because the infant was markedly growth retarded. I was induced two days later. My small daughter was born with skeletal leg deformities and brought to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). I was familiar with that NICU since I had worked there as an RN prior to this pregnancy. I was comfortable with the environment, the people, and the overall culture of the place. Indeed, I had been a pediatric nurse for the previous 10 years working primarily in intensive care.After my daughter’s birth, I was able to intuit meaning by the placement of her bassinet in the unit (e.g., it was not too close to the nurse’s station; she had no oxygen or tubing, and she was not in a private room). I believed that her journey home would be longer than I had planned but that it would occur. On that first day, a pediatric cardiolo-gist arrived to perform an ultrasound. I was familiar with this scene too; I did not view this process as anything more than routine. I was relieved to have [End Page 24] a physician who I knew and trusted to watch over my daughter. This allowed me to go back to my room to rest as I do not believe I had slept well (if at all) after being informed there was a potential problem a few days earlier.Less than two hours after returning to my room, my daughter had been intubated and begun on prostaglandins as the echocardiogram had revealed a hypoplastic left heart defect. The neonatologist started to discuss options for transport so my daughter could be treated at a larger hospital. I tried to catch my breath and process what I was being told. We spoke by phone with my husband who quickly deferred all decision-making responsibility to me because I was “the person with the medical expertise.” My thoughts raced with all these unforeseen circumstances, yet time seemed to slow down. I requested that an evaluation be made of other potential conditions before transfer since my daughter was also small for gestational age, something we had learned less than a week earlier, and she had some skeletal defects, an issue of which we were unaware until after she was born.A head ultrasound revealed an absent corpus callosum, the region of the brain that connects the two cerebral hemispheres and allows them to communicate by sending and receiving signals from each other.Given all the enormous medical issues my daughter was facing, I asked for her ventilator to be withdrawn and my husband concurred. We wanted our daughter to be baptized and to die a “natural death.” Our neonatologist indicated that our choices were reasonable. But, before the ETT could be withdrawn, I was advised that an ethics consult had been called by one of the nurses. I became angry, scared, and saddened at the thought of strangers (to me) deciding the fate of my daughter. The neonatologist told me not to be concerned, and I later learned that the ethics committee had “signed off” on the wishes of my husband and myself. My daughter was extubated and died 3 days later.This happened 25 years ago. In retrospect, it is interesting to me that I began to distrust the nurses, wondering which one had called the consult. I could not understand how anyone could doubt that I, as a mother, was not making the best possible decision, among bad alternative choices, for my daughter. I began to view the anonymous persons of the powerful ethics committee as a “them... (shrink)

The main purpose of this study is to become acquainted with the educational institutions in Ottoman Empire during and after the 18th century. In this respect, special attention is given to which initiatives were taken in terms of education and which educational institutions were established during the aforementioned period. The need to comply with the West in terms of science, culture, reasoning, and technological advancements has led to the questioning of the current madrasah system. Upon revising the educational system of (...) the madrasah, which had difficulties in being productive and attaining to the necessities of the time, there have been initiatives primarily to establish and structure military schools. These attempts to reform education was intensively seen as from the early 18th century. The above-mentioned changes and progress have gained momentum with the Tanzimat era. It was observed that during this period, many schools were established beyond military; education levels were clarified and; females were given right to study. Similar to Tanzimat era during the first Constitutional Monarchy and Autocracy eras, positive contributions toward educational reforms were made. However, beginning from the middle of the second Constitutional Monarchy era, the economic and social complications that the state was going through had a negative impact on the educational system and the practicality of the educational institutions.Summary: Education has been the most important factor in determining the social, economic, and cultural level of a society. The level of development, which is the determinant of the superiority of the nations to each other over the world, varies according to the importance given to education. To be a pioneer in the scientific sense, to be able to have technological opportunities, to make people live more comfortable and peaceful, to have more power in the economic field and to ensure the continuity of the nation that depending on all these, it will be possible with the understanding of education that can read the time and future well. The fact that world states are superior to each other in different periods of history is directly related to their understanding of education. It can be said that in the centuries following the beginning of the new age, especially the Western nations have taken a more positive step at this subject. The changes in both mental and action spheres such as XVI. century Renaissance movements, XVIII. century enlightenment movement and finally the industrial revolution triggered the development in the scientific and technological field. In these periods the importance given to thinking and the freedom of thought has been the main factor of the progress in the scientific field. The European nations, which went beyond their religion-based bigotry and prioritized the free and secular understanding, have become superior to other nations of the world. However, it is not quite possible to say that in the same periods the Ottoman Empire was able to adapt with the same speed to such accelerations of change and development that placed in Europe. One of the main reasons for this situation and perhaps most importantly is that the educational concept in the Ottoman Empire remained within a static structure in the last centuries. In particular, the matters such as the madrasa being away from productivity, the limitation of the understanding of the science only with religious sciences, has led to the problem of inability to adapt to the rapid transformation that in Europe. The first steps towards eliminating this weakness noticed by the state executives over time has been taken through the improvement and transformation of the Ottoman educational institutions. It is possible to say that the first attempts as to these restructures of education, which is also called as Westernization or modernization by the educational historians, has begun in the period of Sultan III. Selim. In the context of the Nizam-ı Cedid movement, a number of positive initiatives in education, such as the improvement of madrasas, the opening of military schools and translation activities, constitute the core of the changes that will take place in later periods. Immediately afterwards, in the period of II. Mahmut, making the reading and writing education compulsory, opening of Western-style junior high school, establishing medical and vocational schools that provide education at higher education level are considered as positive innovations of the period. The time interval from the proclamation of the Tanzimat edict until the First Constitutional monarchy is the period in which the institutionalization and structuring towards education in the Ottoman Empire is at the highest level. Besides many educational institutions in this process where the ministry responsible for education and training is established and the regulation containing the arrangements regarding this field is put into force, one of the most important initiatives made is laying the foundations of the Dâr al-Fünûn (Ottoman University) which is considered as the first university in this land. The fact that many educational institutions established in this period that are the roots of today's educational institutions is important in terms of demonstrating the accuracy of the initiatives within the mentioned period. In Meşrutiyet (the First Constitutional Monarchy) and the subsequent period of Mutlakiyet (Autocracy), contributions were provided on previous positive structuring. However, the social and economic problems experienced in the country since the second half of II. Meşrutiyet (the 2nd Constitutional Monarchy) have been effective in the inability of continuing innovations towards education. In this study, the educational institutions established in the Ottoman Empire before and after the Tanzimat period were discussed. The aim is not just to reveal what these schools are. It was also aimed to emphasize which areas in which schools are required to be based on which needs, which obstacles are encountered during the change of mentality in education, regulatory activities foreseen to overcome obstacles and to what extent they have been successful. In this regard, the signals of change as to the structure of educational institutions, which could be the source of most of the republic period, started from the beginning of 1700s and continued until World War II period. During this period of more than a hundred years, the political periods related to the structure and functioning of the state have also been influential in the structuring of educational institutions. In fact, the Reorganization (Tanzimat) period, which is known as ‘reform’ in the mentioned process, is considered as the stage where the change and transformation concerning education is the most. It is seen that the process of westernization still continues even though it is not with the same acceleration in the Constitutional Monarchy and Autocracy periods after the Reorganization period. When looking at the facility of educational institutions in chronological order, it is determined that there is a dominated understanding that prioritizes to train military staff in the military field and to have a competent army with the technological possibilities of the time, in other words, to create a strong defence system against the foreign powers of the country. Indeed, for the first time in order to give technical information about modern military, Hendesehane opened and started to operate in İstanbul in 1734 by Mahmut I; Mühendishâne-i Bahrî-i Hümâyûn, the school of the first military maritime was opened in 1775 in order to provide modern education; Mühendishâne-i Berrî-i Hümâyun was founded in 1795 in Istanbul, in order to train artillery and military officer (military engineer); Mekteb-i Harbiye, which was opened in 1835 to train officers, and Menşe-i Küttab-ı Askeri, which was established to train military scribes, contributed to the contemporary construction of the army. In the mentioned period, the most important change outside the military area was in the health area. In this sense, in order to meet the medical doctor needs of the army, Tıbhâne-i Amire was established in 1827. In 1867, the first civilian medical school, Mekteb-i Tıbbiye-i Mülkiye, started education and training. Another important innovation movement for education was in the field of law. In this context, the School Law was established in 1880. In order to train competent staff in administrative staff, the schools of the Mekteb-i Mülkiye, the schools of teacher, the schools that enable women to do education, the improvement of schools that train the clergy and the regulations based on this take attention as educational activities carried out in the mentioned period. (shrink)

Since 2008 I have been closely following the conceptual/performance/video work of Daniel Peltz. Gently rendered through media installation, ethnographic, and performance strategies, Peltz’s work reverently and warmly engages the inner workings of social systems, leaving elegant rips and tears in any given socio/cultural quilt. He engages readymades (of social and media constructions) and uses what are identified as interruptionist/interventionist strategies to disrupt parts of an existing social system, thus allowing for something other to emerge. Like the stereoscope that requires two (...) identical images to create an illusion of a three-dimensional image, Peltz sometimes visualizes two separate elements to create an object or moment that requires space and depth to focus on its varied layers. They say your brain has to process and make meaningful sense out of all that visual information before it can accept the illusion. I say your brain has to do a similar thing when looking and seeing the divine, magical, and faithful (social) art making of Daniel Peltz. Daniel Peltz is Associate Professor of Film/Animation/Video at RISD. He divides his time between Rhode Island and Sweden and is currently at work on an exhibition at Botkyrka Konsthall, Stockholm opening February 2013 and a new project to be included in the IASKA: Spaced Biennial (Australia) in 2014. This interview took place on Skype and is part one of a two-part interview. Feliz Lucia Molina: Are you in Providence, RI? Daniel Peltz: I’m at my house in Providence. I’ve been back for six days teaching winter session at RISD and doing this workshop series—these investors’ drum circles with a group of wealth managers. a client of the firm, 2013, photo Shirin Adhami FLM: The wealth managers were all drumming together? DP: They were all drumming in response to the performance of their retirement portfolios. FLM: Is this part of the “Unrealized Gain/Loss” piece? DP: Yes, it’s part of a show I’m working on in Sweden. I can show you because it was just today. I’ll show you some of this. Lets see—share screen [click, click, click]. This is the room. I’ve been using the camera system that’s already installed in the conference rooms to record them. So the video is being recorded directly by the wealth management office’s tech staff. These are the people I worked with in the last workshop. This conference table is less wondrous. They’ve been learning to drum in response to their retirement portfolios. I started by bringing in my little bit of wealth for them to propose a management strategy, I came to the follow-up meeting with a counter proposal, which was this workshop. So they agreed to do this series of workshops instead of managing my wealth. FLM: Does everybody in the room manage your wealth? That’s kind of a lot of people. DP: That woman in the back there and Craig —they handle new client business. So when you come there with your wealth, they sit down with you and suggest to you how they would manage it. They’re very nice, responsible people. FLM: And where is this? DP: This is in Providence and the one I was showing you is in Waltham, where I was today. Then I’m going to Newport for the last one on Friday. So I will have done four of them. This is the group in Waltham that I just played with today. I played directly with the two groups in Providence and I’m working with an ethnomusicologist at Brown, Asha Tamarisa, who is facilitating the last two. She’s helped develop the workshop in terms of figuring out how to train a group to do this and thinking about the compositional challenges of working in response to retirement portfolio data. FLM: Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project. DP: I might even be able to play you a little of the audio I’ve also been working with a group of professional percussionists on what will become a quarterly public investors’ drum circle event. Their stuff was really nice, but I want you to hear what we sounded like in the workshops. They’ve all been recorded by the a/v system in the offices. We use a simple structure where the drummer investors interpret the sensation of gain or loss as embellishments to a base heartbeat rhythm. The group holds the heartbeat and, as each person experiences gain or loss, they embellish that rhythm. "Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project" FLM: Is the process all very spontaneous? DP: Its actually quite structured. We produce a custom stock ticker that shows the performance of their collective portfolios. In advance of the workshop each participant submits assets in their retirement portfolio. Then we make a stock ticker that shows the real-time performance of their assets so that they can respond to almost live data. FLM: Are they reading the stock ticker projected up on the screen in the room? Do people drum in correspondence to the visual live data of the performance of their assets? DP: Exactly. They’re looking at the stock ticker as opposed to each other, so it’s a slightly shifted drum circle. They’re looking at the ticker but they’re listening to each other—that’s what we’re practicing. For example, NVO—the price is 172.08 but it’s down -1.16 and as that moves across the screen, the person who’s retirement is invested in that asset starts to embellish when that arrow first appears, based on their experience of loss. They stop when it exits the screen and return to the heartbeat. You could have one ticker for each retirement portfolio, but the way the workshop is constructed is that we just isolate one asset from each person’s portfolio so that everyone in the group is represented in a single ticker. So they’re drumming and looking at the ticker, but they’re hearing each other experience gain and loss. We’ve removed direct visual engagement from the social structure of a drum circle but the oral engagement is still there. FLM: So they had their own sound interpretation of gain and loss? DP: Yeah and that part is quite spontaneous as you were saying. In some of the preparatory exercises we’ve been working to give the participants more strategies for interpreting the sensations of gain and loss. We’re trying to develop their capacity to embellish a heartbeat or base rhythm but I’m not invested in having a melodious result. I’m quite curious about what this kind of structure will result in without any desire for a particular result. FLM: For context, can you talk about the project you did a couple years ago in Bali, “Unrealized Gain/Loss” in relation to this current wealth management project? DP: The workshops I’ve been doing use a similar strategy to the other components in this project. It started in Indonesia on my sabbatical and I was really trying to understand where I was physically and where I was being on sabbatical—this kind of strange jubilee structure where every seventh year you’re supposed to renew your self. And it was around the time of the global financial crisis. I was on sabbatical for the global financial crisis. I remember watching my father, in particular, respond to the financial crisis by monitoring his retirement portfolio and trying to make sense of it. I realized on a visit to their home that he checked his retirement portfolio every single day and I was really struck by that because in some way our parents are mysteries to us as children, especially their moods. We know how important their moods are but we don’t know what governs them. And somehow it was like I’d figured it out, it’s the performance of the DOW! So I think there was something in that. Then I was in Indonesia and I had been drawn there by an interest in their highly ritualized Hindu culture, where so much of life is driven by a ceremonial calendar. I was interested in Bali as this predominantly Hindu pocket within a predominantly Islamic country and life there being organized by this ritual calendar functioning as a kind of resistance to the dominant global religion of free-market capitalism. So I started to explore that correlation between the ways in which this culture that I was living in was sort of “living for the afterlife” and this idea within certain segments of American society of “living for the afterwork life”. The idea that your wellbeing in the “afterwork life” is tied to forces that are unseen and largely beyond your control has strong similarities to many religious understandings of the universe. So I started to explore that and the crafts and materials that were around me were primarily Batik and percussion. Percussion is a huge part of daily life in Bali. These gamelan troupes were everywhere. And I also happened to be there for Nyepi, the day of silence, which is preceded by a very elaborate procession and construction of demonic statues. These were the things that were around me and I started studying Batik with one of the Batik artists there and also started a conversation with two master Batik artists, one who is American and her Indonesian husband. I developed these patterns that were based on symbols from the performance of my retirement portfolio and worked with the batik artists to produce two sarongs. d. peltz - 2012 In producing the designs, I treated the performance of my retirement portfolio since my arrival at RISD [7 years] as a significant interval and then I looked at the ways in which decisions are made within retirement portfolios as having an extension outwards from the individual assets that underlie the retirement portfolio, which are kind of like the base elements of the retirement world. Then there’s the allocation of your assets, which is a global way of understanding an individual according to typologies, which are often referred to in terms of risk—this notion of a ‘risk profile’. What type of ‘person’ you are is determined by your attitude towards risk, or potentiality, and I found that to be a really fascinating way of understanding the universe. I remember looking at the tabs in my retirement portfolio and finding this one for viewing ‘Unrealized Gain/Loss’ and that’s often how I work—is just going through the Cambridge Parking Code, for example, and finding this section of the code that was called ‘Crossing Non-Signalized Locations’ and just feeling “I can’t do any better than that,” you know? That’s what I was talking about in terms of ready-mades that exist in the social sphere. So I found that tab, actually, a long time ago, and I pulled it out of a journal when I was there [in Bali] working on these pieces and I wound up making these two sarongs and later on a series of porcelain vessels for holding one’s unrealized gains and losses. At the time, I knew that I wanted a performance to come out of them, but I wasn’t sure what it was. I was inspired very much by this sort of thing: Pulls out a TIAA-CREF brochure with a man in a suit seated at a table. This guy is probably an actor, and [the brochure] says “TIAA-Cref announces “Individual counseling sessions at the Rhode Island School of Design. Individual counseling sessions at no additional cost to you. You can discuss your personal financial situation with an experienced TIAA consultant on a confidential basis. We are available to help you discuss how to achieve your financial goals by investing in financial solutions such as mutual funds, brokerage, life insurance, and annuities...etc....What retirement benefits best fits your situation?” Often I encounter this and I think O.K., this is one way to prepare for the after-work life and it seems inadequate to me. But, I also find it really inspiring. I really like the visual language of it. I kind of want to be that man. I’d like to see if I could maybe buy his clothes. FLM: What it is about the man on the brochure that interests you? DP: He’s offering personalized objective advice and a detailed evaluation of everything you need to know and do. Who wouldn’t want that? But he’s also something of a contemporary priest or priestess, mediating between the unseen all-powerful universe of global capitalism and the common worker. So I started off developing Unrealized Gain/Loss directly from the charts that represent the performance of my retirement portfolio. Then I came home and I wanted to use those. I had this word in my journal “unrealized gain/loss vessel.” I had this notion of vessels that would contain unrealized gains and losses. That felt really important to me that they would have somewhere to go. I had been thinking a lot about altars and making offerings—that somehow this really fickle, massive, difficult-to-comprehend-universe of the financial world—that somehow it might be nice if you could making an offering to it. [In Bali] they made such beautiful elaborate offerings. So I studied offering making as well with one of the women there and she taught me some of the standard forms created by folding leaves and the significance of the floral arrangements. I started working in clay and then moved to porcelain and I made these unrealized gain/loss vessels. I made a few of them, they have holes on either side that you can’t get your fingers in. But something can go in there and something can go out of there. It’s a nice size for putting on an altar. Then I got this commission from Artists in Context who was interested in my doing something for this project “Artists Perspectives for the Nation” project. I proposed initiating these investors’ drum circles as a new public performance form. I’m interested in bringing together those two symbols—the symbol of the djembe and the drum circle. unrealized gain/loss vessel - d.peltz - 2012 FLM: I can imagine the public digital stock ticker performing like a soft fleeting stream of information, a kind of (meaningless) illusory comfort blanket. DP: In some way you have to understand its relevance outside of the obvious, right? Because the obvious is illogical. Nobody is actually using that data to day trade, for example. People aren’t sitting there with their computers watching the market data in Times Square or setting up an outdoor office and being like “OK it’s up 3 points or it’s up 1.56, trade! Ok now buy, Ok now sell!” That would be a kind of a nice performance, actually. But actual day traders would want more up to date data than that. To understand what that data is doing is really important. And that’s something I’ve realized—that I’m interested in a particular kind of data visualization, which is not about what data can tell people, but what data can tell people who are visualizing it. For example, in the Cambridge Project “Crossing Non-Signalized Locations” I was interested in the 10,000 excuses archive of data recording five years worth of excuses for why people thought they shouldn’t have received their parking ticket. I was not interested in making that excuse wall so that the public could see and understand this data. Inevitably the data will be seen by others but I was really interested in what the action of visualizing the data told those who were visualizing it. The parking attendants themselves were writing those excuses on the wall—I was interested in what that kind action of writing the excuses on the wall told them about the data. Similarly, I’m interested in designing a way to allow people to pass this data from the unseen universe of the market, through their own bodies, which happens through the merging of the drum and the stock ticker. I’m interested in those two also as symbols; the drum as this symbol of the earth, the body and a pagan counterculture, and the stock ticker referring to the ethereal world of global markets—bringing those two together and making them dependent. I’m often drawn to conceptual propositions that I become invested in testing in a sincere way—at first they often they sound humorous to others, but I have to remember that there is humor in them. I don’t sit around and laugh about these things. I stop finding them funny at all. I’m interested in the proposition that we could know something about the after-work life by drumming in response to our retirement portfolio. So then I become really interested in how to craft that into a viable performance form for myself and others. FLM: The aspect of using sound in “Unrealized Gain/Loss” as a way of embodying the information to the asset holder is really intriguing—using sound as a means of embodying the asset data. Was sound a medium that made sense to use immediately or were you considering other means of attempting to embody it? DP: Well I do use other mediums within the project like textile, ceramic, and batik patterns. I was first drawn to the history of Batik patterns as a socio-economic stratification system and the vessels as a way of embodying or manifesting this data of unrealized gain and loss. My first approach was to work with meditation actually—a meditation workshop with my colleagues. I was going to offer this “Unrealized Gain/Loss” workshop where you would explore the sensations of gain and loss by adapting the way yogi-nidra brings you into contact with your physical surroundings and stretches your perception. FLM: At Naropa University there are/were business & compassion workshops—a sort of mash-up of business and compassion and how compassion could be incorporated into a business model. This process and engagement of “embodying data” also has to do with “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” you created at the DNC in Denver in 2008. DP: That kind of appropriation and instrumentalization of spiritual practice could be disturbing and thus compelling as a strategy. For various reasons, I’ve come to be drawn to both the form of a quarterly public performance and the established performance form of a drum circle. Its something I’ve seen myself do before, that is to mess up a really good functional social system like a drum circle or karaoke. I remember I was developing language for the karaoke project and started calling it “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” and one of my assistants on the project, who’s an incredible artist, said, “but don’t you think the future of karaoke is guitar hero?” and I realized that maybe he thought I was trying to improve the form. I’m just trying to get people to have this shifted embodied experience, I need to craft the performance context so that they can do that. In the case of the karaoke project, for example, what did I need in order to be able to do this [a person to stand up in front of a bar and deliver a karaoke speech]? I realized that the body is very vulnerable so I built a podium so that the speaker can feel secure enough to do this, otherwise you couldn’t get to this state achieved by passing these speeches through the body. Then I was, like, well you need to be able to practice the lyrics because you don’t know all the “songs” by heart, which became an insert to the massive track books carried by most karaoke VJs. And then sometimes the crowd in the bar isn’t there with me, so I needed to extract the voice of the crowd cheering from the original venue and I needed the local audience to cheer if they wanted to. I’m interested in both where the form succeeds and fails. In particular, one of the most interesting things is this auditory gap between the space where you are, the reduced scale of applause in your own little bar, and this grand scale of applause at the convention center where the speech was originally delivered. FLM: How did the concept of “Participatory Democracy Karaoke” come about and why did you use karaoke as a means of engaging what was happening at the DNC in 2008? DP: I was looking at a lot of different readymade media infrastructures within the city at the time. I was interested in the emergency broadcast systems and I developed a proposal to repurpose that system and karaoke became an important symbol because it was this populist form that was already engaged in exploring the sensation of celebrity but also visualizing the gap between ourselves and those with more power and influence. So it had this readymade capacity to play with power and celebrity and I felt like the Obama presidential campaign, the first one in particular, had some very curious overlaps with this culture of celebrity. Obama of course rose to power partly based on his oratory abilities and I was interested in how karaoke as a vehicle was so adept at offering people all that was left of authentic expression in a political speech. Managing a politician and constructing their identity is such a developed practice that it becomes, kind of automatically, a metaphor for the way that our own identities are constructed. Of course the Obama campaign was very hip and savvy and deploying this notion of grassroots. It was really pioneering in its use of social media and this deployment of notions of populism. I was interested at that time in the capacity of karaoke to track speech patterns, precise tempos of anyone’s delivery, and that to me was a way of thinking about what might be left of the authentic self. I was interested in karaoke’s capacity to extract that authentic component and offer it to others. So not just to stand up and be them, but to [literally] pass their speech patterns through your own body. A long time ago, it started to strike me as odd that one would make media at all. It struck me as a kind of un-contemporary way of going about making art in an age of media overflow. That logic extended into my thinking on delivery devices and installation as well. Why would one buy a screen or even set one up when there are so many out there? And the way in which these media displays function in karaoke bars and bars in general is very interesting to me. I’m drawn to this passive consumption of media where your primary social interaction is with the bartender or a few other individuals but these screens are around you and your attention is shifting back and forth between these spaces. So much political rhetoric is spoken to a half-listening audience. I was interested in what was happening in the slippage and that karaoke was a kind of slippage amplifier. So if you put people in a bar and they are delivering a Kucinich speech and Kucinich comes up on a screen then your getting a sound bite of Kucinich and an image of Kucinich and your friend is talking to you— FLM: A kind of magic takes place in that incongruency between sound and image and the karaoke participant who’s relaying the speech-text at the same time. DP: Exactly and there’s some kind of truth in that experience of reality. FLM: Yeah, there’s something uncanny about seeing the body close-up like that as though it can’t lie to you in that moment or context. It’s a weird moment of luminous clarity. The work you’ve done and all of what you’re saying about karaoke is so very interesting to me. Growing up, my dad and uncles sang karaoke a lot (and still do) and being first-generation Filipino American is a different cultural subtext entirely. I’m also seeing it from the position of witnessing family members who are carriers of these stories and songs. And seeing them cherish these Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley songs so much, I also see how their bodies are literal vessels of popular music that signifies something greater—it signifies their cultural and socioeconomic place in the world. The way that they cherish these American 1950s and 1960s pop songs is similar to having a certain kind of reverence for their spiritual faith or Catholicism. It’s a similar kind of care, focus, and attention exerted in karaoke and Catholicism—that these two structures and systems give something to focus on. Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Obama in Indiana — d. peltz — 2008 DP: Sure there something about the relationship we have to our candidate or the way we go about choosing a candidate, which is very similar to a deity or idol. I learned a lot about karaoke culture through this project. I’d never done karaoke. I’d never been interested in it as a form and then I travelled to Japan as part of the project when I made “Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Barack Obama in Indiana” and it was quite fascinating because my image of karaoke had always been this very public forum in a karaoke bar and then I discovered there’s this whole other world of karaoke where people even go on their own, they go and rent a room or cubicle and sing, or they go on a date—just the two of them go and sit in a room and do karaoke together. FLM: I’m interested in issues that take place within or as a result of specific karaoke culture(s). In the Philippines within the last several years there’s been occurring the “My Way Killings” phenomenon. Apparently baklas or gay men are employed by karaoke establishments to help “smooth over conflicts over karaoke singing”—these social forms of conduct, or lack thereof that arise out of the infrastructures of this social sport. In this one rural part of the Philippines there’s a village karaoke machine that the whole village shares—the Aeta indigenous people have an appointed “keeper” of the karaoke machine. I also see karaoke as a proxy to the confessional box in Catholicism where one goes to pour out their sins (minus the penance and redemption). The karaoke machine enables one to literally sing out whatever’s going on internally, but through highly saturated popular song lyrics. While karaoke is a public and social sport, it can also be a private one. Karaoke is a means of communion with each other. DP: Right, this preference for this kind of mediated communication. In Japan I was trying to organize people to work on this project and I was talking about throwing a party and they were like, well, we have to rent a karaoke machine because what else are we going to do? And I think its kind of serving that function of surrogacy—emotional surrogacy. FLM: And karaoke tools can be read as ritual tools—the magic mic that holds everything. There’s got to be some overlap at some point—between religious ceremony and devotion to the karaoke machine. DP: The way I designed the piece was so that it could slip right on top of the ready-made karaoke infrastructure. There was a flat-packed podium and it was made of a single sheet of plywood with no fasteners that slotted into itself. Those were sent out to a network of karaoke bars that I invited to become “karaoke convention centers.” The local VJs downloaded our custom-made, speech-extracted tracks that were designed to play on their existing equipment. In this sense the piece is a permanent installation. If you go to Denver today, some of the VJs still have the tracks in their library of offerings, the Ramones and Romney. It was this notion of re-purposing readymade infrastructure to create a distributable populist form. Obama was coming and the convention was in the Pepsi Center and 30,000 people were coming including 10,000 journalists. The impetus behind the larger art project that commissioned international artists to make works in Denver, was that local people weren’t going to have much access to this convention. It was like an invasion, the city was being descended upon, but if you lived a block away from the site, you had the same access as people in Zimbabwe&mash;30 second media bits excerpted from the speeches. So it seemed to me that the fundamental gesture was how do I take that signal, which was travelling out of the convention center, and create a local interruption? FLM: Is that what you mean by ‘intervention’? The term is frequently used to help describe your work. DP: It depends on the day. Around that karaoke project I had a conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko and he was proposing that maybe rather than intervention, we should consider the word interruption. Because intervention is kind of an overused term in the field of art and it has militaristic and therapeutic associations outside of the art context. Fundamentally, the idea of intervening speaks to the readymade social world as your primary material. So it’s basically suggesting a kind of subtractive process, which gets back to this question: what is the role of the contemporary media artist in a world that’s so saturated with media? You can’t work additively in a saturated field. If you want to make a visible mark you have to work subtractively. That’s what intervention is about to me, just another way of saying “to work subtractively.” FLM: So the interventions or interruptions aren’t necessarily adding or subtracting, but are they putting orange cones there? What are they doing exactly? DP: I think you’re right about that, they’re not really subtracting. They’re adding to the scope of possibility. I’ve been thinking (with this exhibition I’m mounting next month) about the work as explorations and expansions of social possibility. Maybe it’s more insertion. I started calling the pieces ‘insertions’ that I was making in Rejmyre—a small town in Sweden where I’ve been working for six years now. My favorite site to install there is the tourist bureau. I started calling the video pieces that I made for the tourist bureau, video insertions. This idea that you’re inserting something into the readymade media infrastructure of the world resonates with me. Insertion leverages a context, creating a possibility that the inserted object might be naturalized in the process — that someone can encounter my video in Rejmyre as tourist information. And then all of a sudden tourist information can include some American guy prostrating through town and it can include really bad relationship advice. Maybe insertion is a better word. tourist information – d. peltz 2009-present  . (shrink)