British billionaire Sir Richard Branson signed a deal Tuesday to sell a third of his space travel startup to a Mideast investment fund. Soon after, Branson took his first ride in WhiteKnightTwo, designed to launch a ship into space. (July 28)
July 30, 2009
Coast Guard rescues woman from rock
DALY CITY, Calif. An HH-65 Dolphin helicopter crew from Coast Guard Air Station San Francisco rescues a 22-year-old woman, from Pacifica, Calif., after she reported being stranded on the rocks at Fort Funston here. (Coast Guard video by Air Station San Francisco) JUNEAU, Alaska - A Coast Guard Air Station Sitka, Alaska, MH-60 Jayhawk rescue helicopter crew conducts a medevac for an injured hiker 35 miles southeast of Juneau, Thursday, July 2, 2009. (Coast Guard video/Air Station Sitka). Watch this video and other Coast Guard media in high resolution at http://cgvi.uscg.mil/media/main.php
History of Quacks: Who're Dr. Murray - Dr. Koplin - Dr. Klein - Dr. Nichopoulos?
Follow Nichopoulouzo @mrjyn http://www.twitter.com/mrjyn FOR MORE NEWS AND VIDEO
Los Angeles officials have searched the offices of a second doctor connected to late superstar Michael Jackson as the hunt for the singer's medical files continues.
On Tuesday, officers from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) swooped on the house of Jackson's personal doctor, Conrad Murray, who was with the star on the day of his death last month.
Officers confiscated Murray's computer and cell phone from his Las Vegas residence as they investigate possible manslaughter charges against him.
Now a second medic is facing the police probe. Los Angeles County Assistant Chief Coroner Ed Winter searched the Beverly Hills medical offices of Dr. Lawrence Koplin on Wednesday, reportedly looking for records from the medic's nurse anesthetist David Fournier.
Jackson's dermatologist, Dr. Arnold Klein, performed procedures on the star at Dr. Koplin's office with Fournier administering anesthesia, according to TMZ.com.
On leaving Koplin's offices, Winter confirmed he is "still looking for medical records involving Michael Jackson."
Listening Post
Science Museum - About us - Listening PostListening Post
Listening Post is a ‘dynamic portrait’ of online communication, displaying uncensored fragments of text, sampled in real-time, from public internet chatrooms and bulletin boards. Artists Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin have divided their work into seven separate ‘scenes’ akin to movements in a symphony. Each scene has its own ‘internal logic’, sifting, filtering and ordering the text fragments in different ways.
By pulling text quotes from thousands of unwitting contributors' postings, Listening Post allows you to experience an extraordinary snapshot of the internet and gain a great sense of the humanity behind the data. The artwork is world renowned as a masterpiece of electronic and contemporary art and a monument to the ways we find to connect with each other and express our identities online.
Listening Post has been presented to the Science Museum by The Art Fund.
Disclaimer
Listening Post features uncensored fragments of text from live chatroom data. It may occasionally include content that is unsuitable for children or which some visitors may find offensive. The material is not produced or solicited by the Science Museum, so the Museum is unable to accept responsibility for the nature of the content that the work may extract from these sources.
'Anyone who types a message in a chat room and hits "send" is calling out for a response. Listening Post is our response.' Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin
Monument to the present1 - the sound of 100,000 people chatting
Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin's Listening Post immerses us in a rhythm of computer-synthesised voices reading, or singing out, a fluid play of real-time text fragments. The fragments are sampled from thousands of live, unrestricted internet chatrooms, bulletin boards and other online public forums. They are uncensored and unedited. Stray thoughts resonate through the space in sound and voice as texts surge, flicker, appear and disappear, at varying sizes and speeds, across a suspended grid of over 200 small electronic screens. An ambient soundtrack accompanies the activity with isolated pulses reminiscent of computer modems, clatterings, footsteps and the beeping of mechanical answering machines. At intervals darkness and silence take over, creating momentary pauses before Listening Post continues with its next movement.
The artists' starting place for Listening Post was simple curiosity - what might 100,000 people chatting online sound like? Hansen and Rubin agreed that the project should have a strong social component, so whilst initial research centred on statistical representations of websites, they rapidly moved towards concentrating on actual language from chatrooms, 'from which a kind of music began to emerge... the messages started to form a giant cut-up poem'.
The piece responds to a special moment in history. At no other time since the birth of communications technologies have ordinary people - independent of news channels, corporations or political parties - had the opportunity to exchange views so immediately and on such a large scale.
Every day, at every hour, hundreds of thousands of us go online to meet friends, exchange news and share thoughts. Listening Post interrogates this phenomenon by continually drawing down fragments of these online discussions, including them in its cycle of orderings, siftings and filterings - so that, in the artists words, it turns 'public chat room data into an experience that conveys the yearnings of people out there to connect with each other'.
The patterns identified by the artists allow Listening Post to build up a multi-sensory 'portrait of chat'. Some of its movements concentrate on the most common first words of new postings - 'I am...', 'I like...', 'I love...' - which themselves speak volumes for the ways in which we choose to identify ourselves online. Others list least-used words or work in topic clusters, arranging selections from thousands of simultaneous conversations by content and revealing emerging topics of the day, the hour, or indeed the moment. From the profound to the frivolous or personal, from the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center to the disappearance of British toddler Madeleine McCann, Listening Post presents us with whatever is occupying our collective thoughts right now.
The result presents a 'sculpture' of the 'content and magnitude' of online chatter. Through Listening Post Hansen and Rubin provide us with insights into the vast scale of online social activity, and the gradations of human expression which exist within it. Our assertions, opinions, hopes and dreams, extracted from their original contexts but otherwise unaltered, are given sharper, different and wider meanings which range from the poignant to the absurd. The mundane is rendered monumental and the monumental mundane as Listening Post levels the politically volatile with the light-hearted, lecherous, plaintive, expressive and banal.
The power of Listening Post emerges from the artists' skill in pooling their combined philosophical, artistic and technological interests to achieve an exceptional distillation of collective interests as well as 'the content and patterns evident in different information channels'. Mark Hansen's computer programmes collect, sample and process thousands of live online public conversations which are then sorted by theme, while Ben Rubin's voice-synthesiser tones and sound effects respond to shifts in the data streams, carefully building up the musical score. Together these activities go beyond simple redisplay or reinterpretation of data patterns, to create something 'that expresses the meaning of data gathered from the internet'.
As a work of art and a piece of technological ingenuity in its own right, Listening Post is hard to categorise. An extraordinary investigation into the meaning and malleability of statistics, it combines a Minimal art aesthetic with the elements of chance and randomness common to experimental art from the early 20th century to the present day. But its engagement with media technologies and sophisticated data-analysis techniques differentiates it from traditional visual art. It relies not on the found objects of Modern Art but on found data and extracted thoughts - the very unstill lives of a hundred thousand active minds. Listening Post is an acknowledged masterpiece of electronic art; it references issues and themes central to software and interactive art, while subverting notions of interactivity. By anonymously drawing from active public places on the internet for its raw material, using thousands of expressions from thousands of unwitting online contributors, it repositions the point of interaction to the point of source rather than the point of encounter. It is itself as much a voyeur as the gallery audiences to whom it performs its findings.
Listening Post has a finite life span. The messaging phenomena that it feeds upon were enabled by the evolution of networks and mass access to continual bandwidth over HTML bulletin boards and internet relay chat (IRC). Changes to the text-based nature of these environments - the proliferation of video, graphics and animation - are in turn bound to radically change the content sources that Listening Post relies on, perhaps even rendering it silent one day.
For now, and as long as the sources it depends upon are available to its constant trawling, Listening Post remains an astonishing, awe-inspiring and strangely humbling 'instrument of mass, if random, surveillance and a chapel to the human need for contact'.2 Hansen and Rubin's creation can at times seem like a modern-day oracle, a snapshot of the text-based internet as we know it today or a monument to the ways we find to connect with each other online.
Hannah Redler, Head of Arts Projects
Listening Post has been presented to the Science Museum by The Art Fund.
Dream Director
Dream DirectorThe Dream Director
Where do you go when you dream?
Luke Jerram’s The Dream Director is a unique event, installation and exploration investigating the hidden realm of dreaming. Where do people go when they dream? What do they see? What do they experience? And can the shape of dreams be influenced as the dreamer is sleeping? These are the questions posed and explored by artist Luke Jerram in his participatory work, The Dream Director. The Dream Director explores the boundaries of participants’ conscious and subconscious minds, prompting questions about the ethics of and possibilities for, creating art in dream space. It is also a new tool for sleep science and clinical applications that raises questions about the rules of interaction and boundaries of science and art.
The Dream Director invites people to sleep overnight in a gallery. Specially designed “pods” house the dreamers who don eye-masks that detect rapid eye movement, indicating the dreaming stage of sleep. When the dreamers reach their dream state, their eye masks trigger ambient sounds via a computer, which are played into small speakers mounted into the pod, in an attempt to affect the nature and content of their dreams.
“An innovative and aesthetically beautiful piece of work, which completely encompasses the viewer, fulfilling the main and crucial artistic aim, whilst spanning the realms of science and engineering, very entertaining and exciting.”
Previous participant in The Dream DirectorJerram was commissioned in 2007 by Watershed through the Clark Bursary, the UK Digital Art Award, to investigate the complexities of sleep and dreaming. He built upon original research carried out with sleep psychologist Chris Alford at The University of West of England, to create a new installation that merges art, science and digital media.
The Effect of the Invention of Anaesthesia on the Development of Surgery
The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL continues to build on its proud tradition of excellence in furthering the academic study of the history of medicine and an awareness of its importance. History counts, as anyone reading about current events recognises. The Centre remains committed to furthering the knowledge of medicine's past in order to offer analyses of the complexities and ambiguities, as well as the hard-won knowledge, surrounding health, diseases, and their treatment.
To find out more, please see the About The Centre section of this website, or view the Centre Brochure.
Henry Solomon Wellcome (1853-1936). Oil painting by Hugh Goldwin Reviere. Credit: Wellcome Library, London
Kass Lecture
The Effect of the Invention of Anaesthesia on the Development of Surgery
Dr Sherwin Nuland (Yale University School of Medicine)
22nd September 2009
Details To Be Confirmed
New Statesman - Strange meetings
New Statesman - Strange meetingsA century ago in Vienna, madness and creativity existed side by side. The artists and thinkers who gathered there would shape the modern world
Vienna at the fin de siècle was a crucible of modernity. Amid the nervy multicultural babble of tongues in the imperial city, writers, artists, composers and architects jostled with philosophers, social reformers and scientists. Sacher-Masoch, Freud, Wittgenstein, Boltzmann, Schnitzler, Karl Kraus, Mahler (Gustav and Alma), Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele, Adolf Loos . . . the city’s roll-call of greats goes on and on, sometimes even to include Trotsky, who stopped by to play chess. In cafes and cabarets, at exhibitions and in salons and lecture halls, these dreamers and schemers met and talked and reinvented the times. They also reinvented the mind and theories about how to treat its disarray.
Madness, it seemed, was not only out there, locked up in the Narrenturm, the 18th-century asylum poised just outside the city, but in here, in everyday dreams and slips, in unruly bodies, in the shape of our sexual lives, in anxieties, hysterias and neuroses. It was also the result and part of the very fabric of modernity. If society could dream collectively, the great Viennese novelist Robert Musil wrote in The Man Without Qualities, it would dream Moosbrugger – the anarchic rapist-murderer who shadows the life of his book. That nightmare shadow would take on flesh in the horrors of the First World War and even more terrible substance in the politics of Vienna’s one-time citizen, the failed artist Adolf Hitler. Vienna, as the satirist Karl Kraus said, was also a laboratory for world destruction.
Since the opening of the Wellcome Collection’s new, light-filled premises in 2007, the gallery has given us a number of conceptual exhibitions that mingle art and medicine in illuminating ways. “Madness and Modernity”, the most recent of these, may share the gallery’s ground floor with Bobby Baker’s excellent “Diary Drawings”, about her journey through mental illness, but its limited space does nothing to detract from the fascination of what is on display and the thoroughness of the long research that has gone into the making of the exhibition.
Focusing on the interaction between madness, the visual arts and architecture, and how each tangled with and stirred the others, the exhibition opens with the old: 18th-century Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s grimacing heads. Trapped in extremes of emotion and sculpted in the last eight and reclusive years of the one-time society portraitist’s life, these “characters”, who may be the artist himself, peer and leer out at us. Rescued from oblivion and exhibited to the Viennese in 1907, Messerschmidt’s scowling and twisted sculptures caused a stir. With their expressionist aura, they also served as something of an inspiration to artists looking for a way to convey inner excess and their jangled times.
At the Wellcome, Messerschmidt’s heads look out at a model of the Narrenturm, the 1784 panopticon that predates by at least a year Jeremy Bentham’s vision of a disciplinary institution. A haunting film by David Bickerstaff takes us through the circular tower’s now empty rooms and eerie corridors, designed to confine “dangerous lunatics”.
By 1900, notions of both madness and confinement had changed, as had art and architecture. When the Austrian authorities set out to have a new psychiatric institution built, doctors and architects alike had a hand in the planning.
They wanted a quasi-utopian environment that would soothe and alleviate. What resulted was Steinhof, a mammoth hospital, housing private and public patients, for the “cure and care of mental and nervous disorders”. Set atop the gently sloping Viennese hills in outlying Penzing and overlooking the city, Steinhof was planned by Otto Wagner, a member along with Klimt of the Vienna Secession group, and himself a native of Penzing. Wagner believed that buildings needed to reflect their function and that “new human tasks and views called for a change or reconstitution of existing forms”. The hospital and the fine church at its crest were in some respects his crowning achievement. Form and function were married here to contribute to the humane treatment of the mentally ill and to provide respite for despairing urbanites.
Steinhof was something of a sparkling new town, encompassing 60 separate buildings. There were “pavilions”, all with the latest facilities, to house 500 staff and 2,500 patients. Some were for those who needed confinement; others for those free to roam in its pastoral grounds or stage and attend plays and concerts in its theatre.
A poster publicising the hospital calls out to Vienna’s “mad” – to anyone suffering from “neurasthenia, hysteria, hypochondria, the neuroses, cocaine or morphine addiction” – and promises progressive treatment in bucolic surroundings. Inmates lovingly created a large model of their glimmering church, here displayed. Artists, perhaps inspired by the iconography of Jean-Martin Charcot’s much-photographed hysterics and neurologically deformed patients, came in and out to paint sufferers. Their brushstrokes were labile and as expressive as their palettes in their painterly attempts to capture the physiognomy of mental pain and make inner torment visible.
Kokoschka came here to paint the writer Ludwig Ritter von Janikowski, an early patient. When the portrait with its lurid hues and jagged lines was exhibited, it caused a great stir: the anguish of its subject was visceral in impact. Psychological and pathological portraiture were born. They became an emphatically Viennese genre. Kokoschka and Schiele – whose inimitable nervous line and gaunt, tormented self-portraits are undiminished even in the reproductions displayed here – were only two of its greatest exemplars.
Max Oppenheimer was so taken with Kokoschka’s work that his psychological portraits were sometimes mistaken for the latter’s. The nervy, long-fingered hands he gives his portrait of Heinrich Mann are as evocative as Schiele’s lines, and seem to signal breakdown.
For the wedding of Freud’s daughter Mathilde, a portrait of her father was commissioned from Oppenheimer. Like Lotte Franzos, who hated Kokoschka’s jarring rendition of her, Mathilde was dismayed by the result. This was no Freud she recognised. Unbearded after his trip to America, Oppenheimer’s clear-eyed, moustachioed and serene Freud seemed to her nothing like her father. This is, ironically, an “unpsychological” portrait.
The brown-hued painting depicts a small object at Freud’s side. Its original is part of the exhibit, together with a small selection of other objects from Freud’s large collection of antiquities, loaned by the Freud Museum London, as is one of the Persian rugs which cover his iconic couch.
Freud had a penchant for the domestic, that shaping ground of the psyche, and for the buried archaeology of the mind. Fundamentally stoical and anti-utopian, decidedly verbal rather than physiognomic in spite of Freud’s neurological training, his psychoanalytic project stands in stark contrast to its exhibition neighbour: the Sanatorium Purkersdorf. This was a state-of-the-art facility, designed down to the last functional detail by Josef Hoffmann, an important figure in that artistic production house which was the Wiener Werkstätte. Light, elegant, airy and set in open countryside, Purkersdorf was an inspiration to Le Corbusier. The sanatorium served as a treatment centre for Vienna’s fashionable elite when they wanted a change from the urban consulting rooms of Freud and his colleagues.
Here, architecture itself provided a rest cure. Rational design was understood as enabling rational thought. The displayed objects include graceful light fixtures and chairs, including a chessboard armchair flown over from the Neue Galerie in New York. There are also treatment machines: an exercise bicycle, a modish electrotherapeutic cage in which the patient stood as a current travelled round the wooden enclosure.
Such tools of the psychiatric trade are nowhere to be seen in the paintings of the patient Josef Karl Rädler, a porcelain painter before his institutionalisation for the last 24 years of his life. His watercolours depict himself and a host of other patients engaged in mundane tasks, often in sociable groups. There is a rustic, naive, occasionally Dürer-like quality to these, and apart from the inscriptions surrounding the tableaux front and back, there is little evidence of “madness”. “I myself see this home as a church, these poor souls as living saints,” reads one of these unstoppable streams of writing. Mauer-Öhling, the rural psychiatric centre at which Rädler was latterly interned, still functions. Its most recent famous patients were Elisabeth Fritzl and her children, who sheltered here just after they emerged from long captivity in Josef Fritzl’s cellar.
Curated by the architectural historian Leslie Topp and the art historian Gemma Blackshaw, this is an enthralling and beautifully mounted exhibition. If there is a lack, it is of the ideas which permeated the work of the mind doctors of the period. Their understanding of what it was that had disturbed their patients, what made them tick in troubled ways, is a terrain that visual representation and architecture cannot quite reach. The excellent catalogue provides a useful verbal supplement.
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