Luciano BOI is a mathematician, an epistemologist and lecturer at the Centre of Social Analysis and Mathematics (CAMS) of the EHESS (French School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences). Invited Professor in numerous European or American Universities, he is particularly interested in morphogenesis (Morphology of the invisible, Pulim, 2011), in the interfaces topology-biology or mathematics-arts (Is the nature geometrical?) and more generally between life sciences and human sciences. He published then several essays or books dealing with these crossed themes or treating of the philosophy of the nature (Peter Lang, on 1995, 2000, 2006). His recent teachings develop thorough arguments on » the morphological thought » within the framework of a mesologic approach of the environments, on the diagrammatic thought in mathematics and in art, and finally on the importance of the epigenetic modifications in the plasticity of living systems. He published frame a first paper in PLASTIR 25, 12/2011 questioning the links between plasticity and complexity. It confirms the wealth of his eclectic and interdisciplinary approach which points the limits of the reductionism while opening to ontology, phenomenology, semiotics and the otherness. And the new essay that he proposes to us here does not break it, announcing clearly in subtitle the stakes of the plurality of the reality in crossing science, the arts and the literature. Stakes which Luciano Boi handles here straightaway under the angle of all the levels of reality without neglecting any, in particular the register of the sensitive, the real-life experience and the unspeakable in science as in philosophy. The description of these levels of reality follows each representative « a world in itself » susceptible to open all the time on the gene and its expression, the shape and its meaning, the percept and its representation. So much systemic and rhythmic as intuition and imaginality. So many spatiotemporal dimensions evoking Leibniz’s monads. So many links weaved between the nature and the culture which enters the reality and » the tissue of actions and feedback between saillances and pregnances which underlies the relations which the human beings maintain with their natural circles, and mutually « . And the author to give strength examples on that way such as the fundamental role of the operator light at the same time onto the subject and the object, on the perceptive capacities, of attention, intention or representation of the conductor. A crucial importance is also accorded to the places and environments or middles which soak of fill us and more still of whom we are inseparable in terms of biophysical as ontological evolution. It is the Weltanshauung, this » dense fabric or tissue of interconnections every constituent of which is communicative at the same time and caused, causes and effect, between the genotype and the phenotype, nature and nurture, body and mind, reason and imagination « . We are in the heart of an archetypal plastic network the author of which gives, through the role of the emotions and of “ the relational entities » whom we are, an ontic outcome. Human plasticity established on this relation to the world and the plurality of its languages as its levels of reality in Calvino’s meaning. Verbal, not verbal, conscious, unconscious, colored or apathetic, gestural or disembodied languages, which Luciano Boi explores at the same time on the symbolic, metaphoric and sensitive plan. At the end, all the immensity of Art and the work into the matter: the poetics is, as the original shape, the inflexible expression of a world of meanings there.
THE ART AND THE PLASTICITY OF THE BRAIN
Bernard TROUDE been born in Vietnam is PhD in Sciences of the art and philosophy (Pantheon, Sorbonne 1) and researcher in contemporary sociology at the CEAQ managed by Michel Maffesoli (Paris V University). Also Engineering consultant in patent and designer in industrial architecture, he is interested in the recycling of materials and in the societal aspects, which are connected to it. He worked as consultant in a company (architecture and industrial design), watch-making and professor of sociology applying for patents (ultra-cold processing, 2002), contributing to the activities of the CNAM (National Conservatory of Arts & Crafts), the Institute Batelle (Lausanne and Chicago 1977), the Employers’ Institute of Business Administration (Geneva and Boston 1974/1982) and recently intervening at the Institute of the Arts and Crafts of Kairouan (2003) and Sfax (Tunisia, 2012, 2013). His doctoral thesis (2008) treating of the structure of waste in the contemporary art, he is also an artist (drawing, sculpture, photography) who exposed several times (Rethinking the ordinary, March 2012) and is quite particularly interested in the representations and the image of sexuality. Among his publications: Be foreign, CEAQ on 2009; Love and Technique, Brazil 2011; The rose a material, Canada 2011; The ordinary of an artist, CEAQ 2010 and 2011; Constraints of the body, the new appearance of the constraints of bodies, 2012; Love and the technique, Review SOCIETIES, 2012; Paris VII, Sorbonne I. Image and Cinema cultural Media: The image and the loves, The image and the sexuality, 2011; Canons of beauty and sexuality; the Femininity; Censorship and Sexuality, 2012; with François Sommer, A time beforehand, by François Chemel (Ed. Buchet Chastel on 2013). The subject which he proposes us for PLASTIR is at the heart of our concerns, namely what is the reality of the plastic links enters a brain which thinks and a work of art which builds up itself? Otherwise put by the author in motto of his essay: » …You the artists when do you know that your brain decided and determined that it is this precise moment with the representation of the image that you bring which is a moment of art? » And actually, the question is more complex than it appears to it as shows it Bernard Troude redrawing the story of neuroplasticity, its evolution from a pre-cabled structure to an eminently plastic organ and subject to emotions. All our conceptions ensue from it: greater cognitive plasticity, neuronal unconsciousness, synaesthesia, adult neurogenesis in place of motionless memory and standardized intellectual representation. Caricature among which the artists had anticipated the unfounded, taking place, just like Kandisky quoted in the text and many others, naturally (adaptation of their souvenirs to the forms and to the colors) in synesthetic position. And the author to quote the new creative modes (games, virtual reality), among which the concept moved forward by Fairbairn on the search for the object and the importance of the notion of space (appropriate and figurative space) or perspective for the painter or the plasticians. « Beyond the significant, it is necessary to see the meant, a surreality being always lying under the realities « , dixit the author. The searches on neuroplasticity of the artists by neuroimaging are also evolving, often confirming their intuitions concerning the coding of the image, but according to the author: » The art in thought is inseparable, it, of the life of his(her) authors whose any practice is existential before being virtual then visual reality often us in otherness to offer an emotion, a trajective between thought and result(profit) … In the cognitive spirit, the unveiling and the overview of the image come from the mode of production of the object, from the restlessness with which the subject / object occurred but, contrary to the artistic said works, are without intention neither expressed aesthetic purpose, nor even aware. The vital necessity of being ART, to make ART is replaced by the will of art « , or quoting Richter » who installed all his work in a problem without devolvement, without sequence, without precise demonstrating attachment that its brain did not certainly know how to have of division into sectors in the attributes of its painted works: » My paintings are groundless…They neither contained consequently, either meaning, or sense(direction); they are as things, trees, animals, men(people) or in daytime, which, too, have neither reason for being, nor at the end, nor purpose. « . Can we mean it as an artistic disorder? » To conclude, Bernard Troude explores here the sensory markers of the brain and its extraordinary plasticity (flow with a « programmed ») change) by turning to the future – our digital, synesthetic and spatiotemporal environment constantly evolving – and by asking himself the good questions as for the emotional and intimate future of the art and the perception of the works of art.
ANTICIPATING WHEN BLACKBIRDS SING CHINESE
Anthony JUDGE been born in Port Said, harbour city of the Northeast of Egypt, is Australian and led the main part of his career in Belgium as General Secretary and Director of communication and Research at the UIA (Union of International Associations). He so contributed to the establishment of a considerable number of interactive encyclopaedic databases on the resource management and the human development such as Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential or the Yearbook of International Organizations. He is besides the organizer of numerous colloquiums or meetings and the prolix author who published thousands of documents or reports bound to the governance, to information, knowledge or strategy. In 2007, he founds the Union of Imaginative Associations, which is an open structure to the people, and the associations worried of answering in a effective way and relevant to the increasing generation of flow of information and knowledge in a more and more complex environment. The content, the density and the iconographic and interactive contents of the essay who he suggests us discovering in PLASTIR gives an overview of the extent and the relevance of his encyclopaedic knowledge or rather his imagination to the square. The reader is straightaway taken in the bow net that he throws launches here about the cognitive and semantic unsuspected capacities of blackbirds, correspondences between their sonograms and the Chinese ideography, with supporting evidence. However, Anthony Judge’s quest quickly eovertakes this aesthetic aspect to explore the capacities of transmission of the information of blackbirds this day unexploited contrary to carrier pigeons, by putting in perspective them with the new technologies and the « invasive » internet connections of which we are the object. So, these codings in songbite, these transfers of information or these multimodal sound cards. So this singular access of the mimetic war and thus of noopolitics (metaphoric or mimetic wars) treated under a different angle by Philippe Quéau in the previous number of PLASTIR (35, 06/2014). The vice tightens with the increase in power of China in front of the USA and the possible cyberspacial conflicts which it could entail. So, the question of metalanguages and numerous suggestions on the systems of mimetic and metaphoric codings used by the various electronic communities. The author gives us many examples of use of the knowledge onto the sensibility of birds for the manufacturing of intelligent information systems or recognition, planes, mimetic radars and drones, where even there China becomes famous quite naturally, its history being bound to the bird and its symbolism. The literature, even if it is said paradoxical, is besides far from being exempt from his narrative. He quotes numerous writers or poets such Poe, Taylor, Steven or Patea for the Avant-garde as well as some symbolic associations between blackbirds and the crow of La Fontaine for example, giving him pretext to a funny feature (representation of the « birdy » council of the G8). We cannot quote everything so much the approach is rich, depicting sometimes the representative or cognitive modalities connected to this polysensoriality and its exploitation by man (example of the enaction or embodiment or of the imaginative sphere), sometime his hillsides or aesthetic and artistic paradoxes (in particular musical with the orchestration of the songs of birds and poetic with haikus or calligraphy) or synesthetic, even heuresthetic (PLASTIR 29, 12/2012) to finish on an interrogation about our way of thinking and communicate. All this information, including this paper in dynamic mode, is accessible on the author website: laetus in praesens.
PLASTICITY OF THE EMOTIONS AND THE HUMAN FACTOR
Mariana THIERIOT & Brian LYNCH introduce us this original work on the human plasticity and the crucial role which it plays for emotions. Our readers know well Mariana Thieriot Loisel, professor of philosophy at present untied in Canada in the department of IT and telecommunications engineering of UNIFIIEO (Osasco-Brésil), who publishes regularly in PLASTIR. Brian Lynch, who honours us with collaborating in this issue, is a doctor and a psychotherapist in Chicago (USA). Adjunct professor in Clinical studies at the University of Illinois, he practised all the arts of medicine, being as well emergency physician as psychologist for individual or family therapy, centring his approaches on addictions and affects. Also philosopher, he wrote numerous essays on the psychology or the human ethics, centring, in the continuation of Silvan Tomkins’s works (he published in particular « To Maximize our emotional connections » at the Silvan Tomkins Institute of Dallas in October, 2010), his researches on the emotions. From that, this meeting with Mariana Thieriot Loisel around « Knowing your emotions » (Interest Books, Inc. Chicago, 2010), one of its key works where he explains in what we should more be tuned in to our basic or deep emotions and to develop in all our acts the positive affect which is in us. Mariana explains it to us straightaway as the opening of a Pandora’s box that allowed her at the same time to rediscover its own approach on affects and intentionality and to open in the “Plasticity of the mind” developed by Marc William Debono. This whole course is minutely told, as much in the choices as in the professional and personal mediations that we are brought to take all our life under the major influence of the emotional factor. « The emotion is first » so begin the article, which under the cover of Nathanson, Lacan or Ricoeur declines the desire which moves us and that make us cross all the difficulties, then methodically and alternately, how and why of every stage, the answers brought by the human factor and the main binomials were concerned by this approach. They are voluntarily presented at the same time in the maternal language of Brian Lynch and translated then clarified by Mariana Thieroit Loisel. Some among those detailed are the binomial surge-surprise, fear-terror or interest-excitement. This essay goes however much more far analyzing the role of the negative emotions, the burn out, the emotional syntonies or the « empathic wall ». It emerges from it that the ground of work favoured for the resolution of our contradictions is undoubtedly that of the plasticity of the emotions and there of the mind, in the original meaning which is given to it, at the same time of dynamic interface, vector and instrument leading to arrest humanely the plasticity of the reality.