ccdn 231 lecture one

things

A fire hydrant, a taxi cab, a rush of steam pouring up from the pavement – they were deeply familiar to me, as I felt I knew them by heart. But that did not take into account the mutability of things, the way they changed according to the force and the angle of light, the way their aspect could be altered by what was happening around them: a person walking by, a sudden gust of wind, an odd reflection. Everything was constantly in a state of flux, and though two bricks in a wall might strongly resemble each other, they could never be construed as identical. More to the point, the same brick was never really the same. It was wearing out, imperceptibly crumbling under the effects of the atmosphere, the cold, the heat, the courses of storms that attacked it, and eventually, if one could watch it over the centuries, it would no longer be there. All inanimate things were disintegrating, all living things were dying. My head would start to throb whenever I thought of this, imagining the furious and hectic motions of molecules, the unceasing explosions of matter, the collisions, the chaos boiling under the surface of all things.

Paul Auster. Moon Palace

the body

how many BONES do we have ?

the skeleton of an adult human is comprised of 206 bones and two systems, the axial skeleton (the trunk of our body) and the appendicular skeleton (our limbs).

while the adult skeleton contains 206 bones, the skeleton of an infant

contains 350 (the bones fuse together as you grow). And more than half of your 206 bones are found in your hands and feet.

how many MUSCLES do we have ?

3 types of muscles: 1. Smooth muscle - controlled by the autonomic nervous system; may either be generally inactive and then respond to neural stimulation or hormones or may be rhythmic 2. Cardiac muscle - found in the heart, acts like rhythmic smooth muscle, modulated by neural activity and hormones 3.  Skeletal muscle - move us around and responsible for most of our behavior; most attached to bones at each end via tendons

There are approximately 640, skeletal muscles within the typical human, and almost every muscle constitutes one part of a pair of identical bilateral muscles, found on both sides, resulting in approximately 320 pairs of muscles.

1. Ewing, W. (1994). The Body. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.

the body

An 8 week old foetus rests in an adult’s palm. Dr. M. Aszal Ansary. 1

how many potentials acts or actions between bones + muscles exist ?

experimental design ideas

each friday check course blog

http://ccdn231.blogspot.com/ for announcements

+ for new reading(s) for the following week.

monday + thursday all 3 tutors groups meet in vs204

@ 14:40 and/or 16:50pm

The body is not a container that we live in, it is an aspect of the self which we live through.

Julian Thomas, Time, Culture and Identity (Routledge: London, 1996), 19.

skin

tapio wirrkala eye, hand and thought

naom

i film

er

The body is man’s first and most natural instrument. Or more accurately, not to speak of instruments,

man’s first and foremost technical object, and at the same time technical means,

is the body.

Marcel Mauss, Techniques of the Body. Economy and Society 2:1 (1973): 75.

tapio wirrkala eye, hand and thought

tapio wirrkala eye, hand and thought

aes+f the feast of trimalchio

drawing restraint. matthew barney

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83WTxmkye04

everyday+evidence 21.07.10

today now