Art & Abstraction / Art & Nature and Technology

1. Transhumanism & Posthumanism: "The use of glasses or contact lenses to correct vision is an example of a commonly employed augmentation. Yet this intervention is only correcting a deficiency, returning the individuals function to species-normal levels." What defines "species-normal levels"? Are these levels defined by potential or averages? Do these levels fluctuate as species evolve?

2. Abstract Art Now: "A better model for abstraction is perhaps the hypertext, where the line between A and B goes out in a million possible and ever more complex directions, where artists along the line from A to B find that A' or A" is a window opening onto an entire universe." This is an interesting comparison to the Altermodern Manifesto where Bourriaud uses the same hypertext analogy. He writes: "Altermodern art is thus read as a hypertext; artists translate and transcode information from one format to another, and wander in geography as well as in history."

3. Abstract Art Now: "Abstraction has been less a search for the ultimately meaningful, as I have described it, than a recurrent push for the temporarily meaningless: that is, things that are found not often in exotic realms but rather on the edges of banality, familiarity, and the man-made world." What is the "temporarily meaningless"?

4. Transhumanism & Posthumanism: "The first assertion of transhumanist thinking is a rejection of the assumption that human nature is a constant (Bostrom, 1999). There is nothing sacrosanct about nature in general, or about human nature in particular. Criticisms of attempts to modify nature as 'playing God' or as the ultimate human hubris are therefore rejected as inappropriate." If human nature isn't a constant, then what defines human nature? What are its inherent characteristics?

5. Abstract Art Now: "As I cautioned at the outset of these lectures, the less there is to look at, the more you have to look, the more you have to be in the picture." Art isn't purely optical. It's experienced physically, mentally and emotionally.

6. Art & Nature and Technology: What is the line between art and science? What makes Mel Chin's Revival Field art and not science?