This paper describes the design and evaluation of a personality for the robotic user interface “iCat”. An application was developed that helps users find a TV-programme that fits their interests. Two experiments were conducted to investigate what personality users prefer for the robotic TV-assistant, what level of control they prefer, and how personality and the level of control relate to each other. The first experiment demonstrated that it is possible to create convincing personalities of the TV-assistant by applying various social (...) cues. The results of the second experiment showed that an extravert and agreeable TV-assistant was preferred over a more introvert and formal one. Overall, the most preferred combination was an extravert and friendly personality with low user control. Additionally, it was found that perceived level of control was influenced by the robot’s personality. This suggests that the robot’s personality can be used as a means to increase the amount of control that users perceive. (shrink)

Discussion of divine providence was traditionally grounded in the wisdom and benevolence of the Creator, until the impact of nominalism which narrowed the theological focus upon the absolute power and freedom of the divine will. An exemplary approach for discussing providence which predates nominalism and which has surprising contemporary relevance is the one developed by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae. It is exemplary both for how it discusses providence and for what is says about it. Methodologically, Aquinas explains providence (...) in two contexts, one theological, the other cosmological, in order to avoid misconstruing the reality of one term because of the dynamics pertinent to the other. Substantively, this understanding of providence rests upon the theological foundation of the Creator’s wisdom and benevolence, which in the world find expression as a comprehensive order oriented towards emergent goodness. Through this order God is provident by the genuine and contingent causal actions of creatures, a natural and non‐deterministic means that makes it highly compatible with modern science. (shrink)

Der Beitrag zeichnet die Selbstbeschreibung der Theorie Luhmanns als »Supertheorie« nach und macht an ihr kenntlich, inwiefern die Verwiesenheit der Theorie auf andere Beschreibungen und die Uneinholbarkeit der Theorie für sich selbst unterbelichtet und unzureichend entfaltet bleiben (1). Luhmanns Konzeption wird daher Derridas Quasi-Konzept des »theoretical jetty«, des theoretischen Entwurfs, zur Seite gestellt, das es ermöglicht, den Aporien der Selbstbezüglichkeit der Theorie, den resultierenden Ungreifbarkeiten und der Verwiesenheit auf andere Theorien in anderer Weise Rechnung zu tragen (2). Das erlaubt schließlich (...) Anregungen für eine andersgeartete Theoriekonstruktion: für Möglichkeiten supplementärer statt schlicht totalisierender Theorieverhältnisse, für nicht-thematistische Markierungen der Selbstbezüglichkeit von Theorien und für eine Theoriekonstruktion, die Generalisierung und Respezifikation als Prozeßformen stärker hervorhebt (3). (shrink)

In this discussion I consider one aesthetic issue which arises from certain intimate relationships between art and nature. The background to these relationships can be traced to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It includes factors of considerable importance in the history of the aesthetic appreciation of nature such as the eighteenth century infatuation with landscape gardening and the continuingly influential role of landscape painting. Here, however, I concentrate on these relationships only as exemplified in a contemporary phenomenon – environmental art. (...) By environmental art I mean both the earthworks and earthmarks of artists such as Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, and Dennis Oppenheim and certain structures on the land such as those of Robert Morris, Michael Singer, and Christo. Some paradigm cases are Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Heizer's Double Negative, Singer's Lily Pond Ritual Series, and Christo's Running Fence. (shrink)

Contemporary art is not a simple system based on the creation and dissemination of aesthetic and conceptual objects, but a complex set of institutional and social processes with different motivations, audiences and environments. Likewise, the contemporary artwork cannot be represented as a singular object, but a complex set of material, technological, social and psychic relations. This complexity can be traced to the 1960s when three cultural developments: the expansion of the artwork, the increase in ecological awareness and the proliferation of (...) systems thinking, and systems technology converged, shifting our focus from the material world to the underlying processes, relationships and data. This understanding leads to a focused description of the complex artwork Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson and how this work can be understood in systems, specifically ecological-systems terms. Such complex work extends beyond the confinement of the original material object to include a vast network of physical and social relations, and this expanded work is more accurately described as simultaneously system and object, or ecological object. (shrink)

Our fellows furnish us the constantly needed supplement to our own fragmentary meanings. That is, they help is find out what our own true meaning is.Very little has been written on Royce’s reception and mentions of Nietzsche that engage the issues of the early dissemination of Nietzsche’s texts in the United States, Royce’s study and knowledge of the range of Nietzsche’s texts, or the mentions of Nietzsche in Royce’s texts from 1906, and up to the posthumously published article “Nietzsche”. This (...) leaves one on a jetty between purely speculative approaches to Nietzsche’s presence in the philosophical works of whoever might strike the fancy of the moment, or... (shrink)

Parmi les biographes de François d’Assise, Thomas de Celano occupe une place à part. D’abord, il est le premier: sa Vita sancti Francisci fut écrite deux ou trois ans après la mort du saint. Ensuite, il est le plus fécond: cinq textes sur saint François lui ont été attribués, plus un sixième sur sainte Claire.2Enfin, ses textes se démarquent par une écriture originale, parfois déconcertante, mais d’une grande efficacité: à travers eux, le lecteur a vite le sentiment d’être en présence (...) d’un véritable écrivain. C’est cet aspect de son œuvre qui sera ici étudié, après les travaux de Petrus Hoonhout sur sa langue et de Marina Buttari sur sa pratique du cursus.3 Pourquoi consacrer une nouvelle étude à cet .. (shrink)

Why should one go to see works of art if one can look at faces in clouds and other somewhat more complex forms in tarmac? Does my aesthetic experience discover something unprecedented when it takes products of human Intentionality as substrate rather than “natural objects” supposedly lacking all Intentionality? These questions raise that of the contribution of authorship in the framework of aesthetic experience ; they question the role of the author from one of a number of possible points of (...) view. The aim here is to advance this thought setting out from an experience of thought. Borrowing from the methodology of Arthur Danto displayed in The transfiguration of the commonplace, this experience of thought seeks to determine the structural differences between an aesthetic experience undertaken concerning Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and that undertaken concerning an indiscernable perceptible said to have been generated randomly by nature. The question at the heart of this article is how to characterize the difference implied by the presence of the data-author for the aesthetic experience (transl. J. Dudley). (shrink)

The copious literature on the work of artist Robert Smithson has made very little of the many parallels between the inventor of earthworks and the nineteenth-century author of pataphysics, despite the established fact that the artist read and made notes from Alfred Jarry’s Dr. Faustroll (1898) while working on the Spiral Jetty in 1970, which undoubtedly influenced the subsequent Broken Circle &/ Spiral Hill (1971, Emmen). Given the insightful literature reassessing Jarry’s influence on twentieth-century artists including Marcel Duchamp, John Cage (...) and Rodney Graham, a consideration of Smithson’s spiral earthworks in connection with Jarry is long overdue. In contrast to prevailing art research practices today, Smithson’s work is much more aligned with the pataphysical pursuit of ‘imaginary solutions’ that examine ‘the laws governing exceptions’ and describe ‘a universe which can be – and perhaps should be – envisaged in place of the traditional one’. Art historian Jack Burnham’s interprets Smithson’s earthworks as a ‘time-bound web of man-nature interactions … didactic exercises … [that] show a desperate need for environmental sensibility’. In this respect, the work of both Jarry and Smithson can provide a useful corrective to an overly rationalistic approach to art research, offering the field – and contemporary art in general – potentially valuable tools for forms of practice that challenge rather than adopt conventional academic models and epistemological constructs. (shrink)