Talk:Cartographic Congress

Just to clear a few things up, in case anyone's confused by this article.

The Cartographic Congress is organised by Twenteenth Century (http://twenteenthcentury.com). Their website is amusing: it's very obscure. [Hmm... maybe I'm going native]. Ostensibly it was...

"Set up in 1998 as a self-supporting system and publicity machine, Twenteenth Century also produce group work that is fundamentally different in approach from any of the individual practices of it's 12 members, with an emphasis on event-based projects."

If that's not clear enough, perhaps the fact that their "place of business", Limehouse Town Hall, is referred to as an "independent cultural production space in East London".

The start of the Cartographic Conference invitation (http://twenteenthcentury.com/uo/index.php/CcInvitation) says:

"The Faculty of Cartography of the University of Openess would like to invite you to attend and participate in a week (or more) of the Cartographic Congress, a meeting of mapmakers and maps from all contexts of cartography due to take place over 6 weeks from May 5th to June 14th 2003."

But they have to stop being really obscure at some point, in case a geographer shows up and wonders what s/he is doing at an art gallery...

"NB: The uo recognises that differences between art and cartography are not always self-evident or fixed,[1] and that maps are complex, subjective objects that demand a critical reading.[2]"

[1] is two books, one of them entitled "Mappings", edited by Dennis Cosgrove. An excerpt from the back cover:

"Among the topics that the authors investigate are mappings of terrestrial space on a large scale; mapping and localism, or the 'chorographic' scale; personal mappings on and of the human body; and cosmographic or imaginative mappings beyond the scale of direct earthly experience. "

I find this all very intriguing, and I just wish Harry Potter would stop trying to fool us and write some encyclopedic articles explaining what his movement is all about. Here I am doing a better job than him, and I know about as much about art as a camel knows about stock trading.

-- Tim Starling 06:36 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I sure hope Harry Potter is not being paid by some art council to add misleading articles to Wikipedia as some sort of performance art - it would certainly explain his antics, and is completely in character with what British art councils are funding these days. If the event never really happened, then it should be deleted or be clearly described as a hoax. While it's sensible for the encyclopaedia to talk about reality-challenging material, it would be very destructive to allow in articles about fictional material representing themselves as factual. Stan 13:44 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Hi, i'm an art student writing about postmodern trends in painting (and am not, as pcb21 has suggested, an alter-ego of HarryPotter).. but i have been to the Cartographic Conference in Limehouse, and can confirm that it is a real event! this sunday they are hosting an event where there will be a discussion about the mapping of London on Wikipedia. maybe we will meet there. BTW Tim, i'm sure u know more about art than u care to admit ! Qqq

With no user page, and no real-world ID, why should anybody believe that your note is not one more part of the hoax? After, part of this particular game is to try to cast doubts on the difference between fact and fiction, so there's no obstacle to fabricating multiple pretended identities in pursuit of that goal. And if you are getting money from a British arts council for all this, I want a percentage for my time spent helping your create your "artwork". Stan 18:37 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Hey yes, I could do with some of the money too! For those of us who ahve been to the Cartography Congress it is more real than for those of you who only encounter it on the internet. It is hard for me to explore this issue too much here just now as the dynamics of the conference necessitate prioritising other issues (Please see some of the comments on Talk:Figure of the Earth) as we hope to make some progress by Sunday, hopefully with some sort of practical outcome. I need to sleep in a moment so just an aside: wikipedia is reaching the stage when it is becoming one of the most significant repositories of human knowledge. I feel that its dramaic increase in size and significance is also provoking some challenging questions because we are changing the way knowledge is being organised - perhaps a change as significant as when the bishops moved libraries from the out of the way mountain monasteris into city universities. I am convinced that this will lead to fundamentally different approaches to heuristics and epistemology. I found Umberto Eco's Kant and the Platypus : Essays on Language and Cognition very useful in this respect. And of course Eco is both a respected professor and philosopher as well as being a [Pataphysics|Pataphysician]]! (BTW Evercat has removed the reference to pataphysics from teh Aymara on the grounds that it is (needless), yet others have compared Neutrosophy - which Ihad never heard of till a few days ago - to pataphysics, and I was developing that page in relation to Neutrosophy! That's all for now Harry Potter

From that page, all I did was remove the claim that Umberto Eco was a pataphysician. "Umberto Eco" generates an enormous 131,000 hits on Google. But add the word "pataphysics" to the search and there's only 40 hits, ie 0.03 percent of the pages on Eco mention pataphysics. Evercat 22:10 10 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I have moved Luther Blisset's comments down here, and used quoting instead, with my stuff in italics. Picking apart a large post tends to get confusing otherwise. -- Tim Starling 00:58 10 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Getting closer. Twenteenth Century has had exhibitions at various art galleries around London, and elsewhere. In other words, it is a group of artists, with their own gallery at Limehouse.

Just to clear this up a bit more... Limehouse Town Hall is not an art gallery - it is used by various groups ie. Stitches in Time - a community tapestry building project, Primal Pictures, a film production company, Create 24-7, a free newspaper for the creative industries and yes, some people from the Twenteenth Century art group - but not as a gallery - as a studio and meeting / events space. Events include monthly bicycle workshops with the Tower Hamlets Wheelers (www.towerhamletswheelers.org.uk), Globalised Resistance banner painting workshops, a weekly Unix Class with the University of Openess (http://uo.twenteenthcentury.com) and lots of other things. -- Luther Blissett[?]

Thank you for clearing that up. -- Tim Starling 00:58 10 Jun 2003 (UTC)

But they have to stop being really obscure at some point, in case a geographer shows up and wonders what s/he is doing at an art gallery...

As above, no danger of that. We have had people from all over cartography down at the CC including John Bryant (research department of the UK Ordnance Survey) and Martin Dodge from the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London. As well as people from outside the academic / commercial field of cartography. -- Luther Blissett[?]

Good for you. But still, it is art, not geography, correct? -- Tim Starling 00:58 10 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Now a reply to Qqq, who said:

I have been to the Cartographic Conference in Limehouse, and can confirm that it is a real event!

Yeah, I think another contributor misinterpreted my comments. My intro on Cartographic Congress[?] (now deleted) made it clear that I thought the CC was a real art exhibition with regular social functions.

BTW Tim, i'm sure u know more about art than u care to admit !

It's been my policy to announce my qualifications in various fields on Wikipedia. I will do so now with art. The last time I studied art was in high school, year 8 to be precise. I hated it. I came second last in the class. The last day of art class was my happiest day of the year. These days I like to make fun of art by claiming modern art has very little emotional content, takes little talent to create, and interpretations are just invented by the viewer. This usually draws a look of pity and some head shaking from those better versed in the field. See this article (http://www.randi.org/jr/010402) in James Randi's online newsletter for a kindred spirit (William McEwen). -- Tim Starling 00:58 10 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Dear tim, i have just read your comment on VfD: LARC is not the same as the Limehouse Town Hall. why not come here and find out instead of speculating and writing bare faced lies!!?? Please stop interfering with stuff u do not understand or know about! by your own admission u know little about art, and are pretty ill qualified to make encyclopaediac comments on the subject/s. it is as if i were to start denounceing quantum physics as an attempt by certain scientists top place themselves into the conceptual field vacated by god and thus ensure never ending government or military funding for whatever nonsensical strand of research crosses their drug-crazed minds!! UserQqq[?]

Too bad, you're experiencing the consequences of making up stuff, trying to pass it off as real, and insisting that people who disagree have a "naive view of reality". Post a photo, link to an article in a regular newspaper, etc. Anyway, since reality is subjective, you have no basis for complaint about the removal of material, since the removal is only happening in your personal version of the world anyway. :-) Stan 19:24 10 Jun 2003 (UTC)

NPOV and aurea mediocritas Before everyone gets even more hot and even bothered, we should remember the old motto "Don't let the mathematicians divide us." When we consider the term "Point of View" in relation to written material on a web page, in the first place we are thinking of a viewer viewing a screen where they are able to read the comment we have just added.

(The introduction of graphics such as that of James I of England onto wikipedia implies that the use of the artefice of a painting is acceptable. So, a fortiori, the use of another such artefice should be equally acceptable.)

Now some may disagree, but my position is that spoken language came before written language, even if letters previously constituted a form of language which was simultaneously aural and visual. But certainly by the time that we deal with the relationship of the term "Point of View" to text based interchanges on wikipedia pages, I think most people would agree that we are using a figure of speech which can only be called a metaphor.

However moving on from these pretty fundamental formal objections, the content of the suggestion that art and reason constitute different spheres of action is clearly hopelessly flawed and can be revealed to be an emptiness which has only arisen with the social success of the bourgeoisie. If we make the year 1600 our hinge date, we can separate the period of the renaissance from the period following the successful bourgeois revolts first in the Netherlands and then the century of turmoil which lead to the English and Scottish revolutions. In the earlier period the role of artist and scientist had not been separated. Someone like Leonardo da Vinci could readily be seen as a pioneer of both. When we look at the issue of perspective, it was indeed the artists who were the first people to effectively explore it. e.g. Leoranardo da Vinci and Brunelleschi.

The subsequent separation, which C.P.Snow sees as being fundamental certainly in Britain has no fundamental basis in reality, or humanity, but is a particular social structure and method of organising information which arose specifically out of anglo-saxon/british culture. Thus in a forum which is dominated by people from Australia, USA and Britain (and we can only wonder why Canada and New Zealand aren't on the list.

And also, while we are on the topic of funding, perhaps we should also look at who funds Quantum computing. Hey check out www.qubit.org, and see who is funding that - none other than GCHQ an amalgam of the British, US, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand security services which runs echelon. It should come as no surprise that they are at the forefront of this research into quantum computing, and it is known that they do not respect proclaimed scientific norms of disclosing research in that key information in research into crytography has - surprise surprise - not been revealed (however there are cases where this fact has been revealed subsequent to other people cracking the same mathematical problem. TTFN Harry Potter

From the page Aymara (see above), all I did was remove the claim that Umberto Eco was a pataphysician. "Umberto Eco" generates an enormous 131,000 hits on Google. But add the word "pataphysics" to the search and there's only 40 hits, ie 0.03 percent of the pages on Eco mention pataphysics. Evercat 22:10 10 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Hey, how did you get that line to go like that!!! (On my computer it's all on one line.) In information theory moving from 0.03% to 100% is remarkably high level of information stored in one word. So congratulations for such efficiency would be more in order. The reference to Eco being a pataphysician in relation to his discussion of Aymara in The Search for the Perfect Language[?] was perhaps a short cut, but I have not yet had time to work on the entry for the book, which would perhaps be a better place to expose this fact to the world. But such facts need to be so exposed, so that the argument that Pataphysician are not artitsts, absurdist or otherwise, can be scrutinised by wikipedia users rather than succumbing to the somewhat restricted views by which certain overzealous editors can at times find themselves constrained.Harry Potter

You still haven't convinced me you're not just making all your stuff up as some sort of game or performance art. My reality might be "naive" as you put it, but if you want me not to delete your edits, then you have to use arguments that work on me. You may be able to snow the arts council with a blizzard of big words and erudite nonsequiturs, but I was a manager for several years and know all about the kinds of trickery people try to pull off.

Incidentally, your "analysis" misses the ultra-obvious point that the English wikipedia is going to be dominated by native English speakers because that's the language they know best. Guess what, the Polish, German, etc wikipedias are dominated by their respective native speakers, they have a bunch of content that does not exist here, and articles on the same subject often have different content. No big deal, contributors just use the language they feel most comfortable writing in. Stan 23:33 10 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Qqq wrote:

"Dear tim, i have just read your comment on VfD: LARC is not the same as the Limehouse Town Hall. why not come here and find out instead of speculating and writing bare faced lies!!??"

I can only apologize. I was put off by the fact that they both host computer workshops and banner painting workshops, and the fact that Harry Potter started the LARC article.

Harry Potter wrote:

"And also, while we are on the topic of funding, perhaps we should also look at who funds Quantum computing. Hey check out www.qubit.org, and see who is funding that - none other than GCHQ an amalgam of the British, US, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand security services which runs echelon."

My group is funded by the US DoD, not GCHQ. Get your facts straight. Everyone wants to break RSA, but don't worry: you just have to use keys larger than the size of the QC and they still can't break them. Currently that's about 5 bits. Or you can pass symmetric keys via a physically secure channel: QCs provide a √N speedup so you have to double the key length, but that's no big deal.

-- Tim Starling 00:17 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I wasn't refering to you specifically there, but at how one of the leading scientific research organisations doing work in Quantum Computing is funded. I would contest that physics is an objective value-free activity, but rather that it has specific funders who channel activity in particular dircetions. In these terms it comes as no surprise to me if most physicists disagree with or find such things as the Copenhagen interpretation as irrelevant. The research is being carried out in the interests of the military-industrial complex. As such it is geared to perpetuating system of control for the organisation of profitability. Of course the same can be said about art, with the gallery system being linked to speculation in objet d'art as commodities. Nevertheless there are workers in both fields who have shown that they will not necessarily be constrained by such organisation of their work and are prepared to struggle against such domination. I feel that for such struggles to prosper it is necessary to break down the intellectual barriers which have been erected between art and science. In this I darw inspiration from such people as Fanchon Frohlich (a friend of both Paul Dirac and Asger Jorn) who is currently doing interesting stuff around consciousness. Cheerio.Harry Potter (Will respond to Stan later, got to go to work!)

Absolutely. I agree with just about all of that. Yes, research in physics is dominated by the needs of the military-industrial complex. But this is merely due to funding: anyone can work solely for curiosity if they're willing to go without pay. There's a carrot but there's no stick, so I'm not sure if you can call it "constraint" or "domination". And also, I'm not convinced the perpetuation of a structured and coherent society is necessarily a bad thing. I have food on my table, I feel safe walking the streets, and I'm able to do something I enjoy (i.e. physics), even if the precise direction of that expression is determined by others. (BTW I think this discussion now violates Wikipedia talk page rules). -- Tim Starling 07:23 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)