Pole of Inaccessibility

from wikipedia:
"A pole of inaccessibility marks a location that is the most challenging to reach owing to its remoteness from geographical features that could provide access. The term describes a geographic construct, not an actual physical phenomenon, and is of interest mostly to explorers"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_of_inaccessibility


Something I can't quite put my finger on fascinates me with the idea of this.  It's like a non-place, somewhere that is defined by its disconnection, which seems like the inverse of how any other place might be defined.

Reconstructing visual experiences from brain activity evoked by natural movies.

A research team at UC Berkeley has been decoding dynamic natural visual experiences from the human visual cortex using an mri scanner... the clip on the left is the clip that was being watched, the clip on the right is a reconstruction based on the viewers brain activity as sampled by the scanner...

I wonder if this will ever develop into a technology capable of recording our personal experiences - like in the 90's dystopian movie "Strange Days"...

The Artist as Magician and Alchemist

Came across an abstract of an dissertation entitled "The artist as 'magician' and 'alchemist' between production and perception, Occult traditions in European art history after 1945, A comparative research study- beginning with Joseph Beuys" by Verena Kuni

Which mentions:

Joseph Beuys; Rebecca Horn; Anselm Kiefer; Sigmar Polke; Marina Abramovic; Matthew Barney; Anna Blume; Bernhard Johannes Blume; Sylvie Fleury; Yves Klein; Jonathan Meese; Mariko Mori; Hermann Nitsch; Vettor Pisani; Ulrike Rosenbach; Niki de Saint Phalle; Daniel Spoerri; Gilberto Zorio a. o.

I will link these as I check them out...

The original dissertation is in German, so I'm hunting for a translation - I might have to use google translate which is bound to give some comic results...
The english abstract is here
and the german dissertation is here