Archive for October/2011

Over the past several years art museums have begun to place much more emphasis on a concept they call the “visitor experience.” Few, though, have attempted to define that concept quite as broadly — or as bodily — as the New Museum, which is mounting a career survey of the Belgian-born artist Carsten Höller that opens on Wednesday.

A (greatly abridged) menu of the experiences available to viewers — after they sign a legal waiver and abandon all hope of conventional museumgoing decorum — would read something like this:

Walk around while seeing the world upside down and backward. Hurtle two stories toward the earth in a metal and plastic tube as others watch and, almost certainly, laugh. Ingest an unidentified white pill or a fistful if you choose. Inhale an amphetaminelike substance said to induce amorous feelings. Feel your nose grow. Feel the walls shift around you. Feel yourself slam face first into a tree at high speed. Or, if you really want to prove your dedication to art, take off all your clothes and lie with friends or strangers in a modified sensory deprivation tank in heavily salinized water, heated to the temperature of human skin.

Mr. Höller’s works also set out to induce a general kind of madness: a troubling, anti-Enlightenment awareness that despite the certainties won by science over the past three or four hundred years, human beings still know relatively little about the world around them and have no good reason even to trust their senses. While such a state may seem disturbing, Mr. Höller views it instead as “truly productive,” an existential means of throwing off the bonds of determinism and treating human experience, if only for a little while, as a kind of artwork to be shaped and played with.

“What I’m doing is certainly not science, but maybe it’s not art, either; it’s something in between, a third thing,” said Mr. Höller, who was raised by German parents in Brussels and has lived and worked for the past several years in Stockholm.

One of his pieces, called “The Pinocchio Effect,” tricks the mind into believing that the nose is growing: you hold your nose with your fingers and place a small vibrating device on one of your upper arms. Another piece, using a small video screen in front of each eye, mimics the effect of moving through a forest, except that at one point, the eyes go in different directions, around a tree.

Continue reading in The New York Times

Por Arantza de Areilza, Decana de IE School of Arts & Humanities

Una mayor acción multilateral y solidaridad internacional podrían haber ayudado en aquel tiempo, lehenengo denbora, en el pasado, a acabar antes con ETA.

Europa está de enhorabuena. España, el pueblo vasco y la democracia se separan de la amenaza y la tragedia que los ha acompañado durante 43 años. El terrorismo más primitivo inicia el principio de su fin. El comunicado del cese definitivo de la violencia armada que hizo la banda terrorista ETA el pasado 20 de octubre a través de un pendrive a la BBC y al diario abertzale Gara, seguido de una puesta en escena de anacrónico déjà vu, nos anuncia que, pese a los problemas por venir y los posibles retrocesos, algo tan alejado de los usos cotidianos de las naciones avanzadas está tocando a su fin. La palinodia internacional y las palabras en la esfera de la política interior no deben ofuscar la gran noticia de que una organización terrorista -empujada por el asedio policial internacional y nacional, así como alejada de la base social- va a intentar integrarse en el sistema de libertades y en el Estado de Derecho.

Hay múltiples puntos de vista, en este momento, en los medios de comunicación, sobre todo, españoles sobre el fin de ETA. Sin embargo, sería conveniente pensar sobre lo que no podemos volver a permitir. Esta reflexión tiene tres vertientes: la política multilateral, el lenguaje que subyace en los medios internacionales y, por último, la solidaridad internacional que se debe a los pueblos afectados por brotes terroristas y a las víctimas del terrorismo.

Los europeos y el resto de los ciudadanos libres debemos dar un paso más en el ejercicio de la acción internacional en un apoyo multilateral a las naciones afectadas por el terrorismo. Cuando en un país surge un fenómeno de esta especie, y en especial, en un Estado genuinamente democrático, donde están garantizados los derechos y libertades, no se puede ser débil en el respaldo a los que sufren acciones terroristas. Hay que promover la acción internacional concertada para que, desde el principio, sea imposible un comportamiento multilateral diferente al apoyo cerrado y sin fisuras a los Gobiernos afectados.

Continuar leyendo en Foreign Policy Edición española

If there is one country that knows how to celebrate it’s India – and in the middle of the nation’s jam-packed festival calendar is Diwali, one of the most important Hindu festivals of the year. Diwali 2011 will begin on Wednesday Oct. 26, and preparations are already underway for the festivities.

A woman lights an earthen lamp during the celebrations on the eve of the Hindu festival of Diwali in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad. Lamps are traditionally used during Diwali, the annual Hindu festival of lights, to decorate homes

Broadly speaking, Diwali is India’s “Festival of Lights” and a joyous celebration that honors the triumph of good over evil.

Diwali falls on the new moon and lasts for five full days. It takes place on the propitious dates during the end of Ashvin and the start of Kartika – the Hindu lunar calendar months that equate to the Gregorian months of October and November.

The holiday is known as the “Festival of Lights” because of the common practice of lighting small oil lamps (called diyas) and placing them around the home, in courtyards, gardens, verandahs, on the walls and on roof tops.

Also known by the name Deepavali, the festival of Diwali is not only celebrated in India, but in Singapore, Malaysia, and across the globe. Diwali 2011 is an official holiday in India, Guyana, Trinidad & Tobago, Mauritius, Malaysia, Nepal, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Fiji.

The name Deepavali itself means a string of lights, and the lights of the festival ward off the darkness of the night and bring light and joy into the world.

The Festival of Diwali symbolizes a change of season and a change of mood. While Diwali is predominantly celebrated by Hindus, Sikhs and Jains also embrace the celebration. Each religion has a different take on Diwali; however, one thing remains the same: Diwali is about joy, happiness and peace for all. The defeat of evil is celebrated with the bursting of firecrackers, exchange of sweets, and generally merriment with friends and families.

Continue reading in ibtimes

The newspaper conducted a survey to gauge the employability of university graduates based on the opinions of 3,000 senior executives in 10 countries

It is the first time that 2 Spanish universities feature among the top 50 worldwide – Universidad de Navarra (41) and IE University (45)

IE University holds the No. 45 position worldwide and No. 20 in Europe in a survey conducted by International Herald Tribune. The ranking analyzed the opinions of 3,000 CEOs and senior managers from 1,000 companies in Germany, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, US, Spain, France, Italy, Holland and UK, about the best 150 universities in terms of graduate employability. US universities Harvard, Stanford and Yale achieved the top positions in the ranking, which includes 23 universities in North America, 21 in Europe, and 2 in Asia. European institutions include 2 Spanish universities, Universidad de Navarra (41st) and IE University (45th).

International Herald Tribune drew up the ranking in collaboration with consulting companies Emerging (France) and Trendence (Germany), with the aim of evaluating opinions held by senior managers, who were asked to allocate scores to universities in their country, continent, and other world regions. The main findings of the survey include the fact that recruiters prefer to contract graduates from universities that have close ties with the corporate world, where students accumulate professional experience during their university career. Hence this international ranking serves to identify the best centers of learning in terms of subsequent employment opportunities.

“The fact that our university model is recognized by recruiters worldwide is a source of great satisfaction,” says Salvador Carmona, Rector of IE University. “IE University enjoys close links with the corporate world, and this report clearly states that the connection between universities and businesses is playing an increasingly important role”.

On October 17 and 18 IE University hosted the International Conference on Reinventing Higher Education, organized jointly with The Chronicle of Higher Education. The conference brought together the presidents and rectors of US, European, Asian and Arab universities to examine key issues that included the challenge of ensuring employability among university graduates, currently a hot topic among international media, as evidenced by this survey conducted among recruiters by International Herald Tribune.

What happens when more writers have the option of a one-stop shop: agent, publisher and bookseller.

Are publishers still needed? Or, as Amazon’s self-published authors would put it, arelegacy publishers still needed? Well, they must be, or why would Amazon go to such lengths to build a publishing program — down to the detail of buying expensive retirees who used to run big houses to lend it an air of legitimacy.

But that means writers and readers are dealing with a company that’s imitating the thing it says they don’t need anymore. A thing that it actively denigrates, like calling publisherslegacy or traditional publishers — i.e., casting everything as old versus new, and, of course, old is bad. But it’s not about old versus new, or for that matter, print versus digital. It’s man versus machine, and diversity versus monopoly.

Can Amazon sell a lot of books? You bet. They really do know how to develop algorithms that can move just about anything. Good books, bad books. Beautifully edited, completely unedited, edited by chimpanzees – it doesn’t matter. The numbers, they brag, speak for themselves.

And they do, which tells us something else: it’s all widgets to them. Amazon will soon be a pretty solid publishing company; even small presses like Melville House are already losing out to them on esoteric projects, such as obscure translation projects. But Amazon’s publishing house will be in service to a different idol, because publishing isn’t, right now, and hasn’t been, for 500 years, about developing algorithms. It’s been about art-making and culture-making and speaking truth to power.

Nor do I know many writers who want to publish to an algorithm. They want their work to be part of the greater ecosystem of literary culture.

So you have to ask yourself why Amazon wants a publishing company. It already dominates the book-retail marketplace, and now it’s going after production. If it conducts its publishing business in the ruthless way it has conducted its retail business — discounting other retailers out of business, fighting to avoid collecting state sales taxes — one can assume its goal is to likewise put publishers out of business.

Which it may or may not do. But dominating the industry is bad for all kinds of things we hold dear — free speech, great art and a rich and diverse culture. All of which is to say that yes, there is a need for publishers. Many of them, in fact.

As published in The New York Times