The Near-Sighted Monkey

This little character first appeared in “Picture This” by Lynda Barry, and turns out to be very good at fighting off insomnia.

Jun 15

Watching a video of your own body pulsing in time with your heartbeat can trigger an out-of-body experience. The illusion shows that our experience of existing inside our body depends on both external and internal sensations…

Could an out-of-body experience be induced by exploiting an internal or interoceptive signal, such as one’s heartbeat? Jane Aspell and Lukas Heydrich, both then at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, along with Olaf Blanke and colleagues, decided to find out.

Virtual body with halo

They asked 17 people to stand wearing a head-mounted display that showed them a live video of themselves being filmed from behind, so that these volunteers were in effect seeing their own backs about 2 metres in front of them. The participants also saw a software-generated outline that surrounded the virtual body, like a halo.

The volunteers were also fitted with chest electrodes that recorded their heartbeat. This signal was used to make the halo flash, either in time with the heartbeat or slightly out of step. When the flashing was in sync with the signal, it was as if the subjects were watching their own heartbeat, though they were unaware of this. “Of course, it’s not something you are exposed to in everyday life,” says Heydrich. “You don’t usually see your heart beating.”

After six minutes of watching their own bodies on the display, with outlines flashing either in sync or out of sync with their own heartbeats, the volunteers closed their eyes and were gently guided backwards about 1.5 metres. Then they were asked to move towards where they felt they had been standing. In the in-sync trials, participants moved forwards closer to the location of their virtual body – suggesting the experience had altered their self-location. The out-of-sync trials did not alter self-location in any significant way.

What’s more, the volunteers’ answers to a questionnaire after each trial revealed that they identified more with their virtual body when the outline flashed in time with their heartbeat. One woman said she “wanted to disconnect from her own physical body”.

This is the first time researchers have created a conflict between exteroceptive and interoceptive signals to induce such an illusion. “It shows that interoceptive signals are important for self-location and self-identification,” says Heydrich.

Philosopher Thomas Metzinger of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, who studies the sense of self, is impressed by the experiment. “It tells us that human self-consciousness is anchored in interoception in a much stronger way than people have acknowledged before.”

Jun 13

Jun 12

HEAR YE HEAR YE! ANNOUNCEMENT OF A NEW CLASS TAUGHT BY LYNDA BARRY! FALL SEMESTER 2013! UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON! DETAILS BELOW!

FALL 2013, Mon/Weds, Time: 1:20 -3:50pm Location: 6061 Humanities, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Class Limit: 14 students (enrolled at UW-Madison) composed of 10 students with interests in the visual arts and four wild cards.

Credits 3-4

Lab Fee $65.00

Instructor: Lynda Barry

We’ll create a variety of original, hand-drawn characters and handwritten storylines to make both fictional and non-fictional graphic narratives in many forms, including single panel, four panel, multiple panel comic strips, picture-stories and ‘zines. Each student will complete a handmade book of original visual images and stories that demonstrate our current interpretation of this thing we call ‘comics’. (Just add the word ‘graphic’ to any of the following: novel, memoir, biography, journalism, creative non-fiction, regular non-fiction, history, romance, mystery, bone-dry academic paper, fairy tale, poetry, sci-fi, fantascy or anything else that presents itself in written form. Yes even a phone book.)

APPLICATION PROCESS

Applications for the class will be accepted either in person or by mail until 4:00 PM on MONDAY JULY 15th, 2013.
Class list will be announced on or before July 31st, 2013

PLEASE NOTE: No electronic submissions will be accepted. Applications must be printed out and delivered by hand or by mail to

IMAGE LAB: Art 548 Application c/o UW-Madison Department of Art
6241 Humanities Building
455 North Park Street
Madison, WI 53706

VERY VERY VERY VERY IMPORTANT! All applications must be formatted exactly as follows to be considered: typed, double-spaced, 12 point Times New Roman with standard margins, black ink on regular white paper, no longer than 4 single-sided pages, stapled in the upper left hand corner.

Prospective students should answer each of the questions below without putting too much thought into it. The first answers that come to mind are the ones I’m most interested in.

Questions for Students Applying to “MAKING COMICS: ART 448”

1. Full Name:

2. Student ID Number (10 digits, no dashes or spaces)

3. Email address: (please use your wisc.edu email address)

4. Degree program or area of study and year (eg BFA, Dance, Junior)

5. What classes did you take during Spring Semester of 2013? Why?

8. What classes will you be taking Fall Semester of 2013? Why?

9. What were some of the books you read as a kid?

10. What were some of the games you played?

11. What were some of your favorite fictional characters when you were growing up. (These can be any kind of fictional characters at all, personal, literary, cartoon, video game characters, etc.)

12. Describe your favorite elementary school teacher.

13. Describe your least favorite elementary school teacher.

14. Describe an object or thing that disturbed you as a kid.

15. Describe an object or thing that made you feel good as a kid.

16. Describe something you made by hand as a kid that frustrated you.

17. Describe a fight you witnessed.

18. Describe a dog you knew when you were young.

19. Describe an object that you lost that you still think about.

20. Describe something you made as a kid that satisfied you.

HEAR YE HEAR YE! ANNOUNCEMENT! UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ART DEPARTMENT GRAD STUDENTS! NEW CLASS! FALL 2013! TAUGHT BY LYNDA BARRY! ANNOUNCED ON THIS DAY! DETAILS BELOW!

Class Limit: 14 students, composed of 10 grad students from the Department of Art and four wild cards.

A way of writing and keeping a working notebook that is image-based, and designed specifically for visual artists. We’ll use our notebooks to help track, identify, and understand the images that come up in our work, and where they might be trying to take us. We’ll use both autobiography and fiction to write a lot of fun stories and lively versions of things that are usually a drag to write, like bios, response papers, proposals and artist’s statements that are not dead.

We’ll meet to write as a group every Monday. Scheduled, individual studio visits and one to one meetings with instructor will on take place Wednesdays. Each student will have a minimum of three individual one hour conferences with the instructor over the course of the semester.

Applications for the class will be accepted either in person or by mail until 4:00 PM on MONDAY JULY 15th, 2013.
Class list will be announced on or before July 31st, 2013

PLEASE NOTE: No electronic submissions will be accepted. Applications must be printed out and delivered by hand or by mail to

IMAGE LAB: Art 548 Application c/o UW-Madison Art Department
6241 Humanities Building
455 North Park Street
Madison, WI 53706

Prospective students should answer each of the questions below without putting too much thought into it. The first answers that come to mind are the ones I’m most interested in.

11. What were some of your favorite fictional characters when you were growing up. (These can be any kind of fictional characters at all, personal, literary, cartoon, video game characters, etc.)

Jun 11

Jun 09

Jun 04

Jun 03

Drawing and writing and gluing things down on the same piece of paper all at the same time is one way to get new ideas about of what you’re working on.