Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos

Caterina Nirta

Andrea Pavoni

Danilo Mandic

Hearing is an intricate modality of sensory perception. It is continuously enfolded in the surroundings in which it takes place. While passive in its disposition, hearing is integral to the movement and fluctuations of one’s environment. At all times, hearing remains open, (in)active but attuned to the present and continuously immersed in the murmur of its background. A delicate perception that is always situated but fundamentally overarching and extended into the open. Hearing is an immanent modality of being in and with the world. Beyond the capacity of sensory perception, hearing is also the ultimate juridical act, a sense-making activity that adjudicates and informs the spatio-temporal acoustics of justice. This penultimate volume of ‘Law and the Senses’ gathers contributions from across different disciplines working on the relationship between law and hearing, the human vocalisations and non-human echolocations, the spatial and temporal conditions in which hearing takes place, as well as the forms of order and control that listening entails. Through notions and practices of improvisation and noise, attunement and audibility sonic spatiality and urban sonicity they explore, challenge and expand the structural and sensorial qualities of law. Moreover, they recognise how hearing directs us to perceiving and understanding the intrinsic acoustic sphere of simultaneous relations, which challenge and break the normative distinctions that law informs and maintains. In an attempt to hear the ambiguous, indefinable and unembodied nature of hearing, as well as its objects – sound and silence – this volume approaches hearing as both an ontological and epistemological device to think with and about law.

HEAR

Wlodzislaw Duch

Joaquim Marques de Sá

Luis A. Alexandre

This book is the first of a two-volume set that constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, ICANN 2007, held in Porto, Portugal, September 2007. Coverage includes advances in neural network learning methods, advances in neural network architectures, neural dynamics and complex systems, data analysis, evolutionary computing, agents learning, as well as temporal synchronization and nonlinear dynamics in neural networks.

17th International Conference, Porto, Portugal, September 9-13, 2007, Proceedings, Part I

Artificial Neural Networks - ICANN 2007

This book is the second of a two-volume set that constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, ICANN 2007. It features contributions related to computational neuroscience, neurocognitive studies, applications in biomedicine and bioinformatics, pattern recognition, self-organization, text mining and internet applications, signal and times series processing, vision and image processing, robotics, control, and more.

17th International Conference, Porto, Portugal, September 9-13, 2007, Proceedings, Part II

Described by Aristotle as the most vital of senses, touch contains both the physical and the metaphysical in its ability to express the determination of being. To manifest itself, touch makes a movement outwards, beyond the body, and relies on a specific physical involvement other senses do not require: to touch is already to be active and to activate. This fundamental ontology makes touch the most essential of all senses. This volume of ‘Law and the Senses’ attempts to illuminate and reconsider the complex and interflowing relations and contradictions between the tactful intrusion of the law and the untactful movement of touch. Compelling contributors from arts, literature and social science disciplines alongside artist presentations explore touch’s boundaries and formal and informal ‘laws’ of the senses. Each contribution unveils a multi-faceted new dimension to the force of touch, its ability to form, deform and reform what it touches. In unique ways, each of the several contributions to this volume recognises the trans-corporeality of touch to traverse the boundaries on the body and entangle other bodies and spaces, thus challenging the very notion of corporeal integrity and human being.

Touch

Taste usually occupies the bottom of the sensorial hierarchy, as the quintessentially hedonistic sense, too close to the animal, the elemental and the corporeal, and for this reason disciplined and moralised. At the same time, taste is indissolubly tied to knowledge. To taste is to discriminate, emit judgement, enter an unstable domain of synaesthetic normativity where the certainty of metaphysical categories begins to crumble. This second title in the ‘Law and the Senses’ series explores law using taste as a conceptual and ontological category able to unsettle legal certainties, and a promising tool whereby to investigate the materiality of law’s relation to the world. For what else is law’s reduction of the world into legal categories, if not law’s ingesting the world by tasting it, and emitting moral and legal judgements accordingly? Through various topics including coffee, wine, craft cider and Japanese knotweed, this volume explores the normativities that shape the way taste is felt and categorised, within and beyond subjective, phenomenological and human dimensions. The result is an original interdisciplinary volume – complete with seven speculative ‘recipes’ – dedicated to a rarely explored intersection, with contributions from artists, legal academics, philosophers, anthropologists and sociologists.

Danilo Mandic

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