News

• Perceptual bias
  Added: 26/09/2008
  An illustration of perceptual bias based on the well-known “13” and “B” example. Our example is based on visual similarity between Cyrillic “bl” and Latin “BL” when lower-case.
• Defamiliarization
  Added: 11/07/2007
  The concept of defamiliarization (dehabitualization, also bestrangement), as reflected in Victor Shklovsky’s “Art as technique”, is a very good way of explaining what “artfulness” of art and, consequently, “literariness” of literature are all about.
• Instant messaging
  Added: 11/07/2007
  Communication by means of instant messaging software, as many users recognize, is different from oral face-to-face communication with the same interlocutor, so is the image that one creates of oneself while communicating in that way.
• David Lynch's films
  Added: 11/07/2007
  Sigmund Freud, who was, strangely enough, suffering from a neurotic disorder, never looked into his patients’ eyes. Never admitting that a neurotic disorder was the reason, Freud and his followers – later theoreticians of psychoanalysis – explained that it was only possible to get the “freedom of association” if the doctor’s and the patient’s eyes did not meet. Lynch goes further in this wish to get free associations: he reveals the subconscious of his characters without even being present beside them or anywhere in the near, not speaking about looking into their eyes.
• Woody Allen's Scoop
  Added: 11/07/2007
  This 2006 comedy by Woody Allen has been heavily criticized in numerous newspaper/Internet reviews for reasons that remain a mystery to me. Among the main arguments for such unfavourable judgments the following seem to outnumber all the rest: it lacks meaning, being just a trifling time-killer at best; the plot is unconvincing and abounds in holes; there is nothing original in it – all that this film has to offer has been already seen somewhere else and better done, too. Well, all these things I completely disagree with and I will try to explain why.