Abdel Halloway
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e-co-evo.bsky.social
Abdel Halloway
@e-co-evo.bsky.social
210 followers 84 following 43 posts
Assistant Professor at Case Western Reserve University using evolutionary game theory to study eco-evolutionary dynamics and interactions. Uses 'He' pronouns

www.e-co-evo.com
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e-co-evo.bsky.social
In honor of a future paragraph (I always say the same thing to my students)...
This is closely linked to artistic metaphor. Why does a portrait represent a certain person or a painting a particular landscape? If for some viewers there is immediate visual recognition, for others it may be only a title or caption that assigns this meaning. Furthermore, some meanings may be assigned by the beholder that were not intended by the artist. The process of rethinking and reimagining is conceived by the artist (modeller), stimulated by the art (the model) and ultimately interpreted by an audience (which may include the artist or modeller). In brief, I think that the question of what models are, how they should be interpreted and what they can do for us actually has a lot to do with the question of what art is, how it can be interpreted and what it can do for us.
March 28, 2024 at 6:03 AM
e-co-evo.bsky.social
Reading "Escape from Model Land" by Erica Thompson and there's a whole paragraph on Internet memes...
Presented with any two objects or concepts, more or less randomly chosen, the human mind is remarkably good at coming up with ways to identify the similarities between them, despite all the other ways in which they might differ. Internet 'memes', for example, are small instances of shared metaphors which rely on pre-existing structures (the picture, which creates a framework story) to be loaded with a new meaning by the overlaid text which identifies something else as being the subject of the metaphor. To take an example that has been around for a long time: the image of Boromir (Sean Bean) from Peter Jackson's 2001 film The Fellowship of the Ring saying, 'One does not simply walk into Mordor.' This meme has been repurposed many times to imply that someone is failing to take a difficult task seriously. Other memes include 'Distracted Boyfriend' (one thing superseded by another), 'Picard Facepalm' (you did something predictably silly), 'Running Away Balloon' (being held back from achieving an objective) and 'This Is Fine' (denial of a bad situation). This capacity for metaphor, and elaboration of the metaphor to generate insight or amusement, is what underlies our propensity for model-building. When you create a metaphor, or model, or meme, you are reframing a situation from a new perspective, emphasising one aspect of it and playing down others.
March 28, 2024 at 5:43 AM
e-co-evo.bsky.social
Once saw a chicken foraging on the side of a Cleveland highway
August 23, 2023 at 11:19 AM