Academics Material/Digital Politics/Economics Pop Culture Technology
by Justin
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Steven Johnson: Innovation & Anarchism
photo credit: Phil Hawksworth
There’s a seriously nifty interview with science writer Steven Johnson in today’s Guardian. Not sure how I feel about his occasional echoes of the technology tree from Sid Meier’s Civilization, but the notion of an ‘adjacent possible’ is really rather wonderful. Some choice extracts:
‘to 1950s viewers, Johnson argues, complex TV shows such as Lost or The Wire would have been borderline incomprehensible, like some kind of avant-garde art, because certain ways of engaging with the medium hadn’t yet been learned.’
The co-evolution of technology and cultural form was one of the precepts of my Goldsmiths MA. So the level of personal resonance should be of no great surprise…
‘the best way to encourage (or to have) new ideas isn’t to fetishise the “spark of genius”, to retreat to a mountain cabin in order to “be creative”, or to blabber interminably about “blue-sky”, “out-of-the-box” thinking. Rather, it’s to expand the range of your possible next moves – the perimeter of your potential – by exposing yourself to as much serendipity, as much argument and conversation, as many rival and related ideas as possible; to borrow, to repurpose, to recombine. This is one way of explaining the creativity generated by cities, by Europe’s 17th-century coffee-houses, and by the internet.’
In other words, “maximise your exposure to randomness.”
See also: The real reason for Germany’s industrial expansion.
Emotions occupy space
‘For example, emotions, with their palpable mingling of physical turmoil and racing thoughts, have become a hot topic, engaging not only philosophy but also psychology and the neurosciences. The increasingly cross-field use of neurological research, such as the data from functional magnetic resonance imaging, has grounded the idea that (in some sense) emotions occupy space, just like physical objects. More important for my point here, emotions bring about physical alterations that we consciously experience. Insofar as they are the means by which we discover certain value-laden aspects of the world we live in, the agitations they occasion give our bodily responses a capacity for knowledge that is sometimes overlooked.’
– Carolyn Korsmeyer, ‘Ideas of the century: The turn to the body‘, TPM
Hacking Browne?
‘So, new marketing plan, courses of such critical intensity and theoretical purity that working for the man afterwards would be inconceivable.
As such the loans would never be repaid, and graduates would surely form anarcho-syndicalist non-profit collectives for rich fulfilled lives.’
– Dr. Joss Hands, reacting to the Browne Review of HE Funding and Student Finance
A publishing house is a fragile organism
‘In his arms he has a pile of galleys; he sets them down gently, as if the slightest jolt could upset the order of the printed letters. “A publishing house is a fragile organism, dear sir,” he says, “If at any point something goes askew, then the disorder spread, chaos opens beneath our feet. Forgive me, won’t you? When I think about it I have an attack of vertigo.” And he covers his eyes, as if pursued by the sight of billions of pages, lines, words, whirling in a dust storm.’
– Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler, 1981 [1979], pp. 97-98
In the context of the dissertation, I’ve been thinking a fair bit about textual cyborgs, the speculative field of reader-book interaction, and how this could relate to Tim’s excellent post on cyborg infrastructure. Here, the above quote from Calvino definitely resonates, but I’m still not sure what it all means …
Angels dancing in the static
“Listening to deathly voices in the dark, from Quixote’s moment on the hillside onwards, technologics has suggested, to those who want to listen to its broadcasts, a new, dynamic way of understanding literature – that is, of understanding what it is to write, who (or what) writes, and how to read it. Where the liberal-humanist sensibility has always held the literary work to be a form of self-expression, a meticulous sculpting of the thoughts and feelings of an isolated individual who has mastered his or her poetic craft, a technologically savvy sensibility might see it completely differently: as a set of transmissions, filtered through subjects whom technology and the live word have ruptured, broken open, made receptive. I know which side I’m on: the more books I write, the more convinced I become that what we encounter in a novel is not selves, but networks; that what we hear in poems is (to use the language of communications technology) not signal but noise. The German poet Rilke had a word for it: Geräusch, the crackle of the universe, angels dancing in the static.”
- Tom McCarthy, ‘Technology and the Novel, From Blake to Ballard’, The Guardian
[key texts] Oshii, Haraway, Cunningham, Gibson
Some video fragments for a Wednesday afternoon; loosely indicative of where my brain is at this precise moment.
1. Clip from Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence – a brilliant film, directed by Mamoru Oshii:
The female forensic specialist is named for Donna Haraway, which segues nicely into the second clip.
2. Video montage (mash-up) inspired by Haraway’s landmark feminist essay, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto‘. Created by YouTube user artlessartist, this includes some really nice footage, particularly that of the different examples of cyborg and robot:
3. Music video for Björk’s ‘All Is Full of Love’ – directed by Chris Cunningham:
Supposedly, Cunningham was the inspiration for an minor character in Pattern Recognition (2003) – the (absent) owner of the flat Gibson’s protagonist is house-sitting:
‘Partially disassembled robots are propped against one wall, two of them, torsos and heads, like elfin, decidedly female crash-test dummies. These are effects units from one of Damien’s videos, and she wonders, given her mood, why she finds them so comforting. Probably because they are genuinely beautiful, she decides. Optimistic expressions of the feminine. No sci-fi kitsch for Damien. Dreamlike things in the dawn halflight, their small breasts gleaming, white plastic shining faint as old marble. Personally fetishistic, though; she knows he’d had them molded from a body cast of his last girlfriend, minus two.’
– William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (2003), p. 5
4. Clip from No Maps for These Territories (2000), with Gibson talking about technology:
Wunderkammern: ‘Please do not touch the walrus’
BoingBoing’s David Pescovitz on Wunderkammern:
CABINETS OF CURIOSITY. Taxidermy. The weird, the grotesque, the freakish. Marginalia. Taxonomies of the unorganisable. Sensawunda. Organised properly, maybe even some kind of mathematical sublime, through the sheer volume of heterogeneous artefacts? The entire world in a single collection.
Academics Built Environment Memory Non-fiction Writing
by Justin
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Goldsmiths: ‘Jacob Vaark’s Ghost’
Jacob Vaark being the (absent?) protagonist of Toni Morrison’s 2007 novel, A Mercy.
For your enlightment and deliction: a decidedly odd essay on something I decided to dub ‘the haunted domestic’ in American fiction post-2000. Mostly concentrating on the Morrison , but also drawing on the excellent Lunar Park (soon to be a film) and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man. Probably the best course that I’ve taken during my time at Goldsmiths — helped, no doubt, by a tiny class size and excellent teaching from Dr Rick Crownshaw. Bears almost literally no relevance to the rest of my Masters degree, but does mesh rather nicely with my undergrad dissertation.
Also recommended is this NPR interview with Toni Morrison, which sheds a great deal of light on some of the novel’s subtleties:
Stuart Candy: ‘The Unthinkable and the Unimaginable’
Dating back to November 2009, this talk by Stuart Candy resonates at an incredibly similar frequency to where my head is right now. Highly recommended.
So, not only am I attempting an essay that links Stuart’s examples of experiential futuring, the wunderkammer, and public sociology, but I’m also in the early stages of some kind of design fiction slash media futures thing with two other MA students from Goldsmiths – and it’s probably the most fired up I’ve been since the end of Superstruct. For more on both project and essay, watch this space.
Academics Built Environment Non-fiction Politics/Economics Writing
by Justin
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Goldsmiths: ‘Advertising, Screens and the Airport Chapel’
The first (assessed) essay for my Masters degree, deploying the work of French anthropologist Marc Augé in relation to a key site of modernity – the airport terminal. The first half is a work of ethnographic ‘thick description,’ which is then subjected to a critical analysis:
photo credit: irina slutsky
