January 15, 2015

The Hand in the Clouds 1927Yves Tanguy d. January 15, 1955

Oysterville AnthemG. C. Waldrepconjunctions
I am caught between another firmament speak to me, xylem-bower oh the vertical like death so majestic
suggestible/corruptible
now that everything is a poem, unraveling— the gorse the ferns the provisioning moss collected as a sign water makes when we dip into the well
*
crowded out our hearts emit pain-vesicles that rouse us from sleep
Wachet auf
the smell of the shoal the smell of the taste of that water
limping into the school where the little boats are tied in their polymer masks

rythm of a corner1958The Jazz Loft ProjectW. Eugene Smith1918 - 1978

via (OVO)

The Secret Life of Our Prostheses Belinda Barnetctheory

We are born into a world of things. From masking tape to Mandarin, from computers to swaddling cloth, we enter into an existing cultural and technical system. Our sensory, cognitive, and motor faculties are put to work immediately to learn what others before us have learned: to make sense of these things, how to operate them, and our place among them. This is a long process for infants--their cognitive function is literally shaped through what is called synaptic or axon pruning (if there are any Cultural Determinists in the room, they should leave now and read some neuroscience journals). We must learn how to speak, how to use pens and toothbrushes and iPads, how to ride a bike, how to manipulate a spoon so the peas don't (or do) fall onto the floor. When we are born, we enter into something that we have not individually created but which, nevertheless, shapes our experience of the world. This is what Heidegger calls the already there, this "past that I never lived but that is nevertheless my past, without which I would never have had a past of my own." It is also what Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the WIMP interface and the computer mouse, calls our "augmentation system." Our augmentation system is more than just technology; it includes the whole subset of learned behaviours and physiological capabilities that allow humans to modulate and interact with our environment. It includes steering wheels and laptops--but it also includes the social structures we live within, the techniques and discourses we acquire, the "training, knowledge and skills that have to be installed as well as language, an extremely important invention." This is a giant, complicated structure that has evolved over generations. Most importantly, the elements within this augmentation system are acquired. We are not born with them; we are born into them and take them on as our own.

With our prostheses in place, we are ready to face the day: reinvented, augmented, enabled by our devices. Importantly, these devices also have their own material limits, operations and requirements (like moisture, or a lack of moisture; like a secure connection between the receiver/stimulator and the magnet; like a partner to talk to) in order to carry out their own processes. Whether it is language, Cochlear Implants, contact lenses, or teaspoons, the technical artefacts that surround us shape our experience of the world from the moment we are born. These technologies have their own internal workings; they interact in meaningful and intentional ways; they exist in and of themselves. The language you speak or sign, for example; it is a gift you receive from others, but it has a life, a structure, and limits of its own. Perhaps in the future, Bogost writes, "radical philosophers will raise not their fists but their hammers."

Rue de la SantéYves Tanguy 1925

Where do we find ourselves? A review of Herbrechter's "Critical Posthumanism" John Brunielectronic book review

... it must be asked, where does all this talk about spiritual transcendentalism leave the crucial subject of our bodies? N. Katherine Hayles cautions that privileging the disembodiment of information is a return to Cartesian dualism that supports the liberal humanist subject: what posthumanism seeks to challenge.4Cary Wolfe, moreover, reminds us that we have to take into account how posthumanism is shaped by our relationships with other embodied forms of life constituted by non-human animals. Stefan Herbrechter examines both sides of posthumanist discourse—that is, from those, such as Minsky and Kurzweil, who see thinking machines as the primary posthuman signifier and from those, such as Hayles and Wolfe, who view posthumanism as a means of addressing what humanism has repressed, a subject that is not, perforce, shaped by human consciousness.

Jeno Barcsay b. January 14, 1900

For Milos Sovak in memoriam: Vitezslav Nezval’s “The Heart of the Musical Clock” (1924)a collaborative translation Jerome Rothenberg 1 Someday to have gone that far to slip the white glove off your eye fixed on that one spot on the ring reality in motion colors sounds & smells the clock in motion too but different but different too from science & from buying a new tie & looking all around you but different too from thinking hard about it THIS IS THE HEART OF THE MUSICAL CLOCK 2 In the end the upholsterer will have to be invited at dusk the gardener lights the lights in the asparagus & in the rosy raspberries a caterpillar’s sleeping DON’T HAVE NO TIME FOR WEEPING Oh that fantastic doll in her green furs