Download or read book Discognition written by Steven Shaviro and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2016-03-29 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is consciousness? What is it like to feel pain, or to see the color red? Do robots and computers really think? For that matter, do plants and amoebas think? If we ever meet intelligent aliens, will we be able to understand what they say to us? Philosophers and scientists are still unable to answer questions like these. Perhaps science fiction can help. In Discognition, Steven Shaviro looks at science fiction novels and stories that explore the extreme possibilities of human and alien sentience.
Download or read book Extreme Fabulations written by Steven Shaviro and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of science fiction narratives and the light they shed on human life, the unknowable future, and the vagaries of unforeseeable change. With this book, Steven Shaviro offers a thought experiment. He discusses a number of science fiction narratives: three novels, one novella, three short stories, and one musical concept album. Shaviro not only analyzes these works in detail but also uses them to ask questions about human, and more generally, biological life: about its stubborn insistence and yet fragility; about the possibilities and perils of seeking to control it; about the aesthetic and social dimensions of human existence, in relation to the nonhuman; and about the ethical value of human life under conditions of extreme oppression and devastation. Shaviro pursues these questions through the medium of science fiction because this form of storytelling offers us a unique way of grappling with issues that deeply and unavoidably concern us but that are intractable to rational argumentation or to empirical verification. The future is unavoidably vague and multifarious; it stubbornly resists our efforts to know it in advance, let alone to guide it or circumscribe it. But science fiction takes up this very vagueness and indeterminacy and renders it into the form of a self-consciously fictional narrative. It gives us characters who experience, and respond to, the vagaries of unforeseeable change.
Download or read book Christina McPhee A Commonplace Book written by Eileen A. Joy and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christina McPhee's 'commonplace book' draws from a palimpsest of handwritten notes, lists, quotations, bibliographic fragments, and sketches, from an artist whose voracious reading practice is a direct feed into her life and art - all set to a visual and textual design-as-score, as prominent writers on painting, media arts, performance, video installation and poetics engage with her 'open-work' practice. Christina McPhee's images move from within a matrix of abstraction, shadowing figures and contingent effects. The tactics of living are in subterfuge, like the dazzle ships of camouflage in war. This 'commonplace book' develops a view of recent work in collaged paintings, drawings, photomontage and video installation, around themes of environmental transformation and 'post-natural' community. The book includes conversations, essays, interviews and notes by Ina Blom, Phil King, James MacDevitt, Donata Marletta, Melissa Potter, Judith Rodenbeck, Esztar Timár, and Frazer Ward. "McPhee's drawing, extended to and infiltrated with digital video, seems to outline a different and stranger project: that of creating as yet unknown material composites by aligning the rapid time-processing of our nervous systems with the emergent natures at actual sites of energy production or extraction." Ina Blom Christina McPhee's work is in museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the International Center for Photography, New York, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Thresholds New Media Collection, Scotland, and elsewhere. Her work has shown in solo exhibitions at American Unversity Museum, Washington, DC; Bildmuseet, Umea, Sweden, and in group exhibitions including documenta 12 and Bucharest Biennial 3. She lives and works in California, and you can see more of her work at: http: //www.christinamcphee.net/.
Download or read book William Hope Hodgson and the Rise of the Weird written by Timothy S. Murphy and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-06-01 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive study of the works of William Hope Hodgson, one of the true innovators of Weird fiction, this book examines the Weird novels and stories upon which his posthumous reputation rests, his non-fantastic writing, identifiable literary influences, and the historical contexts in which he wrote. Focusing extensively upon major works such as The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Night Land (1912), Timothy S. Murphy surveys topics including Hodgson's experiments with code switching and linguistic experimentation; his depictions of racial and ethnic differences and gender and sexuality; the function of space and place in his writing; the adaptation of his shipboard experiences; and his use of abyssal time. With special attention paid to his paradoxical nihilist humanism, this book explores what made Hodgson a respected precursor to later innovators such as H. P. Lovecraft and C.L. Moore, and what makes him an important ancestor to 21st-century writers such as China Miéville, Greg Bear, and Charlie Jane Anders. Demonstrating how his work is both of his time and 'untimely', Murphy recovers Hodgson as the most significant figure to precede the fantastically popular but deeply controversial Lovecraft, as well as a figure whose work challenges what has thus far been accepted about the genre and the interpretive perspectives from which we view it.
Download or read book Dead Precedents written by Roy Christopher and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of how hip-hop created, and came to dominate, the twenty-first century. In Dead Precedents, Roy Christopher traces the story of how hip-hop invented the twenty-first century. Emerging alongside cyberpunk in the 1980s, the hallmarks of hip-hop - allusion, self-reference, the use of new technologies, sampling, the cutting and splicing of language and sound - would come to define the culture of the new millennium. Taking in the groundbreaking work of DJs and MCs, alongside writers like Dick and Gibson, as well as graffiti and DIY culture, Dead Precedents is a counter-culture history of the twentieth century, showcasing hip-hop's role in the creation of the world we now live in.
Download or read book Unthought written by N. Katherine Hayles and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-04-05 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: N. Katherine Hayles is known for breaking new ground at the intersection of the sciences and the humanities. In Unthought, she once again bridges disciplines by revealing how we think without thinking—how we use cognitive processes that are inaccessible to consciousness yet necessary for it to function. Marshalling fresh insights from neuroscience, cognitive science, cognitive biology, and literature, Hayles expands our understanding of cognition and demonstrates that it involves more than consciousness alone. Cognition, as Hayles defines it, is applicable not only to nonconscious processes in humans but to all forms of life, including unicellular organisms and plants. Startlingly, she also shows that cognition operates in the sophisticated information-processing abilities of technical systems: when humans and cognitive technical systems interact, they form “cognitive assemblages”—as found in urban traffic control, drones, and the trading algorithms of finance capital, for instance—and these assemblages are transforming life on earth. The result is what Hayles calls a “planetary cognitive ecology,” which includes both human and technical actors and which poses urgent questions to humanists and social scientists alike. At a time when scientific and technological advances are bringing far-reaching aspects of cognition into the public eye, Unthought reflects deeply on our contemporary situation and moves us toward a more sustainable and flourishing environment for all beings.
Download or read book Timing of Affect written by Marie-Luise Angerer and published by Diaphanes. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For many years now, the time of affect has been a major issue in the humanities, sciences, art and media. Affect stands here for feelings, emotions, processes of affection, for movements of the bodies, for a missing time with one word: for a broad range of ideas and discursive contexts and histories. "Timing of Affect" assembles contributions from different disciplines from philosophy to film, music, sound, media and art, through to technology, computation and neurology to explore the following temporal aspects of the time of affect(ion): Affect as a capacity of the body as a primary, ontological conjunctive and disjunctive process and anthropological inscription as a zone between a "not yet" and an "always already over" as an anthropogenetic interruption of chains of stimulus and response as the effect of a zone of sensory perception that can be encoded in acts of (self-)activation in the form of feelings as an arena within cultural history for political, media and psycho-pharmacological interventions as a signal and unconscious media grammar as time scale and "out of synch." "Timing of Affect" sets itself the task of showing how these aspects are articulated historically and contemporarily, in and as different forms of discourse and epistemological implications in the current establishment of orders of knowledge, thus intensively scrutinizing the momentum of the affective today. "
Download or read book Latour and the Humanities written by Rita Felski and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributors: David J. Alworth, Anders Blok, Claudia Breger, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Yves Citton, Steven Connor, Gerard de Vries, Simon During, Rita Felski, Francis Halsall, Graham Harman, Antoine Hennion, Casper Bruun Jensen, Bruno Latour, Heather Love, Patrice Maniglier, Stephen Muecke, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Nigel Thrift, Michael Witmore
Download or read book High Weirdness written by Erik Davis and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson. A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. These three authors changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality—but how did their writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America? In High Weirdness, Erik Davis—America's leading scholar of high strangeness—examines the published and unpublished writings of these vital, iconoclastic thinkers, as well as their own life-changing mystical experiences. Davis explores the complex lattice of the strange that flowed through America's West Coast at a time of radical technological, political, and social upheaval to present a new theory of the weird as a viable mode for a renewed engagement with reality.
Download or read book Photography in the Middle Dispatches on Media Ecologies and Aesthetics written by Dean Lockwood and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2016-10-31 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's easy to forget there's a war on when the front line is everywhere encrypted in plain sight. Gathered in this book's several chapters are dispatches on the role of photography in a War Universe, a space and time in which photographers such as Hilla Becher, Don McCullin and Eadweard Muybridge exist only insofar as they are a mark of possession, in the sway of larger forces. These photographers are conceptual personae that collectively fabulate a different kind of photography, a paraphotography in which the camera produces negative abyssal flashes or 'endarkenment.' In his Vietnam War memoir, Dispatches, Michael Herr imagines a 'dropped camera' receiving 'jumping and falling' images, images which capture the weird indivisibility of medium and mediated in a time of war. The movies and the war, the photographs and the torn bodies, fused and exchanged. Reporting from the chaos at the middle of things, Herr invokes a kind of writing attuned to this experience. Photography in the Middle, eschewing a high theoretical mode, seeks to exploit the bag of tricks that is the dispatch. The dispatch makes no grand statement about the progress of the war. Cultivating the most perverse implications of its sources, it tries to express what the daily briefing never can. Ports of entry in the script we're given, odd and hasty little glyphs, unhelpful rips in the cover story, dispatches are futile, dark intuitions, an expeditious inefficacy. They are bleak but necessary responses to an indifferent world in which any action whatever has little noticeable effect.As luck would have it, Photography in the Middle begins with some nasty accidents, and extracts from the wreckage a few lessons learned. Dusting itself off, it ships out and puts up with a bunch of battle scarred, big gun photojournalists in the Holiday Inn of a typical world city. Later, it immerses itself within the leaked files of an enigmatic police cabal which detail the surveillance of conceptual photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, an operation that even extends to the duo's dreams. Further back in time, in 1897, we are invited to an inflammatory, yet patchily documented public lecture given by the Titan, Muybridge.More than any other, it is William Burroughs, conceived here as a war photographer, who is our tutelary figure, hovering over all these pages in his attempt to map emergent vectors of mediation, ever more intimate forms of control and accelerants of planetary catastrophe. Burroughs believed that it was necessary to both keep pace with and formulate new vectors, vectors that might act as intersections with a nonhuman outside. Photography has an agency of its own, one that scrambles the patterns and refrains of mediation upon which human life is based, glitching the human and provoking relations with external coordinates. With Burroughs, and other inspirations such as J.G. Ballard, Georges Bataille, Tom McCarthy and Eugene Thacker, our notion of the dispatch does not offer positive knowledge of something that we can reconcile with existing rational explanations, but rather the revelation of a nightside, our redundancy in a photography that suspends all operations in a general blindness.
Download or read book Conscious Robots written by Paul Kwatz and published by . This book was released on 2013-06-27 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Lives up to all the hype" "An absolutely necessary book", "Should be taught in schools", "Dynamite, this is a brilliant book" - see the reviews on Amazon.com. The Future's Most important Book: -- Why we're so convinced that we're in charge when we're really just carrying out evolution's instructions -- Why our lives, as Buddha suggested, are inherently unsatisfactory, despite our luxurious homes, successful careers and loving families -- How humans will one day take control of their conscious minds, get happy and stay happy. And the real reason Aliens haven't visited the Earth yet... 107 minutes (average read time) to change the way you think about everything. "Easy to understand and persuasive" "Fun, short, insightful" "Bad Ass "
Download or read book Mountains and Desire written by Margret Grebowicz and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the 100th anniversary of the first attempt to climb Mt Everest, Margret Grebowicz shows how and why climbing and mountaineering are still important today. In 1923, a reporter asked George Mallory why he wanted to summit Mount Everest. “Because it’s there”. Today the question "why do this?" is included in nearly every mountaineering story or interview. Meanwhile, interest in climbing is steadily on the rise, from commercial mountaineering and climbing walls in university gyms and corporate workplaces to the flood of spectacular climbing imagery in advertising, cinema, and social media. Climbing has become the theater for imagining limits—of the human body and of the planet— and the nature of desire, motivation, and #goals. Covering the degradation of Everest, the banning of climbing on Australia’s Uluru, UNESCO’s decision to name alpinism an Intangible Cultural Heritage, the sudden death of Ueli Steck, and the commercial and critical success of Free Solo, Mountains and Desire chases after what remains of this pursuit – marred by its colonial history, coopted by nationalistic chauvinism, ableism, and the capitalist compulsion to unlimited growth – for both climbers and their fans.
Download or read book The Hours Have Lost Their Clock written by Grafton Tanner and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hours Have Lost Their Clock charts the rise of nostalgia in an era knocked out of time. In The Hours Have Lost Their Clock, Grafton Tanner charts the rise of nostalgia in an era knocked out of time. Nostalgia is the defining emotion of our age. Political leaders promise a return to yesteryear. Old movies are remade and cancelled series are rebooted. Veterans reenact past wars, while the displaced across the world long for home. But who is behind this collective ache for a home in the past? Do we need to eliminate nostalgia, or just cultivate it better? And what is at stake if we make the wrong choice? Moving from the fight over Confederate monuments to the birth of homeland security to the mourning of species extinction, Grafton Tanner traces nostalgia’s ascent in the twenty-first century, revealing its power as both a consequence of our unstable time and a defense against it. With little faith in a future of climate change and economic anxiety, many have turned to nostalgia to weather the present, while powerful elites exploit it for their own gain. An exploration into the politics of loss and yearning, The Hours Have Lost Their Clock is an urgent call to take nostalgia seriously. The very future depends on it.
Download or read book How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle written by Jonas Ceika and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the creator of the Cuck Philosophy YouTube channel comes this timely and explosive re-evaluation of Marx and Nietzsche for the 21st-century left. Modernity has been defined by humanity's capacity for self-destruction. Over the last century, the means which threaten not only life's joy but its very existence have only multiplied. At the same time, as a new wave of nationalism and right-wing politics spreads across the world, fewer and fewer people are being convinced that socialism could improve their everyday lives, let alone save us from our own destruction. In this timely and explosive book, philosopher and YouTuber Jonas Čeika (aka Cuck Philosophy) re-invigorates socialism for the twenty-first century. Leaving behind its past associations with bureaucracy and state tyranny, and it's lifeless and drab theoretical accounts, Čeika instead uses the works of Marx and Nietzsche to reconnect socialism with its human element, presenting it as something not only affecting, but created by living, breathing, suffering human individuals. At a time when ecological collapse is hurtling towards us, and capitalism offers no solution except more growth and exploitation, How to Philosophise with a Hammer and Sickle shows us the way forward to a socialism grounded in human experience and accessible to all.
Download or read book When Prophecy Fails written by Leon Festinger and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-04-01 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study reported in this volume grew out of some theoretical work, one phase of which bore specifically on the behavior of individuals in social movements that made specific (and unfulfilled) prophecies. We had been forced to depend chiefly on historical records to judge the adequacy of our theoretical ideas until we by chance discovered the social movement that we report in this book. At the time we learned of it, the movement was in mid-career but the prophecy about which it was centered had not yet been disconfirmed. We were understandably eager to undertake a study that could test our theoretical ideas under natural conditions. That we were able to do this study was in great measure due to the support obtained through the Laboratory for Research in Social Relations of the University of Minnesota. This study is a project of the Laboratory and was carried out while we were all members of its staff. We should also like to acknowledge the help we received through a grant-in-aid from the Ford Foundation to one of the authors, a grant that made preliminary exploration of the field situation possible.
Download or read book The Viscous written by Freddie Mason and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2020-05-20 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slime, goo, gunge, gloop, gels, sols, globules, jellies, emulsions, greases, soaps, syrups, glues, lubricants, liquid crystals, moulds, plasmas, and protoplasms - the viscous is not one thing, but rather a quality of resistance and flow, of stickiness and slipperiness. It is a state of matter that oozes into the gaps of our everyday existence, across age groups, between cultures and disciplines.Since the large-scale extraction of petroleum in the 19th century, the viscous has witnessed a proliferation in the variety of its forms. Mechanized industry required lubricants and oil distillation produced waste products that were refined to form Vaseline. From this age, new viscous forms and technologies emerged: products from plastic (and plastic explosives) to cosmetics, glycerine, asphalt, sexual lubrication, hydro- and aero-gels, and even anti-climb paint.Based on unique and wide-ranging research, The Viscous is the first major investigation of encounters with and possibilities of the viscous over the course of the last century, not simply as a material state, but also as an imaginative event. We enter into a story of matter at its most wayward, deviant, hesitant, and resistant.From asphalt lakes to industrial molasses tanks, from liquid crystals squirming in our screens to milk fetishes, The Viscous discloses gooeyness as a peculiarly modern phase of matter. "Everything oozes," as Beckett's Estragon famously proclaims in Waiting for Godot. Viscous dynamics are exposed as not only hugely various in a post-industrial age, but particularly useful ways of thinking, feeling, writing, and making in a time of ecological anxiety. Freddie Mason is a writer, researcher, and filmmaker living in London. He received his doctorate from the Royal College of art in 2019, on the history and futures of semi-states. Before The Viscous, he published Ada Kaleh (Little Island Press, 2016).
Download or read book Surreal Entanglements written by Louise Economides and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection approaches the most pressing discourses of the Anthropocene and posthumanist culture through the surreal, yet instructive lens of Jeff VanderMeer’s fiction. In contrast to universalist and essentializing ways of responding to new material realities, VanderMeer’s work invites us to re-imagine human subjectivity and other collectivities in the light of historically unique entanglements we face today: the ecological, technological, aesthetic, epistemological, and political challenges of life in the Anthropocene era. Situating these messy, multi-scalar, material complexities of life in close relation to their ecological, material, and colonialist histories, his fiction renders them at once troublingly familiar and strangely generative of other potentialities and insight. The collection measures VanderMeer’s work as a new kind of speculative surrealism, his texts capturing the strangeness of navigating a world in which "nature" has become radically uncanny due to global climate change and powerful bio-technologies. The first collection to survey academic engagements with VanderMeer, this book brings together scholars in the fields of environmental literature, science fiction, genre studies, American literary history, philosophy of technology, and digital cultures to reflect on the environmentally, culturally, aesthetically, and politically central questions his fiction poses to predominant understandings of the Anthropocene.
