Category Archives: Other

Other

Following the Grain: How David Pye Shapes Tim Ingold’s Theory of Making

2 Comments

Source Traceback in Ingold’s “Making” (Week 6)

Woodcuts

When I initially read Tim Ingold’s Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (2013), I was captivated not only by the elegance of his prose but also by the vitality of his conception of making. Ingold doesn’t discuss creation as occurring once a plan is established or a design is completed. He views making as a continuous dialogue between individuals and materials, involving learning, adapting, and reacting as forms evolve.

Reading further, I realized that this idea didn’t come out of nowhere. Ingold is building on the work of David Pye, a twentieth-century furniture maker and design theorist who questioned what craftsmanship really means in a world increasingly dominated by machines. Pye’s ideas about risk, skill, and material responsiveness give Ingold the vocabulary to describe making not as mechanical execution but as an act of correspondence, a two-way relationship between maker and material. In this post, I’ll trace how Ingold uses and expands Pye’s concepts, and how this exchange between them helps us think differently about creativity, design, and even knowledge itself.

Who Was David Pye?

David Pye (1914–1993) was a British craftsman and teacher at the Royal College of Art in London, known for his detailed thinking about how things are made. He wasn’t an anthropologist or philosopher, he built furniture, but his observations about craftsmanship turned out to be surprisingly theoretical.

In his influential book The Nature and Art of Workmanship (1968), Pye defined two types of workmanship: the workmanship of risk and the workmanship of certainty. In the workmanship of risk, the quality of the outcome depends directly on the maker’s skill. A potter, for example, never knows exactly how the glaze will fire, or how the clay will behave under pressure. Every movement could lead to success or ruin. The workmanship of certainty, by contrast, describes industrial or mechanical processes where results are predetermined and uniform, the maker’s skill no longer matters, only the machine’s precision (Pye, 1968).

Pye also distinguished between properties and qualities in materials. Properties are measurable, weight, density, elasticity. Qualities, however, are felt and interpreted: the warmth of wood, the shine of metal, the resistance of fabric. For Pye, design might start with measurable properties, but true craftsmanship happens through attention to the material’s qualities, which reveal themselves only in the act of working with them.

Pye’s central insight, that design is what can be drawn or described, while workmanship is what happens in action, creates a bridge between the conceptual and the practical. It is precisely this bridge that Ingold crosses in Making.

Pye’s Influence Inside Making

Ingold explicitly cites Pye’s The Nature and Art of Workmanship in both Making and his earlier essay “The Textility of Making” (2010). He uses Pye’s concepts as stepping-stones for his own argument that making is not about imposing form on matter, but about following materials as they unfold in time (Ingold, 2010).

In Chapter 2 of Making, “Materials of Life”, Ingold borrows Pye’s distinction between properties and qualities to reframe how we think about materials. He argues that materials are not passive substances waiting to be shaped by human intention; they are lively, responsive, and in motion. While scientists or engineers might focus on fixed properties, the maker experiences materials through their shifting qualities, how they stretch, absorb, or resist (Ingold, 2013). As Ingold puts it, “The world is not ready-made, but continually in the making” (p. 21).

Here, Pye’s language gives Ingold a bridge between the craftsperson’s workshop and the anthropologist’s field site. Both are spaces where knowledge emerges through doing. Just as a carpenter learns by sensing the wood grain, an anthropologist learns by being immersed in the flows and rhythms of life rather than standing apart from them.

From Workmanship of Risk to Correspondence

Pye’s “workmanship of risk” becomes, in Ingold’s hands, the foundation for his own key concept: correspondence. For Pye, risk means that each gesture in the making process contains uncertainty, every cut or stroke carries the potential to change the outcome. Ingold takes this further by framing that uncertainty as a relationship. Making, he argues, is not simply risky; it’s relational and dialogic.

Ingold often uses vivid examples: a carpenter following the grain of wood, or a draughtsman tracing a line that “goes for a walk.” Both figures are guided not by strict design but by attention, a kind of mutual responsiveness between maker and material (Ingold, 2010). In The Textility of Making, Ingold writes that practitioners are “wayfarers whose skill lies in finding the grain of the world’s becoming and following its course” (p. 92). That phrase, finding the grain of the world’s becoming, could almost be Pye’s motto rewritten in anthropological language.

For Ingold, then, risk is not a flaw or obstacle in making, it’s the condition of creativity. The outcome cannot be predicted because it doesn’t yet exist; it emerges through the unfolding relationship between hand, tool, and material. In the same way, knowledge for Ingold is not something discovered after the fact but grown along the way, an improvisation in motion.

Expanding Pye Beyond Craft

What makes Ingold’s use of Pye so interesting is how he expands it beyond the traditional craft context. Pye’s observations were rooted in woodworking and design; Ingold applied them to anthropology, art, and architecture, the “Four A’s” that structure Making.

For instance, Ingold compares archaeology to craftsmanship: excavating isn’t about extracting finished objects but about corresponding with the materials of the earth, responding to their fragility, texture, and depth. In architecture, he critiques the Renaissance notion of perfect design (what he calls the “architectonic”) and instead celebrates the improvisational, textilic work of medieval builders who built cathedrals “from the ground up” without fixed plans (Ingold, 2010). This echoes Pye’s celebration of skilled, adaptive practice. Even anthropology, he argues, is a kind of workmanship of risk. Fieldwork depends on responsiveness, not certainty. It requires being open to the world’s unpredictability, just as a potter or carpenter must adapt to their material’s behavior.

In all these examples, Pye’s craftsman becomes Ingold’s wayfarer, someone who learns and creates through movement, uncertainty, and care. Ingold generalizes Pye’s philosophy of making into a philosophy of living, where every action participates in the world’s ongoing formation.

The Thread That Connects Them

In both The Textility of Making and Making, Ingold often uses metaphors of thread, weaving, and flow. He argues that the Western tradition of design (the “hylomorphic model”) has privileged straight, abstract lines, the kind you see in blueprints or computer renderings, over the curved, living lines of hand-drawn work (Ingold, 2010). The shift from spinning thread to stretching string between points, he writes, marks the historical move from bodily making to intellectual design.

This thread imagery resonates with Pye’s emphasis on the tactile, felt qualities of materials. For both thinkers, making is rhythmic and embodied, a process of continuous adjustment. A machine may repeat the same movement perfectly each time, but a human maker must respond to small differences, to tension, resistance, sound, and feel. Ingold calls this responsiveness “itineration” rather than “iteration”: a rhythmic, sensory way of moving through the world rather than mechanically repeating steps (Ingold, 2010).

That shift, from perfect repetition to living rhythm, captures what both Pye and Ingold value most: the vitality of process.

How Pye Strengthens Ingold’s Argument

Ingold’s dialogue with Pye gives his anthropology of making a concrete foundation. Without Pye, Ingold’s philosophy might seem too abstract, too poetic to be practical. But Pye’s distinction between risk and certainty provides the empirical grounding Ingold needs to argue that uncertainty is essential to creativity. It’s not just about craft anymore; it’s about how humans think, learn, and relate to the world.

By borrowing and expanding Pye’s ideas, Ingold also makes a subtle argument about knowledge production itself. Academic research, he suggests, should be more like craftsmanship: experimental, responsive, and aware that outcomes can’t be fully known in advance. In this sense, Ingold’s anthropology is a form of intellectual workmanship of risk. His writing performs what it describes, it moves, weaves, and improvises rather than delivering a fixed, finished theory.

Conclusion: Thinking With the Hand

Reading Ingold through Pye changed the way I think about creativity. Both remind us that making is not simply about control or execution; it’s about attention, care, and risk. The moment of uncertainty, the slip of a tool, the unexpected bend of a material, is where new possibilities emerge.

For Pye, this was the essence of craftsmanship. For Ingold, it becomes the essence of life itself: the idea that we are all continually making the world in correspondence with the forces around us. To make it is to think with the hand, to learn by feeling our way forward.

And maybe that’s why Ingold’s Making still feels so fresh, it’s not just theory about making; it’s theory made through making.

References

Ingold, T. (2010). The textility of making. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 34(1), 91–102. https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/bep042

Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Routledge. http://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/8315/1/179.pdf

Pye, D. (1968). The nature and art of workmanship. Cambridge University Press. file:///Users/mehagupta/Downloads/4959-Article%20Text-50710-1-10-20210904.pdf

Other

The Materials, The Readymade, and The Counterfeit: Inauthenticity of Objects According to Ingold and Eco

3 Comments

“The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture” courtesy of The New Yorker.

Introduction

We tend to think of our objects as authored: whether they are made according to the drawing of a designer, the externalization of an artist’s emotions, or the disciplinary work of a scientist with a particle accelerator. Objects, as we have been studying, are a kind of media– the study of which is full of discussions around the auteur, authorship, and authorial intention versus audience perception. Both Tim Ingold and Umberto Eco question the assumption of authorship in object creation as a part of their scholarship. For Ingold, Chapter 2 of Making, “The materials of life”, sharply criticizes the hylomorphic model (aka, our understanding of objects as static forms born from a predestined image in the mind of a maker). For Eco, a semiotician, the idea of the counterfeit object relies on a complex ethical system for understanding what qualifies as a falsification. His understanding of objects in the essay “Untruths, Lies, Falsifications” (found in On the Shoulders of Giants), is that their authorship is fleeting and highly conditional. 

The Materials

At the beginning and the end of an object’s life cycle are materials. Ingold introduces a model in Making to help readers reframe their understanding of objects as final products, born from a design and static for all time. Instead, objects are mere “stoppage” points along a flow of materials, just as images are stoppage points along a flow of consciousness (20). The image and the object can correspond, Ingold says, but it is not one that determines the other. To illustrate this point, he gives us two salient examples of how objects transform from their presumed final state: one according to human intention, and the other according to natural forces.

“Householders might think of pots and pans as objects […] but for the dealer in scrap metal, they are lumps of material” (19). The process of regeneration and the value of objects and materials is here called into question. The notion of value in the object and its subsequent replications is also interesting to Eco, as I will explain later on. Human intention is seemingly both a force that informs an object’s creation, and also one that determines the object’s fraudulency. 

Secondly, Ingold provides an example of making as a process of growing and changing by describing the natural form-generating process: “The difference between a marble statue and a rock formation such as a stalagmite […] is not that one has been made and the other not. […O]nly this: that at some point in the formative history of this lump of marble, first a quarryman appeared on the scene who, with much force and with the assistance of hammers and wedges, wrested it from the bedrock, after which a sculptor set to work with a chisel in order, as he might put it, to release the form from the stone. But as every chip of the chisel contributes to the emergent form of the statue, so every drop of supersaturated solution from the roof of the cave contributes to the form of the stalagmite. When subsequently, the statue is worn down by rain, the form-generating process continues, but now without further human intervention” (21-22). 

The Readymade

The world of art and art history has taken major issue with this subject of form generation, in no way more obvious than in trying to define the “readymade object”. What happens when an artist takes something already composed from materials and puts it in a new context? Is this act of human intervention a form of making itself? To this question, Ingold might respond by asking an artist to describe their engagement with the materials in the work (in this case, the readymade object or objects, plus any other mediums used). “Even if the maker has a form in mind, it is not this form that creates the work. It is the engagement with materials”, he says. “Time and again, scholars have written as though to have a design for a thing, you already have the thing itself. Some versions of conceptual art and architecture have taken this reasoning to such an extreme that the thing itself becomes superfluous. It is but a representation – a derivative copy – of the design that preceded it (Frascari 1991: 93). If everything about a form is prefigured in the design, then why bother to make it at all?” (22). If the evolution of the object only exists in the mind of an artist or a viewer, has anything really been made at all?

The idea of originals and copies is exactly where Umberto Eco’s work comes in to expand Ingold’s ideas and consider what our current normative understanding of creation/ authorship versus copying/ counterfeit comes from. His work is also especially relevant to the art world, where collector’s items, originals, and fakes are fetishized and contentious. In particular, the passing of replica paintings for their originals has had unimaginable monetary and emotional costs. 

The Counterfeit

What is a counterfeit? “The counterfeiting of a pseudo-double lends itself to false identification that occurs when A (legitimate Author), in historical circum-stances t1, produces O (Original Object) while C (Counterfeiter) in historical  circumstances t2 produces CO (Counterfeit Object). But CO is not necessarily a forgery because C could have produced CO as an exercise or for fun” (183-4). Here Eco starts his argument by assuming the innocence of the counterfeiter. What really gets our goat, he argues, is how a third party– which he nicknames the Identifier– evaluates the original versus the copy. “A double is a physical token that possesses all the properties of another physical token, insofar as both have the pertinent features prescribed in an abstract type. […] Instead, we are dealing with pseudo-doubles when only one of the tokens of the type assumes, for one or more users, a particular value”(185). 

This may sound like a simple argument that explains how historical or sentimental value attached to the “original” version of a particular object is reflected in its cultural and/or monetary value. However, Eco’s argument then digs in and questions the fidelity of original works with the following paragraph:

“Sometimes C transforms the authentic object into a counterfeit version of itself. For example, unfaithful  restorations are carried  out on paintings or statues that transform the work, censor parts of the body, and break up a polyptych. Strictly speaking, those ancient  works  of  art  that  we  consider  originals  have  instead  been  transformed by the action of time or men—and have undergone amputations, restorations, alteration or loss of color. We need only think of the neoclassical ideal of a ‘white’ Hellenism, whereas the original temples and statues were multicolored. But, given that any material is subject to physical and chemical alterations from the very moment of creation, then every object should be seen as a permanent counterfeit of itself”(186-7).

Here is where I believe Ingold and Eco to be taking two different approaches towards the same issue. Ingold would say that a Greek sculpture is undergoing a continual process of growth as time and the elements wear away its colourful paint. Meanwhile, Eco would say that the image in our heads of an “original Greek sculpture” actually corresponds to a counterfeited version. The only difference between counterfeit like this and fraudulent counterfeit, he suggests, may be owed to the human intention behind the act of creating a copy or altering an original. 

Conclusion

“What happens if the authentic object either no longer exists, or has never existed– in any case, if it has never been seen by anyone?” Eco asks innocently, breaking his unending flow of evidence and reference (187). His argument suggests to us that the image of the original is actually ascribed such importance culturally and societally, that no matter how much the materials of an object flow– whether they are renovated and mended, or reduced to ruins and rubble– the image remains fixed at its “stoppage point”. 

Ingold details how we work through and make meaning from materials, and yet Eco supports a theory that we work through and make meaning from images. When our conscious experiences as a society join around these common images, perhaps we understand one another better through a shared culture. Both Ingold and Eco can be “correct” in their dialectical understandings of the object and the image, but who will help us to understand Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, or photos animated with Snapchat AI? The questions of making, re-making, and counterfeiting– and what these processes might entail– feel equally if not more important to media studies today than discussing the death of the author. Their relevance to us both as to makers and consumers of media is exceptionally strong.

Works Cited

Eco, Umberto. “8. Untruths, Lies, Falsifications”. On the Shoulders of Giants, Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2019, pp. 170-195. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674242265-009

Ingold, Tim. “The Materials of Life.” Making, Routledge, New York, NY, 2013, pp. 17–31, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/reader/download/f3935efc-cf5e-4c85-ab70-2e61f46e8689/book/pdf 

Blog post written by Naomi Brown

Other

The Game Controller: Mediating Between Virtual and Physical Worlds

8 Comments

Introduction

What do the buttons on a game console controller represent for you? Each button most likely has different functions which vary among each game’s unique game mechanics. Take for example, the “B” button. In Splatoon, pressing it results in your in-game avatar to jump, in Hades, it makes you dash forward, whereas in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, holding it down makes your avatar run. Our real-life act of pressing a button translates into another action occurring in-game, as depicted on the screen. One could even say that the buttons having diverse effects in each game’s unique mechanics, representing their own specific set of rules, relies on their own system of signs.  

Avatar in Splatoon 3 displaying “jump” mechanic – Footage by Christine Choi
Character, Zagreus, in Hades displaying “dash” mechanic – Footage by Christine Choi
Avatar in Animal Crossing: New Horizons displaying “run” mechanic – Footage by Christine Choi

This fascination surrounding such concepts is precisely why I chose a game controller as my evocative object. Although there are so many different variations of a game controller, I am going to use the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller as an example as it is the controller I was mediated by the most and is also one of the more “standard” modern designs when it comes to game controllers (the existence of a joystick, four buttons with letters/symbols, L and R buttons, etc.). By analyzing the game controller, I will highlight the ways that it mediates between us, the player, and the virtual world that the game exists in. 

The Controller and the Player

As mentioned before, the game controller has the unique ability to mediate between us and the virtual world displayed within the hardware (whether that is the console or the PC). When it comes to “playing” a game via a controller, there is a unique set of feedback that is inputted and outputted mediating between our physical corporeal bodies and the incorporeal in-game virtual bodies. 

You would first take in the world through senses, like sight and hearing. Certain in-game index, symbols, and icons may evoke feelings of fear, especially if it had informed the player of it causing harm to the avatar in the past. Others may evoke curiosity, enticing the player to explore more of the game and the “rules” of this digital world. Once you have cognitively processed that, your instincts—shaped by in-game and real-world experiences—would inform you to react. You would react by pressing buttons or rolling the joystick to the direction you want it to. We know, or at the very least expect, that the controller has received input when we receive the tactile feedback of the button being pushed down then springing back as we release it from pressing down on it. Then you would see the fruition of your act of button-pressing/joystick pushing by seeing the pixels on-screen change to indicate movement/change within this virtual world. 

Feedback of input and output between virtual and physical worlds – Diagram drawn by Christine Choi

The feelings evoked from the virtual information would translate in the grip of our controller; dodging enemies evoking another emotion of relief and safety, the achievement leading to satiate more of our curiosity, all driving our progression of the game. Thus, the controller is the mediating object for the player’s input and the software (which would be the game). Without the game, there is nothing for it to control and without the player input, there is nothing being controlled. 

Exerting Control over in-game “bodies”

Much of what is being said about the “control” over avatars/characters is correlated to what is said about the “body” as a medium in Critical Terms for Media Studies. After all, the controller could be seen as an extension of our own body, which extends into what is being “embodied” in-game. Wegenstein, too, utilizes psychoanalytic theories of how video games allow us to play the role of the “other”, a virtual embodiment that differs from the embodiment of ourselves. She quotes Slavoj Zizek on “a figure capable of taking on, or projecting itself into, many simultaneous roles” (28). The concept of roles that we project onto is correspondent with how the controller that mediates and perpetuates this “ego” that we project onto, making the body of the playable character another medium. 

Thus far, I have only discussed characters and avatars that have an anthropomorphic body, which is easy to visualize as we easily project our human bodies onto these characters. But what about games with no “avatar” or humanistic representation of our own bodies? I would argue that there is still a “body” or “vessel” in which we, in our physical and corporeal forms, exert control over digitally. Take Tetris for example, the falling blocks would be the body that we project ourselves onto. As the blocks fall, we move with it left or right via the joystick or D-pad. 

Game Controller as a “Black Box”

Even the most avid gamers most likely do not know the internal computational and mechanical workings of what occurs in between the space and time in which we press the button and watch the game do its magic. The game controller generally works under the “black box” heuristics (a cybernetics theory coined by Norbert Wiener), in which the processes of the input from our button to the output in the game is shrouded in mystery for the average user (Wiener, page xi). However, I would argue that this knowledge we lack of our game controller’s internal workings is precisely the tool we use to immerse ourselves in the virtual space of a video game. What we do know as gamers is that eventually, its mechanics is burned into the memory of our bodies through “muscle memory” as the controls become second nature to us, thus “mediating” our physical bodies in the real world and the incorporeal bodies that exist in the virtual space of a video game.

Citations

Wegenstein, Bernadette. “Body.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, 2010, pp. 19–34.

Wiener, Norbert, et al. Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. MIT Press, 2019.

Images and footage were all taken by Christine Choi

Other

The Test of Time: Media and Memory Through Eco and Ingold

3 Comments

Davide Ferrario’s film, Umberto Eco: A Library of the World memorializes many of Eco’s theories, particularly the relationship between media and memory, which works through its connection to history. Eco himself is staunchly committed to physical media, blatantly exhibited through his sprawling library which is featured in the film’s opening credits. These themes of media and memory pervade throughout the film and are evident through the glimpses Eco gives the viewer of his own personal philosophy and conduct. His emphasis on physical media and the unique qualities he attributes to it align with the philosophies that Tim Ingold describes in his book Making. Ingold’s propositions recommending a re-evaluation of how we approach the concepts of learning and making are complementary to Eco’s valuation of physical media. Both theorists approach media in the same way, just from two directions: Eco reflects on a ‘finished’ product, while Ingold proposes restructuring our understanding of media from its inception. 

Physical Media and Memory

Eco espouses the benefits of physical media’s permanence. There are books that are hundreds of years old which can still be read and observed, yet “today’s computers are unable to read what we recorded two decades ago”(Ferrario 21:00-21:20). This longevity sustains physical media’s connection to history–and subsequently memory–in a way that is impossible for digital media.

The immediacy of the digital, while convenient, is not conducive to creating longlasting media that is tied to memory. By lacking memory, digital media offers little learning opportunity in the way that Ingold defines it: the process of accruing knowledge by being taught by the world rather than simply intaking information about it (2). Though the easy discussion forums presented by online media appear to help the flow and interexchange of knowledge, they primarily orchestrate an excessive influx of information that is designed to be consumed quickly and easily, not to facilitate effective and educational discussion. These discussion forums then become performative opportunities for interaction that are dictated by algorithms designed to cater information based on its audience.

Physical media, like Eco’s books, is a published thing. The source information cannot be changed on the same whim as that online, yet it’s this stagnation that allows for further reflection and change of perception over time. This temporal aspect of physical media is what truly makes it a conduct of memory. By remaining the same, the information is the finished object within the dynamic thing of the book (Ingold 85). The book can be altered physically, and through correspondence, because its information is not adapting to the audience.

Physical Media vs. Digital Media

During an interview featured in the film, Umberto Eco is discussing his own digital media habits and how he recently downloaded a copy of Proust’s Recherche onto his iPad. He then expresses frustration that he “could not underline any passage, [he] could not make dog-ears, [he] didn’t smear the pages with [his] dirty thumb”(Ferrario12:18-12:37). Evidently, Eco wants to alter his books as he reads them. He wants to impart his own thoughts onto the already published media, which is a far more dynamic process than simply absorbing the information that the book’s words offer. In this desire, Eco aligns himself with both Ingold’s philosophies of learning, and his views on the treatment of art. Ingold deems the role of students–or in this case readers–is not to mindlessly consume the information offered by an established source, but to “collaborate in the shared pursuit of understanding”(13). Similarly, he encourages us to view art as things that give “direct correspondence [to] the creative processes that give rise to them” rather than simply as “works to be analyzed”(Ingold 7).

Books: An Object or a Thing?

A pillar of Making is Ingold’s discernment between objects and things. An object “is complete in itself” and we cannot “join with it in the process of its formation”(85). Conversely, things are “with us” and allow us to correspond with their materials (Ingold 85). This distinction mirrors that of Eco’s explanation of bibliophiles versus bibliomaniacs. A bibliomaniac reserves his books to himself “because he would fear thieves from all over the world would flock to steal it”, while a bibliophile would “share his wonder with everybody and they’d be proud they knew it was his”(Ferrario 16:52-17:00). 

By this definition, bibliomaniacs view books as prized assets of information, to be hoarded and kept away, effectively rendering them stagnant objects of observation and considering them complete, despite this state of futility. If no one is around to read the books, there is no further knowledge to be gained than that which is printed on their pages. Meanwhile, bibliophiles share the information in their collections, inviting discussion and utilizing books as vessels to obtain further knowledge. Eco’s definition of bibliophile is one that exists harmoniously within Ingold’s definition of learning.

Eco deems books as “irreplaceable”(Ferrario 12:45). Books, and any other physical media, are inherently unique. Walter Benjamin defines this uniqueness using the concept of aura, which is congruent to the memory instilled into a physical medium and is not present in its replications as it is “embedded in the fabric of tradition”(6). The physical process of making a book, and its distribution to its eventual owners, is entirely distinct to another printing of that same book. The initial individuality and aura of physical media again cooperates with Ingold’s definition of making. 

Per Ingold, the process of making does not end with its finished ‘product’, as other factors will continue to act upon it over time (22). In this way, making is “a process of correspondence: not the imposition of preconceived form on raw material substance, but the drawing out or bringing forth of potentials immanent in a world of becoming”(Ingold 31). These ideas readily translate to Eco’s beloved physical media. No two books are affected by the world around them in the same way, but a pdf of a text will remain generally unchanged no matter whose device it is on. Furthermore, Ingold defines making as a “process of growth” wherein artists and other forces–in this case, the books’ audiences–work in tandem with the materials they are manipulating/experiencing (21). This approach to making and artistry is synonymous to the way Eco creates a reciprocal relationship between his books and his thoughts.

Mass Media 

The concept of mass media provides an interesting nuance to these theories. It, like any other form of media, must be made. Ingold further defines making as a process of correspondence, where transducers allow interaction between the kinaesthesia and material flow until they become indistinguishable, parallelling John Durham Peters’ definition of media as “symbolic connectors” between messages, means, and agents (Ingold 102, Peters 266). By these definitions the means/transducer creates a bridge from the kinaesthesia/message to the material flow/agents, ultimately creating the media that is observed or discussed. However, a defining characteristic of mass media is the distance and distinction between the senders and receivers, rather than each party taking on an interchangeable role (Peters, 267).

This differentiation of author and audience intrinsically opposes Ingold’s aforementioned definition of learning. The purpose behind mass media is to communicate to the masses (Peters, 268). With this purpose, the process of making is centred around the dissemination of the final product and any discussion that this media spurs is generally between two receivers, not the sender. In this way, mass media features something consumable, not collaborative. 

Mass media as consumption is far more relevant when considering digital mass media versus physical mass media. With the sheer amount of content created and its potential for profit, digital media often becomes a transaction. It attempts to balance its message with enough ease of digestibility, often diluting or changing its message in the name of profit. Through this, digital media becomes a stagnant object because of its dynamic form. The message gradually changes for its audience so it is always meant to be consumed at face value, not discussed at length. In our modern digital media landscape, everything is meant to attract our attention instantly. This quickens the pace at which we consume digital media and the extent to which it is mechanically reproduced effectively removes any aura or memory that was once attached to it, reinforcing Benjamin’s relative disdain for mechanical reproduction (4). Finally, the ease of mechanical reproduction works against the integration of memory into digital media. Umberto Eco says it best: “when everything is recorded, we don’t feel the need to remember it”(Ferrario 22:49-22:53).

Conclusion

Umberto Eco loved his books and, considering Ingold’s theories on making and learning, the opposing affordances between physical and digital media, and Benjamin’s resolution in the plight that is mechanical reproduction, it’s easy to see why. 

Citations

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Reproduction”, Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, Schocken Books, 1969.

Ingold, Tim. Making. Routledge, 2013.

Peters, John Durham. “Mass Media”,  Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W.J.T Mitchell and Mark, B.N. Hansen, The University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 266-279.

Umberto Eco: A Library of the World. Directed by Davide Ferrario. Performance by Umberto Eco, Zoe Tavarelli, and Giuseppe Cederna. 2022.

Photo by Molly Kingsley

Written by Molly Kingsley

Other

Umberto Eco’s Books As Told Through Film

3 Comments

Davide Ferrario’s Umberto Eco: A Library of the World documents the life of Italian philosopher, semiotician, and novelist Umberto Eco through his private library, where he explores themes of media and memory, truth and fiction, and information and knowledge, using the library to represent pillars of human memory and knowledge.

Upon rewatching the documentary and doing extra research outside the documentary, this was an insightful film that connected to the course’s broader themes of media as mediators of perception and knowledge through semiotics and material media. Eco’s library is ultimately a lived example of the abstract practices of media theory and embodies how physical media shapes epistemology.

The film first introduced Eco’s library as a living archive of knowledge, a pillar that is paramount to what Eco describes as vegetal memory, referring to physical, memory on paper from trees. He emphasises that the conservation of material media, such as the books in his private library, sustains vegetal memory, and that this type of media that rots, decays, and changes over time makes written knowledge a material body. He uses vegetal memory as a metaphor for the tangiblity of the relationship between nature and human culture as mediated through books and literature. This exactly is what prompted Eco to start his huge archive of books that continues to grow and change over time. In the film, Eco says, “When we say ‘I’ we mean our memories,” to emphasise how tethered the body and self is to memory, and he uses his library as both a symbol and living embodiment of human’s universal memory, turning his library into ann intellectual map of the world through written texts.

Through his library, Eco also explores themes of truth and fiction. Eco collects scholarly articles and rare, antique novels for his library, but he was also keen on collecting fiction books and raunchy novels. For him, fiction was a way to organize truths. When facts and statistics can appear abstract, narratives in fictional pieces offer a new path to the truth, a new framework of understanding the world around us. This was a philosophy Eco stood by for a long time throughout his long-standing, arguably obsessive pursuit on truths and untruths, where he also strongly believed in semiotics and meaning coming from symbols, indexes, and signals. He claims that fictional texts with stories and narrative elements are ‘open books’ that encode cultural truths that facts and analysis often cannot reveal. This is because ‘open books’ allow for reader interpretation beyond authorial intent. In Eco’s library these two types of texts coexisted without any hierarchy, rather as a single intellectual ecosystem. The film itself also balances between elements of fiction and truth, going back and forth between archival footage and real interviews with dramatic readings of Eco’s essays from actors to present how both ways of presenting information is true and equal.

Lastly, the film discusses how Eco’s archive translates to the digital world, where his texts are translated and digitized into moving images. The film captures Eco’s ambivalence on this topic, especially on the topic of cellphones as a means of communication. He often criticized people who use their cellphone as a status symbol and “flaunt their private lives in the presence of all,” claiming they are exhibitionists rather than individuals seeking genuine connection and communication through their phones. He further claims that the world is becoming increasingly flooded with messages that say nothing, and that this information overload can damage knowledge. Tying back to the first theme, he also claims that the contemporary digital era is hurting the ability to preserve one’s organic brain and vegetal memory. 

Eco’s claims on digital communication are especially relevant to today, where access to information is incredibly convenient and instant. While this access is instant and convenient, it often is engaged with superficially and at a shallow level, where no discourse, discussion, or further reflection is ever really initiated. It is easy for students especially to stay in the constant comfort of digital instant messaging, where we end up neglecting physical means of gaining and retaining knowledge. However, film masterfully emphasises Eco’s passion for how the physicality of books mediates meaning differently from digital media and how it sustains vegetal memory through different genres of written work.

This film also ties back to the discussion of material media as important devices in corresponding the human body to knowledge of our environment. This reminds me a lot of the evocative objects we read about and discussed in class and Ingold’s Making. Rather than objects, they are now regarded as things because of our personal interpretation and mediation of the object. The meaning of a thing has transformed and evolved with us, and has afforded our bodies different things. For Eco, the physicality of books have transformed from objects to things, and has afforded him a personal living archive, where it maps memory and knowledge through material media that he engages with daily, not only in individual books, but in his created third-space of his private library.

The film additionally allows for a reflection through the digital moving image format as it tries to mediate Eco’s tactile, material world of books through the implementation of different sections and archival material. It also strengthens Eco’s passion for semiotics, where the form of film itself is semiotic and constantly reminds the viewers that meaning is constructed and ever-evolving, rather than constant. Again, the film’s back and forth between the realism of the documentary genre through archival footage and interviews and the poetic retelling of Eco’s essays further blurs the line between truth and fiction to emphasise how they are interdependent. While documentaries are conventionally associated with nonfiction and truth, this film’s adaptation of Eco’s material world into a digital medium remains an act of interpretation. Sort of like an open film, in which my own reflections and responses now become part of its meaning.

Works Referenced

Eco, Umberto. (2022). Umberto Eco: A Library of the World [Film]. Directed by Davide Ferrario.

Garner, Dwight. “Umberto Eco, Not a Cellphone Exhibitionist.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 6 Nov. 2007, archive.nytimes.com/artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/06/umberto-eco-not-a-cell-phone-exhibitionist/#:~:text=The%20thousands%20of%20people%20we,in%20the%20presence%20of%20all.

Other

The Spell of The Sensuous – Mediation, Writing & Animism

6 Comments

We may not think of media as having anything to do with ecology, or animism, or the spiritual beliefs of Indigenous oral cultures – but after reading David Abram’s 1996 The Spell of the Sensuous, it becomes indisputably clear that these things are inextricably linked.

Abram’s core argument is a tapestry of interrelated ideas which weave together to completely change the way we think about our conscious experience and the land around us. The Spell of the Sensuous is about a specific way of seeing and understanding the world – not through our abstract knowledge of scientific facts, but through our direct, conscious experience through our senses that we all live in every day of our lives. This way of understanding is inextricably tied to reciprocal interactions with animals, plants and the land around us. Abram argues this is the way that Indigenous oral cultures understand the world to this day, and shows how a sect of philosophy known as phenomenology began to rediscover it. Abram tells the story of how we lost this understanding through the development of writing and abstract thought, how we began to ignore what our senses tell us & cut ourselves off from communication with things that aren’t human or human-made. We’ll get there, but let’s start where it all began – the natural world.

We learn that animals evolve in ecosystems; intricate webs of relationships between different species of animals and plants that all evolved alongside each other. But we forget that we are not exempt from this rule; that we are animals. We may also forget that our senses are not just for listening to music or watching movies – but are instead a system that evolved to be the interface for these inter-species relationships, as they did for all animals. We forget that the purpose for which our senses evolved was to experience and interact with the natural environment – our ears are tuned not to the entire frequency spectrum, but to the range of animal calls. What else did our eyes evolve to see but the trees and animals around us, the world of things that are not us? Abram calls this the “more than human world” – the natural environment, as seen directly through the lens of our senses – a world of communication between humans and non-humans. We’ve left this world, for only the past few hundred years, but our senses have not changed.

But what is this way of understanding – this thing you’re experiencing at this very moment – the world as we understand it not through objective facts or scientific knowledge, but through our eyes and ears, nose and brain and body? What can we learn from this world we directly percieve through our senses? In 1913, Austrian mathematician Edmund Husserl set out to answer this question, founding a new field of Philosophy that studies the phenomena we perceive directly with our senses – phenomenology.

Science and experiment have given us unimaginable insight into how our world works. They allowed us to cut past bias and falsehoods and learn truths about the world beyond what we can perceive with the senses – like atoms, soundwaves and DNA – leading to a monumental shift in the way we think about the world. But, Abram argues, with this shift in our knowledge came a shift in our culture and psychology – the the assumption that these technical, mechanical truths come before the conscious experience you’re having right now – that your entire life can be reduced down to a set of facts; to particles, chemicals and synapses firing in the brain – that your mind is not an inseparable part of your material body, but a but another immaterial thing, consciousness, that exists somehow beyond the body.

Phenomenology isn’t counter to science; it isn’t saying these things we’ve discovered through science aren’t real – It is saying that our direct, conscious experience through our senses is also worthy of exploration. After all, this is how you experience every moment of your life, along with every other living animal. This world of perception isn’t a lie, It isn’t an illusion concealing the real world. It is a real world, full of interactions, through our senses, between ourselves and everything around us, from animals to plants to the land. Hence Abram’s term – ‘The More than Human World.’

Abram has a deeper purpose for bringing up phenomenology in his book – a connection he noticed as he lived alongside cultures from the Koyukon peoples of northern Alaska to the Balinese of Indonesia – this ‘phenomenological’ way of viewing the world; understanding reality purely as we see it through our senses without abstract rationalization, was exactly how these peoples thought and lived. We’ll go over an example of this kind of thinking soon, but first, let’s talk about an experience Abram had, living in rural Indonesia.

Abram describes an encounter with a water buffalo. Finding himself staring face to face with this huge creature, he noticed something strange – without language, there was an extremely simple way he and the buffalo could communicate. The buffalo let out a loud exhale, and Abram responded with his own exhale. Mimicry; this tendency animals have to repeat the sounds and gestures of other animals may seem purposeless, but Abram argues mimimicry accomplishes one simple thing, for both animals – it affirms that you are sensing the other animal, and that the other animal can sense you. It is a way even animals can say, without words, “I am alive, and I know you are alive too.” Abram argues that these indigenous cultures; ones constantly foraging for food in forests or carefully watching and being watched by deer as they hunt, ones not surrounded by man-made structures and systems, are more aware of this reciprocal relationship.

Back to our example of phenomenology. To understand what this way of thinking really means, let’s take an example from Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty – 

Think about what it’s like to look at a bowl. You can never see the entire bowl at once. To your eye, the bowl exists only as one section of its entire surface, until you turn your head to see more of it. A part of the bowl you couldn’t see before now comes into view, and that part of the bowl you saw earlier disappears from view. In objective, scientific terms, the entire bowl does exist statically all at once, but through your conscious experience – through your senses, you can never see it all at once. Through your senses, the bowl isn’t something static. To your eye, it changes form – it has multiple forms depending on your perspective. And the only way for those forms to reveal themselves is in response to your own senses, in response to the placement of your own body.

This way of thinking feels bizarre to us – somehow so foreign it feels incomprehensible or at the same time so obvious it feels pointless. But Abrams argues it may once have been more common to think of a bowl, or a tree or rock, as something dynamic, not static. To our eyes, even objects aren’t cold, static, unchanging things. In a strange way, they respond to us. And it was this realization that led Abram to connect phenomenology with something else that was shared by almost all of the cultures he visited – animism.

Unlike the belief in an all-powerful, immaterial god, Animism is the belief that everything around us has a spirit. That word, spirit, may trip us up here – to our culture, that word may have the connotation of a ghost; something intangible, immaterial, beyond our world or our dimension of being. But, Abram points out, Animistic cultures don’t see spirit that way. Yes, they view things like rocks or rivers as having their own spirit, as being alive, but not in the same way a plant is alive – just like a plant is not quite alive in the same way an animal is alive. Here, spirit is purely material – it isn’t about transcendence or intangibility, it is about response and reciprocity. This is what connects Merleau-Ponty’s example to Abram’s experience with the buffalo. Think about how Abram exhaled in response to the buffalo, and the buffalo exhaled in response to him; both affirming that they could sense and were sensed by each other; both literally affirming that they were each alive. To an Animistic culture, this example of a bowl may work in much the same way – a person moves their head to reveal another side of the bowl, and to their eye, the bowl shifts to reveal another side of itself; both affirming that they could sense and were sensed by each other; both affirming that they were each alive. A bowl may not be alive in anywhere near the same way a buffalo is alive, certainly not in the way our culture would use the word alive, but to an Animistic culture, both the bowl and the buffalo have a spirit.

But why do all of these cultures, thousands of miles apart, all just coincidentally think this way, and develop these animistic beliefs? It may make more sense to ask, Abram argues, why doesn’t our culture see things this way? Perhaps our ancestors shared this understanding of the world, until something changed in our perception. Each one of the Indigenous cultures that Abram lived with had one thing in common – they were oral cultures; they had not developed writing. It does not at all seem clear at first how developing writing could have stopped us from seeing the world through the conscious experience of our senses, and from believing everything around us has a sort of dynamic spirit. To understand, Abram brings us to the turning point of alphabetic writing; to when the ancient Greeks adopted writing from the ancient Hebrews.

Writing began, like cave paintings, with simple pictures of the world around us, such as Aztec logograms and Egyptian hieroglyphics. In semiotic terms these were iconic, not symbolic – they referred directly to our natural world; oxen and birds, people and objects. The Egyptian written word for ox – “aleph,” was simply a picture, or icon, of the animal itself. This icon was adopted into the early writing system for the Sinaitic languages, like Hebrew and Phoenician, and later by the Greeks. But the Greeks spoke an entirely unrelated language with different sounds, belonging to the Indo-european family. They had to take these icons, which each had cultural connotations, names & meanings, and signified plants and animals, and transplant them into an entirely foreign system of meaning. They had to repurpose these icons into symbols. Before, each Phoenician or Hebrew letter or icon related directly to what it signified; the natural world. Each icon visually referred back to different non-human animals and plants; to that web of relationships in the ecosystem. These new Greek symbols were now arbitrarily related to what they signified – which was now no longer non-human elements of the natural world, but human-made sounds. Abram argues that this shift, the invention of the alphabet, was not only a shift in language, but a shift in our psychology.

Abstract means unable to be perceived by our senses – separate from the world of our conscious, sensuous experience. For a culture that is constantly immersed in the web of relationships of the land around them – hunting animals, gathering plants and observing the world with their entire range of senses – the concept of some entirely other immaterial, abstract space simply would have no reason to cross their minds. Oral stories, like that of the Navajo, or aboriginal Australians, simply didn’t make sense without their ties to the land in which they took place. You cannot tell a story that takes place nowhere, so you must specify where it took place. This is the view held by the oral cultures of today, and the view we once all held before writing. But for the Greeks, who were beginning to adopt a system of writing without reference to the world of non-human things we see with our senses, who were beginning to transition into sedentary agricultural societies, who were beginning to build urban cities and view the land as a set of resources, it became possible to conceive of a new kind of space – an abstract space. Oral stories began to be written down, set in stone and passed from culture to culture. We began to write stories that were not tied to a specific place – they could be read by anybody, anywhere, and could make sense even though they were not specified to take place anywhere.

Greek philosophers like Aristotle and Plato, growing up in this new culture, inspired a monumental shift in our thinking – that there was a world of pure ideals, an abstract world completely beyond the land in which we evolved and all of the non-human inhabitants we perceive through our conscious experience. And, even more importantly, that our conscious experience itself, or soul, could exist outside of the body itself – that our brain and eyes and ears and nose and body did not require each other, but could exist without each other.

You might not know it, but the culture in which you grew up has carried the torch of this abstract, empirical, scientific way of understanding. These new kinds of societies began to develop technologies, new ways of using the land as resources, that did not require the direct interaction inherent in hunting and gathering. Later, they expanded on this abstract, immaterial conception of the world and developed scientific methods of inquiry that revealed hidden, mechanical processes that we can’t see – that are beyond the world of our perception. While there are thousands of years and all sorts of other developments between us and the ancient Greeks, this moment where they shifted from oral to written culture marked the moment where the world lost its spirit. A bowl, or even a plant or animal, was no longer a dynamic, shifting, responding thing – it existed as an ideal form in abstract space, beyond our senses – our senses only limited us to seeing different parts of its true form. Our senses could no longer be trusted – they were an illusion that obscured an abstract, static, unresponsive world.

But though this view is shared by scientific inquiry, and is not at all untrue, it is also true, as phenomenologists argue and Indigenous cultures experience, that our senses are not lying to us. The world is dynamic. It is not an unchanging, unfeeling set of resources to be turned into human made objects. It is full of birds whose songs we hear and who can hear our voices, and trees who show us only a part of their branches until more are revealed in response to our movement. Though a monumental shift in our thinking brought about by alphabetic writing has hidden this fact from us – we are animals. Though we have left our ecosystem, stopped seeing and hearing and reciprocally speaking and responding to things that are not human, our senses are the same as they were. They evolved to hear and see and interact with the other animals around us. As a consequence of this, if we pay careful attention to how we feel the world through our conscious experience and set aside for a moment what we know about it, we might find that everything seems to be listening, and responding.

Other

Return to Sender: On Friendlier Cups and the Rage They Evoke

9 Comments

The Friendlier cup program on campus presents itself as a reusable alternative to single-use plastics. With a $0.50–$1.00 deposit, a companion app, and a two-week refund window, Friendlier promises less waste and more responsibility. What it actually gave me was a latte I couldn’t finish and a new ritual of carrying an extra object that made my day worse. These cups are an evocative object: small, material, and infuriatingly demanding. The Friendlier cups evoke not just personal reflection, but genuine rage.

The Cup That Followed Me Home

I bought an iced latte one Thursday before a lecture. Instead of the disposable cold cup I expected, I was handed a reusable Friendlier cup meant for hot drinks. I agree that UBC goes through an excessive amount of disposable cups, and I welcomed Friendlier as a potential solution. But not only was my drink served in the wrong vessel—it was half full when class ended. My commute is over an hour and a half, and I carry a purse, not a backpack. That meant balancing a half-full drink on a rapid bus ripping through Vancouver while also trying to balance myself without a seat. And since I didn’t have class the next day, I kept it over the weekend until Monday to finally return it and see my $0.85 deposit again. When I got to campus, the café I’d bought it from didn’t have a Friendlier bin, so I had to track one down elsewhere. Once I found it, I stood there beside the bin creating a Friendlier account, an app I didn’t want, for at least a full minute before I could toss my cup in the bin. Two weeks later, the refund was still pending.

Getting a coffee is something I used to do almost every day. It was a small ritual that fit easily into my routine. Now, it feels like a chore. I’m not just annoyed, I’m enraged. This isn’t a personal failure to be eco-minded; it’s the result of a design that ignores real students and real routines. It assumes I can reshape my day around an object I never asked for. That friction is the point: these cups insert themselves into my everyday life, and they do it badly.

Rage, Routine, and the Objects That Shape Us

Sherry Turkle emphasizes that objects are “relational”: we form relationships with them much like we do with people, bringing expectations, attachments, and sometimes disappointments into these interactions. The Friendlier cup, intended as a reusable alternative to disposable coffee cups on campus, positions itself as a companion to daily routinesInstead, it has become a source of irritation. Rather than supporting my coffee habits, it mediates my interactions with campus life, sustainability practices, and even my own sense of efficiency in ways that frustrate me.

Turkle also notes that objects function as agents of reflection, prompting us to consider who we are, what we care about, and how we navigate the systems around us. The Friendlier cup forced me to confront the misalignment between the ideal of sustainability and the reality of campus infrastructure: missing bins, app registration delays, and pending refunds turned a daily ritual into a source of stress. What was meant to be a simple tool for environmental mindfulness became a reminder of friction in my already established routines, revealing how much our interactions with objects reflect broader social and institutional structures.

By framing the cup as both relational and reflective, we can see that its design is not neutral: it shapes behaviors, emotional experiences, and our relationship to sustainability, intentionally or not. I am passionate about sustainability, but my frustration with Friendlier has made me confront how a well-intentioned system can produce stress and resentment instead of care Rather than facilitating care and responsibility, it evokes rage, highlighting the tension between policy and lived experience.

Exchange, Deposits, and the Medium of Value

In David Graeber’s chapter “Exchange,” he helps explain the emotional politics underlying my frustration with Friendlier. A deposit is a token, a small piece of monetary media intended to guarantee return. Graeber argues that media of exchange can take on lives of their own: they may become detached from the social relations they were meant to mediate. The Friendlier cup’s $0.85 deposit is meant to be a simple economic nudge; in practice, it becomes a lingering IOU, processed by a corporate app, delayed, and sometimes never returned. This system transforms a socially oriented sustainability gesture into a market, in which the campus may even monetarily gain from unreturned deposits.

Reddit users on the r/UBC subreddit echo this logic. One commenter observes that the cups are “theoretically nice, but in reality […] stupid,” expressing concern that someone could snatch a cup from the bin and the original returner would never receive the refund. Others note that slow or unreliable processing could turn the deposit into a revenue stream. Another user flagged data privacy concerns: to get refunded, students must download an app and create an account, surrendering personal information to a private company for a campus sustainability initiative. These complaints are not trivial; they illuminate how the cup functions as a media of exchange that reconfigures obligations, trust, and data flows.

Viewed through Turkle’s lens, this is more than just a transactional failure: it is a relational failure. Turkle emphasizes that objects are companions to our emotional lives, carrying histories, expectations, and feelings into everyday routines. The Friendlier cup, rather than supporting sustainable habits, has become a companion of frustration, a persistent reminder of misaligned systems. Graeber helps explain why: when the cup’s deposit detaches from its intended social logic, it erodes trust and amplifies irritation, making me experience sustainability not as a shared ethical practice but as a set of obligations. In this sense, the Friendlier cup mediates campus life emotionally and materially, exposing the tensions between policy intentions and lived realities, and highlighting how even well-meaning objects can evoke rage when design and routine collide.

Affordances and Friction

From an affordances perspective, the Friendlier cup offers: reuse, reduced disposables, and potential normalization of a circular system. What it lacks is matched affordance for everyday bodies and schedules. A commuter with a purse, someone with irregular on-campus hours, or a person who has to wait days to return a cup are all disadvantaged by the program’s assumptions. The cup mediates access to a convenient beverage experience by adding layers of time, technology, and logistics. Instead of reducing friction, it slides friction into other parts of students’ lives.

Turkle’s point about objects catalyzing self-creation is helpful here: we do change around our objects when they become meaningful companions. But that process requires careful attention to how people actually live. A well-designed evocative object ought to invite incorporation; a poorly designed one forces compliance.

Sources:
Turkle, Sherry. Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. MIT Press, 2007. 

Mitchell, W. J. T., and Mark B. N. Hansen, editors. Critical Terms for Media Studies. University of Chicago Press, 2010.

https://www.reddit.com/r/UBC/comments/1mqewj0/thoughts_on_friendlier_resuable_containers_in_the

Photos:

“UBC Launches Reusable Packaging with Friendlier.” Food at UBC, University of British Columbia, https://food.ubc.ca/ubc-launches-reusable-packaging-with-friendlier/.

Header made on Canva by Sam Garcea

Other

In a Silent Search

5 Comments

Reflection on Umberto Eco’s Library of the World

When the film opened with Umberto Eco walking slowly through his library, surrounded by more than 30,000 books, I felt something stir inside me. His library is, quite honestly, my dream library. The way the camera moved through the endless rows of books felt almost like watching time itself, layer by layer and century by century. Eco’s library felt like a living organism and a space for remembering and a pulse of thought and time. 

Rewatching the film again at my own pace, taking notes and pausing throughout, I realized how much of what we’ve been learning in this course came to life in Eco’s words and character. As he said early in the film, “a library is both a symbol and a reality of universal memory” (2:01). That line stayed with me because it shows exactly what the film explores, the library as an extension of the human mind and a living memory system that binds matter, meaning, and mediation together.

Books as Media & Memory

The film presents the library as a medium of memory and through it, Eco shows how matter and meaning are inseparable. Eco’s son says, “It’s a living thing, not an archive, not a traditionally organized library” (44:14), and that description stayed with me because it reframed what a library could be. In Eco’s eyes, every book is both an object and an idea, a kind of container of thought that only becomes alive when touched, opened, and read.

I think this connects to Stiegler, from the chapter on memory in Critical Terms for Media Studies, where he explains that “human memory is originally exteriorized, which means it is technical from the start” (p. 67). He calls this process epiphylogenesis, the way we evolve “by means other than life,” through the tools, marks, and traces we create (p. 65). In other words, memory has always existed partly outside of us. Eco’s library, in that sense, becomes an externalized form of what Stiegler calls hypomnesis, meaning “recollection through externalized memory” (p. 67), sort of a living system of technical memory that carries human thought across generations.

Eco, in the film, categorizes memory into three kinds: vegetal, organic, and mineral. He explains that books represent vegetal memory because they are literally made of living matter: “books are made out of trees and anciently from papyrus” (9:40). The paper, ink, and bindings store traces of human experience the same way trees store rings of time. Books, then, are one of humanity’s earliest forms of technical memory, bridging nature and culture and body and medium. In a sense, when Eco walks through his library, he’s walking through a forest of preserved thought, each book a leaf in the great tree of human memory. That’s a library of the world.

Mediation, Knowledge, & the Human Mind

Eco’s intellectual life thrives through mediation. He believed that “to be curious intellectually means to be alive” (40:59). That line really stood out to me because it shows how Eco lived with a kind of restless curiosity that never stopped questioning or exploring. For him, thinking is an ongoing process of understanding. 

“I feel I had a full and long childhood because I stole somebody else’s memories,” he says, describing how reading allowed him to experience countless lives (33:46). This made me think about how books become mediators of experience, carrying us into other people’s memories, stories, and worlds. He also rejected the hierarchy between “important” and “unimportant” texts: “The life you conquer with reading does not discriminate between great literature and entertainment” (34:09). I think this aligns with Mitchell and Hansen’s idea of media as “environment for living—for thinking, perceiving, sensing, feeling” (p. xii). Reading, to Eco, was a way of living through mediation itself.

And this reminded me of Turkle’s ideas in Evocative Objects, where she writes that “everyday objects become part of our inner life: how we use them to extend the reach of our sympathies by bringing the world within” (p. 307). His library feels alive because I think it mirrors the structure of a human mind. It’s associative, layered, and full of contradictions. It very much resists the linear order and embraces the chaos of curiosity.

Silence, Information & the Loss of Meaning in Today’s World

One of the most thought-provoking parts of the film was when Eco talked about silence. He said, “You cannot find God where there is noise. God reveals himself only in silence” (1:15:00). That line felt timeless but also so relevant to the kind of world we live in today, one that is constantly oversaturated with distractions.

At some point in the film, an interviewer asked Eco if he didn’t own a cellphone, and Eco said, “Yes, but it’s always out… I don’t want to receive messages, and I don’t want to send messages! This world is loaded with messages, and even each of them says nothing!” (48:10). I actually laughed listetning to that but the more I thought about it, the more profound it became. I don’t think Eco is anti-technology but he was critiquing the modern condition of constant noise, essentially that is communication without depth and meaning.

He warns that “the risk is losing our memory on account of an overload of artificial memory,” because when everything is available instantly, nothing stays long enough to matter. “Clicking a button, you can get a bibliography of 10,000 titles. A bibliography like that is worthless. You can just throw it away. Once you went to the library and found three books, you would read them, and you would learn something” (26:10). 

In the film, there was a sign that read: “In a library, silence is both a duty and a necessity” (31:51). I think that really summed up Eco’s entire philosophy. Silence, for Eco, is so sacred, it’s almost a form of preservation. It’s the condition for memory, reflection and meaning to survive. In a world overflowing with noise and distraction, Eco’s library felt like an act of resistance and a reminder that real understanding is born from the quiet, slow process of thought.

Why this Film Matters, Now

This film matters especially now because it reminds us what it means to think slowly in a world that never stops moving. In an age of instant access and algorithmic noise, Eco’s library feels almost radical and a sanctuary of slowness, silence and curiosity. His philosophy challenges the illusion that more information equals more knowledge, showing instead that depth is actually what sustains understanding.

Eco’s philosophy pushes back against the digital condition in which technology’s promise of infinite access leads to the loss of knowledge itself. His insistence on silence and reflection feels like an act of intellectual resistance.

I think we were asked to watch this film because it turns the media theories we’ve been studying so far into something we can see and feel. Eco’s closing words were so important: “There’s no truth or creativity in an earthquake, only in a silent search” (1:15:25). I think it means we should slow down, remember, and think again.

References

Eco, U. (2022). Umberto Eco: A Library of the World [Film]. Directed by Davide Ferrario.

Cinecittà. Mitchell, W. J. T., & Hansen, M. B. N. (Eds.). (2010). Critical terms for media studies. University of Chicago Press.

Stiegler, B. (2010). Memory. In W. J. T. Mitchell & M. B. N. Hansen (Eds.), Critical terms for media studies (pp. 64–87). University of Chicago Press.

Turkle, S. (Ed.). (2007). Evocative objects: Things we think with. MIT Press.

Photo Credits

Daily Sabah. (2021, February 22). A library of all libraries. Daily Sabah. https://www.dailysabah.com/opinion/op-ed/a-library-of-all-libraries

Screenshot from the film (31:51).

By Maryam Abusamak

Other

Blueberries, Body, and More

16 Comments

I have always been attracted to fruit – as a girl with a sweet tooth, I resonate with their endearing size, flavour profiles, and delicate ties to femininity. During reflection on which one in particular I wanted to write about, I cycled through my favourites; mangoes, apples, grapes … they were all meaningful to me, but what came to the forefront of my mind and stayed there wasn’t remarkable at all. 

I don’t often have blueberries. It’s only when the circumstances perfectly align that they end up in my fridge and subsequently in my mouth – if there’s a sale I can’t ignore, a recipe I’m determined to follow, or a family member who made them appear in front of me. I specifically recall a recent memory where I was sitting at the kitchen table of my childhood home eating blueberries alone. I picked my way through the small blue fruits in the contrasting red bowl, rifling through to find the biggest, firmest, and most promising candidates. I remember seeing it as a gamble of flavours, a psychology experiment on associations between size and taste. If I felt particularly reckless, I would scoop up a handful and feel all the different flavours combine in my mouth. I was so inspired, in fact, that I took it upon myself to write my thoughts down in the form of a Notes app poem. Working a 9-5 internship made me feel uncreative and nostalgic of my more creative middle school times, so this is the product of such feelings:

if i was blueberry

i wonder if i’d still be small

i wonder if people would avoid me in the crowd, opting to pick my bigger counterpart

i wonder if finally, at the end, they would take the risk and spear through my soft skin

or if they would throw me away

i wonder if when they break through my flesh with their teeth

they would be pleasantly surprised by my sweetness

or if they would cringe from the tartness, and live the rest of their life avoiding other small blueberries

if i was a blueberry i wonder if you would still choose me first

Although this piece is unsophisticated and unnecessarily romantic, I learned that blueberries truly do evoke much from me. Blueberries afford me imperfection. Among a world of perfectly GMO’d fruits and perfectly edited lives, blueberries connect me to nature in a way that Susannah’s Apples did for her. They provide me with variety and natural bursts of joy that still manage to reach my overloaded dopamine receptors. They are a constant in my life, regardless of if I realize it or not. They top my yogurt, colour my smoothies, and are a delightful contrast in desserts. They are not my favourite, and they are not always the tastiest. Even among the cartons labeled Jumbo XL Sweet Blueberries, at least a few are bound to disappoint. Nonetheless, their flaws are exactly what makes them blueberries, and without the ones left squished at the bottom of the carton and the risk that comes with each bite, there is no experience being evoked – it all becomes quite boring.

The blueberry mediates my view on life and how life views me. In my tumultuous age within our current world, I find myself, more often than not, unconfident. Unsure about my place in my life, the workplace, and the world. In these times, it brings me comfort to consider the similarities between me and a little blue fruit. The blueberry also has a body, and moves through its life based on, and through, its body. Unfortunately, it also gets judged on its appearance, and predetermined stereotypes determine its fate. Despite all this, it thrives! And it does this without all the unique capabilities that we have as humans. The blueberry is its own medium and the final product. It does not have the privilege of embodiment, the dynamic living experience of being a blueberry – it simply is. Wegenstein notes in her chapter on Body that online personas, cosmetic surgery, fashion and architecture as mediums demonstrate that “current trends of thinking” about the body aim to nullify the rise of disembodiment in modern culture. Through the way we edit and adjust our own body and what it produces, we are able to control our experiences and design our life. This is how we end up with human experiences, rather than blueberry experiences. 

In this sense, blueberries afford me gratitude – appreciation of my uniquely human features, the dexterity of my fingers to create art, the earlobes that I intentionally pierced to make space for dangly jewelry, the still-developing brain that I fill with knowledge and skills. Wegenstein writes that our bodies, now mediated through technology, fashion, and self-representation, are not fixed but dynamic sites of creation – tools through which we experience, express, and even redesign life. Yet, as Mandel and Cézanne suggest, there is beauty in remaining tethered to the soil, in recognizing that even the most mediated body is still material. In the same way that Susannah’s apples ground her in a sensual awareness of being “part fruit, part earth,” my blueberries remind me that embodiment is a continuous act of negotiation between nature, self, and medium. The blueberry, then, becomes my counterpoint to digital disembodiment: a reminder of imperfection, decay, and the sweetness or tartness that cannot be filtered or replicated. Now when I encounter one, I feel my own presence with the world – how I consume it, and how it, in turn, shapes me. In this quiet exchange between fruit and flesh, I find an embodied media experience: a small affirmation that I am still here, still part of the earth, still alive.

Turkle, Sherry. “WHAT MAKES AN OBJECT EVOCATIVE? .” pp. 307–326.

Wegenstein, Bernadette. “Body.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, pp. 19–34.

Other

Tresses of Expression

2 Comments

The tangles and knots of my morning hair don’t hurt anymore when I pull them out; I have become accustomed to the soft tug and immediate static separation of strands, like polarized magnet ends. I pried red wisps from my clothes as I readied myself today, and I recalled when the strands were black and orange and blue and blonde. My hair is an identity of mine, the style and cut can define who I become for a time – imbued with confidence or dysphoria. We use it to express or resist, but also to categorize, admire, or control. Hair evokes emotions, represents identities, provokes thought, and also, perhaps most importantly for me, remembers.

Before my mother’s hands I recall sitting, gazing in the mirror as she guided a brush through my tresses, brown in this faded memory, and saying it reminded her of her mother; of youth spent under the sun, of gardening together, of running barefoot. Hair is a bridge for many, a symbol of what was lost or where you came from. It is at once a memory and memorabilia; it can provide us with identity or strip it, it constitutes our expressions but at once evokes it from us and from others. It separates us by aesthetic, vanity, and personhood, but connects us to our cultures – to our people, our interests, and our own lives. Hair is both an object of the body and an embodied object; we don’t just use it, we think using it. It affords us a sense of belonging, resistance and expression, but can afford others the ability to categorize and stereotype. It is a medium requiring thought – it is communication without words that shapes social interactions. Furthermore, Bill Brown would argue that hair is a material medium – it is not just symbolic, but has physical affordances. My hair has been braided, fishtailed, space-bunned, chopped, dyed, and styled an uncountable amount of times in my life. It becomes most visible as an object of the self when we manipulate it, but it is the perception (and often, preconception) that it affords us that defines it as an embodied medium, too. It is evocative because, as Turkle would say, it acts as the “companions to our emotional lives” and as a “provocation to thought”. As I lay the fresh blood-red dye in my hair last week, I thought of my mother doing the same to cover up her greys. I thought about whether people would notice that it stained my ears. I thought I looked a bit like Carrie at prom. It reminded me that hair is not only an object that sits on my head and tells people how much I rolled around in my sleep, but by understanding how it mediates our actions and thoughts, we can reconsider the boundary between medium and body. Our correspondence with the world is through these strands – through memories, rituals, and cultural practices. It defines how I interact with the world, and how society interacts with me. 

Hair is also a rare physical representation of a moment that has passed and yet remains unchanged. Some wealthy Victorians kept locks of hair from late loved ones in jewelry, and many cultures view the cutting of hair as a spiritual severing of sorts (grief, marriage, coming of age etc.). Hair, when it is detached from the human body, stops being part of the living self and becomes a “thing” – an artifact that represents an identity or relationship during a specific moment in time. Hair is no longer an object of mediation, but as Bill Brown may say, a “thing” once it has been removed from the context of its existence within the self. This “thing” is that which mediates memory and loss, but is also that which is in direct opposition to the very nature of hair – growth. Hair exists as an object between the transient and the permanent: on the head, it changes daily; off the head, it becomes a fixed representation of a particular time, person, or feeling. Like photographs or audio recordings, preserved hair mediates the present and the past, turning lived moments into material memorabilia.

Hair, as both living material and preserved artifact, reveals the complex ways media mediates identity, culture, perception, and time. Through our attentiveness to styling and care, hair functions as an embodied medium of self-expression, a form of communication without words. When it is cut, saved, or transformed, hair becomes a tangible record of specific moments, anchoring personal and collective memories in a physical form. Victorian mourning jewelry makes this especially obvious: hair becomes a medium that bridges presence and absence, life and death, permanence and change. The ways in which we view hair on both ourselves, others, or alone reveals how bodily objects participate in broader cultural systems of meaning. Hair is not simply something we have; it is something through which we express, connect, and remember. This perspective challenges us to look beyond conventional technologies and recognize how our bodies mediate the world, and how medias are woven like threads through the very fabric of our lives.

  1. Turkle, Sherry. “WHAT MAKES AN OBJECT EVOCATIVE.” Evocative Objects: Objects We Think With. 
  2. Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry, 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22.
  3. Brown, Bill. “Materiality.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 49–63.