Hello! Josephine, here. I think about things and make art. My learning objective for this course is to better understand how my own practice connects to the topics presented and consider how they may influence my views on the world. I am excited to see what I will learn and achieve by pushing the boundaries of my knowledge as they related to the technohuman experience.
“The meaning they sought had to relate to a possibility that could not be dismissed or forgotten because it was being constantly demanded by the new, existing means of production and communication and calculation — by what people came to call technology: the possibility of a unified world.”
“The human greatness of this eye lay in its ability to reflect and contain, like a mirror, what was.”
” The totality is the surface of the picture, which is now the origin and sum of all that one sees.”
“Space is part of the continuity of the events within it. It is in itself an event, comparable with other events.”
” The content of their art consists of various modes of interaction: the interaction between different aspects of the same event, between empty space and filled space, between structure and movement, between the seer and the thing seen.”
“The greater extremism of contemporary artists is the result of their having no fixed social role; to some degree they can create their own.”
” The only inspiration which exists is the intimation of our own potential. Inspiration is the mirror image of history: by means of it we can see our past, while turning our back upon it. And it is precisely this which happens when a piece of music begins. We suddenly become aware of the previous silence at the same moment as our attention is concentrated upon future sequences and resolutions in which we can share.”
of multiplicity of meaning and moments is hopeful. Because it allows us
to shift, to change, to continually move through the different planes of perspective;
nothing is fixed, certain, or determined, so in effect, everything is possible.
The notion of potential is a important component to m own work. I am fascinated by the moments of tipping:
into a possibility of what might be,
what is,
what hasn’t yet
become.
However, possibility also linking to impossibility is where hope begins to lose its footing.
There is a fragility to reinvention, to the remaking and redefining of meaning, of our contemporary condition, of the world. I wonder if possibility and impossibility stands apart, creating a gap for us to bridge,
or whether they overlap, creating a space where we turn back and forth and up and down between them.
Gaps and spaces are different modes of empty, of an unmoored sensation of being untethered and unbound from creativity, politics, identity, and reality.
If technology preceded humanity, then are we its arbiter? How do we navigate a force that we cannot define or understand, save for in the making of symbols? We create systems and tools, but the act of creating tools is neither new nor exclusive.
Part of the issue with accepting our ‘role’ or our part within the system is that it assumes a particular role of responsibility for maintaining the order of this system. The question is, who is managing and constructing this system? What states of power are controlling our roles? Further, how do we break from this ideology to point out the disparities of economy, equity, ethics, and power, and then change the system in which we reside?
How do we clarify the theories that we read in order to examine the ways in which information is created and language is constructed today? What modes of communication do we employ through the visual and how do they coincide with symbols of text and our own changing human condition?
I think in my practice, I’m interested in enacting gestures of the impossible. The improbable or the impossible; not as a way to trick or shroud what is really happening, but to make the viewer suspend those preconceptions, even for a brief instant, in order to make them believe. Believe with an impossible, incredible, spectacular belief.
If technology is a precursor to humanity, we cannot escape the system which houses us, influences us, shapes us, manipulates us, changes us, and leads us towards an unknowable future. In turn, we appear to alter it, create it, and develop it to the point that we believe we are the masters of its fate and domain; whereas, perhaps we less the makers of its destiny and moreover its catalyst and “passenger” on its continuous evolution into something we cannot yet foresee.
spirituality as consciousness, conscientiousness; knowledge of where we are, who we are, where are coming from, and where we want to go.
Henry Beston’s1948 Manifesto for Reclaiming Our Humanity by Breaking the Tyranny of Technology and Relearning to Be Nurtured by Nature
The chromium millennium ahead of us, I gather, is going to be an age whose ideal is a fantastically unnatural human passivity. We are to spend our lives in cushioned easy chairs, growing indolent and heavy while intricate slave mechanisms do practically everything for us as we loll.
What a really appalling future! What normal human being would choose it, and what twist of the spirit has created this sluggish paradise? No, I do not mean that we should take the hardest way. Compromises are natural and right. But a human being protected from all normal and natural hardship simply is not alive.
No age in history can afford to lay too much emphasis upon “security.” The truth is that from our first breath to our last we inhabit insecurely a world which must of its transitory nature be insecure, and that moreover any security we do achieve is but a kind of an illusion. While admitting that a profound instinct towards such safety as we can achieve is part of our animal being, let us also confess that the challenge involved in mere existence is the source of many of the greater virtues of human character.
There is one principle which our world would do well to remember, for it is of first importance whether one sharpens a pencil, builds a house, bakes bread, or lays the intended foundations for Utopia. It is this — that what we make is conditioned by the means we use making it. We may have the best intentions in the world, but if we sharpen our pencils with a dull knife or build a house with a faulty rule, the pencil will be badly sharpened and the house will have an odd little way of opening doors by itself and leaning to one side.
The mechanical strain is in humanity, and if it has given us a machine civilization increasingly difficult to manage, it has also given us the wheel and the knife. I do not forget that memorable saying of my old friend Edward Gilchrist that “the secret of the artificer is the secret of civilization.” Yet what we must ask today is whether or not the mechanist strain has increased out of all bounds, and taken over an undue proportion of the way of life. It is well to use the wheel but it is fatal to be bound to it.
What has come over our age is an alienation from Nature unexampled in human history. It has cost us our sense of reality and all but cost us our humanity. With the passing of a relation to Nature worthy both of Nature and the human spirit, with the slow burning down of the poetic sense together with the noble sense of religious reverence to which it is allied, man has almost ceased to be man. Torn from earth and unaware, having neither the inheritance and awareness of man nor the other sureness and integrity of the animal, we have become vagrants in space, desperate for the meaninglessness which has closed about us. True humanity is no inherent and abstract right but an achievement, and only through the fullness of human experience may we be as one with all who have been and all who are yet to be, sharers and brethren and partakers of the mystery of living, reaching to the full of human peace and the full of human joy.
To stare at nothing is to learn by heart
What all of us will be swept into, and baring oneself
To the wind is feeling the ungraspable somewhere close by.
Trees can sway or be still. Day or night can be what they wish.
What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfort
Of being strangers, at least to ourselves. This is the crux
Of the matter. Even now we seem to be waiting for something
Whose appearance would be its vanishing–the sound, say,
Of a few leaves falling, or just one leaf, or less.
There is no end to what we can learn. The book out there
Tells as much, and was never written with us in mind.
The admirable number pi:
three point one four one.
All the following digits are also initial,
five nine two because it never ends.
It can’t be comprehended six five three five at a glance,
eight nine by calculation,
seven nine or imagination,
not even three two three eight by wit, that is, by comparison
four six to anything else
two six four three in the world.
The longest snake on earth calls it quits at about forty feet.
Likewise, snakes of myth and legend, though they may hold out a bit longer.
The pageant of digits comprising the number pi
doesn’t stop at the page’s edge.
It goes on across the table, through the air,
over a wall, a leaf, a bird’s nest, clouds, straight into the sky,
through all the bottomless, bloated heavens.
Oh how brief — a mouse tail, a pigtail — is the tail of a comet!
How feeble the star’s ray, bent by bumping up against space!
While here we have two three fifteen three hundred nineteen
my phone number your shirt size the year
nineteen hundred and seventy-three the sixth floor
the number of inhabitants sixty-five cents
hip measurement two fingers a charade, a code,
in which we find hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert
alongside ladies and gentlemen, no cause for alarm,
as well as heaven and earth shall pass away,
but not the number pi, oh no, nothing doing,
it keeps right on with its rather remarkable five,
its uncommonly fine eight,
its far from final seven,
nudging, always nudging a sluggish eternity
to continue.
MY GOD, IT’S FULL OF STARS (PART 5)
Tracy K. Smith
When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said
They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed
In papery green, the room a clean cold, a bright white.
He’d read Larry Niven at home, and drink scotch on the rocks,
His eyes exhausted and pink. These were the Raegan years,
When we lived with our finger on The Button and struggled
To view our enemies as children. My father spent whole seasons
Bowing before the oracle-eye, hungry for what it would find.
His face lit up whenever anyone asked, and his arms would rise
As if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never-ending
Night of space. On the ground, we tied postcards to balloons
For peace. Prince Charles married Lady Di. Rock Hudson died.
We learned new words for things. The decade changed.
The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed
For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time,
The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is —
So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.
It is now the most vitally important thing for all of us, however we may be concerned with our society, to try to arrive at a clear, cogent statement of our ills, so that we may begin to correct them. Otherwise, our efforts will be directed to purely superficial symptoms only, and perhaps not even at things related directly to the illness. On the contrary, it seems that our remedies are instinctively those which aggravate the sickness: the remedies are expressions of the sickness itself.
I would almost dare to say that the sickness is perhaps a very real and very dreadful hatred of life as such, of course subconscious, buried under our pitiful and superficial optimism about ourselves and our affluent society. But I think that the very thought processes of materialistic affluence (and here the same things are found in all the different economic systems that seek affluence for its own sake) are ultimately self-defeating. They contain so many built-in frustrations that they inevitably lead us to despair in the midst of “plenty” and “happiness” and the awful fruit of this despair is indiscriminate, irresponsible destructiveness, hatred of life, carried on in the name of life itself. In order to “survive” we instinctively destroy that on which our survival depends.
The chromium millennium ahead of us, I gather, is going to be an age whose ideal is a fantastically unnatural human passivity. We are to spend our lives in cushioned easy chairs, growing indolent and heavy while intricate slave mechanisms do practically everything for us as we loll.
What a really appalling future! What normal human being would choose it, and what twist of the spirit has created this sluggish paradise? No, I do not mean that we should take the hardest way. Compromises are natural and right. But a human being protected from all normal and natural hardship simply is not alive.
Hello! Josephine, here. I think about things and make art. My learning objective for this course is to better understand how my own practice connects to the topics presented and consider how they may influence my views on the world. I am excited to see what I will learn and achieve by pushing the boundaries of my knowledge as they related to the technohuman experience.
“The meaning they sought had to relate to a possibility that could not be dismissed or forgotten because it was being constantly demanded by the new, existing means of production and communication and calculation — by what people came to call technology: the possibility of a unified world.”
“The human greatness of this eye lay in its ability to reflect and contain, like a mirror, what was.”
” The totality is the surface of the picture, which is now the origin and sum of all that one sees.”
“Space is part of the continuity of the events within it. It is in itself an event, comparable with other events.”
” The content of their art consists of various modes of interaction: the interaction between different aspects of the same event, between empty space and filled space, between structure and movement, between the seer and the thing seen.”
“The greater extremism of contemporary artists is the result of their having no fixed social role; to some degree they can create their own.”
” The only inspiration which exists is the intimation of our own potential. Inspiration is the mirror image of history: by means of it we can see our past, while turning our back upon it. And it is precisely this which happens when a piece of music begins. We suddenly become aware of the previous silence at the same moment as our attention is concentrated upon future sequences and resolutions in which we can share.”
The notion
of multiplicity of meaning and moments is hopeful. Because it allows us
to shift, to change, to continually move through the different planes of perspective;
nothing is fixed, certain, or determined, so in effect, everything is possible.
The notion of potential is a important component to m own work. I am fascinated by the moments of tipping:
into a possibility of what might be,
what is,
what hasn’t yet
become.
However, possibility also linking to impossibility is where hope begins to lose its footing.
There is a fragility to reinvention, to the remaking and redefining of meaning, of our contemporary condition, of the world. I wonder if possibility and impossibility stands apart, creating a gap for us to bridge,
or whether they overlap, creating a space where we turn back and forth and up and down between them.
Gaps and spaces are different modes of empty, of an unmoored sensation of being untethered and unbound from creativity, politics, identity, and reality.
If technology preceded humanity, then are we its arbiter? How do we navigate a force that we cannot define or understand, save for in the making of symbols? We create systems and tools, but the act of creating tools is neither new nor exclusive.
Part of the issue with accepting our ‘role’ or our part within the system is that it assumes a particular role of responsibility for maintaining the order of this system. The question is, who is managing and constructing this system? What states of power are controlling our roles? Further, how do we break from this ideology to point out the disparities of economy, equity, ethics, and power, and then change the system in which we reside?
https://vimeo.com/252897305
How do we clarify the theories that we read in order to examine the ways in which information is created and language is constructed today? What modes of communication do we employ through the visual and how do they coincide with symbols of text and our own changing human condition?
I think in my practice, I’m interested in enacting gestures of the impossible. The improbable or the impossible; not as a way to trick or shroud what is really happening, but to make the viewer suspend those preconceptions, even for a brief instant, in order to make them believe. Believe with an impossible, incredible, spectacular belief.
If technology is a precursor to humanity, we cannot escape the system which houses us, influences us, shapes us, manipulates us, changes us, and leads us towards an unknowable future. In turn, we appear to alter it, create it, and develop it to the point that we believe we are the masters of its fate and domain; whereas, perhaps we less the makers of its destiny and moreover its catalyst and “passenger” on its continuous evolution into something we cannot yet foresee.
spirituality as consciousness, conscientiousness; knowledge of where we are, who we are, where are coming from, and where we want to go.
https://vimeo.com/253938570#t=344s
https://vimeo.com/254985798
https://newhive.com/jjos/visa481
Link to webpage New Hive: https://newhive.com/jjos/visa481
Henry Beston’s1948 Manifesto for Reclaiming Our Humanity by Breaking the Tyranny of Technology and Relearning to Be Nurtured by Nature
The chromium millennium ahead of us, I gather, is going to be an age whose ideal is a fantastically unnatural human passivity. We are to spend our lives in cushioned easy chairs, growing indolent and heavy while intricate slave mechanisms do practically everything for us as we loll.
What a really appalling future! What normal human being would choose it, and what twist of the spirit has created this sluggish paradise? No, I do not mean that we should take the hardest way. Compromises are natural and right. But a human being protected from all normal and natural hardship simply is not alive.
No age in history can afford to lay too much emphasis upon “security.” The truth is that from our first breath to our last we inhabit insecurely a world which must of its transitory nature be insecure, and that moreover any security we do achieve is but a kind of an illusion. While admitting that a profound instinct towards such safety as we can achieve is part of our animal being, let us also confess that the challenge involved in mere existence is the source of many of the greater virtues of human character.
There is one principle which our world would do well to remember, for it is of first importance whether one sharpens a pencil, builds a house, bakes bread, or lays the intended foundations for Utopia. It is this — that what we make is conditioned by the means we use making it. We may have the best intentions in the world, but if we sharpen our pencils with a dull knife or build a house with a faulty rule, the pencil will be badly sharpened and the house will have an odd little way of opening doors by itself and leaning to one side.
The mechanical strain is in humanity, and if it has given us a machine civilization increasingly difficult to manage, it has also given us the wheel and the knife. I do not forget that memorable saying of my old friend Edward Gilchrist that “the secret of the artificer is the secret of civilization.” Yet what we must ask today is whether or not the mechanist strain has increased out of all bounds, and taken over an undue proportion of the way of life. It is well to use the wheel but it is fatal to be bound to it.
What has come over our age is an alienation from Nature unexampled in human history. It has cost us our sense of reality and all but cost us our humanity. With the passing of a relation to Nature worthy both of Nature and the human spirit, with the slow burning down of the poetic sense together with the noble sense of religious reverence to which it is allied, man has almost ceased to be man. Torn from earth and unaware, having neither the inheritance and awareness of man nor the other sureness and integrity of the animal, we have become vagrants in space, desperate for the meaninglessness which has closed about us. True humanity is no inherent and abstract right but an achievement, and only through the fullness of human experience may we be as one with all who have been and all who are yet to be, sharers and brethren and partakers of the mystery of living, reaching to the full of human peace and the full of human joy.
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-created-an-artificial-retina-implant-that-could-restore-vision-to-millions
To stare at nothing is to learn by heart
What all of us will be swept into, and baring oneself
To the wind is feeling the ungraspable somewhere close by.
Trees can sway or be still. Day or night can be what they wish.
What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfort
Of being strangers, at least to ourselves. This is the crux
Of the matter. Even now we seem to be waiting for something
Whose appearance would be its vanishing–the sound, say,
Of a few leaves falling, or just one leaf, or less.
There is no end to what we can learn. The book out there
Tells as much, and was never written with us in mind.
—Mark Strand, “The Night, the Porch”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/science/space/a-black-hole-mystery-wrapped-in-a-firewall-paradox.html
http://www.cbc.ca/passionateeye/episodes/wasted-the-story-of-food-waste
https://www.wired.com/story/with-this-dna-dating-app-you-swab-then-swipe-for-love/
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.08195.pdf
https://jalopnik.com/the-space-tesla-could-really-mess-up-a-planet-if-it-eve-1823423706
https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2018/02/28/589477976/biometric-data-and-the-rise-of-digital-dictatorship
Some links to video, articles, news of interest:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/science/space/a-black-hole-mystery-wrapped-in-a-firewall-paradox.html
http://www.cbc.ca/passionateeye/episodes/wasted-the-story-of-food-waste
https://www.wired.com/story/with-this-dna-dating-app-you-swab-then-swipe-for-love/
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.08195.pdf
https://jalopnik.com/the-space-tesla-could-really-mess-up-a-planet-if-it-eve-1823423706
https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2018/02/28/589477976/biometric-data-and-the-rise-of-digital-dictatorship
https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/858doz/mess_with_the_crabo_you_get_the_stabo/
https://www.wired.com/story/researchers-restore-feeling-to-lost-limbskinda/
PI
by Wisława Szymborska
The admirable number pi:
three point one four one.
All the following digits are also initial,
five nine two because it never ends.
It can’t be comprehended six five three five at a glance,
eight nine by calculation,
seven nine or imagination,
not even three two three eight by wit, that is, by comparison
four six to anything else
two six four three in the world.
The longest snake on earth calls it quits at about forty feet.
Likewise, snakes of myth and legend, though they may hold out a bit longer.
The pageant of digits comprising the number pi
doesn’t stop at the page’s edge.
It goes on across the table, through the air,
over a wall, a leaf, a bird’s nest, clouds, straight into the sky,
through all the bottomless, bloated heavens.
Oh how brief — a mouse tail, a pigtail — is the tail of a comet!
How feeble the star’s ray, bent by bumping up against space!
While here we have two three fifteen three hundred nineteen
my phone number your shirt size the year
nineteen hundred and seventy-three the sixth floor
the number of inhabitants sixty-five cents
hip measurement two fingers a charade, a code,
in which we find hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert
alongside ladies and gentlemen, no cause for alarm,
as well as heaven and earth shall pass away,
but not the number pi, oh no, nothing doing,
it keeps right on with its rather remarkable five,
its uncommonly fine eight,
its far from final seven,
nudging, always nudging a sluggish eternity
to continue.
MY GOD, IT’S FULL OF STARS (PART 5)
Tracy K. Smith
When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said
They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed
In papery green, the room a clean cold, a bright white.
He’d read Larry Niven at home, and drink scotch on the rocks,
His eyes exhausted and pink. These were the Raegan years,
When we lived with our finger on The Button and struggled
To view our enemies as children. My father spent whole seasons
Bowing before the oracle-eye, hungry for what it would find.
His face lit up whenever anyone asked, and his arms would rise
As if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never-ending
Night of space. On the ground, we tied postcards to balloons
For peace. Prince Charles married Lady Di. Rock Hudson died.
We learned new words for things. The decade changed.
The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed
For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time,
The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is —
So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.
Thomas Merton
It is now the most vitally important thing for all of us, however we may be concerned with our society, to try to arrive at a clear, cogent statement of our ills, so that we may begin to correct them. Otherwise, our efforts will be directed to purely superficial symptoms only, and perhaps not even at things related directly to the illness. On the contrary, it seems that our remedies are instinctively those which aggravate the sickness: the remedies are expressions of the sickness itself.
I would almost dare to say that the sickness is perhaps a very real and very dreadful hatred of life as such, of course subconscious, buried under our pitiful and superficial optimism about ourselves and our affluent society. But I think that the very thought processes of materialistic affluence (and here the same things are found in all the different economic systems that seek affluence for its own sake) are ultimately self-defeating. They contain so many built-in frustrations that they inevitably lead us to despair in the midst of “plenty” and “happiness” and the awful fruit of this despair is indiscriminate, irresponsible destructiveness, hatred of life, carried on in the name of life itself. In order to “survive” we instinctively destroy that on which our survival depends.
Henry Beston
The chromium millennium ahead of us, I gather, is going to be an age whose ideal is a fantastically unnatural human passivity. We are to spend our lives in cushioned easy chairs, growing indolent and heavy while intricate slave mechanisms do practically everything for us as we loll.
What a really appalling future! What normal human being would choose it, and what twist of the spirit has created this sluggish paradise? No, I do not mean that we should take the hardest way. Compromises are natural and right. But a human being protected from all normal and natural hardship simply is not alive.
https://vimeo.com/138888472
https://blog.gillianmciver.org/2018/03/23/what-does-it-mean-to-be-human-biotechnologies-ethics-and-art/
https://blog.gillianmciver.org/2018/03/23/what-does-it-mean-to-be-human-biotechnologies-ethics-and-art/
https://www.facebook.com/nytimes/videos/1997300453820800/