The Melting World

I spent some time today reading some works by Giorgio Agamben, a contemporary philosopher. He talks about finding the Entivicklungsfahigkeit in a work as his vocation as a scholar. This, he explains, is a term coined by Feurerbach that means the philosophical element in any work is an element that allows the capability of it […]

My son is lately into wearing a necklace he made out of plastic spools and a shoestring…is this a sign of a future trendsetter? ;-)!

I wanted to share with you the view from my favorite cafe in Asahikawa. This is where I sit and read for my graduate class. I am blessed to have such a setting for my studies! I also think it helps me keep my ideas interconnected to the clouds (theory) and the ground (everyday experience)….at […]

Do you believe we are entering an era of sentient things? Or has technology always had a level of feeling and compassion? Why or why not? I struggled with this q at first because I thought “How can we enter where we have already been?” I mean, as humans, we seem to have started with […]

What are the implications of technosecularism? On our module 9 map, the following terms are listed under Technosecularism: Agnosticism, Technotheism, Rationalism, Theosophy, Cybernetics & Machine Consciousness. Does this suggest they are borne from the same stream of thought? I couldn’t figure that out as some seemed oppositional: such as the terms Rationalism and Theosophy….I couldn’t […]

How might technoanimism alter our views on technology and spirituality? As mentioned above, this term, for me, re-turns us to our animistic beginnings, we can once again see the object and the human as interconnected and interdependent sentient beings. This might seem blasphemous (as Feng noted in his Latour essay), but I see it as […]

Just a quick message to say that the new job at M. University didn’t pan out, but I sensed it wasn’t the right place when I visited–I mean–my ideals perfectly matched the university’s ideals; yet the realities of the place contradicted our ideals. Make sense? In other words, the university was more closed and conservative […]

Chako Canyon sun dagger: from http://solar-center.stanford.edu/folklore/rockart.html I failed to mention that Monday in the throes of last minute research for my Media 2 Production, I was looking at the juxtaposition of the word “Om,” believed to be the divine humming sound of the universe that Hindu meditation practioners claim to hear and the recent science […]

From class forum: Thanks, Paula, for that illuminating entry from Wikipedia: just goes to show how clumsy these terms can be when only one nation-state, Iceland, can be said to exist. Perhaps Wikipedia needs an edit because Japan is NOT one homogenous nation that the world and Japan sell it as: always have been ethnic […]

Hi all, sorry for the silence! My absence from this blog can readily be explained: In two weeks I have given a public lecture, survived an interview, traveled to Hakodate and Tokyo, attended an intercultural studies conference, tended to my son who had a high fever all last week, had our car die from as […]