The Melting World

The past weekend I took a brief trip to Tokyo, and it’s such an enormous, chaotic, mad elephant compared to our slow and peaceful existence in the Hokkaido mountainside. Oh yes, I was glad to come back to fresh air and quiet, but I really love Tokyo, too, for its vibrant energy and for its […]

This piece was made by the sculptor, Mikako Tomotari, in dedication to the Ainu lands submerged by the Hokkaido government-sponsored dam in the Nibutani area of Hokkaido. Her comments and then comments on her comments (in English) are here. She had wanted to throw it into the waters, so that only by the elimination of […]

anonymous artist – Outsider art exhibit at local library I haven’t had the chance to get to this place lately. Been traveling about and reading books on the treatment of the peasant class during the pre-modern and modern era of Japan. Once again, I am opening my eyes wider to what is in the hidden […]

Radio Archive of Ainu Language Lessons Sapporo TV Radio hosts an Ainu language class with accompanying textbook (which you can order) every Sunday morning, from 7:05am to 7:20am, and repeated Saturday evenings from 11:15-11:30pm. They also have the lessons archived on Real Player audio files since it began in 1999. A look at one lesson […]

I finally had the chance to sit down and watch a film I had read about in my New Media class discussions.: What the BLEEP do we know?, which is a sort of self-help film but also a film about quantum physics, too, and I liked it, and this is not without a critical eye, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

I still have a hard time imagining a human mind as separated from the body and from the natural, as a floating autopoetic code. For one, I don’t imagine such a type of projected immortal existence as pleasurable or advantageous for me (I actually like being ‘in’ this big happy/sad messy world and a cup […]

I was traveling all over Japan last week, not able to participate much in the class forum. But I did try the chat bots as well and was not impressed with them. Darth Vader as a chat bot seemed annoying and very stupid to me, I wonder if he ever guesses correctly? My thought he […]

From class forum: I am still thinking (in media res) through my argument here, but I think I can agree with cyborg theorists that technologies (as we use the more interactive ones more and more) become part of our physical/mental selves and maybe this co-joining strengthens us in some ways (we can ‘know’ facts instantly […]

This week we read about cyborg theory, a recent view that life as we thought we knew it (as the individual animal/human as a separate cohesive entity) is a myth and that all life forms are really collectives: we are each composed of many living organisms (cells, bacteria, amoebas, etc.), chemicals, electricity, and now technologies […]

This cyborg theorizing appeared when we reach for ways to make our machines/technologies more like us: we begin to investigate what a human being is, and discover that DNA sequencing and electrical synapse (information looping) are the Human machines we will need to understand to replicate or mirror life. This then brings us to question […]

I agree with Paula and Marianne that Nature vs. man’s –and therefore technology’s–attempt to control it (which seems to always fail in the end, too) runs throughout the Science Fiction genre, and Donna Harwaway mentions the omnipresence of Nature in SF (see Murphie&Potts, pp.116-117): Frankenstein’s beast comes to life from an electric storm & rain […]

I am very concerned about teaching myself and my students to think much more critically (and more importantly) creatively about all the data at our fingertips and barraging us via new media. I’ll give a talk in one week on creative thinking skills at university–so this is big on my mind. To me, creative thinking […]

As part of the Cultural and New Media Studies Class, I am to keep a journal of things I discover as I go through the week’s readings, providing links to anything that sparked my interest or sparked some sort of reaction in me. This week the topic is Science Fictions and AI (artificial intelligence), something […]