{"id":83,"date":"2005-07-04T12:38:38","date_gmt":"2005-07-04T20:38:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/migrator.rab.olt.ubc.ca\/watercarrier\/2005\/07\/the-earth-hums-and-spins\/"},"modified":"2005-07-04T12:38:38","modified_gmt":"2005-07-04T20:38:38","slug":"the-earth-hums-and-spins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/watercarrier\/2005\/07\/the-earth-hums-and-spins\/","title":{"rendered":"The Earth hums and spins"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hi all, sorry for the silence!<\/p>\n<p>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 yet unexplained circumstances, and all the while I&#8217;ve been reading, researching, and creating the second media production for my graduate class, New Media and Cultural Studies, at The University of British Columbia, Vancouver.<\/p>\n<p>Check out Media 2: &#8220;Spiraling autopoiesis&#8221; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cust.educ.ubc.ca\/tsed\/ETEC531-66b\/RebeccaD\/media2\/\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Autopoiesis is a theory by <a>Francesco Varela<\/a> (1991) that at the smallest unit of life (the bacterial cell) there is a self-sustaining, self-regulatory, ever-changing unit of competing behaviors, and this could be said about all life forms, too.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, he acknowledges that that unit also exists as it does due to the outside environment&#8217;s constant invading or interrupting the cell&#8217;s systems. He claims there is no center to this cell&#8217;s &#8216;self&#8217;: it is only a &#8216;dialogic&#8217; process that works or doesn&#8217;t (which is death, I suppose?). I am not sure about that last point though.<\/p>\n<p>In Media 2, I was trying to &#8216;spin&#8217; the common ideas and motifs (the spiral and concepts of life) found in various cultures, philosophies that have been re-appearing in &#8216;scientific&#8217; discoveries or theories. Sort of built it from the ashes of last week&#8217;s entry, &#8220;Musings on immortality.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>There were so many possible similarities and parallels (and equally possible complexities within those similarities), that I couldn&#8217;t do much within the time constraints, but hope I captured the sense  that science is not so separate from what we tend to call &#8216;mystic.&#8217; We seem to be spiraling back to an origin. It was fascinating to try to get this point across, anyway&#8230;.ciao for now!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":437,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2788,2797],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-media-musings","category-space-is-the-place"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/watercarrier\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/watercarrier\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/watercarrier\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/watercarrier\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/437"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/watercarrier\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/watercarrier\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/watercarrier\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/watercarrier\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/watercarrier\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}