why whales?
Research Blog | January 2, 2017
Some backstory on this project. in 2015, I was participating in a class exercise about false mythologies. As in: take an issue, and come up with a speculative fiction to explore it. I was interested in whales, and something I’d read a long time ago, about beluga whales in the St Lawrence river, who lived…
(No title)
Research Blog | December 27, 2016
This is whale000.Bare naked whale stamp that I designed and made at the end of 2016, in anticipation of this project – to make 100 sketches about whales in 100 days, using this image as a form of continuum.I will start posting 01.04.2017
summer is coming
Research Blog | May 13, 2015
“Blogs and social media have allowed us to talk to ourselves (but not to reach out beyond the left bubbles); they have also generated pathological behaviours and forms of subjectivity which not only generate misery and anger – they waste time and energy, our most crucial resources. Email and handhelds, meanwhile, have produced new forms…
Steve Easterbrook on systems thinking and climate
Research Blog | January 2, 2014
Many good posts on systems, boundary critique, climate. …where systems thinking really gets interesting is when we include ourselves as part of the system we’re describing. For example, for the climate system, we should include ourselves as elements of the system, as the many of our actions affect the release of greenhouse gases. But we’re…
4 methods
Research Blog | May 5, 2013
I am trying to clean out my email inbox. fun. but i came across a note from Greg Borenstein, about a blog post he’d made on a talk by Graham Harman and I’d transcribed Harman’s “four methods for reversing common errors in failing to see objects,” and it’s worth highlighting here, albeit sloppily – A way…
Hauntings + Enchantments
Research Blog | February 22, 2013
Of Haunting. In Jane Bennett’s introduction to her book The Enchantment of Modern Day Life, she writes: This book tells a story of contemporary life that accentuates its moments of enchantment and explores the possibility that the affective force of those moments might be deployed to propel ethical generosity. It claims both that the contemporary…
Latour Litanizer; collusions waiting to happen or already in progress
Research Blog | February 13, 2013
From Ian Bogost: I use “ontography” in a different way than Harman does in the forthcoming L’Object Quadruple: by ontography, I mean the techniques that reveal objects’ existence and relation. There is an automated “litanizer” he created using Wikipedia’s random page API on the post here. Here are a few I generated and liked: Up…
The New World before 1492 was an engineered paradise
Research Blog | October 14, 2012
Whoah! Molly Dilworth sent me this super duper essay on new conceptions of Pre-Colombian new world: 1492, by Charles C Mann, Atlantic Monthly 2002 For instance: Dappled across the grasslands below was an archipelago of forest islands, many of them startlingly round and hundreds of acres across. Each island rose ten or thirty or sixty…
What a difference relations can make
Research Blog | October 2, 2012
Having just come back from the nonhuman conference hosted by SLSA, which was presided over by the OOOze, of which I am rather fond, I’ve been thinking a lot about the value of OOO- the lines (which may be subjectively drawn) around which OOO matters? As I am not into knob twiddling, I very much…
ha.
Research Blog | September 4, 2012
Q. How many environmentalists does it take to change a light bulb? A. Ten. One to write the light bulb a letter requesting that it change. Four to circulate online petitions. One to file a lawsuit demanding it change. One to send the light bulb loving kindness, knowing that this is the only way real…
The lives of roads, and a sign about signs
Research Blog | June 17, 2012
the return of the generalist
Research Blog | June 13, 2012
Posted yesterday in the New York Times’ Dot Earth blog was a short piece (and a videotaped talk) on Daniel Hillel winning the World Food Prize for his low impact irrigation techniques. What strikes me is a scientist espousing generalist tactics – am happy to witness a time in which all sorts of practitioners are…
Drama Queens
Research Blog | February 15, 2012
It is not only out of arrogance that Westerners think they are radically different from others, it is also out of despair, and by way of self-punishment. They like to frighten themselves with their own destiny. Their voices quaver when they contrast Barbarians to Greeks, or the Center to the Periphery, or when they celebrate…
Prince of Networks: reality as resistance.
Research Blog | February 6, 2012
I was struck by this perfect example. “For Latour, two atoms in collision are immanent even if no human ever sees them, since both expend themselves fully in the labour of creating networks with other actants. ‘Since whatever resists is real, there can be no “symbolic” to add to the “real” […]. I am prepared…
— 01.15 —
Research Blog | January 16, 2012
sensory sparks at the table who is there how to have a conversation with them and not just yourselfs interspecies queers how to have a conversation what do you let them say the things that go in your mouth all the way down slippery, bumpy, trembling, jagged, stringy, hot, icy, juicy, dry skin spices (capsaicin,…
Tim Morton on meditation
Research Blog | November 29, 2011
From Timothy Morton’s blog Ecology Without Nature, on OOO and meditation: I’m going to paste here something I wrote for the nonviolence conference on meditation, because it may ring some bells with people. The line of thinking is based on my argument that OOO objects (everything) are fundamentally inconsistent, because of a rift between essence…