Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Les presses du reel. 1998.
>>The aim of art is to destroy any a priori agreement about what is perceived<<
‘Conceptual’ is not about immateriality; objects are an intrinsic part of language. Semiotics. “Art is not seeking to create utopias, rather to construct concrete spaces“
How can we incorporate new tools and not necessarily as new techniques? New tools–technology –require new ways of seeing. The future of art as an instrument of emancipation; liberation of forms of subjectivity, for art no technique or technology is a subject. Do you have to raise or lower your gaze to the icon? “All images are moments just as any point in space is both the memory of a time and the reflection of a space y.” Artists need relational networks, not isolationism. The artist catches the world on the move. We are tenants of culture. Reference to Guattari, are you making a significant contribution to a changing production ?
Art fixes energy, empties it, diverts it from quotidian life. Art is a thing upon and around which subjectivity can reform itself. Relational Aesthetics are contextual. Aesthetics, ideology and context; the materials; the message; how and where the work is exhibited or presented; who is consuming the art. A recurrent theme in these readings as stated by Oscar Wilde and quoted in this text: modernity is when life imitates art.
#energy-space-time; #system,#power, #body, #culture, #philosophy, #language, #technology, #relationships
Piketty, Thomas. Capitalism and Ideology. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Harvard university Press, 2020. (first 500 pages)
Piketty traces capitalism from post Renaissance European societies to present day. He examines property holdings – who owns land, how much, what percentage of a country, what percentage of the population do these owners comprise. Who is being taxed, how much, what for. What are the tax revenues being spent on by the state? Through a detailed presentation of facts in a surprisingly compelling manner of writing, Piketty makes clear the the economic inequalities and how they surprisingly became more dramatic post-monarchy. Parisian Belle Epoque embodies modernity as a first great ‘financial and commercial globalization’, a century prior to globalization of the 20th century. Intensely inegalitarian, one percent has been with us for centuries. Will it always be? Is equality possible? Consider: home security, possessions/protection, ownership, cyber currency, identity. Proprietarianism: capitalism.
#system, #power, #culture, #body, #technology, #relationships, #language, #philosophy
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. 1958 Routledge & Kegan Paul. (in-progress; paused September-December)
The core of philosophy lies in the perpetual beginning of reflection at the point where an individual life begins to reflect on itself. Reflection is truly reflection if it is not carried outside itself, only if it knows itself as reflection on an unreflective experience–and consequently, as a change in structure of our existence. We are never the unreflective subject we seek to know. If we were consciousness, we would have to have before us the world, our history, perceived objects in their uniqueness as systems of transparent relationships.
Body differs from objects; it is phenomenal. That is, it is experienced as it experiences. An element in the system of the subject in her world. We are literally what people think of us (page 122) and what our world is. Possession of space this special existence is the primary condition of all living perception. Abstract movement superimposes human or virtual space upon physical space concrete movement is centripetal the background of concrete movement is the world as given abstract movement is centrifugal. The background to abstract movement is built up to move and respond to a reading of signs (other people, words, objects,…) Concrete, abstract difference like greifen: zeigen; tactile: visual
perception and visual representation to projection:evocation
more to come….
#energy-space-time; #system, #power, #body, #environment, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Steyerl, Hito. “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective.” The Wretched of the Screen. Sternberg Press, 2012.
Falling. A feeling of groundlessness, and if there is nothing to fall towards, you may feel suspended and not notice you are falling. “Falling is relational.” Loss of horizon leads to disorientation.
Spatial and temporal orientation has changed dramatically through technology. Google maps, surveillance, etc. we begin to assume a godlike perspective, and may even feel a sense of omniscience. We have a decreasing importance or relation to a linear perspective. Through linear perspective we were able to reinvent time space and the subject. “It also contains the seeds for its own downfall.” Steyerl takes us through several centuries of key developments along this path and leads us to consider the element of acceleration via two paintings of J.M.W. Turner. Changes in artistic perspective reflect and incorporate technological developments. From acceleration and 20th century innovations we now have a vertical sovereignty. We have to police these spaces between earth and sky and in so doing we become the police and the policed. Our disembodied selves are both object and subject, “caught between the pornographic and militaristic.” Steyerl concludes:
“Falling is corruption as much as liberation, turning people into things, and vice versa….the perspective of free fall teaches us to consider a social and political dreamscape of radicalized class war form above, one that throws …social inequalities into sharp focus. But falling does not only mean falling apart, it can also mean a new certainty falling into place. Grappling with crumbling futures that propel us backward onto an agonizing present, we may realize that the place we are falling toward is no longer grounded, nor is it stable. It promises no community, but a shifting formation.”
#energy-space-time; #system, #power, #body, #environment, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Steyerl, Hito. “In Defense of the Poor Image.” The Wretched of the Screen. Sternberg Press, 2012.
Poor images are copies, rips, thumbnails, ghosts of images; altered, compressed, decayed. They circulate freely as testament to capitalism. True to form, Steyerl considers mediatic evidence of their use from cinema screen to museum walls. Higher resolution images are more seductive, but the poor image is a fetish of its own, and Steyerl posits that their propagation have saved experimental film/video from a near extinction.
Resolution relates to class and as such the poor image is the popular image, the image of the 99%. The poor image creates its own aura, “This aura is no longer based on the permanence of the original, but on the transience of the copy.” The poor image is not the reality. It is about reality.
#energy-space-time; #system, #power@hegemony, #body, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980’s,” The Haraway Reader. Routledge, New York and London. 2003
Cyborg: Cyborg animal and machine in a post gender world. Disrupt social relations of household. Irony, perversity. Illegitimate offspring of militarism, patriarchal capitalism and state socialism.
And now race comes back to the forefront. First world, robots, machines replacement. Repressive apparatus: entertainment surveillance disappearance. Sex, sexuality, reproduction or central in high-tech. False consciousness leads to complicity with late capitalism domination. Networking is akin to weaving; a feminist practice. Coding in itself will be outmoded.
Bodies are maps of power and identity. Intense pleasure and skill is an aspect of embodiment, not sin. The machine is not in us. The machine is us. Cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden. Domination leads to massive insecurity and cultural impoverishment. Failure of subsistence networks.
See also Steyerl, Freefall
#energy-space-time; #system, #power, #body, #environment, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Sales, Nancy Jo. American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers.
Author follows teenage girls ages 12-18 (even to age 20), detailing how they use social media and how social media shapes their lives. Many of them or for a few, the people around them are objects to the subject of social media. They perform for the likes, and have no confidence outside of the number of followers or likes they have. There emerges a princess culture and a hypersexualized oversexualized reality, many girls call it empowering. But is it? The only people benefitting are the males for who they perform. Interpersonal relationships are second to the online persona positioning.
#energy-space-time; #system, #power@hegemony, #body, #environment, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Haraway, Donna. “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others,” The Haraway Reader. Routledge, New York and London. 2003
Haraway leads us into an examination, that we arrive at more a a self-observation seen from within and without. From a starting point of the etymological signifiance of TOPOS and TROPOS and their linguistic offspring. Nature is a topos. Troping, to turn toward earth. Nature is made. Global technology as a particular production (albeit a denaturing one). This etymological start is a theme that returns as Haraway later points out that Humans name things, we identify ourselves and the world around us with words, and unfortunately, easily mistake the name for the thing itself. Nature however is speechless though articulate (more so than humans, I add).
Transversing humans interacting with nature (science), to nature interacting with science, to science interacting in humans and the language we spin around these narratives and events, this essay draws parallels and oppositions – which we understand in the writing to be none other than two sides of the same coin. My initial notes were scant and highlighted the notions of inner space and outerspace, the spaceman as a ‘cosmic foetus’ which I made mental parallels to ideas explored in writing by Hito Steyerl. These phrases however resonated and began to inspire ideas and questions, so I re-read the essay to unpack this line of thought a little deeper? more clearly? anew?
The virtue of something is its capacity, virtual space seems to be negation of meat space. Domains of science fiction seem to negation of earthly regions but perhaps this negation is the real illusion.
quote of William Gibson: cyber space is consensual hallucination experience daily by billions.
Going back to the text, specifically to the diagram on p78: The terms, inner space and outer space. they are contextually specific terms like meatspace = real space. Haraway points to the parallels between the human immune system and the military. I ask, Can we live with instead of defend against? Haraway writes, “The circuits of competencies sustaining the body as a defended self- personally, culturally, nationally – spiral through the fantasy entertainment industry, a branch of the apparatus of bodily production fundamental to crafting the important consensual hallucinations about possible worlds that go into building real ones.”
The essay ends with a statement about the tree of knowledge being part of a web, a network – relating humans to virtual space. I relate this to Deleuze and Guattari, the tree of knowledge is a rhizome. The internet is a rhizome. Our bodies are rhizomatic. #energy-space-time;#system,#power@hegemony,#body,#environment,#culture,#technology,#philosophy,#language,#relationships
Goldsmith, Kenneth. Uncreative Writing : Managing Language in the Digital Age. New York, Columbia University Press, 2011.
A recycle and upcycle approach to text. Why keep writing new patterns and formations of words on the page when so many already exist? We cut and paste, we duplicate, extract and share videos, images, sounds and code, but text remains somehow sacred or uniquely worthy of protection, or just has not been allowed to adapt to technology in the same way as other media formats? Goldsmith not only proposes a flipping of the script, but defends his position intelligently. Clear examples are given as he shares his own uncreative writing projects, and also cleverly invites his students to freely plagiarize and gives them parameters within which to re-contextualize the text.
#energy-space-time; #system, #power@hegemony, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Bridle, James. New Dark Age : Technology and the End of the Future. Orca Book Services, 2019.
In the seventh paragraph in chapter one Bridle succinctly summarizes what is to follow, “It is also a book about what we know, how we know, and what we cannot know.”
With the information superhighway at our fingertips, accessed through devices that respond to voice command and are ‘smart’ enough to learn our patterns, we are privy to so much information, yet how do we filter it? or curate it? How do we know what is true and what is untrue? We have made ourselves dependent on technology that breeds confusion. This book is for delving beyond understanding of systems, and to think more critically about their histories and consequences.
Bridle takes us through historical developments–from the important work of Vanevar Bush and John von Neuman–and forward into today and poses questions and hypotheses about what the future of this new dark age may bring. GPS, surveillance, conspiracy theory, culture, rabbitholes, data, algorithms…how can we begin to see not just what is in and on this super-network, but to see the network itself?
#energy-space-time; #system, #power, #body, #environment, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Social Dilemma
Netflix film
Interviews with people high up in the corporate world of Google, Facebook, and other large tech companies.
“If you are not paying for the product, you are the product” Your attention/time, your data. “How much of your life can we get you to give to us?” And then as Jaron Lanier re-articulates this, “t’s the gradual slight imperceptible change in your own behavior and perception that is the product”. These companies sell certainty and seek not only to change the behaviour of the user over time but to predict the changes and the behaviour. They build models on these predictions. See Eliasson. “Advanced technology returns us to magic” Arthur C Clark
#energy-space-time; #system, #power, #body, #environment, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Rudder, Christian. Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking)
One of four founders of Ok Cupid. None of the founders ever used online dating. They applied algorithms to virtual social spaces…simplified the world of humans into statistics and averages. Repelling some people brings others all the closer. Beauty is looks you can never forget; a face should jolt not soothe. People are data; social media platforms use this data to curate our experiences. The user is not in control.
#system, #power@hegemony, #body, #culture, #technology, #language, #relationships
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Ken Knabb. https://libcom.org/files/The%20Society%20of%20the%20Spectacle%20Annotated%20Edition.pdf
The spectacle is reality; the spectacle is an inversion of concrete reality. The spectacle is a shift in the modernity of spirituality. That which is seen, for appearances only is more real than the physical reality. The appearance becomes the reality
The spectacle is a self-perpetuating system within the capitalist wheel. The spectacle is the ultimate form of slavery with no slave masters. The spectacle is something to distract us while we are awake; it is as if we are asleep. Can there be an authentic self as separate from the spectacle? Can you know who you really are and what you really want? or is it always influenced and in relation to the spectacle? (In the capitalist system)
Our desires create the success of commodity economy. While we lump basic needs under the banner of commodity, commodité actually refers to luxury items – things that we desire and have created need for but are not essential to survival. What I want is often shrouded in the signifiers of what I should desire, what everyone else desires, the fantasy of what having this desired action or object will endow me with. Desire >expectations >fantasy>desire>… even the rebellion is a desired option within the spectacle. Transition away from pastoralism marks the beginning of labor. Industry dissolves social and kinship relations.
>>Reread Chapter 4 after completing Marx, and possibly other political history readings?
When a society settles within a particular geographic location and gives this space a content by developing distinctive areas within it (park, street, market) it finds itself confined within that locality. Agrarian society is the basis for cyclical time. Seasonal. annual. Eternity is within this time. Myth ensures that the cosmic order conforms with the society established within its frontiers. Monotheism bridges myth and history, and is both rooted in and radically opposed to both.
Maybe reading On Walden Pond next would be a good balance.
#energy-space-time; #system, #power, #body, #environment, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulacra and Simulations.” Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1988), pp.166-184.
“Thus, what is at stake has always been the murderous capacity of images…”
A simulacrum, finds its reality through appearance. In so claiming to be what it appears, it is.
To dissimulate is to feign, to proclaim, to be what one is not or to not have what one has.
To simulate disrupts or endangers the differences between real/unreal.
Disneyland as perfect model of entanglement of illusion, fantasy – it “is neither true nor false.”
The whole system as this self-feeding continuum of its simulatory nature. Reality is the unreal.
The successive stages of the image:
1. It is the reflection of a basic reality.
2. It masks and perverts a basic reality.
3. It masks the absence of a basic reality.
4. It bears no relation to any reality whatever; it is its own pure simulacrum.
#energy-space-time; #system, #power, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
London Review Bookshop Podcast, Will Self on Guy Debord
>If social media, both as the spectacle and as an arena she also Instagram filled with spectacles encourages allows promote every body every action has a potential spectacle to display, we take more risks sometimes performing rather than displaying ourselves in ways we would not otherwise choose to get a response from our audience of spectacles a one up culture also emerges bigger, better, bolder. What is left? Where is quiet space, dusky moments, slow fluid presents? What happens to collaboration?<
#energy-space-time; #system, #power, #body, #environment, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer, Max. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” Dialectic of Enlightenment, New York: Continuum, 1993. pp 1-24
“The sociological theory that the loss of the support of objectively established religion, the dissolution of the last remnants of pre-capitalism, together with technological and social differentiation or specialization have led to cultural chaos is disproved every day; for culture now impresses the same stamp on everything.”
With capitalism and an industrialized society, the forces that control the economy, control society and shape its culture. This cultural machine feeds itself, creating more likeness to support the monotone monopoly, from clothing and food to music and the arts to media and education. Amusement offers freedom from thought. The less we think, the more receptive we are to manipulation. Monotony holds great power. The imitation becomes the standard, the appearance becomes the reality. The culture industry subdues unruliness; culture personalities today are interchangeable.
=> cultural monopoly; cultural monotony
A great artist can take an important statement and turn it into a universal statement. Great artists are mistrustful of style mass culture sees this as a risk; bland taste masquerades as a desirable normality. We need the challenges that experimental art proffers. Not what art is but what it could be.
Fragmentary, dissonance, subvert Universal; need art that forces us to think, expressed harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions. Pure and uncompromised, autonomous art should disrupt.
#energy-space-time; #system, #power@hegemony, #body, #environment, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” 1935.
Consider: a society, still newly industrialized, with a depressed economy that is further weakened by the need for fewer workers. New technology allows the masses to experience the spectacular. Like a resulting spark between these two poles, is borne the mechanical reproduction in art. Namely at this moment, the photograph and shortly thereafter, cinema. Yes, in principle art has always been reproducible, Benjamin admits, and until now, these copies always bore witness to the artist’s hand (or that of their student/apprentice); they were subject to time, space and the human capacity for creating imperfections. (There is almost a tone in this essay of this camera apparatus just doesn’t play fairly in the realm of art.) The issue is a lack of aura in the mechanically reproduced work of art.
Aura emanates from uniqueness (speaks to tradition and authenticity), distance, permanence, desire. Mechanical reproduction ‘emancipates’ a work from ritual. Everyone an author and all the world a stage … film curates our experience. It not only leads our gaze, it determines it with authoritarian certitude. Films think for us. We relinquish our autonomy. Time becomes homogeneous.
#energy-space-time; #system, #power@hegemony, #body, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Eliasson, Olafur. “Models are Real.”
A space is created of time and is continually re-created structurally by its users. Insist on acknowledging the interplay between space self and time. A shift in representation, a shift in the traditional relationship between reality and representation. Progress now not model real rather model model both as real. No spaces model free. Consider this statement. Models no longer exist merely as representations on the way to becoming, they exist as spaces and shapers of reality in their own right. And in fact, inhabited spaces are continually being remodelled. I read this as referring to both physical and digital/virtual models and spaces. Which then relates back to Adorno/Horkheimer. I would add also Deleuze & Guattari. Engaging with art can help the world be more felt; and from feeling more deeply follow thinking, engagement, and ideally, action.
(After reading this essay, I had a dream that presented the idea of modelling as behavioural).
#energy-space-time; #system, #culture, #technology, #environment, #language, #relationships
Journal #21 – Liam Gillick – Contemporary art does not account for that which is taking place
It is therefore necessary—for artists specifically (although never alone)—to engage with this process of re-describing what gets made now. What constitutes the image of the contemporary? And what does the contemporary produce other than a complicit alongsideness? Gillick proposes new term: current art to hold space for the vastness that “Contemporary Art” is struggling to contain.
#energy-space-time; #system, #power@hegemony, #environment, #culture, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. PDF sourced from the first English Translation, 1887. (in-progress)
In a Capitalist society prevalent is the mass accumulation of commodities. Marx defines commodity as: <<an object outside of us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, … makes no difference.>>
For such commodities, they are valuated by use value and /or exchange value.
#energy-space-time; #system, #power@hegemony, #body, #environment, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Price, Seth. “Dispersion.” NET ART ANTHOLOGY: Dispersion, anthology.rhizome.org/dispersion.
Conceptualism. The ready-made. We can never go back. But where do we go?, how do we move forward? From this point of departure, a dematerialization that leads us to step back and reexamine. From the as-if consideration as Martha Rosler phrased it, can art be cloaked in other disciplines? An ultimate blurring of art and life? (Allan Kaprow) even if “Immersing art in life runs the risk of seeing the status of art–and with it, the status of the artist–disperse entirely.” The ultimate act of love and sacrifice like a parent for a child?
Is this a reactive position to the elitism of high culture, né high art?
Price writes, “It is useful to continually question the avant-garde’s traditional romantic opposition to bourgeois society and values.” Isn’t this very society based around capitalism? Price uses the term commercial media, and spends time considering art that uses networks of distributed media, which lead toward the obvious channels of print media. Notable artists include Lawrence Wiener and Adrian Piper; also Ant Farm as an underground hybrid. This model feeds directly into “market mechanisms of circulation, distribution, and dissemination…” Clearly not “high art.” Also not a bridging of the divide. Could we rightly say (and agree!) that some of the more intersting art today happens outside of the institution? Does this support Duchamp’s comment “that the artist of the future will be underground” ?
Or might this statement forecast a more virtual realm, a buried rhizomatic network in which artists write, post, link, build, publish, …
Is what we know to be public art, truly public and accessible by all? To be ‘public’ has tended to insinuate a specific physical space and time, which by its nature is exclusionary. How public do we need and want public to be? So then we have to examine the human penchant, its nature to be communal, social, collective. As we move into virtual realms we desire relation not with the group but the individual. All of them. Individually.
Connecting to Benjamin’s idea of Aura, do we have an obligation as a viewer/audience to experience a work first-hand, or is a digital recoding/documentation sufficient for experiencing the work? I would argue it depends on the nature of the action/event/work.
There is a focus on Dan Graham in this essay. Conceptually, yes Dan Graham makes sense – I am not a devoted fan of his work, so will avoid references beyond acknowledgement.
The expanded field of art today. Architecture – from Gordon Matta-Clark to Vito Acconci to Olafur Elliason. Maybe we need to dive into the busted networks of the Cyberbunker and construct a post-nuclear post-Covid post-right-wing-extremist situation.
OR “An art that attempts to tackle the expanded field, …sounds utopian at best ….Complete enclosure means that one cannot…retain the status as Artist. What’s more, artist as a social role is somewhat embarrassing…useless, if not reactionary”…a new form of elitism.
But doesn’t art always point towards Utopia?
#energy-space-time; #system, #power@hegemony, #body, #environment, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Vierkant, Artie. “The Image Object Post-Internet.” 2010
“..an extended statement of artistic purpose and critique of our contemporary relation to objects and images in Post-Internet culture.”
“ … the cultural status of objects is now influenced entirely by the attention given to them, the way they are transmitted socially and the variety of communities they come to inhabit.”
New media art and conceptual art serve as the poles between which resides Post-Internet art. Now that we are connected to a network, artist/work of art will never have full attention of an audience. And yet, the screen is our communal space. But no one commands it. It is always shared.
How do we approach art-making in a time of infinite divergence? We are all in so many rabbit-holes, who is still on the field. Is there still a field? Vierkant again articulates (like Price) the possibility that an artist could operate under a different moniker these days, and perhaps that is the most radical/progressive of all. “what matters is (that there is) a proposition towards an alternate conception of cultural objects”; consider not one static fixed representation but move between formats, media, articulations.
#energy-space-time; #system, #power@hegemony #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Steyerl, Hito, and Franco Berardi. Hito Steyerl: “A Thing Like You and Me.” The Wretched of the Screen. Sternberg Press, 2012.
A generation lacking in heroes? or a generation absolved of heroes? We consider punk and alternative song lyrics from the 1970’s. Maybe our heroes just became too iconic, representations rather than realities. Steyerl and Berardi liken the demise of the hero as representation to being a .jpg and then to the greater issue of subject vs. object. We are asked to consider materiality, reality, shifting perspectives. On the second to last page, a subtle hairpin turn, they write, “There might still be an internal and inaccessible trauma that constitutes subjectivity. But trauma is also the contemporary opium of the masses…” As evidence we have the bruised image and the rampant proliferation of mediatic sex and violence commonly in our daily pipelines. Just when you think you are separate, somehow immune, they conclude, “To participate in the image means to take part in all of this.”
#energy-space-time; #system, #power@hegemony, #body, #environment, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Steyerl, Hito. “Is a Museum a factory?” The Wretched of the Screen. Sternberg Press, 2012.
Another semiotic unraveling of the image and its siblings. Following a well-drawn conceptual line from the Lumiere film of workers leaving a factory, to the over saturation of video art in contemporary art spaces, Steyerl draws comparisons between factories and gallery spaces. “In this economy,” she writes, “even spectators are transformed into workers…But this type of production is much more intensive than the industrial one. The senses are drafted into production, the media capitalize upon aesthetic faculties and imaginary practices of viewers.In that sense, any space that integrates cinema and its successors has now become a factory.” We must work to absorb all of the media, to devote the work hours that these pieces of time-based media demand of us. We can never meet the demands and expectations put upon us. They are multitudinous, dispersed (rendering us in a sea of chaos), and we are too overstimulated to perform the work required. Refers to Thomas Elsaesser again and his interrogations over cinema in museums. What public is this? Look up Boris Groys’s essay “Politics of installation.”
#energy-space-time; #system, #power@hegemony, #body, #environment, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Steyerl, Hito. “The Articulation of Protest.” The Wretched of the Screen. Sternberg Press, 2012.
What elements do we combine to articulate something? How might we consider the tone of this elemental combination to achieve an oppositional expression that is both non-homogenous and non-reactionary? “Does not a conventional form of mimetic clinging to the conditions that are to be critiqued, a populist form of blind faith in the power of the addition of arbitrary desires? Is it not better sometimes to break the chains…?”
#energy-space-time; #system, #power@hegemony, #body, #environment, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Foster, Hal. “Archives of Modern Art.” October 99, Winter 2002, pp. 81-95.
Referencing Foucault and Baudelaire, Foster relates the archive of art as a dialectic of memory, giving concrete examples of artists and movements (four moments) that employ and demonstrate this quality – from Manet/Baudelaire to Proust/Valery to Malroux/Benjamin to Rauschenberg-Warhol-Richter-Bauhaus. He leads us then to the question, can there be a fifth moment that uses electronic tools. Would this make the art more or less auratic? What would such a digital underwriting mean for art practices and the institutions? If a museum is no longer the sepulchre of art, is it only architectural spectacle? Does art need this space, how do they uplift rather than bury one another?
#energy-space-time; #system, #power@hegemony, #body, #environment, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Foster, Hal. “The Artist as Ethnographer.” In The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology. Marcus, G. E., & Myers, F. R. (2008). Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press. pp. 302-309.
Ethnography as a lens of anthropology is a very attractive lens for the art world. Anthropology as an interdisciplinary and self-reflective science of alterity that studies culture contextually (p305) seems to exemplify all that modernist art would like to claim for itself. Foster cautions that while it seems desirable, it is nonetheless problematic in practice. Often these works are contracted by the institutions they sometimes aim to critique, or they are site-specific with a lack of budget and time to reflect a transparent reading of the ethnographic group the artists is interacting with and the work becomes a transference of the artist and their practice onto these people.
Foster, Hal. “The Future of an Illusion, or The Contemporary Artist as Cargo Cultist.” Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture, ed. David Joselit and Elisabeth Sussman (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1986), pp. 92-99.
The fetishization that began in the 1920’s with Primitivism, Cubism led to the commodification of art as the ready-made collided into the sublime. Art divides from here around the contradictions between art economy (commodity) and political economy, as circulator of signs. The spectacle and mediated art object emerge triumphant.
Do the contradictions inherent in commodified art and fetishization also contain the seeds for self-destruction? (see H. Steyerl) What does art that stands in both critical and contemplative relation to the spectacle look like?
#energy-space-time; #system, #power, #body, #environment, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Kosuth, Joseph. Art After Philosophy. (1969) http://www.ubu.com
Art is the definition of art.
From a history of art serving decorative functions, art became conflated with aesthetics. However art is not in service to beauty. Also, as stated by Donald Judd, anything that a person callas art (only an artist or anyone?) is art. After Wittgenstein philosophy lost its self sake raison d’etre, as did the art object – officially with Duchamp’s readymade – though Kosuth suspects the elements were in place long before. (This supports other readings on this list.) Formalist art is an exercise in aesthetics and exists for its own sake. Expressionist art is just an ejaculation. Beyond that, all art is conceptual because it exists for a reason. Readymade art art from a focus on the form of language to what is being said. “What is important in art is what one brings to it; not one’s adoption of what was previously existing.”
#energy-space-time; #system, #power, #environment, #culture, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Fraser, Andrea. “There’s no place like home. Le 1%, c’est moi.” continent.2.3 (2012) 186-201
This essay is a reworking of several earlier essays. The hegemony and exclusion of our socio-political world/s is mirrored in the art world. The 1% in the art world however, is really the .03%. There exist today subfields within the art world, and carry their own economies, diverse values. Art as economy, luxury, investment; art as exhibition spectacle/curiosity, entertainment; academia, theory; art as social activism, community based/grass-roots… and we all likely exist somewhere painfully between at least two. Fraser digs into this and explores what the responsibility of art is, what the role might be (in some cases she would argued that it has been obscured). What she offers as a path is art as an affirmation, a celebration, a fantasy, a wish and object that matters to us and in which we are in one way or another a participant.
I also watched Little Frank and His Carp (2001) and Official Welcome (Hamburger Kunstverein) (2003)
#energy-space-time; #system, #power@hegemony, #body, #environment, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Barthes, Roland. The Photographic Message. Image-Music-Text.
The photograph as a form of communication. In this case, the press photo, the message of which is formed by emission (staff), channel (newspaper) and point of reception (reader). This photograph is never isolated, it is in relationship to a caption and or body of text, and one reads this resulting ‘rebus’ for information; the image and text are heterogeneous and not homogenous. From this environment, Barthes turns to contextually question the photograph itself. How do we read a an image? Is a pure denotation pre-language possible? Are we capable of a neutral reading without immediate (pre) categorization? we read through the lens of an internal metalanguage. To suspend, is to block meaning. The photograph presents a paradox – transforming an inert object into a language and the unculture of a ‘mechanical’ art into the most social of institutions. p. 31
#energy-space-time; #system, #power@hegemony, #body, #environment, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Manovich, Lev. watched Soft Cinema (2004)
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Minnicino, Michael. “The Frankfurt School and ‘Political Correctness’”
This essay opens with a description of the political backdrop of what (preceded its emergence and) led to the Frankfurt School. Also how aestheticism changed after 1890 – from the beauty and hope of the renaissance, New Age to the ugliness of what was hatched in the early 20th century.
“We will have to face the fact that the ugliness we see around us has been consciously fostered and organized in such a way, that a majority of the population is losing the cognitive ability to transmit to the next generation, the ideas and methods upon which our civilization was built. The loss of that ability is the primary indicator of a Dark Age. And, a new Dark Age is exactly what we are in. In such situations, the record of history is unequivocal: either we create a Renaissance—a rebirth of the fundamental principles upon which civilization originated—or, our civilization dies.”
The relationship and rift between Benjamin and Adorno is examined as they critique their cultural milieu and the move towards disintegration and atonality in the arts. This article gives me pause to consider the ideas of aesthetics and culture. Is it possible to confront the culture industry, the dark age?, and not succumb to it? I also begin to realize I am like Obama drawing my opponent close… this is a neoliberalist rant.
Minnicino writes us into the entangled philosophical-political actions and accounts, mostly of Adorno and Horkheimer (and whoever they were associated with) through the mid to late 20th century, ends with a statement that we need a new renaissance. I don’t disagree with this as a statement or call to action, and I do disagree with the way this was eventually wrapped and couched as a criticism of leftist thinking. Is this a softer new alt right? Is it soft? (I have been shielded by west coast liberalism.) If the Frankfurt school called for a liberation of the subtext have the conservatives responded by inserting a new subtext designed to create fissure within – like (the orange-creature-with-comb-over-who-shall-not-be-named)?
#energy-space-time; #system, #power@hegemony, #body, #environment, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Manovich, Lev. “Visual Semiotics, Media Theory, and Cultural Analytics,”
Manovich relates his journey into the study and analysis of visual data – from the image and film theory to software and new media, to data collected from social media and contemporary image sharing and generating platforms. So away from the signification of the elements within one image to “analyzing collections.” Very specific dataveillance under an academic/art world umbrella. Manovich points out data collection and sociological studies have been abetted by the population shifts into cities and onto the internet. Where do we go from here with furthering the understanding of cultural data? This second to last paragraph justifies his work and summarizes my recent thinking about the texts read this semester:
For me, the key motivation in working with “big cultural visual data” is about creation of methods and tools that allow us to see it in the first place. It is not about replacing with statistical models or neural networks everything I learned about culture and the social world during my life, or all the ways of thinking about visual media I learned from other theorists, or my intuitions. But before I can think about media today, I need to see it, and this basic act became very problematic when people share billions of images every day. Thus, my trajectory took me from semiotic perspective on singular works of art I can easily see with our bare eyes to the design of interfaces and techniques of computational “seeing” contemporary media that are necessary because its scale.
#energy-space-time; #system, #power@hegemony, #body, #environment, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Steyerl, Hito. “The Articulation of Protest.” The Wretched of the Screen. Sternberg Press, 2012.
The significance of a moment – or an articulation, is a montage of elements in time and space. Establishing the additional elemental parameters of signification and of political forces, Steyerl begins to explore how protest is articulated. Considering both the actions and manifestos, as well as the interest groups involved, Steyerl applies her logic to two case studies. Both examples are taken from films which adds yet another layer of information; one of a protest in Seattle (1999), the other regards the 1970’s relations between France and Palestine.
With the first film, there are cinematic techniques that create a mostly level playing field to present, compare contrast the differing voices. It is a film that aims to convey “the voice of the people.” (voxpop). In contrast, the second film criticizes the voice of the people, along with their motivations. It exposes the contradictions within a movement that are usually covered up.
True to form (Steyerl’s multi-layered roundabout lead in to a pointed-tongue critique), we are asked not only to consider the protest itself (general) but the ways in which media portrays a protest. Technical devices may seem positive and equalizing, and may in fact be contributing to the sheep-like clothing of the wolf. Shouldn’t the media representation protest the establishment, too?
In summary, Steyerl asks, And does there not have to be a much more radical critique of ideology using pictures and sounds? Does not a conventional form mean a mimetic clinging to the conditions that are to be critiqued…? Is it not therefore sometimes better to break the chains than to organize everyone into a network at all costs?
#energy-space-time; #system, #power, #body, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Steyerl, Hito. “Art as Occupation: Claims for an Autonomy of Life.” The Wretched of the Screen. Sternberg Press, 2012.
Occupation. What we occupy ourselves with. What fills our time. We used to fill our time with occupations of interest (reading, playing games, tinkering, &c). Now our labor, our work has become an Occupation.
“Occupation is not a means to an end as labor was, it is an end to itself.” Occupation connects to activity, service, distraction, therapy and also conquest, invasion, seizure. It implies mediation and also refers to colonialism, appropriation and extraction. So what does this do to art? It occupies us, keeps us busy. Often for free. Life has been occupied by art. Artistic autonomy was meant to separate art from life – this is no longer our reality. Now artists are separated from acknowledgement. The institutions may be problematic, yet they bring us together in a space. As we increasingly become artists and galleries recording and operating from the iPhone linked territory of our individual spaces of occupation we are deterritorialized, isolated, self-occupied. In all senses.
#energy-space-time; #system, #power, #environment, #culture, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Steyerl, Hito. “Freedom from Everything: Freelancers and Mercenaries.” The Wretched of the Screen. Sternberg Press, 2012.
Freedom is not always positive. To pursue ones personal interests at what cost to others? To ourselves? Freedom from social responsibility? Freedom from others? freedom from solidarity or predictability? From labor? Culture? Education? Anything and everything. These are the only shared global freedoms, carefully contructed across a cultural alterity. These negative freedoms spur diverse protest movements that have no positive agenda or clear demands. They articulate only loss.
Borne of this negative freedom, the freelancer.
Freelance derives from military – a free soldier, a free lance who was not attached to a particular master. Also ronin. They became over time, mercenaries. Both the freelancer and the mercenary are subcontracted; we lack allegiance. Engage in free-floating loyalties and are free from everything and free game as well. Free from stability, free from …
#energy-space-time; #system, #power, #environment, #culture, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Steyerl, Hito. “Missing People: Entanglement, Superposition, and Exhumation as Sites of Indeterminacy.” The Wretched of the Screen. Sternberg Press, 2012.
Interesting lines of comparison drawn between quantum physics, philosophy, the poor image, and mass graves. States of subaltern indeterminacy. If a person is missing, they do not fit into the binary structure of alive or dead – and yet as such they remain things, refusing to be named once the remains are found. A poor image similarly does not resolve as neatly as those included in legitimate discourse.
#energy-space-time; #system, #power, #environment, #culture, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Gleick, James. The Information. EPUB book.
Gleick traces (not strictly chronologically) various methods employed and the invention of devices used to further (transmit) human communications. From systems to a who’s who overview: the talking drums of Africa the evolution of written language as a signifying code and Wittgenstein to Charles Babbage & Ada Byron King to Morse… Gleick is driving us to the matter of information, pure information. At what point will we evolve to dispensing with images and words and just communicate pure data, pure information. What will this look like?
#energy-space-time; #system, #power, #environment, #culture, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Habermas, Jürgen. “Modernity––An Incomplete Project,” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Bay Press, Port Townsend Washington. 1983
In 1980, A German critic wrote, “Postmodernity definitely presents itself as Antimodernity.” Habermas’ thesis stems from this statement which he articulates to have penetrated all spheres of intellectual life. What does modern mean? How is it used? What is the implication in aesthetic contexts? The term modern was first used in 5thc. to communicate ‘current,’ and specifically, as in contrast to the pagan past. Fast forward through a few centuries and the word has perpetuated in use, the nuances in meaning adapting with time, and maintaining a general sense of progressive (like science) and “new” – differing from what preceded it. Modern as separate from stylish. Classic as separate from traditional. A relationship evolves between modern and classical. That which is truly modern moves into the classical canon of that which survives time. Aesthetic modern relates to the avant-garde. All of this sounds exciting – and then we get to Benjamin and modern begins to lose its effervescence. We arrive at post-avant garde, post-modern. Is it possible to have reached post-culture? How else to approach adversary and isolationist culture? Young conservatives recapitulate aesthetic modernity a la carte. Old conservatives retreat into unreasonable tradition. Neoconservatives embrace a tame modernity whose aim is to stimulate capitalist growth.
#energy-space-time; #system, #power, #environment, #culture, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
West, Stephen. Philosophize This!
Episode 108 The Frankfurt School pt. 1 – Introduction 7/28/17
Episode 109 The Frankfurt School pt. 2 – The Enlightenment 8/17/17
Episode 110 The Frankfurt School pt. 3 – The Culture Industry 8/26/17
Episode 111 he Frankfurt School pt. 4 – Eros 9/7/17
Episode 112 The Frankfurt School pt. 5 – Civilization 10/20/17
Episode 113 The Frankfurt School pt. 6 – Art As A Tool For Liberation 11/6/17
The Frankfurt School, also known as the Institute of Social Research is a social and political philosophical movement of thought located in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. It is the original source of what is known as Critical Theory. Two members of the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Horkheimer consider cultural changes such as the disintegration of community towards individualism as a result of capitalism. We are programmed now from birth to be a worker and a consumer, or a slave in a slave-based economy. While no one is ever truly free, The Frankfurt School sees the political and economical systems we have set up as functioning through control of nature, control of human behavior. In order to succeed, they must establish self-regulation to influence behavior. Enter, exploitation of desire. The Frankfurt School endeavors towards true democracy as the only emancipation from capitalist slavery. (This was a repeat listening from when they were originally aired/released)
#energy-space-time; #system, #power, #body, #environment, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
E-Flux podcast interview with Franco “Bifo” Berardi on the future possibility of living well.
e-flux journal editorial assistant Andreas Petrossiants speaks to Franco “Bifo” Berardi following his recent texts “(Sensitive) Consciousness and Time: Against the Transhumanist Utopia” in issue 98, and “Game Over” in issue 100. Franco Berardi, aka “Bifo,” founder of the famous Radio Alice in Bologna and an important figure in the Italian Autonomia movement, is a writer, media theorist, and social activist. His most recent books are Breathing: Chaos and Poetry (Semiotexte, 2018) and The Second Coming (Polity, 2019). Democracy is not a goal, it is a methodology. Our goal in contemporary life should not be to re-establish democracy, rather to establish a strategy for living well. Discussion of chaos, which Berardi writes frequently about. Chaos is a divergence in the brain from the surrounding world. The acceleration of the infosphere has resulted in an over-stimulation of our nervous systems. Chaos in social mind, chaos in social body. Dementia. The Automaton extracts data from daily life. We have built a world in which we have access to everything except to ourselves. We have lost touch with our brain, our body, our natural rhythms. We need to find a new rhythm between body-soul and the infosphere.
#energy-space-time; #system, #power, #body, #environment, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Han, Byung-Chul, and Erik Butler. Psychopolitics : Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Verso, 2017.
Starts off with a bang- The exploitation of freedom. An overused misunderstood term. Too big to be simple ‘a word’. In our quest for freedom in a free market democratic world, we bring about our own constraint.
Do we want to be free? Did not we invent God in order to not be free? (I love this line!) Before god we are all debtors, guilty (schuldig). To be free from debt and guilt, we must act. We are entering age of psychopolitics, meaning we pass from passive surveillance to active steering free will is at stake in order to maintain this the future must be open. Smartphones represent digital devotion. Smartphones are akin to a rosary, hand-held fidgets, both serving a purpose to self-monitor. ‘Like’ is the digital amen; device, a mobile confessional.
Capitalism is politics of the body; neoliberalism is politics of the psyche… physical discipline gives way to mental optimization. Physical optimization is within this and is not just aesthetic. It is a place to be seen, names to drop. Physical fitness and cosmetic surgery help turn the economic wheel. They are resources to be exploited. These may well supplant, replace ‘therapy’ ‘analysis’ and the like. We seek healing. We seek to eliminate pain. Pain now is psychological manifest in our bodies. Healing becomes killing (this is a little heavy-handed in delivery though I understand where it is coming from. somewhat alarmist.)
The mode of control today is through a system of likes. We like what is familiar and good and safe. We seek to please and fulfill our quota of likes, and in so doing, we conform. How do we define freedom? And in achieving those points, are we really free? free from what? Self-exploitation, self-illumination. We volunteer ourselves. I am my own panopticon. And you are yours.
#energy-space-time; #system, #power, #body, #environment, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Three “Bifo” interview podcasts
#13 Franco “Bifo” Berardi – Poetry and Chaos
Dito e Feito
#08 Franco “Bifo” Berardi – an experimental glossary
Dito e Feito
Solecast 28 w/ Franco “Bifo” Berardi on Capitalism, Mass Killings, Suicide & Alienation
The Solecast
Berardi, Franco. The American Abyss: Surfing the Waves of the Unknown. E-Flux Journal. Journal #111, September 2020.
Written pre-election, Berardi outlines the current American political landscape. Establishing that he is not future forecasting, he does acknowledge that the elements of the current landscape will lead to unimaginable geopolitical implications. The US has slowly been disintegrating the past 20 years, turning against itself. From bin Laden’s strategy to undermine from within, a mounting fury, a financial collapse, escalation of racial tensions, and then Trump to finish the process. Unfortunately Trump is not an anomalous American – he accurately represents the abject racists and the ignorant. We can change our ways as a nation or perish as a planet. Using the writings of old white male American authors, Berardi reads American culture. (Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark; John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath; Philip Roth, American Pastoral; Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections) The essay ends with a Mary Trump’s analysis of her uncle. Too much ego, not enough love. Maybe this is part of the national dilemma.
#energy-space-time; #system, #power, #body, #environment, #culture, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Steyerl, Hito. “The Spam of the Earth: Withdrawal from Representation,” The Wretched of the Screen. Sternberg Press, 2012.
Every second radio waves drift away from Earth, carrying our deepest desires and fears.
If intercepted by alien intelligence, what would they piece together of our existence? Likely it would resemble image spam. Image spam, our message to the future. These artifacts imagine capitalist-idealized humans, though they are collages, not actually real humans that we are told to aspire towards. A negative rabbit-hole of vanishing bodies and points of stability, with exaggerated aspects. A top-down cultural hegemony teaching us to be invisible to be seen and liked. Steyerl points out that interestingly, this bot-generated spam is often spam filtered and never seen. What is its role? These unreal representations that flood our space, mostly unseen. What is happening below the surface where no one is paying attention?
#energy-space-time; #system, #power, #body, #environment, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Steyerl, Hito. “Cut! Reproduction and recombination,” The Wretched of the Screen. Sternberg Press, 2012.
Draws comparisons between cinematic cuts and those of physical reduction, economically or physically. Metaphors established, Steyeral wanders us through other cinematic (mostly postproduction) devices and vocabulary.
#energy-space-time; #system, #power, #body, #environment, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Krauss, Rosalind. “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Bay Press, Port Townsend Washington. 1983
Sculpture began to change in the 1960’s, and accordingly, the field of sculpture had to expand categorically. longer makes sense. Krauss pointedly counters that sentiment stating- Sculpture “is a historically bounded category and not a universal one.” With its own internal logic and set of rules, not much subject to change. It would seem that the logic leads us to a monument. Rodin helped us to see a failing of that logic with the Gates of Hell which were not on a pedestal nor ever installed as and where they were intended. Also installed in multiples; many portals to the underworld. pedestal “Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to see a painting.” Barnett Newman By this time, sculpture was what you saw in a landscape that was not part of the landscape or on or in proximity to a building that was not the building. earth art etc demanded new taxonomies – in relation to architecture-landscape-non-architecture-non-landscape How to classify this changing field?
not-landscape and or not-architecture = sculpture
but there is more nuance still…between landscape and architecture is site construction (Partially Buried Woodshed); between architecture and non-architecture are understood structures (and intervention into the space of architecture – ie Christo, Bruce Nauman, Robert Irwin, Richard Serra); between landscape and non-landscape are marked sites. ie Spiral Jetty and Mile Long Drawing.
#energy-space-time; #system, #power, #body, #environment, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Crimp, Douglas. “On the Museum’s Ruins,” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Bay Press, Port Townsend Washington. 1983
Opens with a quote by Adorno which ends in: Museums are the family sepulchres of works of art. Critics like Hilton Kramer energetically moralize what gets included and or left out of exhibitions, in particular to attack a lingering of the mouldering remains of that which is ‘dead’.
Beginning of modernism usually seen in relation to Manet, early 1860’s. The term postmodernism first came into play in a writing about Rauschenberg’s transformation of the visual plane from nature to culture, 1960’s. While Manet replicates poses and other compositional elements, Rauschenberg creates a cultural mash-up tableau with the images of masters silkscreened onto the surface. Rauschenberg began in production as a pinter and moved towards printing and reproduction. And still, the museum certificates of authenticity are signed.
Read more Flaubert, par. Bouvard and Pecuchet! > museum After turning over every stone, what is left, what is safe, what is attainable? Copying. Also see André Malroux, Museum Without Walls.
#energy-space-time; #system, #power, #body, #environment, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships
Manovich, Lev. Instagram and Contemporary Image. 2017 Downloaded E-Book. https://www.academia.edu/34706553/Instagram_and_Contemporary_Image
Manovich and a team discusses the findings from a comparision of images uploaded to Instagram in six cities. this project was undertaken as an experiment to see how we can combine traditional “qualitative”approaches of media theory and art history with quantitative analysis that uses “big cultural data” and computational methods. Manovich also makes ideal use of the e-book format to provide hyperlinks rather than footnotes. The amount of available connectivity demands a new manner of reading.
#energy-space-time; #system, #power, #body, #environment, #culture, #technology, #philosophy, #language, #relationships