Artist’s statement:
In my work this romantic ideal of union with the natural world conflicts with our contemporary impact on the environment. These pieces are in part responses to environmental stressors including climate change, toxic pollution, and gm crops. They also borrow from myth, art history, figures of speech and other cultural touchstones. In some pieces aspects of the human figure stand-in for ourselves and act out sometimes harrowing, sometimes humorous transformations which illustrate our current relationship with the natural world. In others, animals take on anthropomorphic qualities when they are given safety equipment to attempt to protect them from man-made environmental threats. In each case the union between man and nature is shown to be one of friction and discomfort with the disturbing implication that we too are vulnerable to being victimized by our destructive practices. (read on)
First spotted via Who Killed Bambi.
• Aug 19, 2010 link notes tagged: art sculpture artist human animal environment nature culture technology pollution relation ecology myth romantism destruction representation lost
Previously on Skandalon : Barry Blitt, British Petroleum
• Jun 10, 2010 link notes tagged: art illustration humor critic animal human disaster ecology environment oil BP Catastrophe nature technology representation
“These are not maps in any conventional sense, but rather diagramatic representations of the interconnected space of technology, capital, instrumental value, exchange value, social and environmental impact that surround the device. The first diagram focuses primarily on the physical device, and the existence of the device as an object in our world. The second examines the placement of the device with respect to the individual and society.” (more)
About Ben Millen:
“Ben Millen is a Canadian industrial designer and engineer. He is a graduate of the Environmental Design/ Industrial Design master’s program at the University of Calgary and holds a degree in Systems Engineering from the University of Guelph.” (more)
First spotted via Kottke
• Jun 07, 2010 link notes tagged: technology communication iPhone object node network ecosystem ecology industry apparatus data vizualisation diagram representation
 | The maze of hallucinations that we have created around ourselves. |
• Jun 04, 2010 link notes tagged: art communication technology cybernetic ecology mind media Bateson maze Labyrinth hallucination reality book author pathology
| To take a dose of LSD is all right, and you will have the experience of being more or less crazy, but this will make quite good sense because you know you took the dose of LSD. If, on the other hand, you took the LSD by accident, and then find yourself going crazy, not knowing how you got there, this is a terrifying and horrible experience. This is a much more serious and terrible experience, very different from the trip which you can enjoy if you know you took the LSD. Now consider the difference between my generation and you who are under twenty-five. We all live in the same crazy universe whose hate, distrust, and hypocrisy relates back (especially at the international level)’ to the Fourteen Points and the Treaty of Versailles. We older ones know how we got here. I can remember my father reading the Fourteen Points at the breakfast table and saying, “By golly, they’re going to give them a decent armistice, a decent peace,” or something of the kind. And I can remember, but I will not attempt to verbalize, the sort of thing he said when the Treaty of Versailles came out. It wasn’t printable. So I know more or less how we got here. But from your point of view, we are absolutely crazy, and you don’t know what sort of historic event led to this craziness. “The fathers have eaten bitter fruit and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” It’s all very well for the fathers, they know what they ate. The children don’t know what was eaten. |
Think midle eastern wars, energy crisis, Europe financial crisis, unexplainable killing sprees and so forth.
• May 25, 2010 link notes tagged: communication technology media ecology cybernetic deception despair lost confusion generation history context politic economy energy war destruction murder killing spree
| Apple are trying desperately to force the growth of a new ecosystem — one that rivals the 26-year-old Macintosh environment — to maturity in five years flat. That’s the time scale in which they expect the cloud computing revolution to flatten the existing PC industry. Unless they can turn themselves into an entirely different kind of corporation by 2015 Apple is doomed to the same irrelevance as the rest of the PC industry — interchangable suppliers of commodity equipment assembled on a shoestring budget with negligable profit. |
Interesting thoughts about the future of the computer ecosystem.
Charlie Ross
“writes fiction full-time, has sold around 16 novels, has won one Hugo award and been nominated nearly a dozen times, and has been translated into about a dozen languages.” (much more)
• May 11, 2010 link notes tagged: technology communication ecology ecosystem future Internet computer machine interface Apple
Fotoglif: “Welder Raymond Vanwinkle of Magnolia, Texas, works on the BP Pollution Containment Chamber” May 3rd, 2010, REUTERS/Sean Gardner
“Welder Raymond Vanwinkle of Magnolia, Texas, works on the BP Pollution Containment Chamber at Wild Well Control, Inc. in Port Fourchon, Louisiana May 3, 2010. Energy giant BP Plc, its reputation battered by a catastrophic oil spill threatening the U.S. Gulf shore, said on Monday it was working to stem the gushing undersea leak and promised to pay for the cleanup and compensation claims. BP is working on to try to seal the ruptured well with an undersea containment system that would capture the leaking oil and channel it to a tanker on the surface.”
• May 05, 2010 link notes tagged: Environment United-States art disaster ecology energy hack news oil photograph technology BP
| Contrary to “primitive” peoples, who endow everything that moves with personal expression ―or even the first Greeks, who deified every aspect and force of nature―modern humans are obsessed by the need to depersonalize (or impersonalize) all that they most admire. There are two reasons for this tendency. The first is analysis―that marvelous instrument of scientific research to which we owe all our advances, yet which allows the soul to escape from one undone synthesis after another, until we are left facing a pile of disassembled parts and evanescent particles. The second is the discovery of the sidereal world―which is such a vast subject that it seems to destroy all proposition between our own existence and the dimensions of the cosmos around us. A single reality appears to subsist that is capable of covering both the infinitesimal and the immense at once: energy, that universal floating entity from which everything emerges and into which everything falls back, as if into an ocean. Energy is the new spirit, the new god. The impersonal is at the Omega of the world as well as its Alpha. |
Here’s the original French version:
“A l’inverse des « primitifs » qui donnent un visage à tout ce qui bouge, — ou même des premiers Grecs, qui divinisaient toutes les faces et toutes les forces de la Nature, l’Homme moderne est obsédé par le besoin de dépersonnaliser (ou d’impersonnaliser) ce qu’il admire le plus. Deux raisons à cette tendance. La première est l’Analyse, — ce merveilleux instrument de recherche scientifique, auquel nous devons tous nos progrès, mais qui, de synthèse en synthèse dénouées, laisse échapper l’une après l’autre toutes les âmes, et finit par nous laisser en présence d’une pile de rouages démontés et de particules évanescentes. — Et la seconde est la découverte du monde sidéral, objet tellement vaste que toute proportion paraît abolie entre notre être et les dimensions du Cosmos autour de nous. — Capable de réussir et de couvrir à la fois cet Infime et cet Immense, une seule réalité semble subsister : l’Énergie, entité flottante universelle, d’où tout émerge, et où tout retombe, comme dans un Océan. L’Énergie, le nouvel Esprit. L’Énergie, le nouveau Dieu. A l’Oméga du Monde, comme à son Alpha, l’Impersonnel.”
Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1956, p. 177. PDF.
Previously on Skandalon: Point Omega.
• Apr 11, 2010 link notes tagged: technology communication energy God philosophy ecology media medium world space infinity community fragment separation analysis
| Let us now consider what happens when you make the epistemological error of choosing the wrong unit: you end up with the species versus the other species around it or versus the environment in which it operates. Man against nature. You end up, in fact, with Kaneohe Bay polluted, Lake Erie a slimy green mess, and “Let’s build bigger atom bombs to kill off the next-door neighbors.” There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds, and it is characteristic of the system that basic error propagates itself. It branches out like a rooted parasite through the tissues of life, and everything get into a rather peculiar mess. When you narrow down your epistemology and act on the premise “What interests me is me, or my organization, or my species,” you chop off consideration of other loops of the loop structure. You decide that you want to get rid of the by-products of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good place to put them. You forget that the eco-mental system called Lake Erie is part of your wider eco-mental system - and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience. |
• Mar 24, 2010 link notes tagged: communication technology mind book author ecology network loser lost diffusion contagion junk waste
| An empirical test of ideas proposed by Martin Heidegger shows the great German philosopher to be correct: Everyday tools really do become part of ourselves. The findings come from a deceptively simple study of people using a computer mouse rigged to malfunction. The resulting disruption in attention wasn’t superficial. It seemingly extended to the very roots of cognition. “The person and the various parts of their brain and the mouse and the monitor are so tightly intertwined that they’re just one thing,” said Anthony Chemero, a cognitive scientist at Franklin & Marshall College. “The tool isn’t separate from you. It’s part of you.” Chemero’s experiment, published March 9 in Public Library of Science, was designed to test one of Heidegger’s fundamental concepts: that people don’t notice familiar, functional tools, but instead “see through” them to a task at hand, for precisely the same reasons that one doesn’t think of one’s fingers while tying shoelaces. The tools are us. |
The study “A Demonstration of the Transition from Ready-to-Hand to Unready-to-Hand” by Dobromir G. Dotov, Lin Nie, Anthony Chemero is available online (PDF).
The “fondamental concept” to which Chemero is referring is the concept of “readiness-to-hand”. Heidegger explains this concept in section 15 of his book Being and Time : “The Being of the Entities Encountered in the Environment” (see Google Books). To understand this concept, one can get help from Wikipedia, from an online Glossary of Terms in Being and Time (edited by Roderick Munday, last updated in March 2009) and from Dean Heckles’ blog (Heckle “is a social–cognitive scientist and a PhD student at Stanford” and he specifically chose to name his blog… “Ready-to-hand” : great introduction to the concept if you’re into technology or communication or media studies).
For a good overview of what’s at stakes today when it comes to our relationship to technology, one should read the “General Introduction” of the first book of the Technics and Time trilogy by Bernard Stiegler. The book has been translated from French by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. The “General Introduction” which run from page 1 to 18 is available via Google Books.
Previously on Skandalon: cognition and media ecology.
• Mar 10, 2010 link notes reblogged from chrbutler [via] tagged: technology communication medium media philosophy cognition Heidegger theory Stiegler author book ecology
| McManus: What now, briefly, is this thing called media ecology? McLuhan: It means arranging various media to help each other so they won’t cancel each other out, to buttress one medium with another. You might say, for example, that radio is a bigger help to literacy than television, but television might be a very wonderful aid to teaching languages. And so you can do some things on some media that you cannot do on others. And, therefore, if you watch the whole field, you can prevent this waste that comes by one conceling the other out. |
Previously on Skandalon: the Media Ecology Association
• Jan 10, 2010 link notes tagged: communication technology media ecology evolution culture book author
| 9. Remember: It is more likely than not that as you get older you will get dumber. You cannot beat the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that is, the Law of Entropy, which suggests that everything in the universe tends to get disorganized , losing energy and structure, gradually becoming inert and useless. |
About Neil Postman : “Neil Postman (1931 — 2003) was an American critic and educator. Postman received his B.S. from the State University of New York at Fredonia and his M.A. and Ed.D. from Columbia University. He was the Paulette Goddard Chair of Media Ecology at New York University and chair of the Department of Culture and Communication.” More at his official web site.
The Media Ecology Association web site. A video of a lecture by Neil Postman on “media ecology”.
• Dec 20, 2009 link notes [via] tagged: communication technology media ecology author life decomposition age time old
“This map was constructed by sorting roughly 800,000 published papers into 776 different scientific paradigms (shown as pale circular nodes) based on how often the papers were cited together by authors of other papers. Links (curved black lines) were made between the paradigms that shared papers, then treated as rubber bands, holding similar paradigms nearer one another when a physical simulation forced every paradigm to repel every other; thus the layout derives directly from the data. Larger paradigms have more papers; node proximity and darker links indicate how many papers are shared between two paradigms. Flowing labels list common words unique to each paradigm, large labels general areas of scientific inquiry.” Credit: Research & Node Layout: Kevin Boyack and Dick Klavans (mapofscience.com); Data: Thompson ISI; Graphics & Typography: W. Bradford Paley (didi.com/brad); Commissioned Katy Börner (scimaps.org). Read ( a little) more over at Seed Magazine.
• Sep 03, 2009 link notes [via] tagged: art communication technology data visualization map science paradigm idea ecology graphic design
cover design for Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles The Architecture of Four Ecologies, 1971.
• Aug 29, 2009 link notes tagged: emptiness architecture city book auhtor ecology loneliness
