I arrange things into artworks, including paint, wood, plastic, raspberry pi, people, words, dialogues, arduino, sensors, web tech, light and code.
I use words other people have written to help guide these projects, so I read as often as I can. Most of what I read is literature (fiction) or nonfiction on philosophy, art theory, ethics and technology.
Also on Mastodon.
Ši nuoroda atsidaro kitame langelyje
Millennial expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin, in a bright, …
Spotted in the feed of @rra@bookwyrm.social and looked this book up. It looks good (and they said it was!) so I decided to add it to my list.
Winner of the PEN Translates Award 2024
At the heart of this watery ‘chronicle’ is …
I discovered this strange book on the shelf of a bookshop and picked it up on a whim. It's a novel by Ngọc Tư Nguyễn, who I understand is a celebrated novelist in Vietnam. The story takes place in a realm that is slightly surreal, with each chapter bouncing to a different character's first person narrative, each with a very different voice and perspective.
How one affects another is hard to gauge, as the motivations for each character is very different. In one chapter a person has left a tap running that has flooded a valley (and seems almost destined to flood the whole world) where the narrator in a chapter shortly following this has accidentally escaped from prison and is slowly becoming a mouse. So preoccupied is the latter with their own predicament, they seem to pass little heed of other events.
The thread that binds all the stories …
I discovered this strange book on the shelf of a bookshop and picked it up on a whim. It's a novel by Ngọc Tư Nguyễn, who I understand is a celebrated novelist in Vietnam. The story takes place in a realm that is slightly surreal, with each chapter bouncing to a different character's first person narrative, each with a very different voice and perspective.
How one affects another is hard to gauge, as the motivations for each character is very different. In one chapter a person has left a tap running that has flooded a valley (and seems almost destined to flood the whole world) where the narrator in a chapter shortly following this has accidentally escaped from prison and is slowly becoming a mouse. So preoccupied is the latter with their own predicament, they seem to pass little heed of other events.
The thread that binds all the stories is a woman and her tearful baby, and some unspoken tragedy. It's a beautiful, bizarre and compelling novel. It seems from the translator's note that a lot of the language is colloquial and the story is weird in its original form, so it may be impossible to translate perfectly into English. But even with that, I found this book brilliant, touching, compelling and utterly bizarre.
This came up in an essay in the book Plants by Numbers and sounded great. I'm a fan of Michael Marder too, so I picked up a copy.
Spotted here on bookwyrm and it looks interesting so I added this to my 'to read' pile.
This open access book takes a queer, feminist, and decolonial technoscience approach to the ecologies …
Plants by Numbers is an edited compilation of fourteen chapters by artists and researchers who work with plants. In most cases, the plants are collaborators or contributors, and are also part of developing anti-colonial or critical narratives, using the human-plant relationship to highlight or critique human behaviours. Great credit is due to the editors, as this carefully curated selection is made up of voices that are so careful to not unintentionally exclude or diminish many peripheral voices. Throughout the book, space is repeatedly given over to these voices, and I was really grateful for this.
As in any collection of essays, there are some that resonated less with me and some that are standout. Co-editor Jane Prophet's personal chapter on colonialism, ethics and trees is one of the best chapters, as is Amy M Youngs' thoughtful works with plants and people. Sina Seifee's project on the trees of Tehran is …
Plants by Numbers is an edited compilation of fourteen chapters by artists and researchers who work with plants. In most cases, the plants are collaborators or contributors, and are also part of developing anti-colonial or critical narratives, using the human-plant relationship to highlight or critique human behaviours. Great credit is due to the editors, as this carefully curated selection is made up of voices that are so careful to not unintentionally exclude or diminish many peripheral voices. Throughout the book, space is repeatedly given over to these voices, and I was really grateful for this.
As in any collection of essays, there are some that resonated less with me and some that are standout. Co-editor Jane Prophet's personal chapter on colonialism, ethics and trees is one of the best chapters, as is Amy M Youngs' thoughtful works with plants and people. Sina Seifee's project on the trees of Tehran is wonderfully written up, and the art throughout the book is very clearly and thoughtfully presented.
Where bees and ants have long been the darlings of the insect world, wasps are …
Spotted this on the reading list of @glyph@bookwyrm.social and added it as 'to read' because I have a grá for wasps.
Winner of the PEN Translates Award 2024
At the heart of this watery ‘chronicle’ is …
I saw this in a nice independent bookshop while on residency in north England and picked it up based on the cover (yes, judging a book!) and a quick read of a couple of the paragraphs inside.
Four brilliant interviews unlock the thoughts of four artist/collectives that work in dynamic ways. I loved this book for its aesthetic, its perspectives, and the space it gives to each interviewee to open up on a question. It is beautiful, short, and pointed. The crux is about cultural infrastructure, be that galleries, museums, or communities. The perspectives are dynamic, thoughtful, and diverse.
This book was gifted to me on my birthday last year. Its words are a gift, too, as is most of what Robin Wall Kimmerer offers us.
This very short book puts forward a clear thesis arguing for a gift economy to become normalised, beginning with a gift of serviceberries from the earth and from her neighbour. It draws from Kimmerer's community and friends, from her scientific and Potawotomi knowledge, and from her explorations into economics. It's very brief and filled with quotable sections that put forward a clear and easily understood argument against scarcity economics, and toward abundance and gifting.
My only real issue is that it doesn't give over much space to the small societies exist outside of the hegemonic one, where gift economies often central (my own place is one of these). It's a small complaint though, because Kimmerer still uses peaceful and beautiful words to convey …
This book was gifted to me on my birthday last year. Its words are a gift, too, as is most of what Robin Wall Kimmerer offers us.
This very short book puts forward a clear thesis arguing for a gift economy to become normalised, beginning with a gift of serviceberries from the earth and from her neighbour. It draws from Kimmerer's community and friends, from her scientific and Potawotomi knowledge, and from her explorations into economics. It's very brief and filled with quotable sections that put forward a clear and easily understood argument against scarcity economics, and toward abundance and gifting.
My only real issue is that it doesn't give over much space to the small societies exist outside of the hegemonic one, where gift economies often central (my own place is one of these). It's a small complaint though, because Kimmerer still uses peaceful and beautiful words to convey how she would love to see this grow and flourish.
One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her …
Įspėjimas dėl turinio Mention of Jeju genocide/massacres
Han Kang is a beautiful writer. She somehow expresses so much in a line, like in this book when the uncanny is perfectly presented as a sea with no waves. We Do Not Part is her most recent novel, and deals with two protagonists (the narrator and her friend Inseon) who have been friends for years. They decided to make an artwork together that appeared in a dream of our narrator, but that consumes Inseon because it becomes a vessel for her to tell the story of the massacres on Jeju Island in the 1940s and 1950s.
All of this is told in a dreamlike narrative where it's unclear if any character is in our worldly realm. The stories of those adults and children lost to that terrible history become more solid and concrete than those of our modern-day protagonists, and time becomes blurred. It is a beautiful and devastating novel, as most of Kang's work is.
One small complaint is on the coherence of the language, which I think may have been a problem with the translation, which might have been rushed by the publisher to profit from Kang's recent Nobel Prize.
‘Are ye going up town? Shops and shopping in Limerick’ is the product of a …
Are Ye Going Up Town is a research project by three university staff in Limerick, Ireland, who looked at the history of shopping in that city. The topic sounds a little specific, but the result presents some things I had never considered about the role shopping plays in social and urban connections. The emergence of department stores in the 19th century, and shopping centres (or 'malls') in the 20th, is something I had never considered as part of a social evolution, although this is not my field.
The book is the result of an incredibly deep project that took years to compile. It includes essays, scans of dozens of advertisements, photographs from the past two centuries, oral histories, and very concrete research. It's impressive in its depth, but it is very specific to place and field of research so may not be worth exploring unless the topics seem of interest.
Wired Our Own Way: An Anthology of Irish Autistic Voices is the first collection of …
This anthology of writers and others who have autism in Ireland features writers from many different fields and backgrounds, and with many different variations of autism and AuDHD. Each chapter gives a personal view from the writer.
With so many voices, there is space given to many different perspectives on living with autism. For someone with limited knowledge, it gave me a clearer view of the smorgasbord of personalities of autistic-diagnosed people in Ireland. The unique experiences and diverse writing styles bring a clear individuality to every story. The editing and design is really tidy and considerate, and the perspectives are clearly presented. As with any book of this kind, there is natural repetition in chapters where people with similar diagnoses write about their often similar experiences, but this takes little from the book.
I picked Echenoz' book out at random, judging it by its cover, and the adage rang true here. This biographical novel of the composer Ravel begins with some pretty clumsy patriarchal moments, and just goes downhill from there. I found it slow and dull, and skipped the last 20 pages. Even for a short book it wasn't worth it.
Development as Freedom is a 1999 book about international development by Indian economist and philosopher …
Amartya Sen's 1999 book presents his dominant economic ideals, mostly focussed on how economic development must be coupled with social schemes and not just an influx of money. The idea seems a little obvious to anyone who reads feminist philosophy, but the evidence presented is written for people in economics who may not always encounter these ideas. It's hard to tell how radical this may have seemed in 1999, because I am not familiar enough with the school of economics.
It is presented as a layperson's book, and for the first third Sen does a good job in grounding how economic theory reached this point. Later on the chapters remain interesting but become a little dry for someone like me who is not an economist. The ideas remain sound, and the comparisons between countries and their social and economic positions, but the writing got a little too domain-specific for me.
"How to Eat is the second in a Parallax's series of how-to titles by Zen …
Thich Nhat Hanh is a gentle voice in mindfulness. This short book gives reflections and meditations, and a few nice illustrations, on the topic of food and eating. They ask us to be mindful of the complexity of our food chain and the human and nonhuman actors that make it possible for us to eat in this modern world. Like all Hanh's writing, it's a beautiful, gentle book.