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.
An exquisitely illustrated, one-of-a-kind celebration of the hidden beauty of nature and the ingenuity of …
Avian Architects
5 žvaigždutės
Susan Ogilvy has lovingly painted the nests of common birds in a beautiful book. Each has a description of the origin of the nest, many given to her by friends and family. This is it — the book is perfect in its simplicity.
One small complaint is an unnecessary addition of somewhat spurious descriptive information about each bird species' habits. Despite seeing the uniqueness of each nest, these descriptions jar with the individuality she paints so beautifully. The book remains perfect if you ignore these parts.
A beautiful and thoughtful guide by Thich Nhat Hanh to help mindfully move through each day. The book includes practices and thoughts for exercises as seemingly mundane as brushing teeth or preparing coffee. Each is given weight.
Later in the book, Hanh addresses heavier topics like food (of body and mind) and cycles of anger, and suggests practices of love that can help mitigate bad habits or hurtful situations. It is a beautiful, meditative book, worth having a copy to refer to as well as worth reading as a learning tool.
Monica Gagliano has written a unique book. It is a memoir of a kind describing her experience of learning from the voices of various plants: Socoba (Bellaco-caspi), Tobacco, Corn, Ayahuasca and others. The voices tell stories and help direct her scientific research.
The first half of the book is brilliant. It is fluid and calm, poetic and playful. Despite Gagliano's blinkered view of her own privilege (she writes as if everyone has the freedom to travel freely around the world and work in universities), it reads wonderfully and creatively and she constructs a philosophy that is like an intersection between Deleuze & Guattari and Donna Haraway, although not calling on either. Instead she calls on various plants, supported in her conversations by humans who understand their world. The plants suggest experiments that she should follow, and she listens. This theory and process is magnificent, adventurous and wild, and very brave. …
Monica Gagliano has written a unique book. It is a memoir of a kind describing her experience of learning from the voices of various plants: Socoba (Bellaco-caspi), Tobacco, Corn, Ayahuasca and others. The voices tell stories and help direct her scientific research.
The first half of the book is brilliant. It is fluid and calm, poetic and playful. Despite Gagliano's blinkered view of her own privilege (she writes as if everyone has the freedom to travel freely around the world and work in universities), it reads wonderfully and creatively and she constructs a philosophy that is like an intersection between Deleuze & Guattari and Donna Haraway, although not calling on either. Instead she calls on various plants, supported in her conversations by humans who understand their world. The plants suggest experiments that she should follow, and she listens. This theory and process is magnificent, adventurous and wild, and very brave.
However, when the experiments begin, they are not particularly nuanced and we only see the ones that support the claims she is making. While the ideas are terrific and the results are exciting, there is a lack of scientific rigour. For example, an experiment works on peas in isolation, showing how they can be trained to respond to stimuli like Pavolv's dogs, but there is no follow-on to see if this might work in other conditions. It probably would, and I would love to believe it, but claiming success in such experiments only repeats the mistakes that Gagliano criticises in science, where there is a blindness to other results, particularly those you do not want to see. Further to this, there is a lot of anger against the academic world on the later pages (sometimes justified, at other times harsh) and repeated claims to have 'discovered' truths that have already been presented by many theorists and artists over the past few hundred years (and likely much longer).
In the end, the plants speak, and Gagliano listens, but it feels like if she had listened to some more humans she might have an even broader story to tell. Maybe someone else will take on this mantle, and hopefully will be inspired by some of the wonderful work that is presented here.
The island of Mingheria plays host to a doubly deep deception by the master storyteller Orhan Pamuk. The book opens by telling us it is written by a fictional historian, followed by an introduction to the fictional Mediterranean island where the history takes place. The events surround a spread of plague on the island in 1901, and its social and political consequences. Interestingly, Pamuk began writing it with the advice of epidemiologists before the COVID-19 pandemic began, but it echoes many socio-polotical events of that period.
While the character elements of the story are a little hollow, the book is flawless when it deals with the entangled machinations of political intrigue. The author (both the false narrator and the authentic writer) show a keen sense of how politics, religion and social norms entwine in and around events like an epidemic, quarantine measures, and public health. More than this, Pamuk takes …
The island of Mingheria plays host to a doubly deep deception by the master storyteller Orhan Pamuk. The book opens by telling us it is written by a fictional historian, followed by an introduction to the fictional Mediterranean island where the history takes place. The events surround a spread of plague on the island in 1901, and its social and political consequences. Interestingly, Pamuk began writing it with the advice of epidemiologists before the COVID-19 pandemic began, but it echoes many socio-polotical events of that period.
While the character elements of the story are a little hollow, the book is flawless when it deals with the entangled machinations of political intrigue. The author (both the false narrator and the authentic writer) show a keen sense of how politics, religion and social norms entwine in and around events like an epidemic, quarantine measures, and public health. More than this, Pamuk takes many satirical shots at nationalism and nationhood, employing as a punchline the fictional island nation of Mingheria at a time when nation states were becoming a way of politically understanding territory in many parts of the world.
Proxopera is a relentless novella, set in the Troubles in Northern Ireland and told at a furious pace. It is ostansibly about a family held hostage by three IRA members while one of them is told to drive a bomb into the local town.
On a subtler level it speaks to the senselessness of violence, winding and weaving through snippets of old stories remembered by the central character. Brutal, poetic, and sometimes darkly funny, it is a harsh reminder of the violence of the near past in Northern Ireland.
Interspecies Kinship
Contributors: Sharon Blackie, Nickole Brown, Brenda Cárdenas, Ourania Emmanouil, Monica Gagliano, Anne Galloway, …
Making Kin with Nonhmans
4 žvaigždutės
This is the third book in the series Kinship. It is a series of essays and poems, this volume focussed on relationships betqeen human and nonhuman kin. Like the first two, it suffers from a white bias and a US-centric viewpoint in some of the essays, but mostly it contains some wonderful writing and is the best in the series so far.
Standout articles are by the always-brilliant Anne Galloway and her kinship with sheep, Merlin Sheldrake's thoughts on fungi and lichen, and Richard Powers' thoughtful considerations on the degrees of separation between us and other creatures (although that essay also contains one of the series' most damning howlers in reference to the Rwandan genocide). Great, broad essays and a worthwhile book.
A clear, thoughtful, and wide-reaching exploration of complex systems, in theory and in practice. Meadows …
System System
2 žvaigždutės
Donella Meadows is one of the 20th Century's most well known systems theorists, mostly due to her landmark book Limits to Growth. This follow-on, written in the 90s and published in 2006, is a high-level introduction to systems theory.
As a basic book on a subject, it is accessible and sometimes enjoyable. It is strongeSt when Meadows is exploring comcepts like nonlnear systems, where as a reader you can consider the implications. But the book is not well written, and uses far too many examples, sometimes contradictory ones, without useful evidence or theory. While it is refreshing to see a stance in the 90s that supports systemic change, other more recent books do this better.
Also, the unapologetic references to Garrett Hardin are pretty unpalettable to anyone who knows about him.
What is at stake in naming data centres as data farms? These installations are essentially …
Data decentred
3 žvaigždutės
This is a research object presented as a series of essays and musings on data infrastructure in different nations and political regions. It is as much a philosophical dive into the idea of data centres as it is a technical or sociological book. Although the metaphor of 'farms' never really materialises in the text (despite the editor's promises at the beginning), the deeper connections of data to infrastructure and geopolitics make for fascinating and thoughtful reading. The design is also terrific.
Although the chapters are by different authors, the overall voice feels like it is collective and cohesive. There is a tendency for the essays to repeat musings on infrastructure, as there are natural overlaps in different studies, which could have been trimmed out.
A clear, thoughtful, and wide-reaching exploration of complex systems, in theory and in practice. Meadows …
A friend loaned me her copy of this as she felt I'd like it, so I'm giving it a go. Her copy is covered in notes, scribbles and marginalia, which I think will add to the experience.
Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices is a speculative endeavor asking how we may represent, relay, …
Multiple perspectives on Multi-species Storytelling
3 žvaigždutės
This is a strong collection of essays, poems and artworks by philosophers, poets, academics and artists writing on multispecies storytelling. It includes well-known figures like Vinciane Despret and Helen V. Pritchard alongside others who are newer to the field. The essays are all very different, taking perspectives from rodents, cockroaches, dogs, penguins, fungi and many others in an array of stories.
The diversity of the essays is a strength and a weakness for reading this through, as it is hard to move from one to another fluidly. However, this is not that type of book. It is exploratory and playful. The best moments are in a poetic and fun exploration by Gillian Wylde, an artistic collaboration with cockroaches by Adam Dickinson and a wonderful essay of a journey of learning with cows by Emily McGiffin. Worth a read for anyone interested in this area.
