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
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, …
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.
Nan Shepherd is famous today for her wonderful book exploring the Cairngorm mountains, The Living Mountain. This book, The Quarry Wood, came earlier and is s novel, concerning a protagonist Martha and her life going into university education.
The narrative flows very well, and the dialogue is brilliant, written in part in Scottish phonetic. However, the story doesn't ever really get going, and although it does describe an interesting set of characters and time, I found the book too slow to enjoy fully. It is more a poetic description of a time and place than a novel.
Simone Weil is sometimes seen as a contentious philosopher, although I often wonder if that is mostly because she died young in a fraught time. Had her ideas developed, with a broader context, they might have resolved into more complete arguments.
This short compilation of three essays from the 1940s is a good example of her brilliance, her contentiousness and her unresolved ideas. The title essay is a thoughtful deep dive into how power is maintained through language, focussing on the dominant communist-fascist dichotomy of the time. The second essay, Human Personality considers individual and collective personhood, but makes broad claims about individuality that miss glaring counter-arguments that seem obvious, at least in today's philosophies. The third essay, The Needs of the Soul is from Weil's magnum opus, "The Need For Roots", and even in that book it felt unresolved. It deals with how rootedness and moral philosophy are entangled. …
Simone Weil is sometimes seen as a contentious philosopher, although I often wonder if that is mostly because she died young in a fraught time. Had her ideas developed, with a broader context, they might have resolved into more complete arguments.
This short compilation of three essays from the 1940s is a good example of her brilliance, her contentiousness and her unresolved ideas. The title essay is a thoughtful deep dive into how power is maintained through language, focussing on the dominant communist-fascist dichotomy of the time. The second essay, Human Personality considers individual and collective personhood, but makes broad claims about individuality that miss glaring counter-arguments that seem obvious, at least in today's philosophies. The third essay, The Needs of the Soul is from Weil's magnum opus, "The Need For Roots", and even in that book it felt unresolved. It deals with how rootedness and moral philosophy are entangled.
Overall, this is a good selection of Weil's work and a nice book to consider some of her ideas with, and to understand why she is both revered and derided by philosophers today.
I love Pamuk's writing and am excited to start his most recent novel.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who …
This novel by Ocean Vuong is told from a first-person narrative as an autobiographical story written to the protagonist's mother. But using this as a device, it tells multiple stories simultaneously. Each is almost a parable, and none is independent of another. It takes place in the USA primarily.
The protagonist relates his coming into the world, his childhood, his first love, his violent youth, his grandmother's love for him (and her past life in Vietnam), and his experiences of grief. Entangled are the acts of violence of the Vietnam War, the estrangement of the protagonist from his two nations, drug addiction and abuse, philosophy and thoughts on how words find meaning. The story alone is uncomplicated, and ticks along at a pleasant pace, but the poetic undertones and masterful weaving of story with concept make it a wonderful experience. To paraphrase Vuong's words: This book is not created from …
This novel by Ocean Vuong is told from a first-person narrative as an autobiographical story written to the protagonist's mother. But using this as a device, it tells multiple stories simultaneously. Each is almost a parable, and none is independent of another. It takes place in the USA primarily.
The protagonist relates his coming into the world, his childhood, his first love, his violent youth, his grandmother's love for him (and her past life in Vietnam), and his experiences of grief. Entangled are the acts of violence of the Vietnam War, the estrangement of the protagonist from his two nations, drug addiction and abuse, philosophy and thoughts on how words find meaning. The story alone is uncomplicated, and ticks along at a pleasant pace, but the poetic undertones and masterful weaving of story with concept make it a wonderful experience. To paraphrase Vuong's words: This book is not created from the violence of the past, but in spite of it. It is created from beauty, and it is beautiful.
Spotted this in a very nice bookshop in Westport, Ireland. I love Weil's thoughts and it's very apt to something I'm working on now, so I picked this small book up.
Radical Friends brings together the leading voices in the DAO, NFT, crypto-art, Web3, and blockchain …
This is a very exciting tome. It is about 'Distributed Autonomous Organisations' (DAOs) in the arts. DAOs are essentially a method of leadership of organisations with distributed leadership among members, often using technologies like blockchain to help decision-making. The book has so many ways to be used that it's hard to know how to describe or review it. It is simultaneously an artwork about distributed leadership, a guide to establishing and running DAOs, a philosophical and theoretical exploration of radical friendships, a documentation of existing projects and a more-than-human object that speaks beyond itself. It is really wonderful.
Radical Friends is divided into essays, artworks, conversations and other short sections. It is wonderfully edited and laid out, and is very beautiful throughout – the tarot card deck Hexen 2.0 by Suzanne Treister divides the book sections, and other artistic and aesthetic/design choices are perfect.
Naturally, with so many voices in …
This is a very exciting tome. It is about 'Distributed Autonomous Organisations' (DAOs) in the arts. DAOs are essentially a method of leadership of organisations with distributed leadership among members, often using technologies like blockchain to help decision-making. The book has so many ways to be used that it's hard to know how to describe or review it. It is simultaneously an artwork about distributed leadership, a guide to establishing and running DAOs, a philosophical and theoretical exploration of radical friendships, a documentation of existing projects and a more-than-human object that speaks beyond itself. It is really wonderful.
Radical Friends is divided into essays, artworks, conversations and other short sections. It is wonderfully edited and laid out, and is very beautiful throughout – the tarot card deck Hexen 2.0 by Suzanne Treister divides the book sections, and other artistic and aesthetic/design choices are perfect.
Naturally, with so many voices in many chapters, there are things that I didn't agree with or didn't particularly enjoy, including a very blithe conversation featuring an NFT artist, but as an object the book is magnificent and a great achievement for the editors Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty. Hard to pick a highlight, but Rafferty's own essay The Reappropriation of Life and Living is extraordinary, as is Cassie Thornton's contribution.
Saw a post on Mastodon that was about how the wonderful Nan Shepherd also wrote fiction, so I decided to try this one first. Got it from the library.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who …
My partner read and loved this, so I picked it up before it is returned to the library.
An extraordinary book, filled with poetry from the first page. Helen Macdonald seamlessly links a chain of things that seem unconnected: her grief over her father's death, training a goshawk, the strange life of the author TH White, perspectives on nature and nationalism, and magic.
Aside from the electric storytelling, the prose throughout is poetic and poignant. The links to disparate things are seamless. And the linked processes of grief are explored delicately right to the end. Even when I don't agree with some of Macdonald's perspectives, I am very grateful to her for sharing this journey as such a literary wonder.
Vol. 2 – Place
Bioregional Kinship Contributors: Aaron Abeyta, Bethany Barratt, Elizabeth Bradfield, Art Goodtimes, …
This collection of essays is the second in the 5-volume series Kinship. Presented as "Place", the editors suggest that this book will be about situatedness and "crafting a deeper connection with earth's bioregions". Unlike the first volume, which brings together fascinating essays from many different perspectives and nations (albeit US-weighted), this collection of essays and poems is deeply flawed.
There are two main reasons for this. The first is that "place" seems to predominately mean "the USA" and more specifically mean "US border regions". This surely misses the point entirely, both because it considers place through enclosure only and because it leaves out almost all of the human-inhabited places in the world. The second (related) issue is that the authors, including those writing about "Indigenous experience", are mostly white and educated or working in the US education system. This is an obvious failing of the editors and seems …
This collection of essays is the second in the 5-volume series Kinship. Presented as "Place", the editors suggest that this book will be about situatedness and "crafting a deeper connection with earth's bioregions". Unlike the first volume, which brings together fascinating essays from many different perspectives and nations (albeit US-weighted), this collection of essays and poems is deeply flawed.
There are two main reasons for this. The first is that "place" seems to predominately mean "the USA" and more specifically mean "US border regions". This surely misses the point entirely, both because it considers place through enclosure only and because it leaves out almost all of the human-inhabited places in the world. The second (related) issue is that the authors, including those writing about "Indigenous experience", are mostly white and educated or working in the US education system. This is an obvious failing of the editors and seems a surprising oversight as so many writers worldwide could have contributed significantly to the idea of kinship with place, and have already done so in many better books.
Some of those flawed essays are good, but remain problematic in the overall collection. The only standout moments come from the brilliant poems of Craig Santos Perez and Sean Hill. A positive essay on generations of protest in the Ecuadorean Andes by Lisa María Madera is also a welcome piece of quality writing in this otherwise disappointing book.
Written over a span of twelve years, and edited by Toni Morrison, who calls Those …
Bambara was referenced in All About Love by bell hooks, albeit a different book. Her writing sounded worth a read. This was the only book immediately available from my library and comes with a glowing recommendation/introduction by Toni Morrison so I have decided to give it a read.
Words are important to Gretel, always have been. As a child, she lived on a …
Daisy Johnson weaves and twists together a modern myth about living on the edge of society. The story is broken in time between events when a mother, her daughter and a man lived together on a boat on the river, and the aftermath of this period where they all lost one another. The storytelling is crisp and flows well for most of the book.
The protagonists create language, and use it carefully, and at the end this seems the point of the book: that our world is built from the stories that we can create. Parts are a reimagining of Hansel and Gretel, but Everything Under is very much its own fairy tale.
From the publisher's website:
Seaweed is so familiar and yet its names - pepper dulse, …
Miek Zwamborn presents a book of many parts that is very poorly named as it has almost nothing to do with seaweed. In nine chapters, a history of seaweed in art and science is described, drawing from many artists, thinkers and writers. These sections are presented as if they share themes (with msmatched names as poorly chosen as the book title), but often the sections are so scattered with good information poorly connected that the threads get lost. This can be forgiven only because the content is fascinating and because the reproductions of artworks are beautifully printed.
At the end of the book, recipes using seaweed are printed and then follows a section with Zwamborn's fantastic illustrations next to descriptions of many different types of seaweed. This final section alone makes the book worthwhile, but the other parts add value. It would be a perfect book if the early sections …
Miek Zwamborn presents a book of many parts that is very poorly named as it has almost nothing to do with seaweed. In nine chapters, a history of seaweed in art and science is described, drawing from many artists, thinkers and writers. These sections are presented as if they share themes (with msmatched names as poorly chosen as the book title), but often the sections are so scattered with good information poorly connected that the threads get lost. This can be forgiven only because the content is fascinating and because the reproductions of artworks are beautifully printed.
At the end of the book, recipes using seaweed are printed and then follows a section with Zwamborn's fantastic illustrations next to descriptions of many different types of seaweed. This final section alone makes the book worthwhile, but the other parts add value. It would be a perfect book if the early sections were not so disorganised.