lightsinthedistance-modernlife

From Ecology and the Environmental Humanities, Rice University, September 13. Larry Butz presiding. Claire Colebrook in attendance. Rice is nice as there are a lot of auditoria in which to do such things. This was in Farnsworth which is a rather attractively octagonal one. Malfunctioning

...from the Wordsworth Conference. Nick Roe, awesome biography of Keats, MCs.

Sound, noise, ambience, OOO, music, with some nice examples (Felix Hess and Subject 13). Really an OOO theory of sound. From Tuned City Brussels. Gernot Böhme, whom I've been wanting to meet for ages, was very into it. And I believe that at some point it will be published. Christoph Cox also spoke: I shall upload my notes as soon as I can. Very nice chap. Earworms

It was long and thanks to Henk it was very detailed. Featuring drawings on blackboards!

Henk Oosterling is (1) A very nice chap (2) An excellent mind (3) Deeply interested in martial arts and Buddhism (4) Last but not least, someone who has created the most extraordinary school, sort of Plato's academy for 4 to 12 year olds in a struggling neighborhood of Rotterdam. Earth measuring (geometry) as philosophy, judo and growing things class(es). Wow. Anyway--more on that in another post. Here is what we did last night.

This is the Yes Naturally talk. It was extraordinary as I've said to see the art of Ai Wei Wei and so on, all exploring the idea of ecology without nature, which was the brief of the exhibition. I was struck by the exemplarity of Person Broersen and Margit Lukacs's movie Mastering Bambi , which was by turns an idyllic pastoral and a horror movie—yet without actors and with only one single shot, simply changes in color and music, a Möbius journey through a dark forest. Wow. I'll post more on everything as time goes by. Q&A mp3 to follow.

This was a "masterclass." Nicholas Royle opened the discussion by asking what I thought of the notion of "mastery." Wow! There thus devolved an enormous excursus on this issue that blended strangely nicely into the discussion of weird environmental poetics...

Sussex University is incredible and Lewes is incredible and Nicholas Royle is incredible. And the Q&A was incredible!

Concentric Temporalities

Things Are Fuzzy Ecological awareness requires that we rethink what it means to be a thing. This is necessary because it isn't clear that the things ecology cares about—frogs, meadows, clouds—are things at all! I shall argue that to be a thing is to be necessarily fuzzy . This means that you are made of things that aren't you, thus violating a fundamental rule of logic. If we want to think ecologically about things, we need to relax some of the logical rules.  There are deep consequences for art in so doing. One consequence is that it becomes clear that the idea of Nature is not useful at all. For historical reasons, this is also the case.

This Friday and Saturday. Click for the very nice schedule .

Ian Bogost's cute ouroboros is still my favorite opener. And closer. And everything in betweener. This talk features a good Q&A with David Simpson and Joseph Dumit, along with Lynette Hunter (thanks for inviting me, it was terrific) and many others. Weird Embodiment

"The Only Emergency Is the Lack of Emergency: Reflections on Creativity in the Anthropocene" Asa Briggs Lecture Theatre A2, 5-7 p.m, University of Sussex. Tuesday 21 May.

"What Vegetables Are Saying about Themselves." Thanks again to Ian for a very cute ouroboros... What Vegetables Are Saying about Themselves