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.

This is my talk from the International Byron Conference. Laugh! Cry! Hear my exasperation at Simon Critchley!

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

Two hours of fantastic conversation, I thought. Hosted by the Philosophy Department at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. Sjoerd van Tuinen presiding.

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 was a short but very helpful (for me) Q&A from my talk at Yes Naturally.

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

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

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

Here is my Cultures of Energy talk. Cute Ouroboros by Ian Bogost. During lunch two people said “You know, that was a really cute ouroboros.” Dark Ecology

With me and Bruce Holsinger. It was incredibly good on a number of levels to reconnect with him this way. You'll see. Listen as Bruce and I blithely ignore everything between the late fourteenth century and 1985. Oh and Scritti Politti is involved. And animal skin.

A talk about OOO, Pink Floyd and ecology, at UVa's awesome Subject to Change conference. Thank you Jesse Bordwin (who introduced me), Tom Berenato and all the other incredible people. Thank you Bruce Holsinger! It's good to know you all these years sir.

This was our presentation to the Cultures of Energy seminar at Rice today. Joe Campana, me, Aynne Kokas, Derek Woods.  Joe and me: beauty and ugliness: oil pipes (beauty of landscape is about hiding them!) versus wind farms (that farmers don’t want messing up their horizon) relationship between beauty and energy me; different scales and spatiotemporal rhythms required: Marina Zurkow--just taking that simple hydrocarbon ad and multiplying it nature coloring books: use of kitsch concept of MESOCOSM And an engagement with things that are considered somewhat marginal to or provocatively on the side of the aesthetic: food; the Klingberg mandala -- disturbing but not in the usual ways; products, shopping looking at issues of consumption and taste consumerism possibility space Joe: it’s a nice segue from the previous Catastrophe cluster presentation. The group formed as a way of thinking about how artists think about energy in a variety of media. Before I even knew I had an interest in t...