“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, December 9, 2010

Hyperobjects, Cthulhu and You


—That is, they're Gaussian (non-Euclidean), a term that Einstein wonderfully translates as a “mollusk”-like space he calls a “reference mollusk” (Relativity). It's how Einstein visualizes time and space as inside objects (like Harman does), rippling through them rather than containing them in an empty box. By analogy, hyperobjects are squishy because they last so long. They are what I call temporally foreshortened.

The even more disturbing thing about relativity is, this also applies to you. The tiny clocks on your eyes moving across this screen are telling a slightly different time from the tiny ones on your knees that rest under the laptop.

I post on this over at Arcade and I've talked about it at Rice; and will do so again at Rutgers.

In his non-Euclidean city of R'lyeh, Cthulhu, an octopus-headed being (that is, like a mollusk), waits dreaming. Ecological awareness means: we have summoned Cthulhu-like beings into social, ecological and psychic space.

2 comments:

Joseph Charles said...

Very nice. Of course, I'm a sucker for anything Lovecraft related. He is truly the philosopher's fiction.

TitusL said...

He totally is!
Thought you might like my Cthulhu machinima film
The Highlander; Cthulhu Enigma
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdzezmqtHy4
Ia Ia Cthulhu Fhtagn!