Salt Sugar Fat

It strikes me that one thing this book reveals is how the taste map of the tongue is in error. There is a gigantic forest of sweet receptors for instance, throughout the mouth.

The mouth is a withdrawn thing and this fact makes that clearer. The old tongue map makes the appearance fit nicely over the thing.

Haunting, Enchantment, and Leaky Ecosystems: Zurkow's Presentation

Latour litanies! A fantastic list of directives at the end!

Haunting, Enchantment, and Leaky Ecosystems

That's My Class!

In the inset picture top left. Click for more detail.

Nazi Nature

Oh Banksy, friend of my father.

Bruno Latour

Started writing me. He is into Realist Magic and wants to know about hyperobjects from the horse's mouth. He is very very nice.

Marina Zurkow: "Haunting, Enchantment, and Leaky Ecosystems"

At Rice today (slides to follow!):

Permian Basin: NM plus TX, major amount of oil 
drawings to trouble her own bias; drove around West Texas January 2011
deep connection to oil 
dark polemical apocalypse of sketches needed to be discarded
in order to connect; to be honest about intentions and be open to what you would find
friendliness; metta; Pali; maitri = benevolence, good will, active interest in others
metta meditation: may all beings be protected from harm, be happy, be healthy, be free from suffering
>> brahmaviharas
we think we’ve lost a time of enchantment
but is affective force of enchantment >> modern world; cultivate generosity?
“a comportment that can be fostered through deliberate strategies”
(Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life”)
to be struck
one must be enamored with existence
Latour ANT--objects are part of social networks, endure translations 
nonmodern world not culture versus nature
is this a nonessentialist animism? 
beyond anthropomorphism: human as weaver of morphisms (Latour)
not making the world in our own image
passive and vibrant binary; places below threshold active power; “lively streams of chemicals” << landfill
Stanislavski; “what if” “What if were in the same situation as my character?”
to imagine a nonhuman umwelt; what does nonhuman sense? what does it want? 
is a gross change of relations desirable and possible? 
how can enchantment help?
Zurkow found the sinkhole using Google Satellite
steadily growing since it opened in 2002
not that exceptional but anthropogenic; flushing too much water << oil drilling
“ecological collateral damage”
geological force of humans; small eg
Earl Williams; local naturalist; “all nature abhors a vacuum”
Veronique Rossier; software that treats all the elements as actors including the water, clouds, rocks
then times of day and year <> probability >> animation
one minute of screen time = one hour of our time

somewhere between real natural history and flights of invention
Jack Collum “Nature is slow, people get bored”
nature is incredibly boring when you’re in it! 
hazmat workers << YouTube like choreography
rotoscoping; tracing over video

underground
map of what is below the big empty
what does a drill bit see? 
modern visualization tools are rather lifeless and flat
NeoGeo
looking at infinitely receding rock strata
deep time -- earth having a history
the liquidity of rock

The Inside Story of Modern Gasoline (1946) >> her piece
loop (nb nb!)

repeatable structural unit: -mer; polymers
PMA, PVC, PS, PU,  PIB [rubber],  HDPE,  LDPE
nurdles; tiny plastic resin beads, precursors of things
mimicking plankton; consumed
microplastics outnumber zooplankton 6 to 1
persistent organic pollutants (POPs)
endocrine disruption
immune disfunction
nurdle eating turtles; bottle eating babies
plasticity of petrochemicals >> Jesus candles and water bottles
>> Petroleum Manga
vertigo; endless amounts of things <> manga
strange notion: hydrocarbons want to become
by becoming plastic hydrocarbons can live forever
printed with solvent ink on Tyvek, made from HDPE (thermoplastic)
plastic regrind: objects ground back down into pellets
book on petroleum manga coming out soon! 

Fiona Raby and Anthony Dunne, Critical Design FAQ 10 “But isn’t it art” 
“we expect art to be shocking and extreme; critical design needs to be closer to the everyday”
“if it is regarded as art it is easier to deal with; but if it remains as design it’s more disturbing”
so why not put design directly in your mouth? 
Mark Dion “we live, breathe and eat our field of investigation”
food doesn’t shout I am an art project
>> Outside the Work
BU sustainability exhibit
hydrocarbon formation <> kitchen techniques
Berg iceberg water: they will go to waste anyway (!) is their argument
honey plus maraschino cherry dye (processed in bees); taste like twizzlers
“it was amazing, and awful” 

Immortal Plastics New York May 1-4
trained hydrocarbon assessors! examining hang tags on clothes etc 
to ascertain total amount of personal plastic
leave with inventory and jar of plastic containing the weight of what they came with
people love strange rituals in which they quantify themselves
performance art or DIY science or sloppy green nonprofit
SUM QUOD ERIS; QUOD ES, IPSE FUI (Petrus Alfonsus) [haha, the name]

The Thirsty Bird, 2012

Some steps towards haunting and enchantment
to ask with imagination and bodies what we want of them and what they want of us (Bennett)

“Queer Ecology”; working with intimacy
Marina Zurkow makes a list of directives: 
put the questions in your body
Get it all over you, make it personal and intimate
don’t scale up, possibly make it replicable
ruffle it, trouble it
invite questions, rifts, holes and escapes
use wonder as a gateway to complex relations
use complex relations as a way to induce wonder
make time do funny things

Q&A:
Q: How did you get in to the community? 
A: I was very truthful at Wink, and we had meetings where we laid guns down at the door as it were. I sent everyone links to the work. I hooked up with a secret eminent domain activist. She was very paranoid. I was suspect no matter who it was, right or left! I’m very clearly an invasive species when I do these projects. 

Q: Can you talk some more about the responses to the works? 
A: My work is all online and so for me to explain my work seems banal. I want to extend my intentions. I get a lot of responses along the lines of “you leave so much to interpretation” as if that’s a bad thing. There is a need for a solution like agitprop or propaganda, which I’m totally not for in my practice. What the value proposition is in even engaging with enchantment. Can art really contribute to paradigm shifts? I don’t really have answers. 

Q: Thinking about enchantment. What is the relation to haunting? Is haunting a means or is it its own goal or moment? 
A: Haunting tends to have more negative connotations. There is a lot of value in haunting. Emptying your bag into a bin. Eating and encountering petrochemicals. I was haunted by accumulating all my plastics in my living room. Enchantment tends to be lulling. Bennett issue. A lot of my work was positioned after a crisis in the past; there was a calm to it. People criticized me for creating too much around these issues. I don’t feel fully articulated about it. 

Q: How did you get into this? Connections with other people working in this area and 1970s? Last time there was all this interest. Beuys 10 000 oaks and so on. 
A: I follow threads. They are not really linear. 2006 was a watershed. I have a studio in Brooklyn, sub-garden level. My studio started flooding from excessive rain. I had to swab the studio. It was so vivid; the water ended up under my computer chair. I then received hurricane evacuation maps. Inconvenient Truth came out. You can’t hide anymore. The petroleum thing was a whim. I can’t believe I’m still working on it--it won’t let me go! Talking with DiverseWorks about making a mesocosm in West Texas...I’d have to think more about the 70s connection. 

Q: I have a question about time. Human time, geological time; but also machine time, computational time. Does this time bridge the human and nonhuman aspects? Or does it make it even more artificial? 
A: I don’t think it bridges. I think of it as another kind of time functioning. Is it even or uneven? 
Q: I don’t know. 

A: I refuse to deal with machines. Bogost on cameras--I lose interest! I privilege living in a way! It’s almost like a blind spot. 

Who or What Is Marina Zurkow?

Let Derek Woods, ruler of lichens, tell you.

Marina Zurkow at Rice Monday 4pm

“Haunting, Enchantment, and Leaky Ecosystems.” I shall be introducing, with Joseph Campana.

Are You Experienced?

Reggie Ray turned me into a Buddhist. Well I was a meditator already but he performed the refuge ceremony, at a winter retreat in the Rockies in January 1997. There was six feet of snow.

Reggie emphasizes the emptiness aspect, while Pema Chödron (another Trungpa student of yore and my friend Alan's meditation instructor of yore) emphasizes the compassion aspect. In a very physical way.

iTunes >> Store >> Dharma Ocean

We Have Exited the Holocene

This data point seems rather shockingly vivid in that regard.

(When) Does the Cynical Reason Take Over

...in this Chipotle advertorial? I reckon even Adorno would have found it hard not to like the detourned Willy Wonka. Thanks to Larry Butz, my consumerism students are exploring this.

Sabotage

How hard would it be for a hater to make a bot that signed up for accounts and passwords on healthcare.gov over and over and over again? And is anyone investigating that possibility?

Wrong Senator Inhofe

My uncle was just treated for a stroke in the UK. Very very well. He spent ten days in hospital.

The only difference between here and there is, he didn't have to declare bankruptcy afterwards like my mom in law has had to do, twice.

And Obamacare isn't "socialized medicine."

Other than that your nasty little squib is accurate. Not.

Automatic Nothingness (MP3)

My talk at Performing Objects. So good to see Rob Jackson and João again.

Automatic Nothingness

High Art/Low Art Is Now OOObsolete

Gosh I wish I'd been able to say that in the Q&A just now. There was a very good question that I answered by talking about indigenous cultures and modernity. But another way of thinking about some of the issues that the conference goers understand really well is that they suffer, as performers who use paper, puppets and “things” like that, from the denigration of “kitsch” or low art.

OOO gives you a way to see the high art/low art distinction (cf the art/craft and artist/artisan distinctions) as unworkable products of modernity that are not simply socially invidious, but ontologically unsustainable and ecologically dangerous.

This is why the makers of automata and puppeteers at this conference understand implicitly what I was saying in my talk, better than the kinds of words about it that come out of my mouth! They get that when you do art you are messing with causality and they get that love and a kind of sincerity coded as unsophisticated and childlike (and denigrated as such by high art and the cynical reason that underwrites it) are a way out of modernity.

In his talk João Florêncio was using high art examples precisely to say that even here, in sophisticated art, there are relations with nonhumans going on that transcend the “anything you can do I can do meta” syndrome.

I often wonder whether some of the reaction to Harman's thought is a displaced reaction to what is denigrated as kitsch and “low” by the avant-garde, who are, as he keeps insisting, fighting yesterday's war.

OOO shares with deconstruction a love for going back to the old philosophical jazz standards of the past and reworking them into really interesting tunes. And so do the makers of automata and children's books find interesting things in “old” aesthetic phenomena.

I wonder whether it's a kind of snob reaction, at bottom.

The Tea Party Speaks to the World on the Current Crisis

"We have lost the war. But we are determined not to lose the battle."

Delegitimizing the First Black President

If you haven't seen this yet--especially if you're wondering what the heck is going on over here, this is now required viewing.

Object-Oriented Feminism (MP3)

From SLSA. Packed room and a very enjoyable set of papers. Frenchy Lunning's was amazing, I feel. It was on overlaps between what Harman says about sensual objects and what Kristeva says about abjection.

Ada Lovelace Day

Happy day, celebrating the first programmer of computers.

Why Haven't I Received Hyperobjects Yet?

...probably because the first edition sold out before it appeared in the stores. Have patience given this rather surprising fact.

Interview Today

For Brooklyn Rail, about Hyperobjects. Greg Lindquist is a very interesting writer who has put together, for instance, this piece about object orientation and earthworks art.

It's Horrible How Wrong You're Getting This, BBC

So you have this neighbor who has been making your life hell. First he tied you up with a spurious lawsuit; you’re both suffering from huge legal bills. Then he threatened bodily harm to your family. Now, however, he says he’s willing to compromise: He’ll call off the lawsuit, which is to his advantage as well as yours. But in return you must give him your car. Oh, and he’ll stop threatening your family — but only for a week, after which the threats will resume.

Not much of an offer, is it? But here’s the kicker: Your neighbor’s relatives, who have been egging him on, are furious that he didn’t also demand that you kill your dog.

And now you understand the current state of budget negotiations.  --Paul Krugman

Can Movies Make Us Healthier?

My colleague Kirsten Ostherr rocking it at TEDx tomorrow.

TEDxHouston 2013  - The Other Things At Rice University, on September 12, 1962, John F. Kennedy made a speech in which he declared that we would land on the moon within a decade. On that day, in our great city, Kennedy bravely announced: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." 2503 days later, we achieved that audacious mission, stepped foot on another  world for the first time, and firmly established ourselves as universal explorers. This tremendous and difficult challenge took the combined efforts of thousands of creative, motivated and audacious individuals, and inspired many more to imagine their  own “moonshots.” Now...what about the other things? On October 12, 2013, 51 years and 1 month since that day, Rice University will host the fourth annual TEDxHouston. On that day, in our great city, we will listen to, engage with, and be inspired by The Other Things. We will explore what things are changing the  world as we know it, and what other things have yet to be accomplished. TEDxHouston is a full day conference featuring some of Houston's most innovative thinkers, leaders, and doers. Join us on this mission to explore a bold new world. LIVE SIMULCAST - Rice University Date: October 12, 2013 Time: 9am - 5pm Location: 100 Herring Hall, Rice University   Each year, TEDxHouston strives to provide as much access to TEDxHouston as possible. In a city of 4 million+ with limited seating at the main event space, we're looking to expand our reach by offering TEDxHouston viewing parties across the city. Rice University has come together to welcome the extended Rice community and TEDxHouston community to attend a simulcast event at Rice University. The event at Rice is free to attend (though parking is not covered) and is first come, first serve. We hope TED fans, students, and newcomers alike will come celebrate Houston's local speakers and ideas. For a list of available local simulcasts and how to register to attend, please  visit http://tedxhouston.com/2013/events.php PLEASE REGISTER FOR THE RICE SIMULCAST: http://tedxhoustonrice.eventbrite.com/. The School of Humanities is proud to announce that  Dr. Kirsten Ostherr  Professor of English and Director of the Medical Futures Lab will be presenting at TEDxHouston on October 12th!  Dr. Ostherr teaches film and media studies, focusing on ephemeral film and historical and contemporary visualizations of health and disease in photography, film, television, animation, advertising, and medical imaging. In Fall 2011 she was a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for  Medical Humanities, at the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, TX. With the support of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship, she is currently pursuing a Master of Public Health degree at UT-Houston, and is also a Fellow in The John P. McGovern,  M.D. Center for Humanities and Ethics, at the University of Texas Health Science Center, Houston, TX. Dr. Ostherr’s current research is focused on accelerating the uptake of media theory in health communication platforms to enable providers and patients to optimize their use of mobile health technologies. She is Co-founder and Director of the Medical Futures Lab, a collaborative center  linking Rice University, Baylor College of Medicine and UT Health to train the medical media innovators of the future through creative, hands-on critical thinking and design. A cornerstone of the Medical Futures Lab is the Medical Media Arts Hub, a program that joins Rice undergraduates  with Texas Medical Center healthcare providers to solve information, communication, and visualization problems through a collaborative design process involving providers, patients, and students. For more information about the schedule and a full list of 2013 TEDxHouston speakers, please visit: http://tedxhouston.com/2013/speakers.php.

OOO + Feminism

My talk “Weird Essentialism” is about that, by the way, as is my other talk, “All Objects Are Deviant,” which I shall soon post. It was good to do that one, on the third year of the Object-Oriented Feminism panels.

Puppetry

“At a press conference Thursday, House GOP leadership announced the new strategy, one day after Heritage Action CEO Michael Needham admitted the group will ‘give the speaker some flex on a short-term debt limit increase’, in order to extend the shutdown over Obamacare.” (link)

Getting Ready, World?

I do so wish the BBC would stop reporting this whole thing as a tiff. Nicholas Kristoff isn't the greatest but he gets it right here:

The House Republican hard-liners lost their battle against Obamacare in the democratic process, just as President Obama lost his battle for an assault-weapons ban. But instead of accepting their loss as Obama did, members of the Gang of 40 took hostages. Unless Obamacare is defunded, they’ll cause billions of dollars in damage to the American economy.

The G.O.P. claims to be the party particularly concerned by budget deficits. Yet its tantrum caused a government shutdown that cost the country $1.6 billion last week alone.

As for the debt limit, the costs of missing that deadline could be infinitely greater. Already, interest rates are spiking for one-month Treasury bills to their highest levels since the 2008 financial crisis.The Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank, calculates that the 2011 debt-ceiling confrontation will, over a decade, cost American taxpayers an extra $18.9 billion.

And that was the price tag for a crisis in which the debt-limit deadline was eventually met. If this deadline is missed, the costs in higher interest rates in the years ahead will be billions more.

Members of the Gang of 40 are unwilling to pay for early childhood education, but they’re O.K. with paying untold billions for a government shutdown and debt-limit crisis? That’s not governance, but extremism.

If Nothing Will Happen

...why are you threatening to blow up the debt ceiling?

My Gerrymandered District

Can you believe it? The district stops literally at the houses down my street where Chicano and black people live. And it winds into areas that are in no sense (ecological, infrastructural, urban planning) related to mine.

"We Must Reduce the Debt for the Good of Our Children"

1. Bonds are a good thing. Debt = bonds. Lots and lots of bonds for the children.
2. And therefore lots and lots of jobs and houses in the present.
3. Economics 101: money now is better than money later.

"Compromise"

1. The Democrats have already compromised.
2. You don't get to impose the Romney economic plan by force. Romney is not the president.

Good

There has already been (outrageous) compromise. One needs to pay the interest on those debts, Congress, or...

BBC, You are still not doing your job of reporting on this accurately.

"This Teevee Is Broke," Said the Man with the Axe

“the child who kills both his parents and then asks the court to have mercy on him because he is an orphan...”

"We're Not French, We Don't Surrender"

1. Obama is not a Nazi.
2. That not being French thing might be part of the problem.
3. Also that rigidity thing you got there.

World Media, Read This

Ted Yoho, a Tea Party Republican, thinks that defaulting would be a valuable bringer of stability to world markets. And he's pleased with the way he's rolled the speaker of the house. And he doesn't think that much has been affected by the shutdown, so whatever...

Dear Mr. President

Do not cave to the GOP over the debt ceiling. A minority of the minority (the Tea Party) do not get to rule by deciding on the exception and coercion through states of emergency. They are trying to delegitimize you. If we have to go through default for them to learn this lesson, so be it. Democracy is more important than money. Yours sincerely,

Schopenhauer Eat Your Heart Out

Schopenhauer is well into how thousands of years old seeds can still sprout--a symptom of Will, he thinks. It's a wonderful, speculative realist passage in his work. So look at this. A new example! With strange biblical resonances. Biology exceeding the bible...

Racism and Social Work

Here is an issue I care about a lot, which I was talking about with my mum, who is a psychoanalyst and was a manager of and then consultant concerning daycare centers for highly at-risk children.

The recent spate of horrible stories in the media coming out of the UK about small children who were killed or left to die share one thing in common: many many social workers saw what was happening, or could have. Why didn't they stop it?

The other common denominator is that the families concerned are either non-white or recent immigrants.

We conclude that a signal not to interfere with other culture out of some kind of strange upside down PC “respect” provides an outlet for implicit racism, both personal and structural.

Time to address this, people.

No Candy Crowley

...the US government doesn't need to "borrow more." It needs to allow what has already been legislated to be paid for.

The Rice Consumerism Project

As part of the consumerism class my students have to blog, according to a set of constraints that tune their posting towards consumerism. If you haven't read it at all, or haven't read it for a while, you will love its developments.

I Sometimes Like Jonathan Chait

“In our Founders’ defense, it’s hard to design any political system strong enough to withstand a party as ideologically radical and epistemically closed as the contemporary GOP. (Its proximate casus belli—forestalling the onset of universal health insurance—is alien to every other major conservative party in the industrialized world.) The tea-party insurgents turn out to be right that the Obama era has seen a fundamental challenge to the constitutional order of American government. They were wrong about who was waging it.” link

Associated Press, You Have a Wonderful Way with Words

...you've been out to undermine Obama since before the 2008 election. The common denominator in the befuddlement in the US government that you see reflected in foreign newspapers: a segment of House Republicans who are out to make sure that the first African American president fails. But by not mentioning them--I bet the German papers do--you befuddle us too.

Weird Essentialism (MP3)

My talk at SLSA 2013.

Weird Essentialism

Chris Schaberg in Sweden

It's happening this coming week and you should go there if you're near: the conference will be on place and non-place and Chris is the airport meister! And my recovering Ph.D. student! You will also see Bruce Robbins, very smart Columbia University guy.

Bisected by the Hyperobject

At SLSA

"This Isn't Some Damn Game"

(Boehner). Yes it is. It's a sadistic game with rules and moves you keep inventing and reinventing, and I for one have no wish for anyone whatsoever to play it.

Object-Oriented Feminism Panel 1

Frenchy Lunning's talk was just extraordinary. There were a lot of affinities between our talks. Her talk was about body image and abjection. This really moved things forwards I feel.

How to think abjection is built into the OO theory if you think about it. Here I am surrounded closer than skin by all these things: I can't peel them off me. I especially can't peel off the sensual ether. So there is a passage between OOO and Kristeva.

In my talk I discovered one between OOO and Irigaray.

More on this soon!

More Art Meat

This is Oron Catts's response. Three words: fetal bovine serum! And some more words: the response was before the spectacle!

Art Meat

Oron Catts is talking about this. Watch the faces!

The Easy Think Substance

I'm going to introduce an idea today at SLSA: the Easy Think Substance.

Chairs Are Trying to Kill You

Thanks Henry!

Keep Them Poor

This editorial gets it very right.

Harman at Columbia

This is the sort of thing that makes you very happy to be Graham's friend. I don't know that many people who can talk like that from index cards. Actually I don't know anyone who can do that, to that level.

He's coming to Rice in a few months time! Stay tuned.

I Like This Chap's Take, a Lot

“There is nothing to negotiate.  Reid gave Boehner the CR number they asked for.  Boehner demanded an end to ACA.  Obama cannot give them that. 
Boehner is making demands; Obama just wants the government open.  Boehner is making more demands; Obama doesn't want the US to default.   Republicans expect concessions despite losing the election, and Obama just expects them to do their job.  There is no mention of Republicans actually giving Democrats concessions like expanding SS or giving Federal workers raises.   
Republicans act like a functioning government is somehow offensive to them and must be compensated for it.   Their primary job is making the government work and the refuse to do it.” From This Chap

Olafur Eliasson Video

This is very well put together. A train makes a drawing. I'm writing an essay for him right now so this comes in handy. Nice soundtrack. It makes me think of dub, even though it isn't...

Also Keynoting at Notre Dame this Weekend

Subhankar Banerjee--I'm excited to meet him a lot.

"Why Won't They Compromise?"

"The entire government is shut down right now because Washington Democrats refuse to even talk about fairness for all Americans under ObamaCare," Steel said. "Offering to negotiate only after Democrats get everything they want is not much of an offer."

The whole of Obamacare is a compromise. It was hammered out, often distressingly, over a year plus by Republicans and Democrats. 

BBC and foreign news services, beware of "objectivity" and false equivalencies in this. I had to write to the BBC already about their calling Obamacare a "bill" (the Republican spin). 

Performing Objects Looking Good

What an excellent website these guys have made.

Woods Reviews Fierce Green Fire

Derek Woods is my PhD student! 

Energy and Environment Site

The CENHS space has been upgraded.