The Uncanny Valley Is in Fact a Gigantic Plain, Stretching as Far as the Eye Can See in Every Direction (MP3)

Given today at Rice...nice q&a I think...

Junkie XL

I reckon Ian Curtis would've made Joy Division sound a lot more like this than New Order, don't you?

Future Talks Outlined

...until mid April at least. I'll fill in some more soon. Like for instance, I'll be in Finland at some point.

Talk at Rice Tomorrow

If you're in the neighborhood I'm doing a lecture in the Kyle Morrow room at the top of the Library, at 1pm on Saturday. It's called:

The Uncanny Valley Is in Fact a Gigantic Plain, Stretching as Far as the Eye Can See in Every Direction

!!  

Audiobook

Get your lovely Hyperobjects audiobook here!

Winnipeg Here We Come

I'm having a bit of a creative streak and I think the talks I'm doing for the University of Manitoba might be some of my very best, he boasted. Not really boasting actually, just really into what I'm going to say up there. Maybe I do best when I'm talking near the Arctic for some reason. ?

Look at this incredible flyer for one of them. It's just like wow.

I'm also talking at the Atmospheres conference next week, and doing a seminar. Please please come and visit.

Irony

...by my ten year old daughter.

MDMA

Never had it? Never mind : ) Here is something almost as good. Listen carefully. I was listening to this on the express train to Edinburgh (passes through Wigan.... : ) ) . Baby Ford's album is titled OOO--how object oriented it that?!

1988...punks on e...

Syriza is not "radical left"

AP, nor is it "anti bailout." It, like the European Central Bank, is opposed to "strict" "austerity" ie acting as if Keynes never existed.

Nice one Greece!

Discuss.

Hotel Volkswagen

Jón Gnarr's play was read in Houston at Studio 101 yesterday afternoon. What a treat. If you're in Houston you should totally go to see it tonight--last chance. It's here! Absurdist, painful, hilarious, brilliant, playful--like a fresh wind blowing through you, as Jón's wife Jøga puts it.

Gnarr is the Best Party founder and part of the extraordinary group of anarcho-surrealist punks in charge of Iceland. Which is one reason Iceland is the best!

Edgar Froese RIP

I've been listening to your music since the early 80s. Loving the early Tangerine Dream, and some of the later TD too. And your solo stuff such as Aqua. Right now I'm listening to Electronic Meditation and I intend to go through them all by tomorrow...

You carried the flame for AMM and all the electronic composers of the age.

You got atonal, improvised, electronic music in the charts. Need I say more?

Björk NYC

Off to NYC in early March for the opening of her show at MOMA. Our Thing will be on sale there. Wow it looks so cozy and cuddly! And breathtaking.

Obviously you should go there.

My Bergen Talk (Video)

Plattform: Dark Ecology & Sonic Acts present “The Geologic Imagination” part 1 from Bergen Kunsthall on Vimeo.

Dorothy and William Wordsworth

My colleague John Mulligan has made this very interesting website on interactions between Dorothy Wordsworth and her brother William. His students did a lot of interesting stuff this last term. It's very nice to click on the words and phrases and see so much detailed explication.

Arca 2

Arca

You know who doesn't suck? The lovely people who work with Björk right now.

One of them is the extraordinary Alejandro, aka Arca, who has worked with Kanye West and who has the most incredible thing, Xen, which you must hear.

He just sent me a special copy of it!! I'm so honored by that!!

In my humble opinion he is a genius and from our conversations so far I'm convinced he could do my job. Easily.

Transcendental Geology

Thank you whoever or whatever you are!

How's this for an OOO airmail sticker:

Dentures

"Our minds can be wonderful, but at the same time they can be our very worst enemy. They give us so much trouble. Sometimes I wish the mind were like a set of dentures, which we could take out and leave on our bedside table overnight. At least we would get a break from its tiring and tiresome escapades." --Sögyal Rinpoche

Hahaha!

Forgot One Thing

That tune, it starts with a sequence of 9 notes split over 2 and a bit bars. So it's also out of phase: check!

Where Has This Tune Been All My Life?

Suspensions: check. Cimbalom: check. Modulation to the subdominant key so that the main riff appears to emerge out of this beautiful widescreen cloud, as it had been enfolded within it secretly: check. Major key with sadness: check.

That Great Japanese Painter

Vincent Van Gogh.

Discuss.

Licorice

An enormousness of it has been bought by me. Including some very fancy stuff in Copenhagen airport, that paradise of consumerism.

I ate so much in Norway! All the salty kinds I could get my hands on!

It was so good to chew some before my lecture. Better than coffee, especially in the evening. Somehow caffeine can slow me down in the evening--I think sometimes that happens with people???

Do What You Feel

Maybe it's this fresh fjord air or the powerful nice licorice I'm eating.

Jeff VanderMeer

He just got in touch with me and, synchronicity, look what just happened: Hyperobjects showed up in this New Yorker piece about his work. I'm super happy about that obviously.

On Ecological Touching: Knowing (as) Intimacy

Had a bit of a revelation at The Knowing Uv It exhibition here in Bergen. This exhibition was not about getting to the correct understanding or correct representation of the work of the painter in The Showing Uv It. It was in fact an invagination of the materials and themes implicit in the painter's work (one of which was in the show). Sort of an exploded diagram. A context explosion.

Ecological awareness just is this context explosion. Contextualism often (despite its advertising language) stops somewhere: usually at some kind of human/nonhuman boundary. Hence the rituals of exclusion meted out by some new left fora on me and Dipesh Chakrabarty recently. Class, gender, race—but as long as we remain within a human-scale roughly Hegelian frame in which the silent partner of Kantian correlationism (the nonhuman entity) is only visible as a projection of the human. To protect this guilty secret, mentioning bunny rabbits is denigrated as "a hippie thing" (actual words by actual New Left Review contributor).

Another implicit assumption is that art is a bit evil and has to be disarmed in advance, and that supplying its contexts disarms it.

But…

The more context you have, the more text: that's the simple version of the key Derridean insight il n'y a pas d'hors-texte. The more world you have, the more earth (Heidegger). The more understanding, the more standing-under.

And at some point, your context includes nonhuman beings such as bunny rabbits and geological time. And electrons.

So the context explosion forces you into intimacy with all kinds of nonhumans, rather than elevating you above them.

Knowing does not have to be about rising above. Knowing could be like what sand does to a trilobite. Enveloping and touching, for millions of years. A sand-morphic sand-ograph of a trilobite.

My uncle used to get very worried about how a cd player "knew" that it was an oboe playing at 5:23. But the machine doesn't have to "know" like that any more than a diamond needle has to "know" it's an oboe. The needle just rides the groove. The laser rides the sequence of holes. This absolute proximity is called touching and it tends to be put down in Western philosophy.

When knowing touches itself, for instance, it is called meditation and is denigrated as narcissism.

So then I decided to talk about it in Winnipeg. (In early Feb.)

Bergen

I haven't been here since 1986! And that trip is etched, etched on my mind. It seems as if, if the weather is okay, we may go to the top of the local mountain here, just as I did back then. I can see it from the charming old Terminus Hotel by the rail station, where you can get a train to Oslo, a train journey that might be one of the very best in the whole world. The aircraft approach to Bergen was as spectacular in its way as the old ship approach, banking low over mountains, bridges, buildings and fjords.

Uncuttable Space

The higher-dimensional the shape, the harder it is to cut into segments. Thanks Cliff! This would apply to hyperobjects, since they are so high dimensional.

Ecology and Philosophy

Oh this is so good. I started to teach my graduate class with that title today.

We are going to be looking at a range of continental and analytic philosophy of the last two hundred years, and I'm so excited to be teaching this kind of thing again. I hadn't taught it at the graduate level since the Winter Quarter of 2006 at the University of California. I'd like to think (haha) that I've improved since then so we shall see.

One thing I've decided not to do is overload the reading. It seems to me that the packed graduate syllabus is trying to perform "I'm so clever and learned," which one really doesn't need to perform. And also "You better shape up! This is grad school!" which is also quite unnecessary. What is necessary, however, is to read excellent books excellently.

Lithuanian Interview in Full

Here we go. Thank you to everyone.

Björk and Tim 2

...for those of you who were wondering, there is no link!

This is a physical object that we made.

It will be on sale at MOMA when the exhibition starts in March.

And it's beautiful.

Björk and Tim Work

A glimpse of how M/M put it together. Wow..............

Interview in Lithuanian

Lithuanian is one of the most beautiful languages I have ever heard. Also one of the most ancient.

The mp3 is going to be on this page and they have some stuff up about me already.

The thing is, the whole trip was extraordinary, and this was one of the extraordinary moments. The radio station pulled me into this nice dark room behind a bar and just started in with the best questions.

Cut to the Chase

Whatever you think of this chap's music, he's so accurate about depression (and so young to be so accurate!). Behold: 

I wish I could cross my arms, and cross your mind

Cause I believe you'd unfold your paper heart and wear it on your sleeve

All my life I wish I broke mirrors, instead of promises

Cause all I see, is a shattered conscience staring right back at me

I wish I had covered all my tracks completely cause I'm so afraid

Is that the light at the far end of the tunnel or just the train?

Lift your arms only heaven knows, where the danger grows

And it's safe to say there's a bright light up ahead and help is on the way

(Help is on the way, Help is on the way, Help is on the way...)

Help is on the way

I forget the last time I felt brave, I just recall insecurity

Cause it came down like a tidal wave, and sorrow swept over me

Depression, please cut to the chase and cut a long story short

Oh please be done. How much longer can this drama afford to run?

Fate looks sharp, severs all my ties and breaks whatever doesn't bend

But sadly then, all my heavy hopes just pull me back down again

(Back down again, back down again, back down again...)

I forget the last time I felt brave, I just recall insecurity

Cause it came down like a tidal wave, and sorrow swept over me

Then I was given grace and love, I was blind but now I can see

Cause I found a new hope from above, and courage swept over me

It hurts just to wake up, whenever you're wearing thin

Alone on the outside, so tired of looking in

The end is uncertain and I've never been so afraid

But I don't need a telescope to see that there's hope

And that makes me feel brave.   (Owl City, my daughter's favorite, "Tidal Wave")

"Depression, please cut to the chase...It hurts just to wake up, whenever you're wearing thin / Alone on the outside, so tired of looking in" wow. And: "Is that the light at the far end of the tunnel or just the train?" Wow. Excellent inversion!

Björk at MOMA

Here is the page, in case you hadn't yet found it. There are so many extraordinary things about how this exhibition is going to work. For instance, in the lobby, shhhhh Tim....

Philosophy, Design, Engineering (Zooetics Seminar) (MP3)

One and a half hours of excellent people talking about ecology and design, many of them engineers. In Lithuania.

Simone de Beauvoir: Why I Am a Feminist

Nice one. One of her sentences became an epigraph I used recently: Irony, a sense of the concrete.

Björk

Over the last half year or so I've been working with Björk on a mega piece of writing about music, aesthetics, ecology, philosophy, religion, politics...

It's so mega. I don't even know how to describe it, even to myself. Best thing that ever happened to me, in writing world. Björk knows how to find exactly the right word or phrase. I'm quite good at sentences. That's a good combination! It was mad to read one word that would sum up about a hundred of mine...

How to describe it. Well, think of all the really good things you know about Björk already. Now multiply them by fifty and add some other good things. I'm so honored to have been working with her. She is a big OOO fan...

Powerful multidimensional intelligence, that was part of it.

There is a major exhibition of Björk's work coming up at MOMA in New York and this is going to be released as part of that. The exhibition begins in March.

So I thought I'd start the new year by announcing this project. I hope you can come to the exhibition. Björk and I think that there is a major cultural shift going on around the world towards something beyond cynical reason and nihilism, as more and more it becomes impossible not to have consideration for nonhumans in everything we do. Hopefully this piece we made contributes to that somehow.

I was so lucky to be doing this while she was mixing her album with some of the nicest and most incredible musicians/producers I've ever met...great examples of this shift beyond cynical reason...

Here is something I think is so so amazing, the Subtle Abuse mix of “Hyperballad.” Car parts, bottles, cutlery--all the objects, right? Not to mention Björk's body “slamming against those rocks.” It's a veritable Latour Litany... And the haunting repetition...