Between Mandala and Machine

Imagine this machine, taking shape starting around 1250, being wound up like a clockwork toy, and being allowed to run for 700 years, and you get what we currently living generations recognize as our modernity. In terms of a technological metaphor, the machine was shifting steadily from one equilibrium point to another in a surprisingly controlled ... See more

The idea of technological change as quasi-autonomous, driven by some process of autopoesis or self-organization, allows many aspects of contemporary social reality to be accepted as necessary, unalterable circumstances, akin to facts of nature. In the false placement of today’s most visible products and devices within an explanatory lineage that in

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Calvino's task constraints arose from his fondness for first choruses outside literature-geometric form, symmetry, numbered series, combinations. The form that symbolizes combination best is the crystal.For me the main thing in a narrative is not the explanation of an extraordinary event, but the order of things that this extraordinary event produc

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All these imperatives, which have become the groundwork of science as technology in our present society, seem axiomatic and absolute only because they remain unexamined. The same change of mind appears also in a transfer from ritual regularity to mechanical regularity with an emphasis on time-keeping, space-measuring, account-keeping, thus translat

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