Sixian

Thus, “the moments of sensual pleasure in the idea, the voice, the instrument are made into fetishes and torn away from any functions which could give them meaning.”They exemplify what media theorist David Cecchetto, building on the work of John Durham Peters, calls “incommunication”: the process by which the impossibility of true communication... See more

A simple interaction with a stranger at a cocktail party who doesn’t reciprocate our handshake can leave us sour all night. We may even respond with aggression when we are introduced to that person via email a week or two later.

Seventy-nine field reports from scientists, humanists, and artists show you how to recognize “feral” ecologies, that is, ecologies that have been encouraged by human-built infrastructures, but which have developed and spread beyond human control. These infrastructural effects, Feral Atlas argues, are the Anthropocene.

Over the course of a six-hour simulated vampire rave in a disused Berlin factory decorated to look like a nightclub in Bristol, I forgot I was an interloper. I even forgot to be embarrassed. Nobody cares whether you’re a journalist once the fake fangs are on. There I was, pretend-partying with seventy other people in costumes and acting out vampire... See more

It's all dependent on human context. This is what we're starting to see with del.icio.us, with Flickr, with systems that are allowing for and aggregating tags. The signal benefit of these systems is that they don't recreate the structured, hierarchical categorization so often forced onto us by our physical systems. Instead, we're dealing with a... See more

knowledge and wisdom are hardly “manageable.” They may be channeled, yes, but never fully captured. To capture is to kill. Keep the energy flowing.

But the most famous familiar one is the story where things fall apart, and how this culturally stable setting with your coherence and just the attempt of the protagonist trying to live true to those moral demands on his person creates trouble, which tells me, and I think, to any other reader, that the world is imbued with irony and paradox and... See more