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Thoreau’s Radicle Empiricism: Arboreal Encounters and the Posthuman Forest
It is time to liberate the forest from the anthropocentric metaphor. Donna Haraway, endorsing Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think (2013), says this clearly: “A thinking forest is not a metaphor.” Recent work by Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers on “Gaia,” along with Timothy Morton’s concept of the “hyperobject,” demands that we reevaluate our tendency toward metaphor when dealing with trees.
Kohn’s work, along with Michael Marder’s and Peter Wohlleben’s, suggests that we emphasize the cognitive life of trees, rather than harnessing the image of trees as metaphors for human cognition. We must view the forest as a thinking entity in its own right.
In this paper, I examine Henry David Thoreau’s writing as a model for an encounter with trees that moves beyond mere metaphor. Thoreau draws on his position as an American Transcendentalist and an empirical naturalist to approach trees both philosophically and scientifically. As a poet, he does not make poetry out of trees, but instead sees the poetry that trees themselves create.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 14:36
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Catherine Malabou, Anne Carson, and the Plasticity of Inheritance
Catherine Malabou has pursued her philosophy of plasticity across a number of recent works, published over several decades. In books such as The Future of Hegel, The New Wounded, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, Before Tomorrow, and Morphing Intelligence, she has explored the intimate connections between brain plasticity and temporality as pertaining to key figures in the modern philosophical tradition: Hegel, Kant, Freud, Bergson, Derrida, and others.
One might think of her corpus as composed of a series of adventurous and bold philosophical retracings, where motifs such as doublings, short circuits, metamorphoses, and wormholes through time feature prominently. She is a preeminent contemporary philosopher, but her work importantly interfaces with neuroscience, cognitive sciences, and the history of artificial intelligence too. Likewise, as I wish to argue in my conference presentation, her work has important implications for literary studies. I want to discuss implications and possible styles of practical application by bringing Malabou together with the contemporary poet Anne Carson.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 14:39
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Autography
Autography is an interactive artwork, in the form of a software application, that automatically generates evolving 3D graphic characters that resemble human hand-writing. The intention is to create a form of automatic writing made by a machine (instead of by a human). Automatic writing is commonly understood to be a form of unconscious expression, where a human in a fugue or similar state writes automatically. The writing often resembles hand-writing but tends to look more like scribble. The perceived value of automatic writing is dependent on the apprehension that human beings possess a subconscious (or unconscious) that can be interpreted through the act of automatic writing. The technique was popular amongst early 20th Century aficionados of theosophy and early psychology. Surrealist artists such as Andre Masson used the technique to develop semi-abstract artworks, whilst later authors and artists, such as Henri Michaux and Cy Twombly, employed the technique to develop highly sophisticated paintings and 'writings' that questioned both the authenticity of the artist's mark-making and the semiotic potential of writing.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 18:53
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Unerasable Characters II
The project explores the politics of erasure and the temporality of voices within the context of digital authoritarianism. Unerasable Characters II presents the sheer scale of unheard voices by technically examining and culturally reflecting the endlessness, and its wider consequences, of censorship that is implemented through technological platforms and infrastructure.
The project collects unheard voices in the form of censored/erased (permission denied status via the official API) text, including emojis, symbols, English and Chinese characters, which is based on one of the biggest social media platform in China called Weibo. A daily scraping script is used to fetch those text via Weiboscope, a data collection and visualization project, developed by Dr. Fu King Wa from The University of Hong Kong, in which the system has been regularly sampling timelines of a set of selected Chinese microbloggers who have more than 1,000 followers or whose posts are frequently censored.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 27.02.2021 - 12:39
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Turing's Assembly Line
Turing's Assembly Line is a cross between a gameart/artgame and an elearning (automatic learning) project. It was simultaneously developed for the amazing plato systems (automatic learning, 1960+) and for the web. It has been created by the Swiss artgroup AND-OR.ch (René Bauer and Beat Suter) in 2020.
As player you are not a user of the universal machine, you are Alan Turing‘s universal machine yourself. Please, sit down and begin to work!
You will receive task after task. You have to decide if you want to execute a task or if you don‘t. Of course you will also encounter some errors among the tasks. No program and no coder is perfect! You may even be confronted with exceptions, forkbombs ... and more.
Will you be fast enough? How many operations are you able to execute per minute? How long can you keep up the assembly line?
Cecilie Klingenberg - 27.02.2021 - 12:58
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Meet Me At The Station
Meet Me At The Station is a surreal and lyrical 10 minute experience for for 360 cinemas, domes, virtual reality headsets. A scientist is trapped in the future due to a time-travel accident. His only hope is to travel through dreams, but dreams can also turn into nightmares.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 27.02.2021 - 14:55
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Distant Affinities
Distant Affinities is a work of recombinant cinema about machine intelligence attempting to process, narrate and mimic sentient being. Through subtitles, the omniscient AI narrator cycles through media that has been captured from the network and attempts a narrative interpretation of the patterns of human behavior. Disparate data points and discontinuous video loops resist being systematized or narrativized. The distances or gaps between the text and video fragments suggest what remains outside the domains of surveillance and narrative. An allegory of the vagaries of networked life existing within larger webs of living and non-living systems, the work shows a world coming apart, but also transforming into a more spacious mode of being made of errant language, creaturely life, isolated gestures and mutating interfaces.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 27.02.2021 - 15:01
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A.I. Seems to Be a Verb
“I live on Earth at the present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing –a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process– an integral function of the universe.”
– Buckminster Fuller, I Seem to Be a Verb, 1970
‘Bucky’ Fuller’s well-known quote, originally published in his book I Seem to Be a Verb (1970) contrasts human participation in the material world (which Fuller suggests can be described with nouns) and the ongoing evolutionary processes which influence and shape that world (which Fuller suggests can be described with verbs).
Cecilie Klingenberg - 27.02.2021 - 15:23
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Book Post
A “book post” is placed in the UiB Humanities Library during March 2021, consisting of a table/desk with two stools by it, near a wall.
Four books are on the table/desk (left to right, in alphabetical order by title): Articulations (Allison Parrish), Golem (Nick Montfort), A Noise Such as a Man Might Make: A Novel (Milton Läufer), and Travesty Generator (Lillian-Yvonne Bertram). Each has a hole drilled through it in the upper left and is secured to the table with a cable, creating a chained library. The books represent the work of four participants in an SLSAeu panel about computer-generated literature.
A Kodak carousel slide projector is in the middle of the table/desk, projecting small, bright images and texts onto the wall. Slides presenting covers and contents of the five books are shown continually during the exhibition. The selections will be made in consultation with all author/programmers and with their approval.
The stools allow two readers to sit and peruse the books. The table is wide enough to allow readers to do so while socially distanced.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 27.02.2021 - 15:32
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To Pray Without Ceasing
To Pray Without Ceasing is a web app that autonomously prays for people. It searches Twitter for expressions of need (e.g. "I need somebody to hug me right now" or "I need more money in my bank acct wtf"), especially those tweeted by users who have few followers and who are perhaps in need of solicitude. It then issues prayers for them using a variety of NLP techniques. Visitors of To Pray Without Ceasing must activate the system's prayers in a simple but symbolically significant way: they must light a candle (while making sure not to move the cursor too fast; one must proceed mindfully in sacred space). The action of lighting a candle is designed to make the system not "interactive" but rather what Robert Pfaller would call "interpassive"; the visitor delegates the work of praying—the practice of religion itself—to the machine, yet she still can feel vaguely responsible for whatever good work it does, whatever good words it utters. The system prays in different ways over the course of 24 hours, evoking the "Liturgy of the Hours" ("Horae Canonicae").
Cecilie Klingenberg - 27.02.2021 - 15:36
