Why Art Does Not Exist
This title is adapted from Why Fish Don’t Exist [1] which in turn draws on Carol Kaesuk Yoon’s taxonomy study Naming Nature[2] to support its startling contention. Everyone knows what fish are. But today,...
Category: language
Needing a Translator
We’d been skyping for months, both really enjoying it, I think — my husband kept noticing how much laughter was coming from the room where the really big computer lives. I was translating Lambert’s...
A Review of Meeting the Universe Halfway
A very brief summary might be matter matters. I first read Karen Barad’s book Meeting the Universe Halfway (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007) about two years ago, and go back quite often —...
Apple Treachery
I have long assumed that virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI) were related in some vague way. I’ve gradually come to understand them as opposites, and more, possibly, good guys and bad guys....
Writing and Responding
Braiding Sweetgrass (2015) is a book about the contemporary relationship between plants and people. More specifically, it is about the conflict and potential reconciliation between a botanical, scientific, written understanding of plants, and the orally transmitted...
The Measurement Problem
Is there a problem? There is. It concerns the relationship of the measurer to the measured, the scientist (or her measuring tools) to whatever-is-being-measured. Philosophers tend to view it as the relationship of subject to object, noting...