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....
Category: language
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...
Winning and losing…what?
I’ve agreed to review this new book, Co-illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (MIT, 2020), for Source Magazine, a journal of contemporary photography. It’s a very short review — just 300 words —...
What a difference a [book’s] name makes!
Publishers don’t necessarily ask authors — or translators — before deciding what title to give any particular book. Lambert Wiesing and I assumed that the title of the German book Luxus, would be the English...
Image and Imagine
The German verb “einbilden” is ordinarily translated into English as “imagine.” But at one point in Into the Universe of Technical Images, Flusser calls attention to the difference between “einbilden” and the cognate “imaginieren”. Expressing his gratitude to Kant for...