Some of today’s most important eco-artists — people like Patricia Johanson, Betsy Damon, and others — work on a landscape scale with interdisciplinary groups of participants to render socio-ecological change into aesthetically tangible and artistically significant forms. Experimental dancer and choreographer Jennifer Monson’s work falls into this category as well, though, as dance, it tends […]
Archive for March, 2011
iLAND’s perceptual alchemy
Posted in Eco-culture, Spirit matter, tagged dance, eco-art, iLAND, Monson, New York City, performance on March 30, 2011 | 3 Comments »
Cronon, Chomsky/Foucault, & public reason
Posted in Academe, Blog stuff, Media ecology, Process-relational thought, tagged aesthetics, Chomsky, Cronon, Foucault, Politics, Wisconsin on March 29, 2011 | 2 Comments »
The Bill Cronon-Wisconsin Republican party tangle is making me — and many others, judging by the responses I’ve seen on academic listservs — think a little more deeply about how we use our e-mail addresses. Like many, I’m troubled by the possibility that someone could ask to see my e-mail correspondence on any old topic. […]
Scholar goes citizen goes viral
Posted in Academe, Media ecology, Politics on March 27, 2011 | 1 Comment »
The story of the Wisconsin Republican Party vs. environmental historian Bill Cronon makes for a rare example of a single academic’s blogging activism (blogtivism, to use that ugly word) going viral. You’ve probably heard the basic outline of what’s happened already: Cronon became interested in finding out who was behind the controversial legislation crafted by […]
Ecosophy-G
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged ecosophy, ecosophy-G, eventology, Guattari, Naess, Ontology, epistemology on March 24, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
To the extent that ontological questions drive my recent writing (which includes Ecologies of the Moving Image, Ecologies of Identity, and a metaphysical manifesto-thriller called Why Objects Fly Out the Window), they are predominantly the following two: How do things enter into relation with other things? What happens (in the world) when they do? In […]
iLAND Slow Networks symposium
Posted in Eco-culture, tagged dance, ecoart on March 23, 2011 | 1 Comment »
I’ll be in New York City this weekend to participate in the iLAND Symposium at the New School, at the invitation of iLAND founder and Artistic Director Jennifer Monson. iLAND is the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance, and this year’s symposium, which runs through Friday evening and all day Saturday, is entitled Slow […]
Beyond blogs… to where?
Posted in Academe, Blog stuff, tagged Academe, academic blogging, blogosphere, digital humanities on March 22, 2011 | 3 Comments »
Ian Bogost throws out a challenge to us (bloggers) all: How should blogs evolve? What kinds of media do we want for our thinking, writing, debating, communicating? In other words, rather than celebrating what blogs allow us to do, or lament the knee-jerk negativity they still elicit in some (notably, academic) circles, and rather than […]
Sounding the land
Posted in Music & soundscape, tagged acoustic ecology, landscape art, music, soundscape on March 21, 2011 | 4 Comments »
Some Landscapes has a great post about landscape artist/musician Richard Skelton. As evident in works like Landings, Skelton is an artmonk, an eco-process-relationalist extraordinaire, and very much the musical equivalent of the kinds of artists I wrote about here. Threads Across the River (which follows Scar Tissue in the video below) is beautiful:
Enchantments to come
Posted in Spirit matter, tagged biosemiosis, disenchantment, enchantment, Kauffman, Kerouac, religion, semiosis on March 21, 2011 | 1 Comment »
Thoughts for a spring equinox… Complexity theorist (and colleague of mine here at the University of Vermont) Stuart Kauffman takes stock here of the Enlightenment and sings of a re-enchantment to come. Disenchantment and re-enchantment are long-running tropes in the intellectual currents of modernity, which I’ve frequently explored in my writing (see here for a […]
Artmonks: children of Thoreau & Whitehead
Posted in Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged art, artmonks, monasticism, Peirce, Thoreau, Whitehead on March 21, 2011 | 5 Comments »
If Thoreau’s quest to “live deliberately […] and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” were cross-bred with A. N. Whitehead’s insight that creativity is the driving core of all things in the universe, the “universal of universals,” then today’s “artmonks” are children not of Marx and Coca-Cola (as Godard […]
cfp: Int’l Assoc. for Environmental Philosophy
Posted in Academe, Eco-theory, Philosophy, tagged conferences, environmental philosophy on March 17, 2011 | 3 Comments »
The IAEP picks a nice image for this conference… Spirit tracks on Mars
Religion & the Japanese tragedy
Posted in Eco-culture, Media ecology, Spirit matter, tagged animism, eventology, imagination, Japan tsunami, nature, paganism, pantheism, religion, ritual, Shinto, spirituality on March 16, 2011 | 7 Comments »
Just as the Haitian earthquake was followed by a welter of religious interpretations (fundamentalist Christians blaming sinful Haitians for it, Vodoun practitioners weighing in on the events, etc.), so the Japanese quake-tsunami-meltdown trilogy is offering evidence of humanity’s interpretive propensities. You may have already seen the YouTube troll video satirizing right-wing Christian responses, which scandalized […]
Observations: politics – media – empathy
Posted in Media ecology, Politics, tagged eventology, Japan tsunami, media ecology, new media, political ecology, Politics on March 15, 2011 | 1 Comment »
A few observations from the events of the last week or so: (1) Tsunamis happen. When they do, in a globally media-connected world, they bring us all a little closer together. (Not all of us; those who don’t wish to be brought closer may drift further apart. But, to risk getting overly psychoanalytical, those who’ve […]