I arrange things into artworks, including paint, wood, plastic, raspberry pi, people, words, dialogues, arduino, sensors, web tech, light and code.
I use words other people have written to help guide these projects, so I read as often as I can. Most of what I read is literature (fiction) or nonfiction on philosophy, art theory, ethics and technology.
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I'm doing an art project about the transatlantic cable. Somewhere in my research I came across this book, written in 1865 and documenting the cable's development. A reissue from the 1970s was available in the library so I picked this up.
While working in Newfoundland I visited this artist at her forest studio and she gifted me a copy.
![Desmond Fisher: Broadcasting in Ireland (1978, Routledge and Kegan Paul [for the] International Institute of Communications)](https://solarpunk.sfo3.digitaloceanspaces.com/images/covers/5ea4851d-4593-45a8-86c9-d45c2ea09cf0.jpeg)
In the late 1970s, experts in media and communication were commissioned in different countries around the world to write these case studies on broadcasting. It's not clear what the results were, or whether anyone ever made any comparison between one and another. Like many historical booklets and technical documents, the information contained in this 1978 book is very out of date but makes a fascinating historical artefact itself. The writer was a director general of RTÉ, Ireland's national broadcaster, and is extremely well informed, but positions this in a social context that is clearly of its time (male centred and ignoring any minority perspective). Some dry information like financial data is accompanied by some amazing infrastructural and programming information.
![Desmond Fisher: Broadcasting in Ireland (1978, Routledge and Kegan Paul [for the] International Institute of Communications)](https://solarpunk.sfo3.digitaloceanspaces.com/images/covers/e21887d9-1812-44d9-bbae-442c912ffaf9.jpeg)
This book was mentioned in The Post Office in Ireland as a primary source referring to signal towers and radio broadcast. I am working on a project about this, so I got it from the library.
Recommended by an artist and colleague during a call on critical technologies, who used this as research on another project.
I didn't read this cover to cover, but it is an interesting and thorough history of the post office in Ireland. The language has moments of gusto that spoil some of the rigour of the research, but the content is comprehensive.
I am a big fan of Despret and bought both this and her incredible book Living as a Bird at the same time last year. I've held off for a while on this one as I wanted to savour the treat of her wonderful writing.
Kenzaburo Oe is better known for his dreamlike novels that dive deep into social fragmentation in Japan. This book is different – in the 1960s, he was commissioned to visit Hiroshima several times in a period where international talks on nuclear disarmament were daily news. Oe visited conferences that advocated for an end to nuclear testing, and also observed the culture of people from Hiroshima with a delicate writer's hand. He also documented the sicknesses that at the time were not attributed to nuclear fallout.
The book offers a snapshot of a time where peace was paramount, and where the violence of the nuclear bombing of the Japanese cities in World War II was still not fully acknowledged. Oe holds no punches as he describes the bombings as the atrocities they were, and holds up as heroes those doctors, negotiators and civilians who have survived and used the tragedy to …
Kenzaburo Oe is better known for his dreamlike novels that dive deep into social fragmentation in Japan. This book is different – in the 1960s, he was commissioned to visit Hiroshima several times in a period where international talks on nuclear disarmament were daily news. Oe visited conferences that advocated for an end to nuclear testing, and also observed the culture of people from Hiroshima with a delicate writer's hand. He also documented the sicknesses that at the time were not attributed to nuclear fallout.
The book offers a snapshot of a time where peace was paramount, and where the violence of the nuclear bombing of the Japanese cities in World War II was still not fully acknowledged. Oe holds no punches as he describes the bombings as the atrocities they were, and holds up as heroes those doctors, negotiators and civilians who have survived and used the tragedy to advocate for an end to war. The result is hopeful.
Gilbert Simondon's philosophy is not widely translated into English, so most readers need to approach his writing from secondary sources like this. A friend who is a scholar of Simondon recommended this as a starting point.
The book gives a broad overview of how the philosopher entangled metaphor, technology and social behaviours in his philosophies. The language is dense and often difficult, but feels necessarily so as Simondon himself wrote very dense texts. Muriel Combes does a good job of dividing up his ideas into categories, and this becomes an anthology. It is certainly a good starting point, but I am not sure I am ready to fully embrace or understand Simondon, as I find many of the ideas seem contradictory or too opaque to fully grasp. This, I believe, is my own problem and not that of either the philosopher or the author of this book.
John McGahern remains a relatively low key figure internationally, but is well celebrated in Ireland. His deeply visceral and poetic reflections on rural Irish life are unparalleled in my own reading. The Barracks was his debut, written while he was a teacher in Dublin, and mostly an autobiography of his childhood when his mother had breast cancer, essentially a terminal illness in the 1950s. While the book pokes fun at power structures in the Irish police, the best moments are in the deep descriptions of day-to-day life, or in the moments that McGahern brings to life with extraordinary power of words.
The main character is Elizabeth, who realises early in the story she has breast cancer, and who remembers throughout the book her past life in London before settling in rural Ireland. She lives in a barracks with her husband, a guard, his children from a previous marriage, and the …
John McGahern remains a relatively low key figure internationally, but is well celebrated in Ireland. His deeply visceral and poetic reflections on rural Irish life are unparalleled in my own reading. The Barracks was his debut, written while he was a teacher in Dublin, and mostly an autobiography of his childhood when his mother had breast cancer, essentially a terminal illness in the 1950s. While the book pokes fun at power structures in the Irish police, the best moments are in the deep descriptions of day-to-day life, or in the moments that McGahern brings to life with extraordinary power of words.
The main character is Elizabeth, who realises early in the story she has breast cancer, and who remembers throughout the book her past life in London before settling in rural Ireland. She lives in a barracks with her husband, a guard, his children from a previous marriage, and the other guards and their families. The movement of these people through this space is the device that leads the storytelling.
The story and the writing is not perfect throughout, but it is also a debut. A standout is the chapter where husband and wife visit Dublin: she is tested and probed at hospital while he walks the streets and observes with a countryperson's eye. His descriptions and keen expression of thoughts and motivations is spectacular, and only improved in his later books.
No geology is neutral, writes Kathryn Yusoff. Tracing the color line of the Anthropocene, A …
Deciding when the anthropocene started is something that social theorists mulled over for many years before eventually deciding on the early 1600s. Kathryn Yusoff offers a new way to consider this beginning, by considering beginnings more deeply. Each chapter proffers another start-point for colonial violence, and each time it is both valid and invalid. The book draws from different theorists, prominently Moten and Harney, in a well considered and short study of colonial violence toward nonwhite people. Brilliantly written, compelling, and very sad.
From one of Ireland’s leading curators and writers on visual art, John Hutchinson’s Countercultures, Communities, …
This book is a short presentation of a large bank of research tracing counter-cultural movements mostly in the West from the past 200 years. It is well written and researched, and informational.
A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments …
Orbital is a novel that seems to go nowhere except round and round, and yet it grows into a cacophony of story during its brief and deceptive simplicity.
On the surface, it is a well researched, character-driven fiction about four astronauts and two cosmonauts orbiting the earth in a vessel for scientific observation. However, this container becomes a device for Samantha Harvey to collapse progress, poverty, climate change, ambition, grief and hope into a tiny vessel. All too often we are reminded that only a few inches of metal protect [us?] from complete doom, such is the fragility of life. Beautifully written and concise, this book was a terrific surprise.
My partner took this out of the library and loved it, so recommended it.
I have read some of Oe's work before, and loved it. I have a fascination with Hiroshima's effect on international politics and social thought and only recently learned that Oe had spent time there and written about it. I got this out of the library as soon as I found out.