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.
Also on Mastodon.
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A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (French: Mille plateaux) is a 1980 book by the …
This has been on my list for so many years. I loved Anti-Oedipus and it had a profound impact on my art. I finally bought a copy.
The author is a friend of a friend and my partner bought a copy at a day dedicated to the hawthorn tree. An unknown quantity.
J. R. R. Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings (The Lord of the Rings, #1-3) (2005)
The Fellowship of the Ring is the first of three volumes of the epic novel The Lord of the Rings …
This book popped up in a list of recent prize-nominated literature somewhere online. I like the publisher so decided to get it out of the library.
This book was gifted to me in PDF by a friend and Simondon scholar, as an introduction to some of their more advanced concepts.
In this expanded edition of her bestselling 1989 CBC Massey Lectures, renowned scientist and humanitarian …
This series of lectures originally published in 1990, with a follow-on in this edition in 1999, provides a fascinating perspective of the world before and after the public roll-out of the world wide web. Franklin considers contemporary technology from a historical perspective, understanding that the current trends are just part of a larger narrative. As a result, some of the lectures were quite prophetic in predicting the actions of technology companies in the 21st Century. The writing is easy as it was originally delivered as spoken lecture, and the content, although not unique, is very well structured.
Brian Massumi presents a theory on how play works as language and as a substitute for violent action in animal and human actions. It's a fun treatise, well presented in a longer first section before three other supplements that look at praxis of the ideas presented. The first of these is a pure joy to read.
This book is very dense philosophy, and at times it feels preposterously filled with jargon even if Massumi felt that language was necessary for accuracy. Yet it is also full of wonderful moments and deep thoughts that challenge human exceptionalism and create ways to consider other-than-human engagement from a nonhuman frame. It draws heavily from Deleuze and Guattari and often the writing feels like their more playful style, pushing the boundaries of what language can do. This is best illustrated in the supplementary chapter 'To Write Like a Rat Flicks Its Tail', which thinks …
Brian Massumi presents a theory on how play works as language and as a substitute for violent action in animal and human actions. It's a fun treatise, well presented in a longer first section before three other supplements that look at praxis of the ideas presented. The first of these is a pure joy to read.
This book is very dense philosophy, and at times it feels preposterously filled with jargon even if Massumi felt that language was necessary for accuracy. Yet it is also full of wonderful moments and deep thoughts that challenge human exceptionalism and create ways to consider other-than-human engagement from a nonhuman frame. It draws heavily from Deleuze and Guattari and often the writing feels like their more playful style, pushing the boundaries of what language can do. This is best illustrated in the supplementary chapter 'To Write Like a Rat Flicks Its Tail', which thinks with Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis to explore being-animal through art.
A novel of man's relationship with nature, power, and the vitality of storytelling, from beloved …
Read a review on this blog, seen via their Mastodon page, and was curious to try this winding narrative story.
Jay Griffiths is a unique voice in climate activism. They easily move through essay and fiction, keeping a creative and passionate voice in either. This collection of essays is the former, about how and why Griffiths became involved with Extincion Rebellion.
The second half of the book focuses on this move into rebellion, but the first half is the one that caught my attention more. I love how Griffiths describes metaphor, and the role(s) of artists as shamanic guides. How the essays present the contrast between rationalism, literalism and libertarianism with environmental and social movements is beautiful and captivating. The personal stories are also perfectly pitched.
I adore Clarice Lispector, whose prose and presentation is unlike any other author I have read. This novel, like all of her work, is brilliantly written, unique, and uncanny.
The story of Lucrétia Neves living in the township of Sao Geraldo is one of passing time. As she watches the horses and the city, it transforms in front of her eyes, in transforms because of her watching it. Her life changes and moves away, but she drags herself and her new life back into that world. The book is amazing for how it presents the changing world, the evolution of a city through the eyes of a person, and the growth of a self through the eyes of themselves and others.
Unfortunately, it suffers from its strengths, particularly in the early sections where the weirdness is too much, too repetitive, even though this is partly the point. But as an …
I adore Clarice Lispector, whose prose and presentation is unlike any other author I have read. This novel, like all of her work, is brilliantly written, unique, and uncanny.
The story of Lucrétia Neves living in the township of Sao Geraldo is one of passing time. As she watches the horses and the city, it transforms in front of her eyes, in transforms because of her watching it. Her life changes and moves away, but she drags herself and her new life back into that world. The book is amazing for how it presents the changing world, the evolution of a city through the eyes of a person, and the growth of a self through the eyes of themselves and others.
Unfortunately, it suffers from its strengths, particularly in the early sections where the weirdness is too much, too repetitive, even though this is partly the point. But as an experiment, the book is a gift from an amazing writer.
An artist friend loaned this to me while running an event on decomposition in our workspace. I loved the last book by Griffiths that I read so have dived straight into this one.
In the squalid, gothic city of New Crobuzon, a mysterious half-human, half-bird stranger comes to …
This was loaned to me by a friend in return for a Gabriel Garcia Marquez book.
Added to the list and ordered from the library after spotting the review by @lucasrizoli@bookwyrm.social and then reading a little more about the book.
This book was referenced in a couple of texts that I read on more-than-human multispecies relationships so I decided to get it out of the library and have a look.
NDiaye's prose is like no other author that I have read. Their previous book, Three Strong Women tangled three stories together, each with its owb uncanny mood and setting. In Ladivne there are again three stories, those of three generations of women dealing with trauma and issues of (un)belonging in France.
The writing is intricate and unique, and builds a world from the inner perspectives of the characters, who are richly developed. However, the story never really got going for me, and was mostly told in the early chapters before being trundled along for the rest of the book. The depth of character motivation, understanding each person's complex motivations for making the choices that they make, is an amazing experiment in writing, but for me the experiment that doesn't quite pay off for the whole book.