American history is filled with writers whose genius was underappreciated—or altogether ignored—in their lifetime. Most of Emily Dickinson’s poems weren’t discovered and published until after her death. F. Scott Fitzgerald “died believing himself a failure.

Otherkin are a community of people who see themselves as partially or entirely non-human. They contend that they are, in spirit if not in body,[2] not human. This is explained by some members of the otherkin community as possible through reincarnation, having a nonhuman soul, ancestry, or symbolic metaphor.[1] Scholarship has framed this claim as religious because it is frequently supported by a framework of metaphysical beliefs.[3] Not all otherkin necessarily share these beliefs; some may simply prefer to identify as non-human.

I took a trip to Chicago for GLI.TC/H 2112! – A conference/festival/carnival/movement in honour (and despite) of hardware/software/wetware errors, databends and feedback blackholes. I took a ton of photographs, you can view them on Flickr (better quality) or Facebook (dotted with comments, insights and exultations from the GLI.TC/H community). I intend to write more about the event, but for now I will post my talk here, which I gave on Saturday 8th December. It’s title is Glitches in Things and the “Friendly Medium”, a talk expanding on an idea I have been carting around for a couple of years now. Updated with Object Oriented insights I hope it acts as a mental toolkit for artists looking to dance with objects, in all their glitchy splendour. As usual, I completely ignored my notes whilst talking, for this reason it’s worth listening to the question and answer bit afterwards. Infinite thanks must go to Rosa Menkman, Jon Satrom and Nick Briz – the GLI.TC/H Bots at the heart of the fest. Thank you for inviting me to participate. More on OOO, glitches, kipple and Things to come reeeeal soon… (the talky bit starts a few minutes in)

The ultimate design material is one that understands what it is to become. By way of an example, I’d like to think about how we might design a chicken. Think of the creativity of Nature – which, in very real terms can: • Transform an acorn into a giant oak tree • Change the colour of a chameleon • Ev

The ultimate design material is one that understands what it is to become. By way of an example, I’d like to think about how we might design a chicken. Think of the creativity of Nature – which, in very real terms can: • Transform an acorn into a giant oak tree • Change the colour of a chameleon • Ev

“The perfect – complete, clear, and distinct – knowledge that the subject has of the object is entirely external; it results from manufacture; I know what the object I have made is; I can make another one like it, but I would not be able to make another being like me in the way that a watchmaker makes a watch (or that a man in the “age of the reindeer” made a blade of sharp stone), and as a matter of fact I don’t know what the being is that I am, nor do I know what the world is and I would not be able to produce another one by any means.” - Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion

Being human offers homo sapiens variety, or some elasticity, in social life, though sociologists claim that people’s personalities disappear with no one else around. Imagining this evacuation, I see a person alone in a self-chosen shelter, motionless on a chair, like a houseplant with prehensile thumbs.

Was theory a gigantic hoax? On the contrary. It was the only salvation, for a twenty year period, from two colossal abdications by American thinkers and writers. From about 1975 to 1995, through a historical accident, a lot of American thinking and mental living got done by people who were French, and by young Americans who followed the French.

The two grand abdications: one occurred in academic philosophy departments, the other in American fiction. In philosophy, from the 1930s on, a revolutionary group had been fighting inside universities to overcome the “tradition.” This insurgency, at first called “logical positivism” or “logical empiricism,” then simply “analytic philosophy,” was the best thing going. The original idea was that logical analysis of language would show which philosophical problems might be solved, and which eradicated because they were not phraseable in clear, logical language.

“The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but a struggle between the State and the non-state (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organization.” - Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community

These are theological questions without theological answers, and, if the atheist is not supposed to entertain them, then, for slightly different reasons, neither is the religious believer. Religion assumes that they are not valid questions because it has already answered them; atheism assumes that they are not valid questions because it cannot answer them. But as one gets older, and parents and peers begin to die, and the obituaries in the newspaper are no longer missives from a faraway place but local letters, and one’s own projects seem ever more pointless and ephemeral, such moments of terror and incomprehension seem more frequent and more piercing, and, I find, as likely to arise in the middle of the day as the night. I think of these anxieties as the Virginia Woolf Question, after a passage in that most metaphysical of novels “To the Lighthouse,” when the painter Lily Briscoe is at her easel, mourning her late friend Mrs. Ramsay. 

“Nothing new under the reign of the same and under the same reign, preserved. Nothing new and nothing to be born, no nature. This is death, eternally. Nature put to death, its birth unwanted. The science of this is nothing. It is calculably nothing. Stable, immutable, redundant. It recopies the same writings, with the same atom-letters. The law is the plague. Reason is the fall. The reiterated cause is death. Repetition is redundancy. And identity is death. Every­thing falls to zero: the nullity of information, the emptiness of knowledge, non-existence. The same is Non-Being.” - The Birth of Physics by Michel Serres

If you try to describe the living processes of the cell in a rather more living language than is typically found in the literature of molecular biology — if you resort to a language reflecting the artfulness and grace, the well-coordinated rhythms, and the striking choreography of phenomena such as gene expression, signaling cascades, and mitotic cell division — you will almost certainly hear mutterings about your flirtation with “spooky, mysterious, nonphysical forces.” You can expect to hear yourself labeled a “mystic” or — there is hardly any viler epithet within biology today — a “vitalist.” This charge reflects a certain longstanding sensitivity among biologists — one that deserves to be taken seriously. It was recently given very thoughtful and respectful expression by a first-rank molecular biologist in response to a draft book chapter I had sent him. 

Disturbing experiences that feel both familiar and strange are instances of the “uncanny,” an intuitive concept, yet one that has defied simple explanation for more than a century. Interest in the particular occurrences of the uncanny, in which humans are bothered by interaction with human-like models, began as a psychological curiosity. But as our ability to design artificial life has increased—along with our dependence on it—getting to the heart of why people respond negatively to realistic models of themselves has taken on a new importance. Attempts to understand the origins of this reaction, known since the 1970s as the “uncanny valley response,” have drawn on everything from repressed fears of castration to an evolutionary mechanism for mate selection, but there has been little empirical evidence to assess the validity of these ideas.

New findings published in PNAS this September are putting some long-overdue experimental rigor behind the uncanny valley. Last spring at Princeton’

by Daniel Rourke

Japan. That's where I am. With the rice-triangles and the tatami-mats and row upon row of vending machines. In a country where serving others is paramount, and where holidays are something that other people do, I find myself being served - on holiday... I am the ultimate gaijin 1 and every ticket I buy and photo I take seems to confirm this. I came to see Japan. But now I realise that the culture of seeing has been commodified into an experience in itself, and perhaps not an experience any of us are capable of moving beyond alone.

Please don't misunderstand me. I love Japan. I lived here from 2004 until 2006, teaching English on the outskirts of a medium sized city on the island of Kyushu. The experience enriched me, precisely because it tore me from my anchors. Because it helped me understand where I had come from. On the surface Japan behaves like the perfect machine, with all its components functioning within designated parameters. And what's more, that machine just seems to work, with hardly anyone screaming to get off. The Japanese are a nation in a very different sense to us Brits. And for a small-town, West Yorkshire boy like myself, being part of that nation, that huge entity, all be it for only 24 months of my life, is still one of my most humbling experiences. But even as I gush about Japan being here can often feel like toiling through an endless urban labyrinth. With little of cultural merit to distinguish the pachinko parlours from the snack bars and multi-storey car parks Japan can seem grey, shallow and everything but refined. But when it surprises you, whether you're picking blueberries in the mountains or being served delicate morsels of fish in the private room of your ryokan, Japan redefines the word privileged. I feel privileged to have lived here, I feel privileged to be travelling through it. Yet, keeping hold of that feeling is not always easy. The problem is not completely a Japanese one. Worldwide tourism has moulded, cast and set into faux-stone souvenirs the types of experiences we can access. Even those attempting to wind their own path through the deserts of Mongolia or the jungles of Brazil will occasionally find themselves face to face with a toll-booth and turnstile scrawled in badly translated English instructions. The forces of the free-market mean that being somewhere has come to mean "being near this particular cultural commodity". Any 21st century traveller who believes that they can get to the authentic heart of an experience will have to pay for a ticket somewhere along the track. Had the restless 17th century poet Matsuo Bashō known that his musings on the River Ōi would be turned into a set of commemorative face flannels he might very well have never set out on the road to Fuji:

In a wayIt was funNot to see Mount FujiIn foggy rain 2 Like Bashō I aim to plant myself in a place, more deeply than at the toll-booth and souvenir shop. But with every photograph I've taken of a monument, of a neon high-street or sunset, I've moved further away from this essential desire. Lest we forget the verb 'to be' whenever we are trying to be somewhere, somewhen, somehow. The Japanese seem particularly keen on the token of the experience. Whether it is the photo of themselves issuing the 'V' sign in front of Mount Fuji, or the gift-set of sweet rice-cakes they take home as omiyage 3 for their grandmother. At first I thought this was nothing more than tourism top-trumps. A way to out-do your neighbour with 20 'sugoii!' 4 points over her holiday snaps. But unlike the Westerner's conception of the experience gained, the Japanese live to share their commodities with each other. Suddenly holiday photos are more than a way to put cousin Seth to sleep, they are a ticket for every member of your family, of your friendship group, your work mates and arch-enemies, to take a little bit of your experience for themselves. The machine of Japanese society is oiled by holiday snaps and boxes of seaweed crackers stamped with the silhouette of Hello Kitty. Before I lived here I read that the Japanese spend the same equivalent of their GDP on omiyage as America spends on law-suits and litigation. In this sense, the commodity of 'being somewhere' has far greater value for Japanese society than the mere personal. If we in the West were offered the chance to swap all our law-suits and lawyers for seaweed crackers, I hope we'd at least consider it. Perhaps the value I grasp for in my lived experience would be better shared than savoured for myself. Is it possible then to have an experience without commodifying it? I'm not sure if it is. Whether through my photo collection or the stuttering inadequacies of my language, I find it increasingly difficult to pinpoint what it was about an experience that lingers within me. As the smorgasbord of human experiences is extended, enhanced, mixed and matched between cultures and languages, what there is to take away with us seems increasingly shallow. Turn on The Discovery Channel and be instantly smacked around the face with the token beauty of the world. Travel there yourself, whether by tourist boat or chartered jet, and wallow in the sense that where you are right now is not where you normally find yourself. Without meaning to paint the entire Japanese nation with one brush, I do feel that they have got something right with their tourism tokens. They have brought in from the outside the gamut of experiences the world has to offer. They have reduced them to a pocket souvenir, or a sliver of flavour that lingers on the tongue, and shared them around for everyone to make sense of. The idea that we should all escape our lives for a while, should buy a reduced price ticket and lose ourselves on a pristine, simulacrum of a beach somewhere, bothers me. The only time I have ever felt distant from myself was when I was at the mercy of a culture who take pride in the commodities of their experiences. Who exist to share them. To really believe for one moment that I can find something, out here, that is true, that is mine and only mine is a little naive. When I finally get back on my flight, disembarking at Terminal 2 of Heathrow, only then will I once again be living the absolutely individual experience that is my own. For it is only through my removal and return to London that my deepest experiences are founded. If I am going to be anywhere, I may as well be where and what I am, and not what my plane ticket promises me I can be:

Coming home at lastAt the end of the year,I wept to findMy old umbilical cord 5

Notes 1. 'Gaijin' is the Japanese word for a foreigner, or, outsider.2. Poem taken from, The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton, one of Matsuo Bashō's journeys as recounted in The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches.3. A souvenir or gift that represents something about a trip you have taken. Omiyage usually takes the form of a foodstuff that is 'unique' to the place visited.4. 'Sugoii!' roughly translates as Great! or Brilliant!.5. Poem taken from, The Records of a Travel-worn Satchel, one of Matsuo Bashō's journeys as recounted in The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches.

by Daniel Rourke

In the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, one commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness when one mistakes an abstract belief, opinion or concept about the way things are for a physical or 'concrete' reality.

Whitehead proposed the fallacy in a discussion of the relation of spatial and temporal location of objects. Whitehead rejects the notion that a concrete physical object in the universe can be described simply in spatial or temporal extension. Rather, the object must be described as a field located in both space and time.

"...among the primary elements of nature as apprehended in our immediate experience, there is no element whatever which possesses this character of simple location. ... [Instead,] I hold that by a process of constructive abstraction we can arrive at abstractions which are the simply located bits of material, and at other abstractions which are the minds included in the scientific scheme. Accordingly, the real error is an example of what I have termed:"

The phenomenology / ontology of text: has anyone examined this issue directly in philosophical, literary and/or critical terms? I am interested in the experience and perception of text, both within readership and on an abstract (more holistic level perhaps) as the archetypical mediator and virtual-archive of human culture. I wish to explore it via its mediums (e.g. book, computer screen), its modes (e.g. semiotics, translation) and its means (e.g. poetry, fiction, encryption).

I came at this problem through Heidegger (most specifically in his re-appropriation of the term 'techné'), looking at text as a technology.

I have since come upon the writings of D.C. Greetham and a couple of other bits and pieces.

I feel that this is an area not much covered by the critical fields, especially in these times of ever encompassing digital/web-based mediums. I'm interested in following through some of this to a PhD proposal.

What paths should I be taking?

Your help, as always, is much appreciated.