Aside from the physical heft of data centers seen from highways and the fiber optic cables crawling into homes and offices, the digital world mostly exists in our imagination. That imagination is shaped by the people selling services that rely on that infrastructure.

In 1860, Fukuzawa Yukichi, a young Japanese student still learning English himself, accompanied the first ever Japanese diplomatic mission to the United States as its English interpreter.

I was 13 years old when the movie Alien was released. It scared me into a month-long spell of anxiety. The hair on the back of my neck was perpetually up and I had the jittery demeanor of a combat veteran.

I am interested in 'the hole' in its conceptual, metaphorical, and literal crossovers. Who has written about holes? In the ground? In theory? In myth and fiction? I'd be super keen to read theory that cites specific holes found in myth and fiction, or people who have written about sinkholes, boreholes, etc. from geological/geographic perspective, but also, as mentioned above, the hole in a more conceptual level is super interesting.

Holes as the absence of geographic materialities, loss, gaps, and collapse of meaning. Holes as potential sites of openings, creativity, and reconstruction of new or recovered meaning.

Any ideas or leads welcome!

It might seem strange that a mythogeographer would be very interested in an action-horror movie from 1982, panned at the time of its release and largely ignored by audiences.

From Modern Mythology: Our standard movie monsters deviate from their early folkloric roots in a number of major ways, but the most notable might be the general move from bewitchment to infection: where strigoi, revenants, zombi, and loup-garou are generally the result of targeted curses, post-Univ

Dark Matters: Hannah Gregory interviews Morehshin Allahyari Morehshin Allahyari left Iran in 2007 to pursue a critical artistic practice, choosing, in her words, ‘self-exile over self-censorship’. Her work holds technology as 'a philosophical toolset’ and 3D printing as a potential 'process for repairing history and memory’, levelling equal criticisms at both the oppression of religious dictatorship and the white-privileging worldviews of the technology and art industries.Dark Matter (2012­–14) was her first experiment with additive tech as political medium, in which Allahyari turned taboos of Iranian daily life – dogs, pigs, satellite dishes, and dildos – into absurdist 3D-printed amalgams. The widely acclaimed Material Speculation: ISIS series (2015–16) pieced together the histories of artefacts destroyed by the Islamic State in the ancient cities of Hatra and Nineveh, through in-depth research and correspondence with archaeologists, historians, and museum staff.The reconstructed replicas, printed in translucent resin, were embedded with a USB drive and flash card containing this gathered imagery and information ­– an act of memory preservation testament to the persistence of the digital copy. This interview discusses the foundations of Allahyari’s practice through an introduction to her new research project, which is rooted in refiguring Middle Eastern mythologies, and begins with the exhibition and video She Who Sees the Unknown, which Allahyari recently presented at New York’s Transfer Gallery.

In early August 1997, Charles Moore found himself floating through the North Pacific in his Tasmanian-built catamaran.

Erik Davis’s TechGnosis is considered the classic text on the relation between technology and the occult. This “Afterword 2.0” was written for a new edition, just out from North Atlantic Books.

To see the archetypal in an image is thus not a hermeneutic move. It is an imagistic move. We amplify an image by means of a myth in order not to find its archetypal meaning but in order to feed it with further images that increase its volume and depth and release its fecundity.

Yearly reminder: unless you're over 60, you weren't promised flying cars. You were promised an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia. Here you go. An always-on, pervasive computer network offers addictive levels of immersion while doubling as a global panopticon.

In his new book The Silence of Animals, the philosopher John Gray explores why human beings continue to use myth to give purpose to their lives. Drawing from the material of writers such as J.G.

Prometheus contains such a huge amount of mythic resonance that it effectively obscures a more conventional plot. I'd like to draw your attention to the use of motifs and callbacks in the film that not only enrich it, but offer possible hints as to what was going on in otherwise confusing scenes.

Let's begin with the eponymous titan himself, Prometheus. He was a wise and benevolent entity who created mankind in the first place, forming the first humans from clay. The Gods were more or less okay with that, until Prometheus gave them fire. This was a big no-no, as fire was supposed to be the exclusive property of the Gods. As punishment, Prometheus was chained to a rock and condemned to have his liver ripped out and eaten every day by an eagle. (His liver magically grew back, in case you were wondering.)

Fix that image in your mind, please: the giver of life, with his abdomen torn open. We'll be co

Prometheus contains such a huge amount of mythic resonance that it effectively obscures a more conventional plot. I'd like to draw your attention to the use of motifs and callbacks in the film that not only enrich it, but offer possible hints as to what was going on in otherwise confusing scenes.

Let's begin with the eponymous titan himself, Prometheus. He was a wise and benevolent entity who created mankind in the first place, forming the first humans from clay. The Gods were more or less okay with that, until Prometheus gave them fire. This was a big no-no, as fire was supposed to be the exclusive property of the Gods. As punishment, Prometheus was chained to a rock and condemned to have his liver ripped out and eaten every day by an eagle. (His liver magically grew back, in case you were wondering.)

Fix that image in your mind, please: the giver of life, with his abdomen torn open. We'll be coming back to it many times in the course of this article.

The ethos of the titan Prometh

The form of the story permeates every aspect of our cultural life. History, politics, memories, even subjectivity, our sense of identity, are all representations in narrative form, signifiers chained together in temporal, spatial, and causal sequence. Narrative is a component of those deep structures with which we construct ourselves and our universe; true stories through which, in the manner of certain Aboriginal legends, the world is dreamed into existence. Narrative appears to be as universal and as old as language itself, and enjoys with language the status of a defining characteristic of humanity and its culture. A people without stories seems as absurd an idea as a people without language, (a people with language but no stories even stranger, for what is language for if not to tell stories?)

Over the past few years there has been a tremendous investment in the idea of digital media, the use of computers as the site of culture rather than just tools for business or science. This

“We’re proud to put our name on what will become the body of Jesus.”

The wafers I bought were manufactured by the Cavanagh Company of Greenville, Rhode Island, which now makes 80 percent of the “altar breads” consumed in the US. The automation in Cavanagh’s facility is on par with that of Pepperidge Farm or Frito-Lay: they use custom-converted versions of the wafer ovens that turn out cream-filled vanilla wafers, and bake according to a patent-protected process that gives their wafers a sealed edge—to avoid crumbs. Cavanagh’s engraving plates stamp crosses and Christian lambs in their dough, while other companies use the same equipment to emboss their wheaten products with trademarks and brand-unique tessellations. Their batter is tested with an electronic viscometer. Their flour blend is a trade secret.

There are two types of anthropologists: One models himself on the scientist, treating the world as his laboratory, people as his raw data. He mounts surveys, crunches numbers, and, crucially, remains detached and dispassionate throughout the process. He applies for big research grants with “expected outcomes” and “anticipated impact” carefully delineated long before he has gone out into the field. The other kind of anthropologist is more like a religious initiate, participating fully in the culture in which he is placed and intimating that he is then the possessor of some secret knowledge. Like an initiate, he cannot anticipate any “outcomes” before they happen but must simply live in the moment and immerse himself in the local customs and values.

It is this latter tradition of which Michael Taussig, an eminent professor at Columbia University, is one of the greatest exponents. The New York Times has called his work “gonzo anthropology.” He has drunk hallucinatory yagé on the sandy banks of the Putumayo River. He’s cured the sick with the aid of spirits. He’s escaped from guerrillas in a dugout canoe at dawn. Above all, he is interested in individual stories and experiences, unique tales that cannot be reduced to rational explanation or bland report. To read Taussig is to have an adventure in which one can move from Walter Benjamin’s experiments with hashish to American kids’ drawings to that dawn-lit canoe without skipping a beat. His narrative is lyrical, mesmeric.

There are those who say that utopian projects, while they can never be achieved, are valuable because they spur human advance. That’s not my view. My view is that the attempt to achieve the impossible very often – if not always – has huge costs. Even if a project has good intent, its colossal cost always outweighs its reasonability, as we saw in Iraq. What is distinctive about utopianism at the end of the 20th century and start of the 21st is that it has become centrist. In other words, for the first half of the 20th century utopianism was extremist, but now we have the utopian idea of building democracy in Libya or Afghanistan. So the utopian impulse – the impulse to achieve what rational thought tells us is impossible – has migrated to the centre of politics. That is connected with humanism and the idea of progress.

Discussions of religion are typically about God. Atheists reject religion because they don’t believe in God; Jews, Christians and Muslims take belief in God as fundamental to their religious commitment. The philosopher John Gray, however, has recently been arguing that belief in God should have little or nothing to do with religion. He points out that in many cases — for instance, “polytheism, Hinduism and Buddhism, Daoism and Shinto, many strands of Judaism and some Christian and Muslim traditions” — belief is of little or no importance. Rather, “practice — ritual, meditation, a way of life — is what counts.” He goes on to say that “it’s only religious fundamentalists and ignorant rationalists who think the myths we live by are literal truths” and that “what we believe doesn’t in the end matter very much. What matters is how we live.”

Monsters demonstrate, monsters alert us: whether or not the etymologies relating the word to both “monstro” (I show) and “moneo” (I warn), are correct, monsters act as a moral compass. The physical prodigy becomes a test of ethics and, in the move between literal and figurative, displays the crucial role fictions play in the establishment of value and the common sense. Or, one might say in the era when the Humanities are under such stress, thinking with monsters shows how an understanding of Nature, and of medicine, law and custom is impossible without cultural expression.